Halo MCC/Infinite/general Griefing thread - Six months, two maps, no refunds

[Titos]

I think there's a lot more you can do with Halo. The Banished are actually a neat concept that I think is tapping into some of the potential. Covenant remnants are a logical path to take because of course those kinds of things would spring up after the collapse of a gigantic hyper-zealous empire. There's also ONI you could deal with, but I think they'd avoid that as I don't think they want Master Chief to be mowing down humans. And of course there's the Flood, who even though they were "defeated" at the end of Halo 3, can pretty much never be totally eradicated as outright mentioned by Gravemind himself.

Honestly, I think Halo 4 had a lot of the right concepts but they were just, again, poorly executed. Bungie set up Chief drifting to a Forerunner world in Halo 3's Legendary ending, so the Forerunners pretty much had to be involved in some way. There's a theory that Mendicant Bias intentionally sent Chief to Requiem knowing he'd awaken the Didact so as to prove he'd redeemed himself after helping the Flood genocide the Forerunners, but it's (AFAIK) never explicitly stated. Chief fighting a bunch of robotic Forerunner minions is fine, although the whole Promethean faction was laughably undercooked in Halo 4.

I think one of Halo 4's biggest failings is that at many points during the campaign, all subtlety and logic was just totally thrown out the window in order to deliver by-the-numbers action movie schlock. Didact was cool in the Halo 3 terminals and expanded universe, but in Halo 4 he's just a crazy supervillain who wants to destroy the earth for some reason - oh and be sure to buy the books to find out why he went insane (seriously, they didn't even have the god damn courtesy to mention his mind-rape at the hands of Gravemind in Halo 4's terminals!) Librarian was kind of a deep character, but now she's just an exposition dump machine in what was probably the worst cutscene in the entire game.

Despite all that though, I've warmed up to Halo 4 over time. Don't get me wrong, it's highly, HIGHLY flawed, but my real ire is directed towards Halo 5, which I felt took all the potential Halo 4 built up and flushed it down the toilet in favor of this out-of-the-blue nonsensical evil Cortana plot and this random guy named Locke kinda-sorta hunting Chief for extremely flimsy reasons which really resulted in fucking nothing at the end. I could probably write a dissertation on all the reasons I hate Halo 5, but I'll leave it at that for now.

Halo 4 could have been great if it didn't have the Infinity or the Didact/Librarian. Replace the Didact with some crazy Forerunner AI in the vain of Guilty Spark trying to keep Chief/Cortana on the planet for some reason. You could still include Elites/Jackals/Grunts, just have them be members of another ship that crashed there who are pirates or war holdouts like that one Japanese dude who didn't know WW2 had ended for like 30 years. Having an AI as the main baddy would also make a nice parallel with Cortana going rampant. Maybe give the villain some leverage too like offering to fix Cortana in return for something that isn't quite clear at the beginning but turns out to be bad news ALA Guilty Spark in CE. The first few levels of 4 are pretty decent because the setup is simple, find a way off the planet, save Cortana. It falls flat on it's face by introducing like 3 factions in 3 levels, one of which you have to read 3 books to even get the gist of their motivation.

 

[Endu]

Another month, another Community Update. And once again, absolutely nothing is shown for Infinite other than 343i thanking all the food companies for dealing with the delay.

Apparently there's going to be a """high-level""" Infinite update by the end of the year, separate from the normal community update on December 17th. My money's on something basic like the menu/progression being shown.

Changing the subject, I've been playing Spartan Ops legendary solo for the achievement, and it's reminding me how absolutely unfun all the enemies in Halo 4 are. None of the Prometheans are fun to fight, the new Covenant designs are gross and sounds gross, and the dialogue is vomit-inducing. At least I can select every other game when matchmaking so I don't get too sick of H4's multiplayer.

 

[The Doom Slayer]

Changing the subject, I've been playing Spartan Ops legendary solo for the achievement, and it's reminding me how absolutely unfun all the enemies in Halo 4 are. None of the Prometheans are fun to fight, the new Covenant designs are gross and sounds gross, and the dialogue is vomit-inducing. At least I can select every other game when matchmaking so I don't get too sick of H4's multiplayer.

Spartan Ops was the thing that really turned me against Halo 4 initially. I fucking hated it. It was a great idea executed in the absolute worst way possible. Gameplay was obnoxious with hordes of enemies constantly being dumped on top of you, it was repetitive as fuck, maps constantly got reused, story/dialogue/characters were all fucking terrible, etc. And for one final kick in the balls the story it was trying to tell pretty much ended up going nowhere.

Fun fact: the 343 team behind Spartan Ops was, for god knows what reason, put in charge of Halo 5's campaign. And it really, really showed.

 

[Miller]

I've been playing Spartan Ops legendary solo for the achievement

In the original version of the MCC you could unlock the achievements just by playing the cutscene or something like that.

 

[Quintex96]

In the original version of the MCC you could unlock the achievements just by playing the cutscene or something like that.

You could, but you might as well play them all the way through to help you grind out the obnoxious 'Kill 1000 of X enemy' Achievements.

 

[Miller]

I guess I shouldn't have joked about it:

In November 2020, it was announced that Alex Kurtzman’s Secret Hideout film studio has joined the production of the Showtime series. The five filmed episodes were re-edited under the coronavirus shutdown, with production on the sixth episode and reshoots being planned in Ontario, Canada.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_(TV_series)
That said it might be bullshit, the only source is some website that I've never heard of.

 

[Endu]

I'm absolutely not looking forward to the Halo TV series in any way. Unless they release a trailer or something that looks really promising, I'm going to steer clear of it.

 

[The Doom Slayer]

I guess I shouldn't have joked about it:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_(TV_series)
That said it might be bullshit, the only source is some website that I've never heard of.

>Alex Kurtzman

Holy shit, just when I thought that show couldn't sound any worse they just had to toss that fucking hack into the mix? Jesus Christ.

 

[HeyYou]

I'm absolutely not looking forward to the Halo TV series in any way. Unless they release a trailer or something that looks really promising, I'm going to steer clear of it.

I was weary first when they announced it and we heard nothing for ages, then when they said pretty much every Spartan-II but John was going to be literally whos outside of Soren, then when they announced they raceswapped Keyes and Miranda (what are they going to do, say the events are canon but their appearances aren't?) and NOW they've announced that Kurtzman is helping and they recast the original Cortana actress with Jen Taylor, while the original actress is going to play Halsey only. Jen's legendary but what a disrespect to the original actress and what a nonsensical move. Jen's definitely getting up there in years, it would've made far more sense to have Jen play Halsey, have a different actress play Cortana, and then maybe dub her over or something.

 

[King Dead]

I beat the entirety of Halo 4's campaign by myself on Legendary without remembering that you could always sprint. I forgot that it wasn't tied to an armor ability anymore and had its own keybind. That made me feel a little stupid once I realized my mistake.

The campaign was a mixed bag overall. It's definitely the weakest in the MCC, but it has some okay moments. My biggest problem was that a lot of encounters boiled down to just having a whole bunch of enemies thrown at you at once, especially giant packs of Crawlers. Heaven help you if you ran out of weapons that could get headshots. Knights are also pretty bullshit on higher difficulties.

I liked the Pelican and Longsword sections, it was nice to get to use vehicles you generally didn't in previous games; there was that Easter egg in Reach that let you fly a Pelican, but you couldn't do much with it. The Forerunner weaponry provided some additional weapon variety, and the Incineration Cannon is still as good as I remembered. But then you have things like the sound design being such a major shift away from the Bungie Halos for no reason at all. Grunts are shrill and sound like they have a smoker's voicebox, Elites sound far too deep, and every single weapon in the game sounds wrong. Not to mention the artstyle shift; I got used to it by the end, but again, unnecessary changes.

The story was pretty meh. I get what they were going for with Master Chief and Cortana over the course of the campaign, but it was really jarring to hear him talk so much (and some of those lines from the Chief were really bad; no offense to Steve Downes, I don't think anyone could have delivered those lines well). Didact could have been an interesting villain, maybe, but he was reduced to just a one-dimensional "I'm gonna kill all humans because reeeeeee" dumbass. I still like Lasky though, probably the best new character in the entirety of Halo 4.

And Spartan Ops is just...really fucking dull. It wasn't a bad idea in theory (provide additional campaign-lite content after you beat the main game), but in practice, it's just not really fun. There's not really any replayability in the missions, unlike Firefight where you can have a bunch of different gametypes custom-tailored to your preferences. The story isn't interesting either, and I'm remembering now why everyone hated Sarah Palmer. I sure am looking forward to hearing her complain about eggheads for the umpteenth time, that hasn't gotten old

Overall, I now know why I forgot about so much of Halo 4. It's just pretty dull overall.

 

[The Doom Slayer]

I believe 343's said they originally wanted Halo 4 to be an Xbox One launch title, but MS basically forced them to release it sooner on the 360. That's probably why it felt so halfassed, particularly the Prometheans who seriously felt like they only got half the dev time they were supposed to.

I feel like if the current Xbox regime was in charge at the time they probably would have let 343 get their way in launching it later on the Xbone, as Phil Spencer seems far more lax than Don "Just buy a 360 faggot lol" Mattrick.

 

[King Dead]

Update on spoops: Jesus fucking Christ some of these levels are designed to be anti-fun on Legendary. I guess since you can respawn infinite amount of times, 343 decided that the only way to actually provide a challenge was to just drop 50 enemies on you at once with perfect aim. And just when you think you finally cleared the last enemy and you've finished the mission, nope here come more drop pods.

I can guarantee I am never going to play these again once I get the achievements done. I could see myself replaying 4's campaign (and I will when I do some campaign playlists), but never gonna play this awful mode more than I absolutely have to. At least I'm getting some extra season points for this.

ETA: I suppose that they were designed to be a matchmade multiplayer activity first and foremost, so in that regard, going in with a full team of four would make Legendary's gigantic swarms of enemies slightly more manageable. But MCC doesn't have spoops matchmaking, so for solo players (or those that want the achievement for finishing them all solo on Legendary), it's really painful. Still have no desire to replay them once I'm all done. Awful stuff.

 

[Endu]

You're going for the solo legendary Spartan Ops achievement, too? I'm seriously wishing you luck. I got it a few days ago and it was the most teeth-grinding, ball-busting achievement I've gotten so far. It's not "hard", since you can just respawn endlessly, but you die incredibly quick and it takes so long to clear out each wave the game keeps throwing at you.

Also I replayed the campaign with two friends, one of which never played any of the Halos before and we worked our way to four. He was definitely disappointed with the campaign and I can summarize it below:

• General story - On top of the Covenant being the enemies again (which isn't actually explained in-game at all), you also have to deal with Didact talking about confusing shit no casual fan knows of ("Mantle of Responsibility"), and Cortana basically being off her meds. We made a lot of jokes about bringing her back to Halsey so she can get her insulin. My friend cracked up when he first saw Didact and the Librarian, their designs are dumb.
  
  
• Characters - You're not given any time or reason to start caring about the new characters (which boils down to Lasky, Del Rio and Palmer). Lasky is just an anti-Del Rio, whose whole purpose is being a dick so nobody cares about him, and Palmer only had one line. Granted, after playing Spartan Ops I'm glad she doesn't talk, but you have no reason to try and like her or any of them. Fuck it, the best character is Roland.
  
  
• Visuals - On a texture-level, everything looked the best it's ever been, and it's surprising considering the game was released on 360. But the art design is really unappealing and everything looks way overdesigned. There's really no reason for Forerunner weaponry to be in all these bits and pieces, other than the devs liked how it looked. Fuck them for how they changed the grunts, too.
  
  
• Audio - With the exception of one or two tracks, the music in Halo 4 is entirely forgettable. It simply just doesn't match the style of Marty and Michael, and it goes for a more generic military theme instead. Also weapons are hit-or-miss with how they sound, with the DMR sounding pretty good and the BR sounding like complete ass. They also made the Covenant stop speaking English for whatever reason. Fuck that.

I actually bought the Legendary Edition of this when I was a kid, I was that excited about Halo 4. A fool and his money, I guess.

 

[King Dead]

You're going for the solo legendary Spartan Ops achievement, too? I'm seriously wishing you luck. I got it a few days ago and it was the most teeth-grinding, ball-busting achievement I've gotten so far. It's not "hard", since you can just respawn endlessly, but you die incredibly quick and it takes so long to clear out each wave the game keeps throwing at you.

Also I replayed the campaign with two friends, one of which never played any of the Halos before and we worked our way to four. He was definitely disappointed with the campaign and I can summarize it below:

• General story - On top of the Covenant being the enemies again (which isn't actually explained in-game at all), you also have to deal with Didact talking about confusing shit no casual fan knows of ("Mantle of Responsibility"), and Cortana basically being off her meds. We made a lot of jokes about bringing her back to Halsey so she can get her insulin. My friend cracked up when he first saw Didact and the Librarian, their designs are dumb.
  
  
• Characters - You're not given any time or reason to start caring about the new characters (which boils down to Lasky, Del Rio and Palmer). Lasky is just an anti-Del Rio, whose whole purpose is being a dick so nobody cares about him, and Palmer only had one line. Granted, after playing Spartan Ops I'm glad she doesn't talk, but you have no reason to try and like her or any of them. Fuck it, the best character is Roland.
  
  
• Visuals - On a texture-level, everything looked the best it's ever been, and it's surprising considering the game was released on 360. But the art design is really unappealing and everything looks way overdesigned. There's really no reason for Forerunner weaponry to be in all these bits and pieces, other than the devs liked how it looked. Fuck them for how they changed the grunts, too.
  
  
• Audio - With the exception of one or two tracks, the music in Halo 4 is entirely forgettable. It simply just doesn't match the style of Marty and Michael, and it goes for a more generic military theme instead. Also weapons are hit-or-miss with how they sound, with the DMR sounding pretty good and the BR sounding like complete ass. They also made the Covenant stop speaking English for whatever reason. Fuck that.

I actually bought the Legendary Edition of this when I was a kid, I was that excited about Halo 4. A fool and his money, I guess.

I'm halfway through. I can only stomach doing one or two episodes at a time before I have to take a break. Also replayed a couple missions for specific achievements that I missed my first go around; was really close to saving both generators on Legendary, but my Mantis blew up just before the end and they destroyed a generator before I could get back. Apparently one of the missions is really good for farming kills on all the Promethean enemies (episode 5 chapter 1), but I'm not gonna bother with that until I've finished up my other playthroughs. There's the whole Master Chief Saga playlist to do yet, for instance.

Hard agree on all your points. The graphical enhancements are certainly noticeable, but I remember it looked pretty great at the time too. But all the grafix in the world won't improve upon a shitty art style foundation. It's a game that's good on a technical level, but bad on pretty much every other. A lot of things just feel off when you play it and compare it to any of the other Halos.

Also fuck 343 for their character assassination of Halsey. Not only did she have the full support of all the higher-ups, even when the SPARTANs were just to be used to quell the insurrectionist movement, but nobody would be crazy enough to go after the architect of the only thing that kept humanity alive during the Human-Covenant War. Not to say that the actions she took were ethically sound (I can see no way to truly excuse abducting children to conscript them into the military and then experiment on them to create supersoldiers), but everyone knew and signed off on it. The only way 343 could justify throwing her under the bus was by making Halsey into this evil mad scientist persona. Didn't really work for me anyway because she was always confronted by Sarah "Fucking Eggheads" Palmer in the cutscenes, and it's literally impossible to make me hate anyone more than her. No idea if she got worse in 5 or not because I don't have an Xbone, but I've heard that campaign is shit on multiple levels, so I wouldn't doubt it.

I'll do you one better: not only did I buy the Limited Edition, I also went on eBay and bought all the different preorder armor variants, because Microsoft did an absolutely wonderful thing by giving exclusive skins to like five or six different retailers. I even spent I think $130 on the FOTUS armor from the 360 console bundle. Major regret.

 

[The Last Stand]

Changing the subject, I've been playing Spartan Ops legendary solo for the achievement, and it's reminding me how absolutely unfun all the enemies in Halo 4 are. None of the Prometheans are fun to fight, the new Covenant designs are gross and sounds gross, and the dialogue is vomit-inducing. At least I can select every other game when matchmaking so I don't get too sick of H4's multiplayer.

If you die in Spartan Ops, you just respawn and get set back a bit. At least how I remembered it from Halo 4.

I just couldn't bother because it was boring.

 

[Endu]

Also fuck 343 for their character assassination of Halsey. Not only did she have the full support of all the higher-ups, even when the SPARTANs were just to be used to quell the insurrectionist movement, but nobody would be crazy enough to go after the architect of the only thing that kept humanity alive during the Human-Covenant War.

Definitely, especially after seeing Halsey in Reach. Sure she was sometimes abrasive toward Noble Team, but it was clear she had ONI's blessing to continue her research and her importance in the war couldn't be overstated. I don't look into the Halo books/comics/etc., but I'm confused how she turned into someone the player was supposed to hate. It's like ONI had a change of heart out of absolutely nowhere and decided that Halsey was a war criminal, even though (like you said) she saved humanity.

You're also doing yourself a favor by avoid Halo 5. Out of curiosity I decided to watch all the cutscenes after playing Halo 4/Spartan Ops, and you're better off just reading a super-brief synopsis. The only good thing I saw was they toned Palmer's character way down in the handful of scenes that she was in, but other than that it's trash.

 

[Gravemind]

I'm confused how she turned into someone the player was supposed to hate.

I can give you a really simple, all-encompassing answer to that question by way of namedropping one author who all but singlehandedly ruined Halo's lore going forward from 3:

Karen Traviss.

 

[DNA_JACKED]

I cant stand 343's work. They royally fucked over CE in the anniversary collection by ass-ramming the art design with contract and colors, obliterating the feeling of isolation and imposing monumental power of the forerunners that Bungie managed in 2001.

I didnt even bother with halo 4, as far as I was concerned 3 was the end of the story and anything they made afterwards would feel like a massive cash grab. Sure enough, Halo 4's story was a confusing mess that relied on external source material to make any sense, seemed to contradict the "humans are forerunner" reveal from 3 with an even MORE OP totally there the whole time enemy.

Halo 5 was a predictable trend chasing mess with a boring ass campaign, cock tease boss fights, and the most uninspired multiplayer since black ops the re-re-rerelease. 343 also doesnt understand multiplayer at all. They fuck up the balance of every map they touch. sniper rifles in a map designed for shotguns, cover placed wherever with no concept of area control, powerups that royally fuck up weapon balance just throw into corners. I played basic bitch forge maps with better balance.

I have absolutely no faith in infinite, and dont look forward to its release. I only bought MCC to be able to play halo 3 on PC and have forge mode from reach. Halo 1 and 2 are still alive in their OG format and have great community support, and even halo 3 had an unofficial port that went nowhere. Halo online was fantastic in its community supported form. MS has no idea what they are doing, and that isnt going to change anytime soon.

EDIT: also ElDewrito was better then any MicroShaft product.

 

[The Doom Slayer]

About Halsey - 343 took a morally gray character (she did a lot of fucked up stuff but let’s be honest, humanity and pretty much all life in the galaxy would’ve been 100% screwed if it wasn’t for the Spartans) and said “No, she is literally Hitler LOL” and proceeded to take every possible chance to shit all over her. They seem to have calmed down with it as of late but it was really bad in the beginning.

Both she and Palmer seemed like footnotes in Halo 5, but that's just a byproduct of how everyone in Halo 5 seemed to have their characters lobotomized and whittled down to generic "soldier" archetypes with absolutely no other personality traits to speak of.

 

[Miller]

The only good thing I saw was they toned Palmer's character way down in the handful of scenes that she was in

I think it was worse, 343 pushed aside every character that people didn't like in Halo 4 instead of toning down and making them more likable. Palmer only appeared in what, 2 cutscenes? To me, people like Lasky, Roland and Palmer should have had a bigger role in 5 since they were introduced in the previous game (the beginning of a new trilogy), they should have become the Chief's friends or allies for that new adventure like Johnson was.
I never had an issue with the way they portrayed Halsey in 4, I thought that she was acting like she knew that something big was happening (in a 4D chess way) and would have sided with 'Mdama for I don't know, half of the Halo 5 until a big twist. Instead 343 made something else because they have no vision for a trilogy. They've released another bit of ARG in the ONI Archive video the other day, I can't get hyped because I don't know if this was made before or after they started re-working the campaign of Infinite.

Or perhaps what I had in mind was worse than what they did, lol

Both she and Palmer seemed like footnotes in Halo 5, but that's just a byproduct of how everyone in Halo 5 seemed to have their characters lobotomized and whittled down to generic "soldier" archetypes with absolutely no other personality traits to speak of.

I agree, 100%.