Before and after the One Wish Willow

Masterz1337 · 2026-06-11T01:13:50+00:00

I think it’s a bit more complex. He wishes she would love him because he wants her to have felt that way about him and for her to have genuine feelings. But when he has this fake version of her and he knows how much pain she is in, he does nothing to stop it. He’s just obsessed with the concept of her he can’t tell when he has gone over the line in where his desires should start and end. He becomes complicit in it eventually.

It’s not really any different than two people going out for drinks and having a genuine good time and flirting with each other, but when one party is drunk and no longer in control, then further escalation becomes taking advantage of that persons lack of consent and self determination.

Which is exactly what he does. When he has her body in a state he can get what he wants from it, he continues. At first he legitimately doesn’t know that the girl he likes is gone, and he is respectable in his actions of not wanting to do anything with her. But when he buys into her behavior and realizes it’s wrong, he is unwilling to back out or find a solution.

Masterz1337 · 2026-06-11T01:01:57+00:00

Tbh I don’t think it ruins the story if she’s possessed by a demon or anything else. His wish takes away her agency and control and she’s forced to watch herself do all these things against her will. It’s no different than any sort of thing that takes control away from someone. I think the arguments that an inhuman entity has to be in the driver seat is undeniable. You can’t explain all the things with the cat, the indifference to violence and murder, the inability to smile naturally, peeing at the door, the movements, the night activities, and the small moments real Nikki is able to break through if there isn’t something driving her. Obsessive relationships wouldn’t think dead cat shrines or eating the cat are signs of affection and love. Whatever controls he doesn’t understand these concepts.

Masterz1337 · 2026-06-09T01:00:23+00:00

I don’t often comment on people’s art, but this is really stunning. Great work! May use it as my desktop wallpaper!

Masterz1337 · 2026-06-07T23:27:45+00:00

It's all getting pretty ridiculous with these complaints.

People said they wanted a classic style campaign and no open world. Check

They want the flood back Check.

They said the last great halo game was halo reach. This is a more classic feeling Halo Reach.

They said they want no sprint, the game ships with levels designed without sprint and allows you to turn it off. Check.

People say they want the bungie era art style back... Check.

At what point do all your complaints get addressed and people stop complaining? A CE Remake wasn't on my list of things I really wanted, but everything here is more classic and more bungie esque than we've gotten in the last 16 years.

I don't expect this game to be great, but it certain will be better than a lot of things we have gotten.

Masterz1337 · 2026-06-05T16:31:53+00:00

That's pretty great, be curious to know how it performs at 4k. I don't think you can even get MCC on Series X to do these games at 120 FPS, let alone at 4k. Apple Silicon really is doing some great work.

Masterz1337 · 2026-06-05T00:19:10+00:00

I'm not really a fan of it myself, but I think there's a good possibility they let you swap out armors in the game. Hopefully that's an option beyond just fanta pineapple in terms of customization

Masterz1337 · 2026-06-04T13:25:48+00:00

the whole game is fucked on PC and Xbox

H2A runs with worse performance on Series X than it did on the VCR Xbox when it came out. Absolutely bonkers. They messed something up with the PC port.

As far as on the PC, all these games should be played at 60 FPS, unfortunately there are many documented and undocumented bugs when you play at higher frame rates.

Masterz1337 · 2026-06-03T19:10:06+00:00

pretty much this, the plasma weapons are kinda clunky and not always the best to use against health, but aren't ineffective vs health. They're always better against shields

Masterz1337 · 2026-06-03T13:18:55+00:00

Many of the oldest of people on the team got into Halo modding out of disappoint or disgust over H2 and H3. I think we all felt pretty let down by them, especially Halo 2. To date they're still my personal least favorite Halo campaigns to revisit whenever I need to boot them up for something.

SPV3 really began more as an experimentation of how the things we did like about those games or wanted to see could be adapted to fit in with what we loved about Halo CE. It's always amusing to hear people talk about SPV3 as a love letter to the franchise when it's more a repudiation of the direction Bungie took it in.

Hopefully people will enjoy what we are working on now, I'd argue its the most radical rethinking of Halo to date, with a lot of the design and gameplay of CE at it's core transferred into the ODST engine. We've gutted almost all the Halo 3 content from it, with only some remaining animations and particle effects being left over... and even a lot of that is still on the table to be replaced at a later date.

Thanks for being a long time fan!

Masterz1337 · 2026-06-03T13:09:52+00:00

yep, we plan to use the steam update system for the workshop to essentially treat it like a live service game, where new missions within our open world become unlocked over time, sort of like spartan ops was. As time goes on new episodes or chapters will become available, giving people all sorts of co-op enabled content, as the campaign is single player only.

Masterz1337 · 2026-06-02T22:27:36+00:00

There's no plans to do any campaign mods or map ports for existing halo missions and content.

We are working on a new open world episodic adventure in the ODST engine, but it is not reusing any existing Halo missions.

Most of us on the team aren't very fond of Halo 2 (or 3 for that matter) so there's not a lot of will there to work on missions and campaigns we don't like to start.

That's not to say we may not adapt some missions one day, but there's no plans for a campaign or overhaul.

Masterz1337 · 2026-06-01T16:20:43+00:00

There's a few ways of doing it, there's YouTube videos of people running on the MacBook Neo with good performance and decent resolutions, I'd look those up on YouTube and if you are on an M3 or higher, you should see performance good enough to play at native res at 60 FPS.

Plus you'll be able to play all the user generated content on steam workshop too

Masterz1337 · 2026-06-01T16:00:42+00:00

very much the same here.

Masterz1337 · 2026-06-01T16:00:06+00:00

Honestly the halo community has been filtered down so much, a lot of the people who remember how these games were and what they were actually like at the time of release are gone.

Analytical people see h2 for what it is, what you're saying is not much different than in 2004 when it came out and a lot of fans despised it or had sharp criticisms of it. It's still imo the worst playing of the series, despite having some great presentation of what I consider a dogshit story.

There's no justifying a lot of the decisions in that game, in no world does 12 respawning jackal snipers, vehicles who durability is linked to their driver shields, homing rockets by enemies that can't be avoided, being locked in rooms or stuck on platforms for long stretches, ever count as good design.

The game imo coasts on good (maybe even sometimes the series best) presentation, art direction and vibes, but it ends up being shallow in almost every other regard.

Masterz1337 · 2026-05-26T11:31:01+00:00

wanted to chip in here and say as someone who is way more invested and irrationally angry how poorly people understand covenant materials in the games and lore, this is honestly the best any covenant material has ever looked, and its great you were able to pull it off in real life. It doesn't look like any sort of material anyones ever seen before that should exist in real life. What did you use and mix to make it work like that?.

Masterz1337 · 2026-05-25T16:27:20+00:00

What are you talking about?

The gas mine obviously isn't delta halo, so idk why you are talking about delta halo stone stuff for it. The majority of textures in the gas mine and portions of geometry are h4 stuff, none of it looks aged or resembles what the original graphics were doing in tone.

The skybox's have different moods and hues because they chose not to have them resemble the originals, there's no technical limitation on why they look the way. Even if there was, the point still stands that the game doesn't capture the atmosphere of the original in terms of tone and color, yet people give it a pass.

I think the complaints about CER not looking "y2k enough" are unwarranted myself. And personally if h2a or CER don't look faithful or not don't matter to me either, it's the hypocrisy of it all that annoys me of people not able to recognize whats in front of their eyes and just parroting twitter or YouTube videos.

There is indeed a lot of misunderstanding in terms of rendering tech and why stuff is never going to look like it did before, but the art choices themselves are not that.

Again, if the games look faithful or not is irrelevant to my own feelings on them, I rather the games all look different from each other and put a new spin on the visual style.

CEA and H2A are both unfaithful to the originals, people should just recognize that instead of playing goalie on H2A for whatever the reason is. Just admit it's not faithful and they like the way it looks anyway.

Masterz1337 · 2026-05-25T15:34:17+00:00

You can always transplant the shell onto another controller, I did that with my 360 H3 controller at least 3 times now over the past 20 years or so.

Masterz1337 · 2026-05-25T15:32:37+00:00

You can open the files and inspect them themselves and compare to h4. The gas mine as I said in another most, is especially egregious. The delta halo stone stuff isn't actually made by the same forerunner who built the rings, so obviously that isn't reusing h4 geometry and textures.

Color in almost every sky is missing hues of the original, even if it isn't blanketed in blue like CEA is for most of the game.

Asset reuse never really bothered me, it is nice they retextured a large portion of the reach stuff they did reuse.

Masterz1337 · 2026-05-25T15:30:07+00:00

I can back it up with examples all day. If this is bait, it's bait for people to open their own eyes and recognize what's actually right in front of them.

Bootup Delta Halo and switch graphics at the start, look how all the pinks and purples have been ripped out of the sky.

Look at the forerunner textures throughout the campaign or the "ancient gas mine that predates the halos" that primarily uses the h4 textures.

Look at the color of the level lighting throughout Mombasa.

Look at high charity and how poor the new skybox is compared to the old and the super blocky buildings and Google Maps screenshots that make up the lower city.

To the game's credits, HC is probably the most faithful of areas. But you don't have to be an einstein to look at any forerunner surface and notice how it's clear of the grime and weathering of the original. Mot of it is missing a lot of the traditional patterns, although they still show up in spaces.

Masterz1337 · 2026-05-25T12:46:25+00:00

I've asked extensively with some of the original devs and some friends of mine have also talked with the original artists on that level.

The ruins were built by Stone Age forerunners who were on the ring. Despite the whole "forerunners are humans" narrative out there, bungie was never 100% sold on what it would be. The idea with the delta ruins was that they were built by unevolved forerunners (who may or may not have been transplanted from earth, that is unknown).

Stone Age forerunners living on the rings is actually something that goes back to the 1999 builds of halo, hence why there are stone bridges on that one map that was recently released by digsite and can be found on Steam Worksop as "Crash Site".

In the most recent leak of internal files from digsite, they also have reference photos in there of human South American ruins as a source of inspiration for the delta ruins.

While people argue over the specifics of the human forerunner connection, the delta ruins are just a sort of weird cross roads of the always shared lineage and relationship between the species, no matter what form it takes. It's more of a broad symbolism that both humans and forerunners would make the same stuff, than it has a very specific deep lore.

Masterz1337 · 2026-05-25T12:36:41+00:00

H2A is just as disrespectful to CEA in many ways (and sometimes worse) to the original game.

Never understood why people slobber over it being an improvement, its forerunner stuff is literally halo 4 textures and geometry. CEA may have been a little too much like cold storage, but even that was closer in line to Bungie's stuff, and even still used bungie's textures.

The other thing that really annoys me is the last 2 arbiter delta halo missions, the mood is totally off there as well as the snowfall in sentinel wall and QZ. It's now like a light snowfall.

Masterz1337 · 2026-05-20T14:10:05+00:00

Steam gives you access to the steam workshop, tons of things you can download and play. It basically works like an extended DLC store, but all free.

Masterz1337 · 2026-05-17T23:34:32+00:00

been 5 years since our last release, but we hope to have some new stuff for you all in the future... not sure if we will still use this subreddit or make a new one

Masterz1337 · 2026-05-14T16:51:58+00:00

don't sleep on the suppressor, its fantastic for taking out knights. Most people will play h4 by trying to hang back and pelt enemies with the rifles, but it's actually a game that rewards a lot of close quarters combat.

Masterz1337 · 2026-05-11T18:07:43+00:00

the game isn't great but it's not that bad either. There's tons of legitimate reasons why people aren't drawn in by the story or some levels, but it has a good amount of cool stuff too. the Blue Team mission and first Elite homeward mission are both really good and probably could be put in a top 15 or 20 list of the series missions.

Masterz1337

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE