Mi: Halo Talk

Mi has joined the chat

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MadSnipah: got a sick no scope. Gonna totally clip that bitch up.

MrAnderson: Yeah I'm sure it will have a star studded premiere. The first no scope ever recorded on film!

Chupathingy: Oh, Dude! You just got burned dude! BURNED!

Yew: Did anyone else notice that the sniper rifle is an actual anti material rifle now? I noticed it doing serious damage to a tank in firefight. I should probably test that….

Blug: Bloom is fuckin stupid! Stupid shadowrun guy ruined halo!

Blarga: The Cage is a stupid level. I want lockout back. Lockout is PRO.

Mi: Hey, Yew! Maybe the reason why the tank is dominating Hemmorage so much is no one thinks to shoot at it with the sniper! It would be pretty cool if that worked. The sniper used to dominate the open cockpit tank in Halo 1. Would add halo 1's balance back in a bit.

Bargle: Swat should be it's own playlist!

MrAnderson: Yeah it should, so I don't have to play it every time your stupid ass is in my game and votes for it every time when I'm trying to play team slayer.

Yew: Swat and snipers matches do get pretty old when they are half the games you play…the voting system kind of failed to account for making sure people have a chance to play default game types when something popular with mindless players pops up.

Tatchikomatic: Mindless is probably too harsh.

MrAnderson: Yeah. We call them “Call of Duty fans” around these parts.

Mi: Best decision of all time: Black Ops won't have nukes. Looks like Treyarch finally has an opportunity to one up Infinity Ward. Took IW dying for it to happen though.

Yew: Black Ops also having saved films is good news too. More games are trying to copy Halo's feature set.

Blarga: Call of Duty is for newbs! Real men play Halo Swat.

Bargle: With jetpacks turned on!

Blug: And grenades!

Chupathingy: and secret spy bow ties!

SuperShredder: I honestly don't know why you guys like swat so much. It's just sort of there…headshots aren't really a revolutionary experience anymore. Energy shields are what makes Halo the game it is. I also like the armor abilities a lot so I prefer the game types that actually have them turned on more.

Yew: Armor abilities are damn near useless in firefight though.

Mi: ugh. Don't get me started on firefight. Everything is useless in that mode except high explosives.

Blug: Sniperfight is hardcore!

Blarga: Gruntplocalype gets mad credits!

Yew: how do you mean?

Mi: Elites in firefight are way too hard to kill. The problem for me is that halo single player has been running away from what made itself good since Halo 1 wrapped.

Tatchikomatic: Oh this again. Why do you miss your widdle super pistol?

Mi: no it's not that. Elites are fucking broken now. For all of Bungie's talk about how Reach is influenced by Halo 1 they completely ignored Halo 1's balancing when it came to the elites and made the majority of them much too time consuming and difficult to kill.

Blug: LEARN 2 PLAY NEWB.

Chupathingy: I died a butt ton before I figured out the combo worked that well in this game.

MrAnderson: oh shut up Blug. I've seen your profile on B net. You haven't even beat the campaign.

SuperShredder: Of course the game is going to get harder. People beat the first one three ways till sunday and they want an interesting new challenge.

Mi: I don't see how making an enemy juke away from your shots like they were on speed, take three sniper bullets to the head before dieing, and carrying a fuel rod gun that can kill you if they so much as sneeze in your direction constitutes an interesting challenge.

Mi: Just because it takes you 2 minutes to kill one guy and you could have to restart from a checkpoint at any time doesn't make those 2 minutes more fun then if he died in 20 seconds and you just had to avoid getting torn up by normal plasma fire instead of being blown up.

Mi: The "30 seconds of fun" they always talk about for an encounter in Halo 1 has turned into "300 seconds of wasting my goddamn time." It's a game where you kill things where everything in the game is going out of it's way to keep you from killing things in any satisfying way. There's challenge and then there's just frustration.

Tatchikomatic: I think it's fun. It's intense. And if you want to win you can always use the Plasma pistol to take down shields.

Mi: That's pretty much the only reliable way to win ever since Halo 2 on legendary. Plasma pistol to headshot. It's boring having to do that over and over because you have NO OTHER OPTION that kills elites that is fast enough to not leave yourself exposed and is still ammo efficient. It doesn't help that every game since 2 makes you basically be made of straw on legendary.

Blarga: Ur a newb Mi.

Bargle: Its totally EZ. I beat it first day. I'm hardcore!

Blug: I could really go for a ham sandwich!

MrAnderson: That does sound good, damn now I have to go buy ham later.

Mi: at least in Halo 3 brutes went down fairly well to carbine fire. Still not good enough but they didn't have shields that recharged if you stopped shooting them for 2 seconds and they didn't do a tumbling act that wasted half of your limited ammo trying to nail them.

Mi: I mean honestly. Can any of you remember the times you fought low level blue and red elites? Or is all you can remember being bum rushed and having your time wasted by the white ones who are EVERYWHERE and take for freaking EVER to kill?

SuperShredder: I think you are over-reacting here.

Tatchikomatic: The AI has more time to show off it's intelligence when it lasts longer.

Mi: I see nothing intelligent about the AI. All it does is shoot at me and bum rush me. It never has a chance to do anything smart because I'm not taking any risks it can capitalize on because the second I move out from a safe spot I get slaughtered. It just moves up to stand right next to me and cut me down with overwhelming firepower in firefight because that's all it has to do. I'm not a threat unless I can kill it super quick with the combo or an explosive so it has no need for strategy or self preservation.It's just brute force and lots of annoying dodging.

Blarga: Firefight is EZ. Just shoot stuff with your infinate ammo sniper rifle and a fuel rod gun.

MrAnderson: You realize that sniperfight isn't actually the default variant don't you?

 

Private message: Yew: I actually agree with you here.

Private Message: Mi: well then say so in channel for fucks sake. I'm getting eaten alive here.

 

Yew: uh well. I kind of agree here. The original Halo was fun to play because the enemies were tough but fair. Most elites had a comparable amount of health and shield strength to you. Even the super strong ones could be taken out quickly with a bit of skill and preparation. Grenades and melee were also much stronger in the old games which made sure you always had options. You were challenged but you were rarely annoyed.

Mi: Yeah! You could get a rhythm going. You knew how to take out every enemy 1 on 1 with no trouble, even the hunters who went down well to a single pistol shot to the back. The trick was in how many enemies their were and the level design being complex with interesting corridors, cover, and multiple levels. It wasn't about one enemy being hard to kill it was about the strategy of navigating a wide open battlefield and using what you had to overcome a numerically superior force.

Mi: It was about being a bad ass and rolling through a group of enemies laying waste in fun and clever ways. The later halo games are all about crouching in a corner cowering and whoring the 3 or so effective killing methods from your camping hidey hole because if you take any risk at all you are dead.

Blarga: URGH. WALL OF TEXT

Blug: Stupid bitches are stupid!

Bargle: Yo dawg I heard you like bitching so I put bitching in your bitches so you can bitch while you bitch.

Tatchikomatic: there is a point I suppose but it's not as if the new games aren't fun.

Yew: the point isn't that the new ones are never fun. The point is if they made a game that was balanced like Halo 1, and added in all the advancements they made in later games with the addictive credit system, fun armor abilities, and larger scale, It would be more fun then what they have now, which means they lost their way in development of the later games. Focusing too much on smoothing things out and not enough on keeping what made the original game any good.

Mi: I think they just lost too many people from the original staff to other things and replaced them with people that don't really 'get' the first game's single player. They may have liked it but they didn't really understand the basic underpinnings. So design wise the Halo series distances itself from the first game with each iteration even as it tries to close the gap quality wise. It just makes too many changes and sticks with too many of those changes to ever rediscover the old game.

Yew: Multiplayer in the series consistently improves in most ways (though sometimes has steps back and has to readjust) but the single player has never reached the first game in playability due to focusing too much on challenge.

MrAnderson: yeah I think many people stopped caring about Halo's single player and just focused on multiplayer around the first time they got sniped by a jackal sniper in Halo 2 or faced a hunter that takes 3 years to kill with sustained fire.

Mi: Halo 1 did things that no other halo game has really recreated. At times in Halo 1 you were faced against basically an army of covenant holding a position (in the encounter I remember the most you are up against 6 or so elites. 2 camo elites. 20 or more grunts 10 jackals, 2 wraith tanks, 2 hunters, and the threat of the flood they were holding off turning toward you.) and you didn't just have to shoot things, you had to choose what to engage, when to engage it, what weapons to use, and when to retreat. It was like a puzzle with near infinite solutions if you had the patience to work things out. A playground of combat.

Yew: The first game also was fun for having marines that actually held their own against the covenant and flanked you sometimes with as many as a dozen supporting units. And during the flood portion of the game you were alone but the battle had 3 or 4 sides including you so their was always an element of being a part of a larger conflict.

MrAnderson: yeah, an ACTUAL larger conflict, not a larger conflict in the background represented by far away enemies you had no reason to interact with. Real AI contending with each other on the same battlefield as you that you had to account for.

Mi: their were so many of them and the fact that they were reacting to each other as much as they were reacting to you added so much randomness to the fight that everything was dynamic. In Reach your allies are useless and as soon as you get in range every enemy just wants to kill you and only you. So everything is much more predictable and boring. They just make it more intense by making you fly apart as soon as you get hit three times and making your enemies as hard as a brick wall and hopping around more then daffy duck.

SuperShredder: Jesus. Calm down it's only a game.

Tatchikomatic: No kidding.

Mi: Gah. Fine. I'm not trying to get you people to enjoy the game less. I just think it could have been better.

Mi has left the chat

Yew: I think she had a point. Also vehicles are overpowered as hell in 3 and Reach.

MrAnderson: I wouldn't mind a 'Halo 1: part 2!' style game myself. I miss being able to experiment on the harder difficulties without dying every ten seconds. At least Reach's multiplayer seems fine.

Yew: Firefight seems to me like it was just balanced for multiple people focusing fire on the same enemy. Maybe that's part of what is hurting single player: they just didn't care about people playing single player as much as they cared about their big social gaming revolution.

MadSnipah: Dood I just got another hardcore no scope in this snipers match I was playing. I miss anything?

SuperShredder: Just some freak ranting about Halo 1. Some people just can't let the pistol go.

 

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The previous chat session was fictional. Any net names were changed to protect the imaginary.

As a side note. While Halo: Reach is far from perfect I still enjoy it as a game, and would like to thank Bungie for making such a consistently interesting series of games that have provided me hours of enjoyment and a lot of interesting food for thought on game design concepts.

Oh and thanks to the Halo fan community, for being completely effing insane, and Halo.Bungie.Org for being the best island of sanity in the fandom.