Bloody Initiate

They've always been very careful about it too.... so you don't notice. It's not just Halo btw, other console shooters have it too... like all of them. There are just many more easily controlled muscles in an arm than in a thumb, so console shooters have aim assist. PC shooters use the whole arm, so PC players can aim much faster and more precisely with less effort. It was tough on me when I first started watching BF3 videos without realizing they were ALL playing on PC. I felt sooooooo bad, but then I realized they were on PC and I was on Xbox and suddenly the way they could keep their guns on target while going full auto made sense.

Yeah but to win with the magnum you have to get in close so you can spam and take advantage of that high rate of fire. It has a very fast kill time - if you don't miss. If you're keeping your distance, chances are they aren't using a boltshot, and that means you're probably losing the fight because you're using your magnum.

My point was that not all player performance is quantifiable. Using the example of Team Regicide, you may think your king is terrible because he keeps dying, but maybe he's dying more because he's worth more points, wears a nav point over his head, and everyone on the other team is gunning for him while ignoring you. Maybe your K/D is artificially inflated because you're letting them get by you when they want so that you can just go for kills and leave your king to rot. Maybe you are playing badly by continually failing to help him out. I'm sure anyone who has played 10 games of Team Regicide has seen this happen, the other team focuses on scoring regicides and your team does nothing to assist or protect your king. There are plenty of times when you can't save a player who is a bad king, but I know I played a game of Team Regicide where I got most of my team's score in the beginning by slaying a lot as the king, but then when I needed their help for the rest of the game I didn't get it even once. I was stuck outside the buildings in abandon, my team was terrible, and I did my best but the entire enemy team was focused on taking me down. I don't think there's a player in the game who could have won that game with that terrible team. My K/D looked bad, 12-17 I think, but I was the only person on my team with double digit kills. That wasn't my failure. My only point is that maybe you're missing the point. I like having a good K/D, but it's not the most important stat in every gametype. Regicide is a variation on Slayer, it isn't Slayer. You know how I think you should punish a bad king? Leave him as the king, because when you have a bad team against a good team and you're the king, your game is going to be an absolute nightmare.

Accumulating more of an arbitrary number doesn't constitute cheating. It wasn't cheating in Halo: Reach and it isn't now. The fact that people complained about it was one of the stupidest and most embarrassing things I've experienced from the Halo community. The number was even more pointless in Halo: Reach, where it really did mean NOTHING. At least in Halo 4 you can unlock specializations and stuff. If you prefer Spartan Ops, play Spartan Ops. In Halo 3 the problem with people making new accounts wasn't that they got to 50 fast, even though that's what all the IDIOTS complained about. The problem was all the lower-skill players they crushed along the way whose Halo experience was SUPPOSED to be facing players of equal skill. Instead it was a lot of getting annihilated by higher level players who Trueskill had tried to keep fighting each other. FYI Halo 3, which I regard as the best in the series for multiplayer, is probably also the game that made Halo second in the market. Trueskill did its job, people didn't do theirs, and everyone who wasn't in the upper half of players skill-wise got stomped on way more often than they should have by people wanting to go back and raise that number again. Otherwise getting your rank up fast just doesn't matter that much, and people should learn to mind their own damn business. I wish people's fascination with it would cease though. It's frustrating how the thing that drives people to play is also the thing that drives them to play in ways they shouldn't. Gotta correct this. Matchmaking is still determined by Trueskill NOT your SR. So if he goes into Matchmaking at level 130 he will do just as well as he would have otherwise. You see people in Matchmaking with similar SRs facing each other because people of roughly similar skill who have played similar amounts will have closer Trueskill AND SR. If they get all their SR from Spartan Ops though, their SR will be much higher than most people at their Trueskil level.

Depends on the gametype. In FFA slayer for example, your death contributes to someone else's score, but it's just one person's score out of many. So the death suddenly doesn't matter as much as it would if there are only two teams competing. In objective gametypes your death may have been necessary, it may have even been a selfless and game-changing thing. You might have touched the flag for less than a tenth of a second before you were killed, but you added 30 seconds to the flag's reset timer and gave your team 30 more seconds to win the game. In team slayer a death is almost as negative as a kill is positive. Different gametypes, different values to kills and deaths. An assist in FFA should hurt your score, because you helped someone else score a point, and no one is on your team, so every assist is a failure on your part to meet your objective. Get too interested in how things are scored though and you find yourself trying to encourage a certain type of gameplay rather than actually scoring gameplay. For example people argue a death shouldn't be penalized because the point to the other team is consequence enough, and people who think you should play aggressively think assists should always be rewarded - even in FFA where they directly hinder your progress. The game is BETTER when it allows players to play the way they want, without being pushed in one direction or another. It may be less like the game you want to play, but it's not just for you.

I hate killcams, I was embarrassed for 343 when I realized killcams were in this game. I especially hate the game winning killcam because unlike all the others that I skip by respawning or changing my loadout, the game winning killcam I'm forced to watch. It also stops me from killing people after the match is over, which I enjoy because I like winning DMR fights without a reticule, it's like teabagging without being petty. They know I won that fight, but I don't try to flaunt it or brag. I just win. I'm always disappointed when people stop moving when the match is over. I take no pleasure in killing people who don't fight back. Now though even when they DO fight back our battle is interrupted by that idiotic kill cam. I liked it better when they didn't work.

I don't know if the following is true in Halo 4, but I know in Reach that the really good players actually did BETTER. Reach basically had much more to do with being cheap, so people had extremely good basic skills (aka better players) also focused hard on exploiting the games weaknesses. The result is someone who might have a K/D of 1.8 or even 2 in halo 3 had a K/D of FIVE (5.0) in Reach. In Halo 4 it's hard to tell, because it grabbed a lot of stuff from Reach but corrected some of Reach's mistakes (Like everything that exploded exploding HUGE). I suspect the pros will still do fine, and if it looks like they aren't that's because Trueskill is doing its job. The best players have very good teamwork, which I'm hearing is more important than ever. That might be Halo 4's ace in the hole so to speak. I may not like a lot of what they've done, but I think they got it pretty team-oriented in a weird backdoor way. You actually have LESS information coming from the game about your team than you did previously, but if you communicate and work together you can use Halo 4's weakness as its strength. You basically have almost no information about your team without your team telling you (and you respawn instantly, so you never look at the score), but the other team has the same conflict. Therefore by not supporting teamwork, Halo 4 gives teamwork a bigger advantage. Land of the blind and all that.

I didn't want things to stay the same, but I wanted the things that worked well to remain mostly unchanged and the things that didn't to be improved. I also really like a lot of the new stuff. I like the perks (Notice how no one calls them anything else, and Halo 4 doesn't call them "perks?" It's significant), and I defended all the AAs in Reach, even Armor Lock (Still laugh at people who couldn't handle it). They've been nerfing a lot of stuff though, really since Halo: CE. The pistol was way too good for sure, but no one minded really because back then people just didn't take games as seriously (See: Halo: CE Legendary ending). Nerfing is really the problem. They've continually knocked down the best-performing aspects of the game because they - like many game developers - never figure out that nerfing doesn't really work. Slowly but surely the player's ability to affect what is happening on screen decreases. In very rare cases, Nerfing is necessary, but in 99% of the cases, it's the wrong - but easy - thing to do. If you have 10 guns, and 1 is better than all of them, then most developers nerf that one. It's easy, and it seems like the right thing to do. The problem is that in the time it took you to figure out how your own game worked, the players figured it out on day 1 and have been enjoying it since. They're fast like that, the players, and they enjoy things that work, especially when those things let them feel confident and capable in the game. Then you take away that thing they enjoy, and instead of 1 good gun and 9 bad ones they now have 10 equally uninteresting and ineffective weapons. You needed to look at what worked about the 1, and you needed to bring that home. Then you'd have 10 fun things instead of none. All the players see is that they had something good, and you took it away. This is the biggest reason nerfing doesn't work, because even when it DOES work mechanically it doesn't work politically. People HATE having things taken away from them after they've tasted them. They've been doing this with all the things that worked well. All of them. I just used guns as the simple example. You know what else doesn't work as well as it used to? The Warthog, the Banshee, the player's movement speed, the Jet Pack, Active Camo, any and all of the player's starting weapons, The Scorpion, the HUD, the weapon recovery after using certain armor abiltiies, the list goes on. They keep knocking down stuff that works and throwing us a bunch of shiny things hoping we won't notice or care. The MECHANICAL aspects of the gameplay have gotten less and less consequential while we gain the capacity to customize our armor, accumulate funds, and shop for new weapons (which are weaker than ever before) and abilities (Which are designed specifically to have a low impact on gameplay individually). I actually really like almost ALL of the new stuff as far is it looks and feels, but as for how it all WORKS? I don't like weaker weapons, especially ones that performed differently once upon a time and WERE FINE IN THOSE GAMES. It's that old "don't fix what isn't broken" adage coming out again. There are exceptions of course, the sniper rifle has mostly just gotten better and better (although I think the Reach sniper rifle was better, just for a lack of contenders), and I'm actually glad they weakened grenades instead of keeping them strong as they were in Halo: Reach. The Reach grenades were insane and almost completely unavoidable. I like a lot about this game, and in fact the complaints I outline above aren't deal breakers so far. I just use the King DMR and need to work on my teamwork, then I'll be set. It just bothers me how many things that don't work remain the same and how the things that DO work get changed. I'll never forgive the BR being 5 shot, and I'll never forgive the fact that I had to "(L) to crawl" at the end of the campaign. They copied some of the worst aspects of Call of Duty, a series of games I respect and enjoy, but don't regard as perfect. If they'd just get it out of their heads that they need to knock down the best performing mechanics, and instead they need to look at those as examples of how things SHOULD work... They'd have to do a little more work (elevating 9 aspects is harder than nerfing 1) but they'd be on the road to becoming absolutely singular and a cut above other developers. They struck gold with certain aspects of Halo in the past, but dismissed it as dirt. It takes longer to kill people in this game, which I admit is a very big difference, but aside from spending a second or two more on a fight (I think they tend to be over in under a second in CoD), it plays a LOT like Call of Duty. Usually outside of actual fighting though. Fights in Call of Duty and other military-style shooters tend to be less like fights and more like paper-rock-scissors. If you saw someone first and had the right weapon and situation, you get a kill. "Skill" in those games has almost all its influence before the trigger is pulled. There was no "fight" just a series of kills. That's probably the biggest difference. You actually have individual combat in Halo. The maps are designed with fewer and fewer dead ends and lots of ways into each location, this creates a circular flow where you always have someone behind you. You respawn instantly and can move very fast OUTSIDE combat but move very slow in combat. The result is you get back to the fight quicker and that fight is determined less by skil and more by circumstance. You have fewer indicators on your HUD that tell you what is going on with your team. Without a mic, they're just a bunch of people who probably aren't going to shoot you. There are killcams, which I hate. The only thing more frustrating than suspecting the person who killed me wasn't very good is seeing it proven with footage from their perspective. Oh how exciting, he was spamming grenades into the hill. Oh how intense, he walked up on me when I was one-shot and mopped up the kill. Oh how fascinating, he was actually aiming at my ally but I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and caught the stray snipe. I REALLY HATE killcams, and what I hate most about them is that they were very Call of Duty. I enjoyed what I played of the Call of Duty games, but that was like their trademark. To see the people responsible for Halo rip off something so specific is just painfully disappointing. I'm gonna stop typing now because this a monster of a post. Sorry for the long read. I actually have been enjoying Halo 4, but I'm really afraid of what's going to happen with the novelty of "new" wears off. I was confused and upset when I found I just couldn't play Reach without screaming about nuclear grenades or no bleedthrough. I want to have fun, and I'm not that picky. I just hate nerfing, and I hate when something that works well is seen as a problem instead of an example.

Initially I thought this was a stupid idea because I always thought the sword was too simple a weapon to base a gametype on, but then I got to thinking of the difference it might make in Halo 4... you could get some extra fun out of the different armor abilities. Most loadouts would have the following unchanging details: Energy Sword Plasma Pistol or No Secondary, shouldn't make a difference Mobility Awareness Then when you include AAs, suddenly the loadouts can look different Hunter: Promethean Vision Vanguard: Hardlight Shield Skirmisher: Thruster Pack Scout: Hologram Centurion: Auto Sentry (Not a big problem really, just kind of a nice way to perhaps mop up some no-shields people) Didn't make the Cut: Stalker: Active Camo (I don't think you can get a lock on someone who's camo, so they almost automatically win sword fights. Or at least as long as you're trying to line up the lunge their auto-aim will do theirs for them) Sentinel: Jet Pack? Eh, probably not Also anything with regen field won't make sense in a game where the weapons kill you in one hit.

I've long felt like the "Infinite" option on armor abilites had enormous untapped potential. Back in Halo: Reach you'd obviously need to disallow some abilities like Armor Lock for this to ever work (Just because becoming a glowing white rock for the whole game is dumb), but things like jet packs, sprint, and evade all already limit themselves (Jet packs have max altitude, sprint has max speed, evade has max speed/distance). Holograms were even interesting when infinite. In the case of many armor abilities I'm not sure why they ever bothered limiting their charges in the first place. As demonstrated in the video, something as simple as infinite thruster pack makes it look like a completely different game.

I dislike elimination gametypes because generally NOT playing is significantly less fun than playing (I feel this way about EVERY type of game btw, people shouldn't be forced to stop playing before the game is over. That includes board games, card games, and video games). It sounds neat in principle, the belief being that players suddenly play smarter. The problem I see is that all those people paid $60 for a game and most likely $60 for a year of Xbox Live and suddenly the game is telling them they have to watch the match be played instead of play it because - as their killcam demonstrates - XxTrIcK5hOtZxX got lucky when he was jumping in circles and throwing grenades. As a shooter you play for entertainment (which is the goal of the game, if you play for different reasons that's fine, but officially the goal is entertainment), suddenly having to just WATCH the game in your deathcam just doesn't sound right. I would not play that game, and I wouldn't expect anyone else to either after paying $120 for the pleasure. Of course they have the option to just not play, right? That's exactly right, and they won't, and they don't. They had an Elimination playlist in Halo 3 for a bit, they took it down because no one wanted to play it. Seeing this was the trend, why go through the trouble to program an option that you're pretty sure statistically no one is going to use? I love choices and I generally think the more options the better. However given the large list of other complaints I have with this game, I would prefer 343 spent their time improving the game people play, instead of the game no one plays.

They're actually very similar tactically to Elites but with a few new tricks. You still have to pop their shields and land some headshots. What you want are variations on the good ol' noob combo. At a distance I preferred railgun + headshot weapon. Up close I preferred the same things you'd always want up close. At mid-range I was fond of packing a scattershot or shotgun, but engaging first with my DMR or lightrifle. When they go to tele-charge you for melee, you step back (Prepare to lose your shields) and blast them with the CQB weapon. That worked every time, you just have to keep your nerve. What you DON'T want to do if you can avoid it is spend a lot of ammo from your headshot weapon dropping their shields. It might work, but you're just expending way too many rounds. You want to either bait them into range of your nastier weapon or you want to create some kind of combo. You also don't want to engage them from too far away because if they teleport behind cover all your work will be for nothing. You want to be mid-to-close range or you want a technique that will kill them well before they have a chance to escape (like a binary rifle) I didn't waste a lot of time telling you how the launcher weapons and sniper rifles own them, because that's not very helpful. Railguns are pretty common throughout the campaign, as are scattershots, plasma pistols, and mid-range headshot weapons. So with the common easy to get weapons, you want to either vary the noob combo or bait them into a CQB insta-kill weapon. Also remember that either I'm a bad shot or their heads act just a little differently, because I think the average amount of headshots it took me after popping their shields was 3. Needlers are also awesome against them, they teleport away after the first supercombine explosion, but the second supercombine seems to take less needles and they often just warp 10-20 feet behind their last position. The result is a hilarious multiple-supercombine explosion smack down where they try to run away but just keep blowing up.

Also they made the clips shallower, either by literally reducing the amount of rounds in a clip or by increasing the amount of shots to kill. WTF? Stupid nitpicky fiddling garbage like that really hurts a game when you add it up. Little details like that wear down your patience so that when something big messes up, you explode. So I guess the answer to the OP question is: The community would probably like it if the developers QUIT FIXING what ISN'T BROKEN. The problem with that answer is that people all have a different idea of what's broken or needs fixing. I can tell you one thing though, no one ever complained that there were too many bullets in their gun. So why the hell did it get reduced? As I typed that next to last sentence I couldn't help joke to myself that people DID complain that there might be too many bullets in their faces, so maybe that's why there's fewer kills in each clip. I understand you can't please everybody, but I don't understand why game developers (343 are far from alone in this mistake) insist on ******** everyone off instead of trying to please anyone. Nerfing doesn't work 99% of the time, but every game developer is absolutely in love with the idea.

Played Team Regicide on Abandon, that has to be the most imbalanced experience I've ever had in the playlist. You don't realize how much of a difference there is between being indoors and outdoors in that map until you have a nav point over your head. I began the game by doing well and killing a lot of people in the upper back lift. Then they finally killed me, and I spawned outside. Then they killed me again and again and again and there was nothing I could do about it. Every time I spawned 2-3 enemies would be coming at me from multiple directions. I'd win one fight and behind me someone else would come at me. It has to be said that my team was absolutely terrible (At the end I was fighting their king and my teammate walked up behind him - and didn't assassinate or beat him down, even though their king wasn't strafing or anything). A better team would have at least killed some guys so I wouldn't have to face so many on my own, but I'm not sure that would have made much of a difference. I also stayed king from start to finish, which sucked. Overall that map sucked painfully hard for Team Regicide. Normally I feel the smart move in Abandon is to NOT go into the center lift building because that's what everyone wants you to do, I prefer to hang out outside picking people out of there. Nobody really messes with you because they're all focused on that center building because they either want to camp it or rush in and feed the campers. I stand back and DMR whoever isn't on my team. The King has no such choice. Way worse than Complex, at least that map is big enough that they can't just close the gap with one sprint. Multiple DMRs across the map isn't as bad as DMRs and ARs and grenades up close. So yeah, my team may have been bad but I'm not sure a lot could have saved that game.

Plasma Pistol and Boltshot are best. If you play just one gametype/playlist you're going to find one pistol is much better than the others, but if you play different playlists it becomes more muddled. For example: Infinity Slayer Best: Boltshot Big Team Infinity Slayer Best: Plasma Pistol (Worth mentioning that BTB had the biggest population of any playlist for awhile, even bigger than the standard 4v4. So more players would have been relying on the Plasma Pistol. It's also worth mentioning that the boltshot will be the worst in this playlist) Regicide : Boltshot (But really you have a shot at using any of them, probably the magnum least) TEAM Regicide: Plasma Pistol OR Boltshot, dropping overshields is often more valuable than having a baby shotgun, but equally often you might want a baby shotgun. If you're the king you might want a boltshot, if you're not you might want a plasma pistol. Get it? Dominion: Plasma Pistol King of the Hill: Probably the stupid magnum, even though it sucks. The ability to put down more accurate headshot fire just comes in more handy in KotH since everyone is constantly exploding. Really though you died to 'nade spam before you could switch to your secondary. I'm not even complaining about 'nade spam, that's just KotH for you. The boltshot seems like it'd be better because you get forced into CQC in the hill, but most people don't enter the hill until they've cleared it of enemies UNLESS they're relying on a CQC weapon (Sounds like a good way to die to FRIENDLY grenades) Didn't comment on all playlists because I haven't played them all extensively. For me this poll should have read: "Which secondary is the weakest?" because it's obvious to anyone who plays more than one playlist that the boltshot and PP are useful and the magnum is not. Even if you think the boltshot is OP, you will still find use for the Plasma Pistol. You will not find use for the magnum. Why the hell did 343 make weapons take more shots to kill (Magnum used to be 5, now it's 6, BR used to be 4, now it's 5)? They didn't expand the clips at all either, so I guess they wanted everyone to spend a lot of time reloading. They probably thought you'd switch to a secondary instead, but all the secondaries fail in the role of primaries, so if you're out of ammo on your DMR you DO NOT switch to magnum because you're better off reloading. I've out-shot people with a magnum before when they had a BR or DMR, and it's funny, but it's also a joke, which it's not supposed to be.

Complex is definitely rough on the king. I spent most of my time as king in that map hiding behind one of the trees until I got the overshield required to sprint to better cover. By the time I did I actually had to stay behind the tree because the enemy team had advanced enough. I'm not sure that was the only way that could have gone though, I think generally you're experiencing the consequences of poor team work. As for Solace, I actually like Solace, and since I tend to run Promethean Vision and never had much trouble with campers anyway, it doesn't bother me that there are a lot of corners and such for them to hide behind. It definitely sucks for the king to spawn in the open though, I got 4-5 king jousts with the sniper rifle in Solace because every time that dude moved I found him and sniped him. I don't know if 343 can fix that though, I'm not aware of any preferred spawning system for VIPs, and if there were such a thing fewer spawns = easier to control spawns. Overall I found Team Regicide decent fun, but I didn't like searching it alone. I just did it for the challenge, but getting slaughtered over and over again because you're the only one on your team going for the king sucks. It's hard to think of a different strategy, since a lot of the time you're rushing because your king is rushing and the only way to protect him is to help him. Like I said it seemed like it could be good but I think I won't be playing it much unless I have a team.

I feel stupid for not know this already. It would have been handy for when I was playing BF3 and the smallest update in that game was like 1.2 gigs. Does this work with Spartan Ops? I have less than a gig of memory left on my Xbox so I've only played the first episode.

I never found Armor Lock especially frustrating. So I agree with your subject line.

I've been complaining too much about this game. That doesn't make me happy or give me any kind of pleasure, it just feeds itself. It's also not fair or accurate, because there are plenty of things I love about the game. The rules: For each critique, there must also be one compliment. Basically each time you want to complain about something done poorly you must also list something done well. It is not vice-versa. 1a: I actually like the DMR quite a bit, and in fact take some pleasure in using all of the marksman rifles. 1b: I don't like that there has always been one king gun. The DMR should draw its power from its excellent accuracy and superior zoom, it shouldnt just be better. 2a: I love Promethean Vision, I use it all the time. I love how I can pre-fire corners with it and get an edge in a DMR fight, or pre-fire with a sniper rifle every now and then completely destroy my opponent's chance of threatening me. 2b: I find it disappointing that the maps seem designed to give the jet pack very little to do. Ever since Reach map designers keep taking the easy way out and just smother every map in soft kill zones. It seems fair to me that someone who foregoes another AA for the jet pack should be allowed to go somewhere with it. This is especially true in Halo 4 where you can get ordnance. No longer can the guy just ****** the power weapon and disappear to the top of the map, prohibiting everyone else access to said power weapon. Now anyone can get a sniper rifle or whatever might help them take that guy down. 3a: I've always loved the hologram, I never used it much because it isn't my style, but every time I get fooled by one I smile. I like that there is a weapon whose power is creativity. 3b: I hate that the AR and weapons like it have always struggled in this series. I love going full auto, I just wish it were the smart thing to do every now and then. I don't want it to be a king gun, I just hate having an AR and knowing that literally every weapon in the game can beat me if they're used right and I don't surprise them. I was never a fan of rushing in for the melee, but I like the mobility you can employ when your weapon is more forgiving. I never use it in a loadout, but sometimes when I'm out of ammo on my primary I'd like to see an AR on the ground and know I"m not doomed. I'd also like it to be a legitimate choice for a loadout. 4a: I think BTB is looking to be much better now than it was in Reach. I even think it can be better than it was in Halo 3 because things have the potential to be more balanced now. I know I've already been thrilled to see how my beloved Valhalla/Ragnarok plays just a little bit differently with AAs and DMRs. It's exciting to think of what could be done. 4b: One side gets the Gauss in Exile? Seriously? There is no justification or argument for this, a shorter run to the tank is nothing near balanced. 5a: I thought the Prometheans were an interesting new enemy in campaign. The knights were especially challenging. I also found the binary rifle in the hands of prometheans was appropriately shocking. You see something red and you're like "They're getting ready to do someth-" BLAM you're ashes. That is way better than the jackal snipers from Halo 2 Legendary, because you get a sense of something nasty but you often don't have time to stop it. The same doom, just more cinematic. Of course the bit of warning and less-than-perfect accuracy makes them less deadly, but dying instantly to an unseen sniper was never that cool in Halo 2, it was just an irritating memorization game. 5b: The marines are worse now than ever, which is impressive because they were god-awful in Reach. These guys literally died instantly upon contact with the enemy. Why Bungie and then 343 decided that the allies should just sputter like that confuses me. I always enjoyed trying to keep them alive in Halo 2 and 3 on Legendary, now they're just a waste of time. The reason you always wanted them alive before is because they gave you your choice of a bunch of weapons and vehicles, but you obviously couldn't take them all. So you'd outfit your marines and get a badass posse. Now you just ignore them, which doesn't feel right. What kind of hero doesn't give a damn if his comrades get smoked? 6a: I like the hardlight shield, the regen field, and the autosentry. I generally am not going to use most of them, but that again is more due to my personal play style than flaws with the AAs. 6b: Thruster pack throwing you out to third person and being somewhat bizarre to aim is generally not worth the effort in my opinion. No reason you shouldn't be able to shoot. 7a: I like the recoil on the BR believe it or not. I generally haven't liked a lot of recoil in the Halo series because I think the game just works better if the spartans are way too cool too suffer recoil. However I like it on the BR, I like that it's there but also that it's a predictable pattern. It feels good to master recoil. I always loved in Rainbow Six 3 how I could aim for the chest but rely on my recoil to carry it to a headshot. 7b: I don't like that the BR suddenly forgot how to 4-shot. That was dumb. It would be balanced if it could 4-shot. As it is, use the DMR instead. BR should do well at mid-range and lose at long or close. Instead it just loses. 8a: I like that there is a railgun 8b: I don't like that the railgun sucks. 9a: I love the Mantis. No complaints on that one. Just love that thing. I don't even know that I'd call it good, but I don't care because I love jumping in my giant suit and tromping across the battlefield with actual foot soldiers who can't do the same thing. It's better than having a mech in a mech game, because everyone else has mechs in mech games. The Mantis feels special, and that's all that matters. I tend to hang back with the thing because having it and not accomplishing anything is so much better than not having it. Who doesn't want to own a killer suit?

I like AAs, I think they were a good addition. Plus stuff like that doesn't go away once it's in. I think sprint in a shooter with map sizes like Halo maps does two things: It empowers foot soldiers with unpredictable movement, and it lets the developers slow them down even MORE so that they're easy to shoot so long as they're not sprinting. It does the same thing in Call of Duty. In Borderlands and Battlefield 3 though the sprint is a necessary way for players to move across the truly massive maps. The difference is that Call of Duty and Halo are arena shooters where you are in a smaller map and the sprint is there to get you back to the fight faster, it speeds you up without making you any stronger or tougher. I don't think sprint is going anywhere either, but it showed up in the first place because players were painfully slow in Reach. They can sprint, but when they're not sprinting they're easier to shoot because it takes them 6 years to move 6 inches. They can't strafe as well, so fights become more about getting the first shot and who will miss once. I think the weapons have gotten worse and worse at killing people. 3 shots in Halo 1, 4 shots in Halo 2 & 3, and 5 shots in Reach and Halo 4. That creates a situation where you have to stay focused for just a tad bit longer, and you are more likely to make a mistake. On the flip side, it also makes mistakes you make slightly less consequential, because you've only lost 20% of the fight with a 5 shot weapon instead of 25%. The result: Averaging. The weapons average you out but taking longer to kill. If someone is a better player than me I'd have 4 shots to kill them in Halo 3, in Halo Reach and Halo 4 I have 5, which means I'm going to land more shots, probably die anyway, but they are going to be weaker for the next fight. Suddenly you can't just out-BR one person and then the next, because the first person took a greater toll on you. Shields also seem to take forever to start recharging, it's something insane like 5 seconds, but I don't remember how that compares to previous games. I know that in Borderlands if you find a shield that has a 5 second recharge delay and it doesn't empower you when it's depleted, you throw it away immediately. That's against strictly NPC enemies that you throw away that 5 second recharge delay, not against actual human players who are tenacious and thousands of times more aggressive than any NPC. Once again you can't just *win* fights anymore because they all leave you in seriously crippled condition for the next fight. So to sum this up: You have to spend longer fighting each person, and you can't emerge from those fights in good shape because you're slower and they just take longer. That means that even against complete newbs you can't keep fighting, you have to take breaks, and you won't get them because the game has instant respawns, everyone sprints, and all the maps give you 2-3 ways to approach every encounter. You can't hide because everyone can see through walls if they want to, and you can't run because everyone is just as fast as you and the routes through maps all loop back on themselves anyway. Reach changed a lot of things, the power weapons were ridiculously powerful and every fight began and ended with grenade spam. The most important thing it changed though was the basic soldier. He was slower with a weaker gun. Halo 4 backed off the power weapons and nuclear grenades, and I'm happy about that, but I'm still a slower weaker soldier. I can go fast if I want, but I have to choose between fast movement and combat, because you can't combine them without a speed boost. They weakened the basics. That wouldn't be bad except that Halo always present a strong basic soldier. You had your shields and you had a weapon that when used properly would win you a fight before it became dangerous. That's why there were never loadouts, everyone started with the same strong template. Now you're still supposedly strong but everything is slowed down so newer players can follow. The result is everyone is just a bit more average. People said the same thing about Reach when it came out, and it was true then too. They went further with the basic soldier in this one with instant respawns and everyone having sprint and loopy maps. I am seriously glad that the rocket launcher isn't an automatic 6 kills though, and that grenades aren't completley unavoidable anymore.

I end up thinking it's a sort of good thing without being great or horrible. All it does is keep teams closer to full and matches slightly closer to fair. That's the good part. The bad part is how often you DO join a game only to lose instantly, or worse, die a few times because the enemy team has massive map control and power weapons and THEN you lose (I still like to keep a good K/D, so showing up and immediately facing a guy with a rocket launcher sucks, especially when the game ends right after he hits me with it) So you have the bad stories (Like the one I mentioned) and you have the good stories (Join a game mid-way and turn the tide, winning the game thanks to the JIP system). The end result is that games just continue to get played, won or lost, all with slightly more people involved. Does it suck to join and lose instantly even though you weren't really at fault? Yes. Is it awesome to show up in a game after everyone has a good score and STILL rock their faces off? Yes. The whole time, more people get to play with shorter waits. I think overall JIP is a good thing, but mostly it's just another thing which doesn't impact things a whole lot one way or another. It's also nice when you lose players because they're betraying or something and you boot them because you ought to, that you can hope for replacements. Like many things in Halo 4 though, it has the effect of dumbing things down. You don't have time to think or plan when you join a game in progress, you just have to react. Similarly your nice map-domination strategy falls apart when half their team rage-quits and suddenly they get a new half that spawns behind you. This just isn't a game with a big difference between good and bad players, and it isn't a game which rewards intelligent play that much. It's a game where you run around sprinting into fights and dying and respawning instantly so you can't even pause to wonder why you died. The dumber you play, the more being outnumbered matters, so be glad that the JIP system keeps that from happening too much.

I tend to be much more excited about what we can do next than what we have already done. I was very happy to see Valhalla return, but that's just because I believe Valhalla is the best Halo map ever made, and therefore an exception. For the most part I don't get excited about remakes, and I don't pine for my glory days of pwning on [insert map]. For me those maps had their day. With very few exceptions, I don't remember the maps as being the source of my enjoyment so much as the company I kept or the performance I achieved. I think the forge community has done some very nice work in the past, so from both 343 and the forge community I prefer new ideas. So far in Halo 4 I like Haven, Solace, and Complex. I WOULD like Exile if it weren't for the ridiculously stupid decision of giving just one side a Gauss Hog while the other side's consolation prize is a shorter sprint to a tank. The point is not to complain about Exile though, and instead to say there are maps I like and that show me this team can make some nice things. I would rather see more of those nice things instead of someone's re-imagining of another old map.

Stashed all the weapons beneath the floor did they? You're right, they were just too quick for me.

I haven't had this problem, though I've had others. I would bet it was a connection issue or just the Halo 4 map design tricking you into thinking you're safe. I've noticed the maps have circular sight lines that keep you from ever really controlling your angles of exposure. Whenever you look one way to fire at someone you almost always open yourself up to fire from at least two other directions, usually with one of those almost directly opposite the direction you're facing. The result is you jump behind cover with two badguys looking right at you and laughing because you think you're safe. I believe it's part of the widespread Call of Duty copy thing. That game is all about sprinting around shooting people and dying as fast as you can, Halo 4's gameplay is designed to do that the more and more you learn about it.

I love the Mantis. I would never call it OP though. Generally speaking vehicles have a harder time in this game, I think largely due to the maps all being slightly tighter quarters and every player having sprint. Ragnarok is the only BTB map with enough open space to move a vehicle safely. Exile seems like it but if you don't control the middle then infantry are just a short jog away from you at all points on the map. Now if you asked whether the Mantis would be OP in one of the earlier games where the BTB maps weren't so tight, I would say still probably not because it doesn't have a precision weapon like the Scorpion's main cannon or the Gauss. However it would be a lot harder to take down if it could keep its distance from infantry cover, but in the same scenario its weapons would be nearly useless because it has to get within sprinting distance to make kills consistently. If a team supports their Mantis, it will go on to do great things, but that's teamwork killing you not the Mantis. The same is true of every vehicle in the game. Even the Scorpion goes down easy without team support, and the Gauss may be awesome but you have to drive it conservatively or your gunner just gets picked off by people behind him. The turrets turn slower in this game I think, so more and more you have to have teammates watching your flanks.