RedStarRocket91

"I'm not coming with you this time."

NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERDS Aw, nuts.

Okay, I'll accept that's a reliable source. But while it shows that Halo 5 has outsold other Halo games, those games it sold better than are Wars, Anniversary, and the MCC. Or in other words, it's sold fewer copies than any of the main series to date, and barely half as many as Halo 4.

Actually, there's an awful lot of evidence that Halo 5 has actually been the worst-selling Halo game to date. Obviously due to the increasing rate of digital downloads and Microsoft being evasive with sales figures it's difficult to pin down exactly how much by, but the linked post gives a well-reasoned argument with good supporting evidence. Vaguely OT: the lack of splitscreen sucks. Worse is that beyond the campaign there's absolutely NOTHING that can be played offline. You can't load the theatre; you can't play a solo Warzone game; you can't muck around in Forge; you can't even run around by yourself in a custom game map. If you don't have Gold, or an internet connection, there's literally nothing in the game except the campaign, and that's so poor that I can't imagine many people wanting to go back and replay it. I used to really love playing splitscreen with my brother, or my friends: more than that, some of my best memories of Halo are the LAN parties I used to play with my band, where we'd grab a pizza and a few beers and just sit and play splitscreen or customs for hours on end. Halo 6 is going to have to do a lot to convince me to buy it after how disappointed I was with 5, but actually allowing offline players to play the damn game would go a long way to boosting my opinion.

Slightly strange mix at the moment. My Warframe addiction is as strong as ever, but since it's been essay season for me I haven't been on nearly as much as usual - looking forward to getting back into that a bit over the coming weeks! Other than that, I've been trialling a few new XCom mods (probably going to play Long War at some point in the near future) for when the current LP is done, and I've been messing about a bit with Minecraft on the PC along with a couple of other staff members. I'm in the middle of building a fortress across two mountains. It's pretty cool.

I'm gonna break from the general consensus a bit here, and say Jorge for the best Spartan. He's just generally an incredibly kind and selfless person: when Noble Team gets jumped by the Zealots in the Visegrad Relay, despite the fact that he's the closest one to them and so in the most immediate danger literally the first thing he does is throw himself on top of the civilian to shield her with his own body. When the Covenant in there have been dealt with, he's the only one to take his helmet off and try to comfort her. Not to mention he's the most friendly of all Noble Team toward six, and its only member to be noticeably distressed over the course of the campaign when Dot picks up on his vital signs rising. Plus, when the time comes for someone to stay with the slipspace bomb, even though he's stood right next to a Spartan-III - who I'll take this opportunity to remind everyone are literally trained with the intention of being disposable - he doesn't even offer to draw straws or flip a coin on it, he just volunteers immediately. For the worst Spartan... it's a call between Emile and Tanaka. Tanaka isn't really all that bad as she is horribly bland, undercharacterised and underdeveloped, and while that's pretty much par for the course in Halo 5 she had by far the least amount of screentime in the rest of the expanded universe to make up for it. Overall though I think I'm going to have to go with Emile. His attitude of superiority, coupled with the fact that his AI is so terrible at using his shotgun making him by far the least useful member of Noble Team, makes him come across as all style and no substance (particularly coupled with that ridiculous helmet), and the fact that he's by far the nastiest Spartan when it comes to interacting with civilians really doesn't help.

Here's how. They produce content which actually has some quality. Everyone wins: players are more willing to spend actual money because they're guaranteed to get the item they want, Microsoft and Xbox owners are happy because their bandwidth and system memory is less clogged up with trash nobody cares about, and the devs are happy because they can concentrate on actually making high-quality assets which adequately represent their skill rather than just adding crap that nobody likes or wants simply to dilute the REQ pool and extend the grind. I think that almost every single customisation item in Halo 5 is ugly as sin. I think it looks ridiculous, is of low quality, and exists purely to frustrate people into buying REQ packs. There are a handful of items that I really like - but because they're all rare, I'm never going to get them, since the pool is being diluted with yet more trash faster than I can swim through it. I don't get paid very much, and I refuse to spend what amounts to an hour's pay or more in order to spin a virtual roulette wheel for what's probably less than a half percent chance for me to actually get a customisation item I want. But put all of those items that I want on sale directly, and I'd be happy to purchase them.

Mechanically, the game is very solid. The weapon sandbox feels vibrant, diverse, and well-balanced, and the new Spartan abilities all slot into gameplay seamlessly and naturally. Visually, a lot of the campaign is very impressive, especially up close, and the background vistas are extremely pretty. Plus, Knights are now actually really fun to fight and reward skilled play, since even on Legendary if you know what you're doing and have the aim to match you can kill one in as little as three shots from a Lightrifle - which is a big step up from being bullet sponges in 4!

Not sure I agree with you on that one, actually. I like Marty well enough, but particularly by Halo 3 it seemed like he'd just run out of ideas and was just rehashing or outright re-using tracks from the first two games, though while I didn't really like most of the music in Reach I thought his work on ODST was incredible. A leitmotif or a theme is good, but it was starting to just feel repetitive and uninspired by the end. Not to mention that Halo 4 has one of my favourite soundtracks in any game ever: stuff like 117, Arrival, Faithless, or Green and Blue are all amazing tracks, and do a lot to breathe fresh air into a soundtrack that was starting to go stale. OT: It's definitely weird seeing Halo 4 like this and comparing it to the sounds I'm used to. The Assault Rifle's definitely much worse sounding here (and I'd actually say its normal Halo 4 sounds are better than the version in Halo 5!), but the Storm Rifle actually sounds powerful with the older sounds rather than the joke that it is, and the Battle Rifle's a lot more menacing with the heavier bullets. That said, while I do actually prefer the older Magnum sound I feel like it doesn't really fit a weapon which can be fired as quickly as Halo 4's own pistol as it's just too heavy to feel natural.

The 'load checkpoint' button

Why on earth would I want to stay sane? That said: The Lord of the Rings by J R R Tolkien, Mezzanine by Massive Attack, and probably a slush machine. So how does this work: do I ask you a truth now, or do you ask me another?

It's technically not a weapon, but it has one attached, so I'll cheat and go with that by saying the machinegun on the Elephant. Attached to the Elephant. I really loved the big wars on Sandtrap back in the day, and given how impressive Halo 5's forge is, I'm sure we'd get some really awesome game modes out putting them back in.

If you were able to travel 100 years into the future or 100 years into the past and you could go anywhere in the world, and spend a week there, where would you go and why? And I'll take a Truth. It's too early to start getting dares to ban Church

Long-term, we want to fill it with both member gameplay submissions and highlights, footage from any tournaments and Community Events that we host, and more general 'Let's Play'-style content from the staff. Right now, the latter of these is being filled by our XCom 2 series, in which I'm playing through the game using Spartans submitted by members of the forum, and while I'm not sure what the next big 'series' will be (this is the first time we've done anything like it), since we've generally had a positive reaction to this one it's the kind of thing we'd like to do more of. We're also hoping to put some standalone videos on, as getting together to record one session is much easier to schedule than trying to get people together at regular times every week, since we're spread over multiple time zones and all have diverse and often-changing schedules. Beyond that, we'd perhaps like to look into bringing back the podcast, though that again suffers from the aforementioned scheduling issues, and even potentially start doing some short news videos, since people seem to enjoy getting their news in video format.