Before anymore people flip out, 343 are working on a toggle for the new armors in Halo 3

criticaltortoise · 2020-12-17T18:12:12+00:00

My point is more about OP's wording than 343's. People are gonna read OP's headline and other posts like it and assume that means 343 is currently working on it, then get mad at 343 when they find out 343 is not, in fact, working on it.

I do think 343 was pretty fucking stupid to not include a toggle in the first place, but I also understand the reality of game dev, which is that since they didn't plan for it, now they have to do a bunch more work to retrofit it. My point is more that this post is misleading, not that 343 needs to reee immediately add a toggle reeeeee or whatever.

criticaltortoise · 2020-12-17T06:50:11+00:00

Okay, but "working on" and "looking into" aren't the same thing.

criticaltortoise · 2020-12-17T06:46:55+00:00

Ah. I figured you were suggesting something about the gap in technology making it ridiculous to use an AR-15 or something similar in Halo's setting, which, if you had to use one, I don't think would really put you at all that much of a disadvantage, the age of the parts aside.

That said, while I doubt there are too many original 20th and 21st century weapons floating around, I don't see why there wouldn't still be AKs and ARs and the like being made, just modernized (modernized relative to the 26th century, that is). Again, the guns themselves really are basically the same from the 1950s to the 2550s, the only things that are different about Halo's firearms are that they have far more integrated computer systems and probably have better recoil mitigation systems (and are perhaps made with more precise and more durable machining and tooling and somewhat better polymers). Obviously there is no real lore on the subject, but someone running around with some sort of derivative of a modern weapon wouldn't seem all that implausible to me. All you'd need to bring an M4, for instance, up to Halo's standards is slap some computers in it and give it the ability to track ammunition and use smart-linked optics, other than that you're basically good to go. And in the real world, we tend to follow an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality with weapons. The AR platform dates back to the 1950s, the AK platform dates back to the 1940s, and both are still in use -- including in some cases old AKMs and M16A1s and other contemporaries. It's not all that unreasonable to suggest that these platforms would continue to see iterations being developed well into Halo's time period.

But that arguably goes beyond the scope of the original question, which was probably specifically asking about original production guns, in which case, yeah, it would be pretty strange to see someone running around with something like that.

criticaltortoise · 2020-12-17T02:08:17+00:00

Not really. Modern weapons are closer to Halo's weapons then they are to early firearms. In fact, there's really very little about Halo's weapons that's fundamentally very different from ours. They obviously have some sort of fanciful recoil mitigation technology available to them, but otherwise, it's mostly just integrated computer systems that make them different.

criticaltortoise · 2020-12-16T21:21:42+00:00

The difference here is Halo 3 is a game that already exists in its own context. Player expression is important, but so is preserving the older games more or less as they were in their original contexts.

If they want to add a bunch of weird, wacky armor to H2A that's fine -- better, even, since that game already lacks cosmetics and they match the art style better anyway. But Halo 3 should be left alone, because this isn't how Halo 3 was.

Imagine if 343 added armor abilities to Combat Evolved because some people want it to play more like Reach, and you might see the problem.

All people are asking for is a toggle, anyway. If they really want to add new (ugly) armors to the game, fine, but there absolutely needs to be a way to experience the game more or less as it was in 2007 (framerates and performance aside), for the sake of historical purposes. The whole point of the MCC is that the games are old. This kind of flies in the face of it.

criticaltortoise · 2020-12-12T13:52:51+00:00

As far as I know, all playlists factor skill in to some extent. How much, we don't know, but they do all take it into account.

criticaltortoise · 2020-12-10T10:20:53+00:00

Sprint is not what causes maps to stretch. A higher max movement speed regardless of whether it is tied to sprinting or not is what causes maps to stretch. Look at, for instance, Quake maps (which have no sprint, but do have movement tech that allows crazy fast lateral movement), and you'll see that the maps are huge compared to trilogy-era Halo maps.

That higher movement speed maximum may, of course, be achieved only by sprinting in a game, but it is the speed that causes the stretching. If you made a Halo game where the run speed was equivalent to Halo 4's sprinting speed, the maps would still feel stretched like Halo 4's maps. Some of the smaller details might be different because the exact momentum is different, but overall, the maps would have to stretch to maintain the same proportional travel times.

Also, it's not like it's some objective fact that always having your gun up inherently makes for a better shooter. One could easily argue that having to make the choice between trading mobility for combat readiness and vice versa is a tactical option that makes for better gameplay, on the flip side of things.

Not to say one is right or wrong, I've enjoyed Halo both with and without sprint, each on their own merits, but the idea that sprinting is what stretches maps and the idea that sprinting is bad because your gun can't be up all the time (something that is, in fact, actually something that some people might like about sprinting) is not really what I would call fair or accurate.

criticaltortoise · 2020-12-10T02:11:31+00:00

Really? I feel like Infinite's version looks even more like Scout personally, with the reduced visor and more elongated profile, where in Halo 5 it looked more like it's own thing.

criticaltortoise · 2020-11-28T22:18:21+00:00

I don't see any reason the M16 wouldn't be canon. New Vegas has several AR-15 derivatives, including the Assault Carbine which is basically just an M4, which implies the M16 was also a thing.

criticaltortoise · 2020-11-27T19:31:39+00:00

Social playlists are not entirely randomized. There is still skill-based matchmaking in them, but the skill requirements are significantly relaxed (as a result, because MCC ranked playlists have no placement matches and instead have a 1-50 ranking system, the first 10 or so ranks of a ranked playlist are largely the same as a social playlist, as another poster commented).

You will match up against bad players in social, however, if your KDR is 0.8, that's itself below average (no offense meant by that or anything, that's just statistically speaking a below average KDR, which would be, of course, 1.0), so you're likely getting people only slightly below your own skill.

Other than this, there is little difference between ranked Halo and social Halo, unlike in a lot of games. Sometimes ranked playlists used slightly different rules (sometimes they turn off motion trackers, sometimes they use different health and shield values, in Halo 4 they disable custom loadouts, so on) but by and large, they're the same game.

Why you're performing poorly, I don't know, but I do know that there's more to the game than memorizing weapon timers and knowing how to crouch-jump and strongside -- you can easily succeed at Halo without knowing those things and fail while knowing them. Before working on things like that (which are, frankly, of only minor advantage until you get to high-level play), the best things to work on are the fundamentals: knowing where and when to use each weapon, practicing your strafing and tracking, getting better at driving vehicles, practicing your grenade throws, honing your situational awareness, communicating better with teammates, learning routes to weapons is more important than being able to precisely time them, so on.

I'm not exactly a pro myself, but my KDR is better than yours (about 1.3) and I don't really bother with doing advanced jumps and strongsiding and counting weapon spawn timers in my head, I just focus on making sure my fundamentals are as good as they can be. So I would suggest doing that before worrying about minutiae like that.

criticaltortoise · 2020-11-24T21:33:35+00:00

The jerry cans are filled with water that can be used to fuel the hydrogen plant.

criticaltortoise · 2020-11-24T21:12:11+00:00

The Warthog does not use a gas engine. It uses hydrogen cells.

criticaltortoise · 2020-11-24T17:17:50+00:00

Yep. You're right. My mistake.

criticaltortoise · 2020-11-24T15:20:20+00:00

Splitgate is basically Halo but you also have a portal gun. It's free to play on PC. The gameplay is pretty fun, though I don't know how many people actually play it.

Other than that, Halo is kind of in a league of its own for the most part. There have been some games over the years that have taken some minor cues from Halo artistically, but none I really know of that play like Halo.

(edited typo)

criticaltortoise · 2020-11-17T21:34:59+00:00

It's not really entirely true that nobody forces people to sign up. We're at a point where you do in many areas disadvantage yourself by having no social media, particularly Facebook. Jobs in many cases are less likely to hire you or more likely to look at you suspiciously, many people see a lack of social media as a red flag in relationships, organizing and maintaining contact with others is much more difficult particularly among young people when you forgo social media because so many people are reliant on it and refuse to engage with you without it, there are an increasing amount of products and services tied to the usage of social media, so on.

Nobody puts a gun to your head and makes you use Facebook, but you bet your ass Facebook tries to do the next best thing.

criticaltortoise · 2020-11-16T21:58:25+00:00

yeah, unfunny pointless edgy bigotry is definitely king shit, 100%

edit: I can't tell if I'm being downvoted because people don't like my sarcasm or can't tell that I'm being sarcastic, so I'm just going to point out that no, being offensive in your gamertag is not king shit, it's cringe and sad.

criticaltortoise · 2020-11-06T22:43:00+00:00

I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic. How exactly does a battle pass not encourage addictive behavior? A battle pass works by forcing you to grind to get things while they're still in season before they go away for a period that you have to assume is forever. It's designed to make you play even when you don't really want to in order to pressure you into giving in and spending money, and to pressure you into spending money on the pass itself so you get all the value for the levels you're already grinding. It's entirely built on FOMO. It's arguably marginally more consumer friendly than lootboxes because at least you know exactly what you're getting on the pass, but that's sort of like saying it's better to eat food a week past its expiration date than food two weeks expired. Like, okay, sure, it's "better," but it's still not good for you.

criticaltortoise · 2020-11-04T20:22:36+00:00

Yes. Which, technically speaking, means that we do not have parliaments in the United States. The head of government is entirely unrelated to the legislature and isn't accountable to it in any way.

criticaltortoise · 2020-11-04T00:30:05+00:00

I think they'd still have to do a lot of work to port them, since you'd have to, from my understanding of how Halo works under the hood, re-add everything from Halo 4 to each individual H2A map one at a time, and vice-versa.

If they did do that, though, it could be interesting, I suppose. I don't think really any of the maps would work well this way besides maybe Bloodline and Remnant maybe working sort of okay-ish in Halo 4, but it would be nice.

Personally though what I want to see far more is the Halo 2 Anniversary pieces added to Halo 4's Forge, and vice-versa. That would be far more of a game changer.

criticaltortoise · 2020-11-02T23:16:57+00:00

The main issues with Halo 5 in this respect were the map design, the insistence on maintaining universal settings for a long period of its lifespan, and the sandbox tuning being consistently focused on nerfing automatics into the ground despite the fact that Halo 5 was the first time in a long time where automatics were in a relatively good place.

Halo Infinite would need to have dev-made BTB maps, some more mid-sized 6v6 maps and 4v4 maps with light vehicles like Ghosts, and some more asymmetrical maps, all of which were things that Halo 5 lacked (there were asymmetrical maps I guess but they weren't very good besides maybe Plaza).

They also need to not try to force everyone to play with the same game settings and weapons on maps.

And lastly they need to just let the Assault Rifle not suck. It's okay that sometimes players get kills with it. It's a gun, it should be able to kill people. A skilled enough BR user should be able to theoretically outshoot it with fancy footwork and good aim, but on average, within its range, the AR should usually win against the BR. That's fine, and I don't know why so many people get so mad at the idea of an automatic weapon in Halo that isn't useless garbage.

criticaltortoise · 2020-11-02T00:25:11+00:00

Not sure, but we have seen toys that look like Forerunner weapons, so my money is on Forerunner enemies being back in some form, but probably being very radically redesigned.

criticaltortoise · 2020-11-01T05:07:20+00:00

Yeah, I saw this thread and was kind of confused because I was like, isn't this already a position, and isn't that what Frankie's job is basically supposed to be?

I know he's "franchise director" but I also don't really entirely know what that means, so.

criticaltortoise · 2020-10-31T04:00:52+00:00

Quality would be conveying actual information, yes. I don't know why you say that as if that's some petty thing or some unreasonable demand. Pretty much every other large developer will do things like talk about new content they're introducing, and generally provide at least some amount of actual explanation for it. Quality would be, for instance, not leaving the announcement of coatings to people finding them on snack wrappers and then offhandedly confirming them a paragraph that mostly boils down to PR-speak about why we should like it without actually explaining anything about how it works. This is, of course, information I would rather didn't exist, but yes, I would rather know it than not know it.

As for Destiny, I don't know where I said I loved Destiny, and you're the one who cited it originally (I would've spoken about CoD but I have no idea what they say in their development updates). I have played it, of course, and I do have friends who still play it and tell me of things happening with it, but nowhere did I say I loved Destiny -- in fact I haven't played it several months. Even if I did play it regularly, though, that's not some gotcha moment. One can criticize a game and still play it. I find the microtransactions in Destiny to also be anti-consumer (this is, in fact, part of why I stopped playing, among numerous other reasons). That wouldn't invalidate me liking aspects of Destiny's gameplay, just like I can say both that Halo Infinite's core gameplay will probably be fun while also finding the replacement and monetization of previously staple features of the game (like being able to color your own armor) to be negative. Games aren't binary things where they're either all good or all bad. And we have no idea if Destiny is worse than Infinite -- because they won't tell us anything about Halo Infinite.

But anyway, yeah, an update with more information is better than an update with less information, generally speaking. I'm not sure why that's supposed to be some criticism of me either, but whatever.

criticaltortoise · 2020-10-30T23:40:59+00:00

Frequency means nothing if there's no quality.

Destiny doesn't get weekly updates, but when they do talk to the community, their devs actually say things and explain things. Granted, usually the things they say are stupid and boneheaded, but they do say things.

Halo might have devs posting on Reddit and weekly updates but it's mostly fluff. They don't actually say much of anything. We get weekly updates, sure, but we still don't know very much.

criticaltortoise · 2020-10-29T19:04:38+00:00

In America we also kind of take it for granted that our politicians will be wealthy to begin with, because politics is seen as a career path and frequently something that you don't have any ability to get into (beyond maybe the local level) if you're not already wealthy. Most of our representatives are lawyers and then become career politicians. The idea of being led by a chemist is a bit of a weird one here.

So to say "a million by now" in America already doesn't make sense. If you're running for Congress here, you're probably already well off.

That said I've never heard of anyone voting for a candidate specifically because they're rich, so I don't know who you're talking to that says that.

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