RedStarRocket91
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Posts posted by RedStarRocket91
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Second, the phone country code 38 (see green) is non-existent (https://countrycode.org/)
GUYS HE DESTROYED A COUNTRY TO COVER IT UP
YOU KICKED US OUT OVER A CUP OF TEA AND YOU'RE LETTING HIM GET AWAY WITH THIS!?
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Lock. Him. Up.
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Oh boy.
How... how much detail are you wanting, exactly? I could write a lot on this.-
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Truth told, I'm not really that fond of any of the Spartan-IVs. I'm sure a lot of that is down to not having read any of the books since Halo 4, but the ones in the games just aren't really that interesting.
The only ones I can really name are Palmer, Thorne, and the members of Osiris. Palmer is pretty dull, and it doesn't help that she's so overpowered in cutscenes: the same applies to Osiris, who seem to make up for their general lack of personalities by showing off in the intro. The only two members of Osiris who really get any development at all are Locke and Buck. In the case of Locke, Nightfall was pretty unimpressive to begin with, and in Halo 5, he's as poorly written as everyone else. Buck has the advantage of having been in ODST, but again, come Halo 5 and he's a completely different character, reduced to wisecracking instead of actually showing off any trace of his personality in ODST. That only really leaves Thorne, and while he's certainly nice enough in a bland, 'designated hero' kind of way, he just doesn't really get enough screen time, or character development, for me to be invested in him as a character.
So instead, I'm going to say that my favourite Spartan-IV is the leader of Fireteam Crimson, since he's a hell of a fighter without needing to resort to cutscene power, gets on with the mission without needing to open his mouth and snark constantly, and is surprisingly handsome beneath that helmet
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And yea they actually still give out Platinum REQ Packs and Gold REQ Packs during HCS streams that expire after 10 minutes. It's more of a way to get viewers than to actually allow players to get the REQs lol. Their timing... I mean they just got MLG back January this year. THIS year. When everyone is all but done with Halo 5.
It just seems like such a short-sighted approach, you know? I mean yeah, I get that they want to bring viewers in, but like... surely the only reason the vast majority of people who care about HCS do so, is because they play Halo themselves? I know some people who don't play Halo anymore might still keep up with HCS, but I'd expect that the overall number of people who actually care about HCS enough to watch it to be based mostly on the number of people who currently play the game. So the best way to increase the number of people watching HCS would be, get more people actually playing Halo.
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Someone's been keeping up on Twitter!
Agreed though. I have yet to share my own thoughts on this but my questions were already reflective of what I was thinking. We should have had something like this a long time ago- it is way too late in Halo 5's lifespan for casual play to be releasing something worth so many hours of gameplay. Half these wins and maybe we're on to something.
Ashamed to admit, but I actually haven't! I just ran the numbers myself from what you linked in the OP, lol.
343's attempts to get people back into the game have always struck me as a bit... odd. I remember a while back (might have been HCS?) there was something where they publicly gave out a code for some special goodies during the stream. But I tried to redeem it about a half hour after the stream was over, and it had already expired. Just, why would you even put a time limit on something like that, let alone one so short? They should be doing everything they can to get people back onto Halo 5 given its dwindling population, especially for things like skins that they're giving away for free anyway. And yet they insist on hiding their incentives away behind a grind wall or ridiculous time constraints. Makes me wonder what the overall strategy is, you know?
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On the one hand, I can respect stretching out skins so that they feel like an achievement.
On the other hand - that really is a lot of wins to unlock all of the skins. If it had been Magnum kills or something then yeah, fair enough, but even assuming you win half your matches (as you should if the matchmaking system is doing its job), then you're looking at 1300 games to unlock all of the skins. Assuming ten minutes per match and then two minutes of downtime between matches, which is pretty conservative for non-US locations where matchmaking times are significantly longer, and you're looking at about two hundred and sixty hours of playtime, just to get all the skins.
It's definitely encouraging to see something new added to the game which can actually be reliably obtained rather than having to swim through all the sewage in the REQ pool, but those really are very, very steep requirements, especially so late into Halo 5's lifespan. At 75 wins, the first skin alone is going to take somewhere in the region of 30 hours of gameplay to achieve, and I think most people who aren't already playing Halo 5 aren't going to care nearly enough about a simple cosmetic to put that kind of time in. Five wins for the first one - something you could feasibly do in a couple hours of play one evening - would have a much better chance of actually pulling in a few extra players.
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I thought it was clear I meant static defences alone.
Back on-topic, nice work comparing the UNSC's resources between battles, it really shows how much we needed the Great Schism.
Yeah, I'm just re-reading my earlier reply now, and I think 'fortified' was probably a bad word to use there. Maybe 'defended' would have been better.
Also, just wanted to say how much I enjoyed the question this week - it's been a while since I've had an excuse to go digging through the games for answers, and it's been a ton of fun trying to put all the pieces together!
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It was better defended because more naval vessels were dedicated to defending it, but if both planets were attacked at the same time, more vessels would be sent to Earth and you'd be saying Earth was better fortified. It's impossible to say any other planet was fortified better than Reach considering how most of the UNSC Navy was destroyed after the battle, according to you.
Absolutely, if they were attacked simultaneously and the UNSC had sent the majority of their ships back to Earth, I'd agree that Earth was better fortified.
But, they weren't, and it didn't, so that's not the discussion we've been having. I'm comparing what was actually present to participate in each of those battles.
If I can give you an analogy here: imagine two cities. One of them has bigger walls and more towers, so in that respect yes, it's more fortified. What I'm saying is, you need to account for the number of men who can actually defend those walls, too.
You should be looking at the permanent defenses put in place to make a fair comparison. The ODPs have MAC cannons and more.
...I did, though? Almost the entirety of my second response is dedicated to looking at exactly that, and I came to the conclusion that the static defences aren't sufficient to make up for the reduced size of the fleet. To go back to the city analogy, once there's a hole in the walls and all the towers overlooking it have crumbled, what matters more in determining the outcome - the size of the walls and number of towers elsewhere, or the number of men who can actually defend that breach? It's the same with the orbital defence grid: in Halo 2 the UNSC has the advantage of massively outnumbering the Prophet of Regret's fleet, and effectively ambushing them, and yet within the first hour of the battle the local cluster has had two of its three stations destroyed and the Covenant have their breach in the walls, after which point all the other battlestations contribute nothing to the fight since the only thing which can actually respond to the Covenant's attacks in that area are the fleet, which is at least a third smaller than the one which was defeated at Reach.
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Red said planet, not colony. If we're talking about any planet here, I'm sure Earth's more fortified (link a source if I'm wrong). As for colonies, Reach is probably the most fortified one, I'm not sure though.
Well, are there any sources which actually say that Earth was more fortified?
Again, working from what we know within the games: at least 60% of the total UNSC navy was present on Reach, according to Dot at the start of 'Long Night of Solace'. From the Arbiter's speech at the start of Halo 2, we also know that the Pillar of Autumn was the only ship to escape, meaning that humanity had, at most, 40% of their previous fleet present for the Battle of Earth. In other words, if the accounts from Reach and Halo 2 are accurate, then at least in terms of naval vessels there's no way Earth could have actually been more fortified than Reach.
As for the orbital stations, I don't know what they're actually worth in terms of 'ships', but we can suppose two main things. The first, that a single station int sufficient to stop one of the Covenant's carriers, given that the Prophet of Regret's flagship is able to simply bypass Cairo Station during the mission of the same name. The second, that the orbital stations appear to be extremely vulnerable to boarding actions - of the three that we see boarded during the mission, two are successfully destroyed. The last one only barely repels its boarders in time, and that because there was a Spartan-II present - and there obviously aren't enough Spartan-IIs to defend the whole defence grid.
It's never mentioned again after that as far as I remember, so I don't know whether the grid was destroyed or simply rendered ineffective once the Covenant had punched a hole in over East Africa, but in any case, it's difficult to rate its overall effectiveness as a substitute for the missing ships. All we know is that, in order for Earth to have been more fortified than Reach, the battlestations in its defence grid needed to be worth at least half as much as all of the ships which participated in the battle, plus whatever Reach had in terms of static defences.
But wait! That presupposes that the entire defence grid can actually participate. The reality is, once the Covenant are beneath the defence grid, they can't actually do anything and Earth is reliant on its fleet, who as we've already established, cannot be larger than the number which defended Reach. Johnson mentions that Cairo Station co-ordinates fire with Athens and Malta stations while on the monorail ride at the start of Halo 2: assuming that the battlestations are arranged so that they work in clusters of three, that means just three battlestations together need to be as effective as half of the entire remaining human fleet in order to ensure the same level of fortification as Reach.
While you could make the argument that the UNSC ships might fall back from cluster to cluster after each set's destruction, this hits another snag when you consider the Covenant concentrated their forces over East Africa, meaning that once the first cluster (or the first few clusters) had been cleared, they didn't need to bother attacking the rest, since the battlestations can't move to counterattack. But even assuming that the Covenant are incredibly bloody-minded and destroy the entire defence grid before settling in to excavate, they're still capable of destroying them very quickly via boarding actions, and can still fight them in small clusters rather than having to deal with the whole lot at once.
So ultimately? Even if we assume that the 300 orbital platforms are collectively worth more than half of Earth's fleet, the UNSC is still less fortified than Reach by simple virtue of having fewer vessels with which to counter-attack and form any kind of strategy, and unless just one cluster is worth more than half the surviving UNSC fleet, then even if both fleets and the cluster all fought at once in practical terms the UNSC would be facing a fleet at least as large as the one which attacked Reach, with a smaller effective strength.
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Of course they could have. Just fire a Halo ring
More seriously, no. It's stated somewhere that the UNSC needed to outnumber Covenant ships three to one in order to have even odds of victory, and after the fall of Reach, humanity didn't even come close to that. I'm going to be working off game canon here, since I'm not an expert on book lore, but here's my breakdown.Reach itself is perhaps the best example: it was the single most heavily fortified planet in the UNSC. By August 16th, it was being defended by at least 60% of the UNSC's fleet, assuming Dot's comments at the start of 'Long Night of Solace' were accurate, most of the surviving Spartan-IIs and Noble Team. From first contact at Visegrad Relay to the whole world being glassed after the Pillar of Autumn's escape took a little over a month. Now admittedly, Reach is supposed to have really taken a toll on the Covenant, but they still won it, and even if we work on the assumption that '60% of the UNSC fleet' represented the absolute total percentage of the UNSC's fleets ever present over Reach (rather than in addition to its own forces, which were probably worth at least a few percentage points by themselves), that still means humanity had a whole third less available to defend Earth than they had when they had failed to defend Reach.
As for Earth? The defence that we saw throughout Halo 2 went okay, thanks to home turf, an ambush counterattack, and an extreme numerical advantage, but even then losses were bad, as within a few minutes of the opening battle two of the major orbital defence stations had been wiped out. But even with these advantages, two of the defence platforms are still destroyed, and this by a Covenant fleet which is one-fiftieth the size of the fleet which destroyed Reach. In ODST we see a much bigger fleet appear, and absolutely no signs of effective counter attack: by Halo 3, the UNSC has seemingly been reduced to operating out of abandoned surface bases, one of which falls to a single Covenant capital ship. Even the combined UNSC and Elite forces simply don't have enough strength to prevent the Covenant from opening the portal to the Ark.
Now, let's crunch some numbers. At the start of 'The Ark', it's mentioned that the Covenant outnumber the Elites three to one. Now, if we assume that everything in that battle represents the absolute total number of remaining Covenant ships, and that a Brute-led ship is only one-third as effective as an Elite ship (i.e. about as effective as a human ship), then using our initial statement that the UNSC needed to outnumber Elite-led ships three-to-one in order to have a chance of victory, at the time of the battle above the Ark, the UNSC would have needed a ship for every Brute ship and three for each Elite vessel (a total of six to four) to have a chance of winning that fight. And that's not even considering that the Covenant fleet would have been vastly larger, since it wouldn't have had a sizeable chunk of its fleet destroyed during the schism.
Next, consider that the Elite ships (i.e. a quarter of the potential Covenant hulls) were able to glass 'half a continent' within, at most, a few days, at the end of 'Floodgate'. Now even if we assume that Hood was exaggerating the scale of destruction, and that it indeed took a few days, the fact remains that the Covenant could have glassed Earth very quickly - from the first beam being fired in New Alexandria, it only took about a week to destroy Reach. The only reason they didn't do the same to Earth was because they were too busy digging out the portal to the Ark to bother.
Lastly, it's mentioned that the fleet which destroyed Reach was 50 times the size of the one which initially attacked Earth, and I seem to remember that fleet lost about a third of its strength in the battle. So on top of everything else - even on Reach, the best defended human world in the galaxy, the UNSC lost 60% of its forces to the Covenant's (at worst) 40%. Assuming that Earth could do as well as Reach with a similar rate of attrition, and even assuming that the 'largest Covenant fleet anyone's ever seen' over Delta Halo both represented all of the Covenant's and was only one ship larger than the fleet which had attacked Reach, the UNSC's navy would be completely wiped out with more than half of the Covenant's own fleet remaining. Even if we assume that High Charity only accounted for just over the mass lost at Reach (which it clearly doesn't) and the rest of the fleet was only the 2/3 which had remained after that campaign, the rate of attrition would still comfortably tip into the Covenant's favour, since even allowing for High Charity being destroyed an an unfavourable engagement on Earth they'd still end the battle of Earth with about 30% of their initial forces intact.
So to sum up: in order to defeat a unified Covenant, by the time of the battle over the portal to the Ark, humanity would have needed to outnumber the Covenant three to two in order to have a chance of winning, despite having already lost at least 60% of their forces, would have had to muster those forces about a third faster thank to the Covenant glassing a third faster, and that's on the assumption that the Covenant didn't bring the ships that would have otherwise been destroyed in the Great Schism anyway.
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Just gimme everything to kill except with a few caveats:
- Gimme some Halo 3 Brute Chieftans.
- Gimme some Halo 3 Scarabs.
- Gimme some GOD DAMN FLOOD.
Translation: give me Halo 3
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Let's start with my biggest fear: that all we'll get is yet another incredibly barebones splinter faction of the Covenant, and the Prometheans. Elites will just be regular rifle-wielders, with the only variant being a version with a better rifle and more shields, Grunts will be pure fodder, and Hunters will be how they were in Halo 5. At least this means we'd hopefully have another full set of Jackals. The Prometheans would be pretty much as they were in Halo 5 - teleporting bullet sponges with homing weapons which completely kill all mobility and force the player into a dull cover-shooter style.
But let's go for something more hopeful. The title is Infinite, after all, which I'm hoping means we're going to get to shoot basically everything in the Halo universe. So to start with, let's list all of the known factions, and then work back from there, in rough order of appearance; the UNSC, the Covenant, the Flood, the Prometheans, the Banished, and the Created. We can also reasonably throw in the Insurgency, even though they haven't appeared in the games. Also, on reflection, I'm coming back and adding this to a spoiler for the sake of thread length!
So, for the Covenant, honestly? I'm happy for them to just disappear at this point. They were totally beaten for reals as of Halo 3, and again in Halo 5. If they come back again, it's just going to devalue them completely, and it's going to feel like they've been pushed in thanks to laziness, stagnation, or lack of creativity. The Banished can fill the same sort of role, but much better, since in addition to an art style which is at once obviously different to the Covenant, yet much more closer to their 'classic' aesthetic, they don't need to have the restrictions on units which the Covenant have suffered from Halo 4 onwards as they're a full-on successor empire rather than a splinter remnant. I think the only thing they're missing are Jackals, and I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to write them back in.
The Banished alone have the potential to be the be the best enemy roster yet in a Halo game. Let's go over the possibilities, shall we?
- Grunts with small arms (Plasma Pistols, Needlers)
- Grunts with heavy weapons (Fuel Rod Guns, Plasma Launchers)
- Suicide Grunts
- Jackals with shields (Plasma Pistols and Needlers)
- Jackals with rifles (Carbines or Needle Rifles)
- Jackal Snipers
- Elites with rifles (Plasma Repeaters, Storm Rifles, dual-wielded Plasma Rifles)
- Elites with specialist weapons (Carbines, Needle Rifles, Concussion Rifles)
- Elites with Fuel Rods
- Elites with Energy Swords
- Elite Special Ops
- Elite Rangers
- Brutes with rifles (Plasma Repeaters, Spikers)
- Brutes with specialist weapons (Carbines, Needle Rifles, Brute Shots)
- Brutes with Fuel Rods
- Brutes with Gravity Hammers
- Brute Stalkers
- Brute Jump Packs
- Skirmishers
- Drones
- Engineers
- Hunters
And there you go: before we even get to the vehicles, there are already over twenty different kinds of enemy to shoot at! Sure, you could argue there are a few similarities between Brutes and Elites, but really, they're different enough to constitute separate enemy types. And as for vehicles: Ghosts, Choppers, Prowlers, Marauders, Locust, Wraiths, Banshees, Phantoms, Spirits, and even Scarabs. Together, that is an absolutely huge selection of enemies to shoot at, making firefights much more interesting.
But the Banished would hopefully just be one of several enemy factions. I think it's probably fair to tie together the Created and the Prometheans, but what exactly would the Created's roster be? It couldn't just be all Promethean, not least because theirs is so shallow and repetitive. So what I'd absolutely love to see would be, humans who've actually chosen to side with Cortana. Imagine, for the first time, facing the entire UNSC roster as an enemy. And why stop with just what we've had in the main games so far? Let's add something from the rest of the canon: SPI armour, to add a stealthy unit to their roster. Combined with a few tweaks to Promethean Soldiers to make them a bit less irritating, and you could have a roster which looks something like this:
- Crawlers with small arms (Boltshots, Suppressors)
- Soldiers with small arms (Suppressors, Lightrifles)
- Knights with heavy weapons (Binary Rifles and Incineration Cannons)
- Knights with Scattershots
- Watchers
- Marines with small arms (Assault Rifles, SMGs)
- Marines with Shotguns
- Marines with heavy weapons (Rocket Launchers, Grenade Launchers)
- ODSTs with small arms (Battle Rifles, Suppressed SMGs)
- ODSTs with specialist weapons (Hydras, Railguns)
- ODSTs with heavy weapons (SAWs, Spartan Lasers)
- SPI Soldiers
It's not so impressive a roster as the Banished, but it's still far, far better than the Prometheans alone. And with a few tweaks to the Prometheans (no more homing weapons, drastically reduced teleporting nonsense), it could even be fun to fight. Certainly that's improved once we add vehicles to the mix: Warthogs, Mongeese, Hornets, Mantises, even Pelicans could all help supplement the Promethean roster, since at the moment all they have is the Phaeton.
And lastly, of course, there's the Flood. I know a lot of people don't enjoy fighting them, and I understand why, but there's no denying that they do offer something very unique to Halo's enemy sandbox. Especially in Halo 3, where the Flood were at their squishiest, they were focused far more on numbers and wave attacks than the Covenant, and given we're now more than a decade on, I don't see why we can't do better. Contrasting the Promethean style of a small number of specialists, and the Banished's style of a huge amount of flexibility, the Flood could fight with sheer, overwhelming numbers, no longer held back by the limitations of the Xbox 360's hardware. I don't want the Halo 2 style Flood, where you're taking on a room of twenty or so surprisingly tanky abominations two or three at a time: I want a wall of zombie flesh which constantly presses at my attention, swarming me with a dozen enemies at once, where I'm running out of ammunition despite the fact that everything is dying in seven or eight bullets or a single 'headshot' to the infection form.
Obviously some variety is nice, and so here's a potential roster:
- Infection Form Swarms
- Carrier Forms
- Human Combat Forms (weak, fast, and VERY numerous)
- Elite Combat Forms (still weak, but with energy shields and some weapons)
- Brute Combat Corms (slower but MUCH tankier and with the most powerful melee swings)
- Stalker Forms
- Ranged Forms
- Tank Forms
And that's it. You don't really need a huge amount of variety with the Flood, since they're so much more focused on numbers than individual variety.
Anyway, that's my incredibly-long take on what I'd most love to see in Infinite: nothing less than the biggest, baddest, most diverse roster of enemies to date!
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I'm confident we'll be seeing more of Blue Team, if only because they've been introduced to the game canon at this point and so it'd be weird if we didn't have them.
That said, I'm not so sure if they're going to be playable. I suspect that Infinite is still going to have a heavy focus on multiplayer throughout the campaign, and if that's the case, I'm sure that at least one of them will be in the team. But whether we're going to see the full Blue Team, or some combination of Chief and other Spartans, I'm not so certain of. I hope I'm wrong on this, as co-op being the default state for the campaign is a really bad idea, but given some of 343i's responses to criticism of Halo 5, and just the name of Infinite itself, I suspect that it's still going to be something designed around four player co-op.Now, just to be clear: while I strongly disliked the way they were handled in Halo 5, I actually think Blue Team could add something worthwhile to the games in the hands of a remotely competent writer, and really enrich them in the hands of a good one. A big part of the reason I was so frustrated by them in Halo 5 was that they were there purely to act as stand-ins for actual human players, and so if they have to do the same in Infinite, I'd far rather that they're at least fully fleshed-out characters while doing so.
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Drizzy_Pls
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Like everyone so far, I'm generally in favour of a Reach-style unlock system. You play the game, you earn credits, you spend those credits on undersuits, helmets, attachments, skins, whatever.
However, I'd particularly like to see a much more modular style of customisation. For example, if you like the up-armoured versions of the Mark V and CQB helmets in Reach, you need to unlock the base version of both, and then the up-armoured versions of each. Under a modular unlock system, you'd spend credits to unlock the base versions of each, and then unlock increased armour as a single, separate thing, which could then be applied to any helmets you own in the same way as visor colours.
You could even have a tree of unlocks. A base version of a helmet might be cheap - twenty minutes of multiplayer, say. But once you own it, it unlocks another pair of helmets, and those two each unlock another pair of helmets. If you find one you like? You can spend credits to upgrade it, every upgrade allowing you to equip another attachment simultaneously. It's a good way to sink credits into things, and give players a real sense of progression as they unlock new items on the road to their favourite, or to make that favourite even more customisable.
There's so much you could do with this. Armour material options could let players choose between a glossy or matte finish; wear and tear could mean it looks fresh out of the factory or weathered and damaged; individual pieces might be cracked, or discoloured, sporting field repairs or emblems. You could have the shiny, chainmail-style undersuit from Halo 4, the softer, more fabric style from Halo 5, or even the more traditional, armoured ones from Reach. Attach an ammo pouch to your upper arm; a combat knife to your hip; maybe a tacpad on your wrist. Hell, attach a tacpad to every piece of armour! And why stop at just the armour itself? Maybe you want your energy shields to be red, or to make the classic noise while they're down and recharging, or your HUD to be purple? Perhaps you even want hard armour to appear around the edges of your screen, as it did throughout Halo 4's campaign?
And that's before we even begin to talk about monetisation. Let people just buy game credits with real money, or to immediately unlock a specific item at max rank, even if they haven't otherwise unlocked it.
Lastly - you think the current ocean of garbage in the REQ system is there because they honestly expect people to like it? Of course not! It's there to dilute the REQ pool, to decrease your chances of getting something actually worthwhile to frustrate you into spending more money on REQ packs. Under a system like this, there's no point adding crap since people just won't buy it and it doesn't hinder people from getting what they want, so we also get the nice side-effect of them having to produce high-quality items which people actually want to buy.
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There's a few I've really liked over the years. I was a big fan of the social slayer playlist back in Halo 3, as team deathmatch is always fun and it was nice to be able to just play it without the usual stress of the ranked playlist. In fact, most of Halo 3's social playlists were a lot of fun: big team objective matches are some of the best things in Halo, and Halo 3's maps were perfect for them.
Beyond that, I had a surprising fondness for the Dominion playlist in Halo 4, for so long as it lasted. I wasn't expecting to enjoy it as much as I did, but it's probably my favourite of Halo 4's game modes, and I was really sad when it died off. I'd have loved to see it make a return in Halo 5: I get that Warzone is sort of the spiritual successor to it, but I'm not really a fan of Warzone. Would love to see it come back for Infinite!
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I hate the REQ system with a passion, so put simply: no. A thousand times, no.
To be clear: I understand that post-launch support and content is necessary for the ongoing health of modern games, and that this costs developer time and money. I think it's perfectly reasonable that if we want the benefits of that post-launch support, we should be prepared to pay for it. And I do appreciate that it means the community doesn't end up divided according to individual purchases. It's possible to end up wasting money on map packs which you can end up never being able to play because none of your friends own them and the matchmaking pool in their dedicated playlists is too small to give you good matches in a timely manner.
However.
The REQ system is just repulsive. Let's leave Warzone aside for a moment, though we'll come to that particular tumour later: the REQ system is the only way to unlock cosmetics, outside of a very small number of armour sets which can be accessed through playing the game elsewhere. If you're like me, you probably enjoy armour customisation: settling on a look for my Spartan was one of the things I enjoyed most about Reach, and even in Halo 4, despitethe overall poor quality of most of its armour. But if you want a specific thing from Halo 5's armoury, then you're stuffed. I remember fairly early on, there was a piece of armour that I really liked the look of - I can't remember what it was now. If it had been Halo 3, I'd have had to do a specific challenge to get it: in Reach, I'd have had to save up my credits. But in Halo 5? Nope. The only way I can get that armour is to keep throwing my credits into the REQ system so that I can have a tiny chance of unlocking it. If I don't get it, then I might as well have just thrown the credits away altogether because I have nothing to show for it. No, Halo 5, I don't care that I've unlocked the Recruit Snot Pattern helmet, and the fact that you shove it in my face with a fanfare and glitter, as though it's something to be celebrated rather than a complete waste of my time, is just added insult.
And that was back before they even started diluting the REQ pool. Since launch they've added even more cosmetics, meaning my chances of getting something that I actually want have dropped from something like one in two hundred, to one in a thousand. It's not even that most of the armour and skins available are ugly as sin and that I wouldn't use them even if I were given them for free (though that, and the incredibly lazy approach to reskinning items certainly doesn't help). It's that, when I have a specific cosmetic that I actually want, I don't care about anything else, because it's not the cosmetic that I want. And the only option to guarantee I get it is to either grind like hell through all the crap in the REQ pool, or to cough up enough real money.And let's not forget: the REQ system is further diluted by all the crap tied into Warzone. I have literally no use for this, as I'm not interested in playing a pay-to-win game, but the REQ system insists on filling most of its packs with Warzone-exclusive junk rather than actual cosmetics, further slowing down the rate that I can get wade through all the garbage to the armour I actually want. And the worst part is, occasionally it gives out certifications: which increase the chances that you'll get certain Warzone-exclusive things in your REQ packs. And you can't even get rid of them! Once you have them, they're permanently attached to your profile like little unresectable tumours, making it take even longer to work your way through the cosmetics since now you've got even less chance of getting one in your REQ packs.
Oh, and of course - the pay-to-win game mode is the only one where you can actually earn credits at any kind of speed, since playing the actual fun, non-pay-to-win game modes gives you very little. So unless you're happy to spend seven or eight hundred hours being everyone else's punching bag, your only option is to pay up if you have an armour you want.
I hate the REQ system. I hate everything about it. It's brought pay-to-win to Halo, it's completely destroyed player customisation and all sense of player progression, and of course it's an incredibly predatory system of real money gambling which is designed to deliberately ruin my game experience unless I spend even more money on the game. And you know what? It has't even fulfilled its supposed purpose! The DLC maps we've gotten have been of extremely poor quality, usually little more than lazy variants of existing maps, or variants from Forge, while the cosmetics we've gotten have set new standards of ugly. It's the worst kind of cash grab, combining pay-to-win with progression blocking and real-money-gambling, and it's one of the principal reasons why I gave up on Halo 5. It pains me awfully to say this, but the REQ system is in Infinite, then I won't be.I just wanted some armour, man!
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Long overdue and very well deserved. Congratulations to both of you, you'll be really fantastic assets to the staff
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I've always had a soft spot for the Warthog, just from a design perspective. Its the most wonderfully utilitarian thing in the game - it's fast, reasonably durable, hits hard against infantry, and can carry an objective. But the most important part is, everyone who rides in it has something important to do: it's not like the Scorpion where the turret gunner is just there as window dressing. Without a driver, the Warthog is just a turret; without a gunner, it's just target; without an objective carrier, you're reduced to just plinking away inaccurately with small arms, far less effective than you would be on foot. The Warthog has one job, and it does it extremely well, and for that reason I'd hold it up as one of my favourite vehicles just from a design perspective.
In terms of what I like driving just personally, I have to say the Chopper. It's big, it's inaccurate, and it's frankly pretty clumsy to use, but you don't use it for any of that - if you want a small, nimble gun carriage, grab a Ghost and you'll be far happier. No, you choose the Chopper because ramming things is really cool. Halo 3 in particular had much more of a focus on up-close, personal combat than the other games, and the Chopper fits that perfectly. Aiming your attack run just right, popping the boost at just the right moment, and watching enemy vehicles or soldiers just smashed to pieces in front of you is an incredibly satisfying feeling, and one which never gets old.Lastly, an honourable mention to the Elephant, which is my favourite just because of how much it adds to any gametype you put it in. Having a completely mobile base isn't just fun by itself, but also because of how many combat options it opens up - do you want to retreat to a defensive position, to give yourself as much time as possible to deal with enemy assaults? Do you want to drive it forward to support a push towards a power position on the map, using its guns and respawns to secure a vehicle or weapon spawn, or just deny it safely to the enemy, or do you ant to take the riskier option of getting right up against the enemy's Elephant, trading map control and security for a fast-paced, close-range brawl? The Elephant is absolutely unique for what it adds to Halo, and I'd absolutely love to see it make a return in Halo 6!
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I'm sorry I'm so late to this!
I'll start by shouting out a couple of honourable mentions. In no particular order; '343 Guilty Spark', from CE, for its absolutely fantastic pacing, really creepy atmosphere and brilliant introduction to the Flood; 'The Maw' from the same game, for its epic three-way battle and the intensity of the Warthog run at the end; 'The Ark' in Halo 3, for its massive, sprawling combat on foot and in vehicles; 'Midnight' in Halo 4, which has possibly the single best music of any mission in Halo; and finally, 'Lone Wolf' in Reach, which was just the perfect ending to Noble Six' story.
But for me, there's only ever really one choice for my favourite mission, and that's 'The Covenant' from Halo 3. It has absolutely everything: from the opening moments, storming the fortified position with a Spartan laser, to the vehicular assault on the first tower and then the fight upstairs; the Hornet battle across the sky as you assault the second tower, and the sudden change of pace as the Flood arrive on the way out; and then the vehicle rush culminating in the only time we battle not one, but two Scarabs, simultaneously. And then it culminates with a direct assault on the very last of the Covenant themselves, a desperate rush against the clock as the thing we've been trying to prevent for three games, finally happens.
It's everything which is good about Halo, wrapped up in a single mission. Almost the whole weapon sandbox is available to use at one point or another; you fight every single type of enemy; the set pieces are at their most massive, most epic, the music is absolutely on point the whole way through, and the overall sense of pacing, and of escalation, is brilliant, as the high stakes just keep getting higher and higher with each success and setback. And the payoff at the end is just fantastic; when the Covenant are defeated, they're really defeated, with the last of the loyalists wiped out to the last, including the prophet, the Halo rings are finally disabled, and you even get a glimpse of Cortana toward the end, setting up the next mission perfectly.
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Doesn't even make sense.
I don't even understand why Halo 3: ODST is in there.
It was titled as "Master Chief Collection" because it was a port-collection of all games starring Master Chief ONLY.
Well, ODST is in there because it was basically an extension of Halo 3 anyway, and so most of the hard work in porting the engine had probably already been done.
Plus, the case can be made that the Reach should be included on the MCC, since he does technically appear in it, albeit very, very briefly.
Allowing people to vote multiple options in a poll when the options mean the exact opposite, is stupid.
in General Discussion
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