- Sliding Ghost
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Posted by: the real Janaka
Posted by: Sliding Ghost
I feel the same, it is as if there's an overwhelming fear towards allowing the player to do just a bit more than simply shoot and throw grenades in a fps.I've been seeing developers in a bad light for a long time but now it's just becoming apparent. They frustrate players who want to find new ways to play.
I just spent 70 minutes collecting 18 Elite Councilors and when I got 19 Zealots & Spec Ops Elites, I decided to get them to fight Tartarus. I got him on my Banshee and managed to get him to the Elites without them diving off. All hell broke loose. Most of them got knocked off the platform and the ones with guns rarely fired their guns. But the worst part is that my recording program -blam!- up with it's settings and none of my programs can recognize the videos.
How inconvenient it was that I couldn't control the AI without putting myself at risk or having to make sacrifices (i.e. can't watch the battle because I'm too busy working).
How inconvenient it was that I couldn't save my result due to the lack of checkpoints.
How inconvenient it would have been that there was no Theater to save my results at least in video form. It's why I'm especially worried about Halo 4 potentially having no theater for campaign. It was one of the best things Halo 3 did.
Posted by: the real Janaka
Just a simple thing as being able to halt ones fellow marines fom running to their deaths, would be a good start ( would have eliminated so much frustration), but no, I'm forced to knock over a crate so that it covers the doorway, or run two checkpoints back, so that I'll have the time to kill the enemies before the marines get there. And all the hassle with marines and vehicles, it's an endless back and forth before I get what I want.
Hardly any of the more micromanaging parts of the game were explored. Things that I'd say would be the natural evolution of a Halo game. Exactly, exactly!!
All this stupidly hard and tedious labor just to fulfill our dreams. Setting things up in CE was great due to the timed checkpoints (they reoccur in some areas), easier to control AI (no marine drivers besides Ghosts), and how most checkpoints could last forever. Setting things up in Halo 2, 3, or Reach is going to cost you at least 5 hours, 4 of those hours are going to be managing the stupid AI or building blockades to control them instead of making the final preparations (i.e. weapon stockpiles, vehicles).
Why in Reach, on LNoS, I got Jorge blocked up with a dozen supply cases which opened up opportunities for stealth not to mention easier ways to kill the enemy. But it took me at least 30 minutes hauling all those supply cases and getting them into the position I wanted (otherwise the Elites will simply jump over them and get his attention). The only available checkpoint is right behind a loading point which closes the door behind me, stopping me from going back if I wanted to make changes. So if I miscalculated, I have to start all over again!
It's easier to just use Liberty to move all the AI to one spot. I did this on Nightfall, got the hidden Banshee, the Guta, every Covie in the area all in one convenient location with a checkpoint. Really -blam!- great compared to my setups in Halo 2/3 (Hornets getting knocked out of the sky by AA Wraiths because they don't fire unless I'm not in a Hornet, Elites piloting Ghosts, climbing up crates).
Posted by: the real Janaka
Planning my battles and executing them smoothly has always been one of the charms of the singleplayer part of Halo, and I've always wanted that part to grow and become more reliable, so that I don't feel like I'm breaking the game. Amen to that. It's lame when battles always play out the same. From what I hear, Halo 4 encounters will play out differently, but only when reverting. That's not nearly as much change as I hoped.
Posted by: the real Janaka
On Halo Wars: Back when Halo Wars was announced, I went into theater mode and placed the camera high over The Ark, at the part where all the tanks were, and I remember thinking that it could be really awesome if the game essentially was Halo 3 seen from above and controlled more like an rts. But it ended up being a reskinned AoE, which wasn't bad, but still..
EDIT: sorry for going off topic (I do that far too often) :(That'd have been interesting.
The #1 thing I didn't like about Halo Wars was that we couldn't save our results. So if I got an army and I send them at some enemies, sometimes they don't have enough time to aggregate for total domination since their allies have already killed off the enemy forces. So I have to start over, building up my resources... it's very inconvenient.
Not a problem. I do that too.
To summarize my post, I think Halo games are becoming more and more inconvenient.
Areas that really need attention IMO: checkpoints (only lasting 8 seconds, even if it was delayed by a single Grunt that I didn't spot, that's just lame. Getting a bad checkpoint and I have to kill myself 5 times to get to an even earlier one), options (i.e. separate save and quit, revert to second last checkpoint, HUD adjustment, extensive audio adjustment), theater, performance (frame rate drops, huge lag at loading points, that's just not right), easter eggs (I found them lackluster in Reach, excluding the 4 Banshees one), game saves (why can't there be game save management so I don't have to press the xbox guide button, sign out, then sign back in? It's already inconvenient that we can't rename them, that we have to go to system settings to access them, etc.).
[Edited on 10.30.2012 5:51 PM PDT]