Fredex

I have just spent easily an hour on this 2gb download only to find that I can play just one episode. One hour of downloading for ten minutes of gameplay. That's like deciding to play chess but realising you have accidentally left half the pieces in France and will need to catch a ferry to retrieve them... I understood staggering the releases of the first five that were included but this is just silly. I wouldn't have minded the ludicrously long download (seriously are the servers on fire today or something) if I got to play all of them.

Am I the only one that finds the options regarding vehicle destruction a tad... ridiculous? Because vehicle health is separate to player health indestructible vehicles render the player invincible in any vehicle where they themselves cannot be shot out of the seat. These options have severely hampered my attempts at creating a couple gametypes. The first was a go at creating a CTF game for a LAN similar to what we played on the first Halo. However indestructible vehicles mean that Warthogs aren't the bullet magnets they used to be and Scorpions may as well be replaced by Godzilla... this gametype was doomed to failure due to the lack of despawn settings anyway. Ideally I'd have liked the vehicles to simply remain where they were left indefinitely like the used to... instead of disappearing the moment you turn your back on them as if they're being spirited away by ninjas... I am currently working on a sumo game with rocket hogs, which is where the ridiculousness is really highlighted. With indestructible vehicles disabled landing all 6 rockets from the volley on an enemy hog will destroy it. I primarily want the rockets to be more about pushing the enemy around than killing them so damage reduction or indestructible vehicles need to be used. The problem with the latter is that the rockets will do a hell of a lot of damage on direct hits to one of the players in the hog but if it hits the armour an inch to their left does nothing... There really needs to be three setitngs for Indestructible Vehicles: Enabled, Disabled and Classic... ie Halo 1 style where the player still took damage and could be killed by shooting the vehicle, even though it could not be damaged itself. Frankly this is just what Enabled should do fullstop since there are plenty of options for making players tougher or even invincible without this. ...and whilst I am here I fail to see the reason for the arbitrary vehicle limits in Forge when you can place 16 of any vehicle on the map (on top of the original by using dominion vehicle pads. Then there is the aforementioned despawning timer which is just way too short. Warthogs have some really great destruction animation on them with bits flying off left right and centre but most of this stuff despawns before it even hits the floor. The incredibly short despawn timer and vehicle limits suggests that the game is running right on the edge of the console's capabilities but that simply cannot be the case. As a test I just piled up some 24 vehicles on top of a map's worth of fusion coils and plasma grenades then fired a rocket into the middle... the framerate didn't drop by any noticeable amount and this is way more simultaneous destruction than you'll ever see in a real match. Of course with 16 players, 16 consoles and latency galore it would be a different story but it strikes me that the sensible thing to do would be to calculate the graphics budget appropriately based on how much is on the map and the number of players. Instead they seem to have created some really great destruction graphics and then decided not to bother displaying them for more than a second in case your console's GPU had accidently been replaced with mild brie... If there is only one vehicle being destroyed then why not keep the debris around a little longer... or you know, just stop spending all the graphics budget on lighting up every single level like an epilepsy testing clinic... Destruction aside, vehicles and weapons that despawn if no one is looking at them is more than just annoying. It is game breaking.

My problem with the vehicles is that they don't feel formidable enough... in previous Halo games when someone had a banshee up or was rolling round in a tank you'd be inclined to make a rush for the rockets to take them down, it meant strategy and teamwork was required... now they die from battle rifle spam before you need worry...

Now that it's working at last it seems to reset my armour, loadouts and any other customisation options every single time I restart the game... Every single armour piece, emblem, weapon and ability now has a star next to it so I can't even see new stuff at a glance.

What amuses me about the whole situation is that in our lan sessions of the first Halo we used to look down on anyone using the Magnum excessively because it was so overpowered and turned every game into an incredibly boring ranged fight. However it seems that Bungie and now 343 looked at the dodgy balance issues of the original Magnum and decided to base the entire game around it. Most matchmaking games simply revolve around a team standing at one end of the map with 'precision' weapons and a team standing opposite them doing the same... which gets boring pretty damn quickly. Dominion is really the only saving grace of this game as far as I am concerned as the shielded objectives prevent every single encounter being decided at 50 paces...

The only thing I am able to confirm is what I already suspected that it is to do with each player's profile and not their connection... since with another gamertag on another console (but the same modem) it works ok. I thought it might be my connection since it was playing up recently but no... On release day a couple of my friends had this issue when the rest of us did not and we concluded it was because they got the game a few hours earlier and hence created their profiles before us so were on a different server which was down. However by this token a few of my friends that started playing at the same time as me should be having the same issue and just aren't... it seems like it might just be random who gets sent to the backup server and who is actually able to play. I was just going to log on briefly today to play the new Spartan Ops but due to some ridiculous decision on 343's behalf you have to be online to play an ostensibly single player thing...

I have encountered games with dodgy server issues before but I have never wanted to play with friends only to find I have been shoved onto some manner of backup server, assumedly situated in the centre of a black hole... The explanation given for this is just overly patronising and frankly ridiculous. 'In previous Halo titles, you’re dependent on the servers to get the information you needed for Matchmaking, and if they go down, you can’t play. Fallback hoppers are a new functionality for Halo 4, and they allow people to continue playing Halo 4 when there are server issues.' In previous Halo titles I was never unable to play whilst friends were all merrily prancing about in a game... hmm, that sounded overly camp. Whatever. Frankly I may as well simply be unable to play, there being only around 1000 people on the poxy server I have been assigned to and none of my preferred game types. I have no indication nor idea of if/when I will be back onto a real server and able to play again or indeed why this is only happening to me of all my friends. The day 1 server issues were a joke but apparently it now seems as if they can occur again at any time without warning... how fun.

Still have my rank but cannot join friends or play spartan ops. War games is showing a cut back games list with less than 1500 odd people playing in total. Same problems that were occurring on launch day except now it is only affecting me of all my friends... Fantastic...

I'll be honest at least the loadout system in Halo 4 actually makes sense. When it gives you the option of a jetpack you can justify this by the fact that you are a heavily armoured, cybernetically augmented super soldier fighting aliens in space. When COD lets you become 'Cold Blooded' you have to wonder what the hell it is on about.

Considering CTF, to my mind at least, is the gametype which made Halo... or certainly the one we used to play 90% of the time I am pretty damn disappointed with the CTF we've been given in Halo 4. The game just seems to be crying out for an 8vs8, flag at home to score, CTF on Ragnarok... because frankly the map currently feels a bit useless on any of the existing gametypes. It's either a DMR camp fest on slayer and KOTH or largely underutilised on the poor assimilation of CTF that currently exists...

I'd quite like a gametype where the Mantis' had jetpacks but maybe that's just me...

Stop joining different games? Half the time when you do you leave the rest of the players a man short when the dodgy matchmaking system fails to fill the spot anyway. I'm the same with Complex and Ragnarok... if there's enough of us playing we usually just vote tactically to avoid them but when the rest of the room come down with some manner of incurable brain disease and actually vote for the things you can rest assured it's out of the way for a while on the playlist... assuming the room maintains enough people to keep going that is.

I look at it the other way... to be 100% satisfied with something and see no room for improvement shows a startling lack of imagination, independent thought and ultimately maybe even intelligence. There is very little I see or do that I don't feel could be altered for a better experience and granted hindsight is 20:20 but at least with video games there is the ability to patch and update, hopefully based on community feedback. No amount of internal play testing can compare to hundreds of thousands playing it when it goes live so invariably there will always be balance issues and things that need tweaking. I can only hope 343 are as diligent in this regard as some other developers are and don't simply ignore glaring game issues to work on endless amounts of DLC instead... So with that in mind no I will not stop whining about balance issues causing major overuse of the BR and DMR that ultimately ruin large chunks of the game... it's the only way they'll learn.

We accidentally launched a game of regicide with 6 of us online the other day, forgetting it was only a 6 player game... so we thought why not give the 18 regicide challenge a go, it seeming ludicrously impossible on the face of it. In order to get 18 in a game you need to kill only the king and no one else... or you'll win on points before hitting 18. Then it turns out the thing is bugged anyway and stops counting at 10. A friend tried the daily 10 in a legitimate game and found that even when going only for the king game after game it is only really ever going to happen in a room full of complete idiots with just one other player as good or better than you to get the kills on. Doesn't really seem like they have thought some of them through and the reward just isn't worth the effort...

Right now I would really find a game without either the Battle Rifle or DMR to be vastly more enjoyable than the current matchmaking experience. As I have said before I personally find strafing in and out of cover shooting each other in the face from opposites sides of the maps akin to, and about as much fun as, Duck Hunt. I'm sure I am virtually alone in this though as 90% of the games I play seem to solely involve this kind of play... so clearly the community just love Duck Hunt. The most fun fights in Halo tend to be chaotic melees where two teams pile into an objective to vie for control of it at the same time until someone emerges the victor. Dominion generally gives me my fill of this as the shields go a long way to stopping boring buggers sitting out the fight entirely and just picking off the stragglers. However virtually every other gametype seems to revolve around the same formula: A. sit as far away from the objective as physically possible B. shoot all the enemies on said objective in their faces until they fall off C. think about actually bothering with the objective D. repeat Ultimately I am finding so many of the games as dull as a symposium on the colour beige. Dominion is the one redeeming factor with the odd game of KOTH and Oddball where the entire enemy team don't just hang back hunting ducks. Hopefully a real version of CTF will come along soon and save me from giving up on this game before it really gets off the ground...

Saw I personally see no problem with... it's basically a power weapon in sheep's clothing so it being powerful is fine. Given the truly abysmal range of the loadout automatics I don't think this one should be ruined too. As for the Bolt Shot I would personally say the range needs to be lowered. It can still be a one shot kill pocket shotgun but at the moment it seems to kill at twice the effective range of a proper one... which doesn't seem right for a loadout gun. It should be a weapon that can turn the tide in a melee fight, not one that can kill at twenty paces... Binary Rifle is a tad over the top but the most ridiculous thing about it is the stockpile of the damn things the Infinity seems to possess. This is an ancient alien weapon from a newly discovered planet we're talking about here and yet on the last game I counted four of the things in play at one time. In fact I picked one up to take aim on an enemy with one only to be shot at close range by a second enemy with a Binary Rifle. Meltdown seems to be solely about who controls the Doom Cannon... sorry, Incineration Cannon and Binary Rifles 90% of the time...

Host quit the other day literally 5 seconds before the game finished. It then spent a good 5 minutes reselecting a host only for it to immediately finish upon finally doing so. One guy can't cope with waiting a few seconds so the rest of us have to wait minutes on a black screen for a game to finish... Yeah it's not ideal.

So far the most fun I have had in Halo 4 has been in custom games and matchmaking sessions where the entire enemy team aren’t just sat across the map ducking in and out of cover with a battle rifle or DMR. Two guns which just ruin the game entirely to my mind. So here’s a list of things I would change: -Reduced backwards movement speed so backing away firing with a ‘precision’ weapon isn’t a guaranteed kill against someone with an automatic gun in close range. Would also make the sword and hammer rightfully dominate in close quarters again and give the oddball carrier a fighting chance. -Either a return of the old loss of scope when hit feature or a sway you can’t simply counter for as if it doesn’t exist. I dread to think how the game will play when everyone uses the Rogue specialisation... -Reduced damage against vehicles for the Battle Rifle. When the enemy has a Banshee in the air killing it should prompt you to make a rush for that rocket that’s just spawned in... not simply spam the thing with rifle fire from half way across the map. -Slightly reduced damage against vehicles with the sniper rifle. I appreciate it is meant to be an anti material round but that doesn’t mean it should be the single most effective anti vehicle weapon. So maybe just an extra shot to kill would be good. -Minor increase on plasma grenade splash damage. Not by much... but at the moment it seems a bit illogical that a stick is a kill whereas a grenade a foot away is just like an overly flashy party popper... -More reward for EMP disables. So many times now I have hit a vehicle with EMP, stuck it with one grenade but died before throwing the second only to get a measly handful of points for doing all the hard work whilst a teammate that just strayed into the fray mops up with an unjust double kill... minor issue but there we go. -Slightly reduced range on the Bolt Shot charge up. Just slightly. -A little more splash damage on the Railgun and more damage vs vehicles... considering it’s bigger brother is used to bombard planets from space it currently feels a bit... useless. So yes, just some balance issues from my perspective. True I am biased in that I hate the poxy Battle Rifle but then it doesn’t require more than a cursory look at the game to work out the thing is overused to hell and there must be a reason behind this...

Seconded. It will be good for big team capture the flag... when they finally realise it should have been in from launch but for slayer and king of the hill it is the most abysmal DMR/BR camping fest I have ever encountered. You'd think it would be fun for vehicles but since the DMR and BR seem to fire bloody tank shells anything not currently situated behind three feet of rock is reduced to so much scrap metal instantly...

Ceiling raised on 'Ravine'. Visually it seems to go up for miles but you can get out of bounds within about 5 seconds with a jet pack... very disappointing map.

Getting thrown into a game that is already underway is one thing... starting a game at 7vs2 when people quit before the next player search is just baffling. We were only in a party of two at the time... it could have happily put us on the team that was at a disadvantage to balance things... for starters.

I had a fantastic one just now. Gauss hog shot me whilst I was on a ledge above him and he was aiming at the floor... the shot ricocheted up at a 45 degree angle before veering to the left sharply and finding my face. Honestly if I had created a kill cam this buggy I would have just removed it from the game at the last minute... no one would miss it.

Frankly I was just kind of including the DMR as well, it and the Battle Rifle must make up 90% of my deaths... The issue I am having more often than not is that I will get the jump on someone with an automatic weapon at close range... the only place it is effective, only for the enemy to back away firing. Every couple foot they get away significantly decreases the damage of automatic weapons and because of the rate at which you can jog backwards it's not long before the fight is entirely one sided. In half the games I play it feels like they may as well have just removed everything but the Battle Rifle and DMR from the game... This is not just me whining about getting killed though... even when someone is running at you with a sword you seem to come away unscathed half the time because you can simply back away firing... the sword and hammer should be devastating up close but they just... aren't. In the last game I took a hammer off someone by killing them from close range and was only really able to get a couple kills with it because I had a speed boost ordnance drop and active camo... I don't feel like decreasing the backwards movement speed would annoy people as much as something like a weapon nerf but I think it would dramatically improve the game and fix a whole host of balance issues.

I can't seem to find a bug submission section so hopefully this will do, though frankly it seems a bit silly creating a post solely for this. The piece 'BLOCK, 3x3, FLAT' has the 'magnets' located in the wrong place, they are not centred correctly on one side making them pretty much useless. They are out by .1 units. Also whilst I'm here: 'This is a place to discuss and share your ideas of the new and vastly improved Halo 4 forge.' Hilarious. 10/10. Well done.

One issue I have with it is that it feels like it almost discourages playing the game... if I hit the XP limit but have a few multiplayer commendations coming up I kind of want to stop playing, even if I am enjoying it, because it will just make the next level take longer if a whole bunch of XP is wasted. Now I don’t actually know if the limit stops you completing commendations and challenges or if the experience from them still contributes and it is just the game complete experience that ceases... these things are not actually made clear but since I am not sure a couple times it has led to me stopping for the night when we might have played a few more fun games. Frankly the system reminds me of the thing that MMOs have in Japan to stop people killing themselves by forgetting to eat...