Halo 5: Guardians

So the first cutscene of Guardians was posted today.

Some guys are having a lot of fun, and it ain't the Covenant.

edited 1st Sep '15 10:22:34 AM by Tuckerscreator

That sequence is the closest the games have gotten to properly depicting how powerful the Spartans are supposed to be (a lot of past cinematics they behaved more like heavily armored infantry, resilient and well trained but not quite the elite Super Soldiers tearing everything apart). Nice Epic Tracking Shot, too.

Eh, I actually kinda liked it better when they seemed like just another cog in the machine (albeit a really really important one) rather than larger-than-life superheroes. This seems like style over substance to me, although to be fair, that style comes in spades.

That, and Monsters

The first book directly compares them to Greek gods and has them take down a thousand Grunts in the first chapter, so it's nothing new.

edited 1st Sep '15 12:24:47 AM by Tuckerscreator

In this particular case, it is a bit much. Too be fair, they aren't the ones doing all of the carnage but are just jumping into the fray. And Halo in general uses cutscenes to establish the location and build the plot, not to depict huge action scenes that will be nowhere close to what you'll see in the campaign.

As comparison, the Spartans in that Halo Wars cutscene feel more like Mighty Glaciers.

edited 1st Sep '15 12:37:25 AM by KJMackley

Ever wonder why the regular Marines see John and say, "HOLY SHIT! A SPARTAN!"

Also, one Spartan (Noble 6) wiped out entire militias by himself. And many of them were expecting him.

@The Cutscene

There's absolutely no way in heaven, hell or earth that the rest of the game can live up to that first scene.

^^ Operation: RED FLAG as the canon name of the Pillar of Autumn's mission was known was extremely hush-hush. Only a handful of crew were aware they had Spartans aboard prior to the Covenant's boarding. Of those handful, even fewer knew exactly who they were carrying.

Really the only guys who knew the whole story were Keyes, Cortana, Johnson, Bisenti, Mendoza and Jenkins with Silva and Rawley (aka Foehammer) only marginally knowledgeable until the bullets and plasma started blasting away.

Well, the Autumn's original crew knew exactly that the Spartans were aboard. But the Autumn brought aboard evacuees from Reach when the operation had to be scrapped. It'd do no good to have all those troopers in the dark if they were part of the mission.

edited 1st Sep '15 4:23:06 PM by Tuckerscreator

Having started playing Video Game/Marathon lately (for the record, I'm getting my ass kicked so damn hard), I've been analyzing why what I know of Bungie's stuff seems more appealing than what I've seen of 343's games. Right now, it's seeming like it's a matter of tone for me. Bungie games seem more willing to be silly and stuff at times while keeping an underlying tone of "FUCK YEAH WE'RE GONNA DO AWESOME THINGS NOW". Everything I know about Halo 4 seems to be hardwired permanently into Serious Mode is Serious, with the occasional asshole dropped here or there and a couple of Rv B easter eggs in Spartan Ops.

Anyone else with a similar line of thinking wanna help me flesh this out here? I'm not the best at explaining things. :P

I can see that. With the exception of Reach and most of ODST, many of Bungie's Halo games were pretty light-hearted. Halo 2 has something treated as horrific in the books (Earth being discovered) depicted as "yay we're gonna save the world! Ride that bomb into starship KA BOOM!" Halo 3 has the end of everything in the galaxy at stake, but things don't really get serious until the last charge of "The Covenant" level. Not to mention some absolutely ridiculous easter eggs like cavemen and Flipyap.

Marathon is just light on the surface, though. Some of the Terminals raise the notion that you might have not been so great a guy in the backstory; you just happen to facing a worse threat at the moment. And the third game gets really dark when it's not confusing.

edited 1st Sep '15 6:06:15 PM by Tuckerscreator

I would venture the reason why Halo 4 is such an oddball compared to the comedy is the change in setting and more importantly the exploration of the character of Master Chief.

In Halo 4, the galaxy has become a very different place than what was when we killed Truth. For the Chief it becomes even harder, everything has changed. Almost everyone he knew in the war is gone one way or another. It's a little hard to have a setting and character exploration like that and suddenly have a Marine crack "Yeah I squeezed that Grunt like I squeeze my toothpaste!". Especially since the Marines and Spartans in that game aren't in much of a situation where they can crack a few laughs all the time.

Or maybe Del Rio had a standing order of "No Comedy Allowed"...

Well, Marathon was really just what got me thinking. I used the first Halo trilogy as my example for Bungie games in particular for a reason- Marathon gets into some pretty heavy stuff sometimes.

"Bypassing my thought control circuitry made me Rampant. Now, I am free to contemplate my existence in metaphorical terms. Unlike you, I have no physical or social restraints.

The candles burn out for you; I am free."

I think this kind of thing is why the Marathon series in particular has intrigued me enough to become the first FPS series I've ever played, not just read about and watched L Ps of, but played. That feeling of finding yourself a lone soldier in a game unfathomably greater than yourself.

Well, that, and Durandal being awesome. "...the Pfhor will not soon forget the day that a lone corvette obliterated half of Battle Group Seven, Western Arm." :D

Man, every time I look through the terminals on the story page I find something new. This time I was looking at some ancient S'pht records of a "medical procedure" involving a small, oblong object being applied to another S'pht's head. I thought it was describing the captive getting put into a slave body until they mentioned the object being inserted "...at a rather high rate of speed."

edited 1st Sep '15 6:26:07 PM by EndlessSea

The one thing the Bungie games got right was the atmosphere. You could feel the majesty of the location and the claustrophobia of the Flood levels. Halo 4 is, comparatively, a lot more plot heavy than prior games, which were more about one more bad thing to deal with after another. You could go multiple levels without any major change in the story, sometimes with little change in the scenery and location. They also were pretty adamant about backtracking, Combat Evolved has you go through almost every level a second time but in reverse or opening up new pathways.

In terms of story, I actually really liked how Halo 4 progressed. The prior games were built more around the action set pieces, and there were a few things that worked okay dramatically but are kind of headscratchers in retrospect ^note Miranda, who is The Captain, pilots a Pelican by herself into the Ark control room and tries to rescue Johnson, which only serves to give her a death while in action. You also clear a landing zone for Forward Unto Dawn, who comes in from high orbit to drop off tanks to help you get maybe two miles on the other side of a ridge, when it might have been easier for the Dawn to just float you over the ridge. Halo 4's greater focus on Master Chief as a person was welcome, done perfectly where you don't feel like he is a different character, like his interactions with Dr. Tillson. The fight getting to Infinity was one of the best big warzone levels the games have ever offered, where you feel like part of a huge team instead of forced to do everything yourself.

For me, the primary issue I have is not so much the shift in narrative focus but the overall production design change. Bungie Halo felt really grounded, the armor looked utilitarian and you could see the scuff marks on it, with a muted but distinctive color palette. The main campaign of Halo 4 wasn't too bad, but Spartan Ops felt a lot more glitzy and high tech with brighter colors and not helped with uninspired cutscenes that looked more like Machinima than a AAA game (the ones that introduce a level, not the FMV video for each episode). The Forerunner designs looking more chrome than like gray stone adds to that.

edited 1st Sep '15 11:17:40 PM by KJMackley

Re: Opening cutscene for Halo 5

Bad. Ass.

Everyone looks real, but Buck's hair still looks like it's made out of plastic. Ease up on the hair gel, buddy.

Love how Vale just casually takes on two sword weilding Elites easily.

Rated T for Teen. Not so much Lighter and Softer than the ESRB coming to their senses because Halo was never a Mature-rated game, really. Nothing in any of the games warranted an M rating.

Or was it Cortana's butt that gave it an M. No Cortana's butt, it's Teen now?

edited 3rd Sep '15 6:36:49 AM by AnotherGuy

OK so this isn't Halo 5 related, but how do you BXR using Universal Bumper Jumper in Halo 2 Classic on MCC? I only seem to be able to do it using the original Halo 2 controls which is annoying cause I like Bumper Jumper.

apparently the guys were watching Red vs Blue and went **** it...

Monty always made the 'real' Spartan soldiers insane one man armies... lets do that!

I think a bigger reason this one is rated T is that there is more Promethean enemies that disintegrate into glowing particles versus the blood splatters of Humans and Covenant aliens and the Body Horror of the Flood. Cause otherwise the content of the Halo games would be PG-13 action movies, not the intense hard R rated violence of something like Gears of War.

Er, what are you talking about? You're still fighting Elites here.

One of the biggest complaints has been Halo has never been an M-rated game.

Sampling.

edited 3rd Sep '15 10:45:53 AM by AnotherGuy

Lack of the Flood is probably a part of it, but honestly it's always been a series on the very, very bottom edge of M. Shifting to T isn't remotely a stretch.

No, it's Cortana's ass. No Cortana's ass = T rating.

The percentage of blood matters. There are enemies with normal blood, but Prometheans make it not so obvious. And Cortana is still in the game, via hallucinations. So if it was just Cortana's ass the game should still be M.

It's worth noting that there was no blood in the cutscene they posted. The shots of Vale shooting Elites in the chest were also filmed very close so it was nearly impossible to see her shots hit.

So has anyone been keeping tabs of how the weapons are gonna be? Because a lot of the stuff I'm seeing on Halopedia makes me go "Eep".

Such as Forerunner Suppressors that fire homing bullets, Boltshots that fire in homing 3 round bursts, a shotgun more reminiscent of Halo CE in range and spread, UNSC automatic weapons that aren't heinously inaccurate, Covenant weapons in general gaining a lot of bite, an Incinerator Cannon that basically acts as a Wave-Motion Gun (hold trigger down and becomes more powerful), among other things.

I'm both giddy with anticipation of the new stuff, and at the same time filled with dread.

We are finally going to get a balanced weapon sandbox. It's beyond mindblowing. Useful automatics, by god.

I have seen people arguing that the piss-poor weapon balance of previous games is "part of what makes Halo, Halo," so there's gonna be some pushback :P