Halo coming to the PC after nearly 12 years with the Master Chief Collection - Sensationalist Headlines

This is the first time gaming news has made me feel pure happiness since fucking forever. Such bliss. I'm just sitting here, smiling and waiting like I did with Tony Hawk 3 and Half-Life 2.

ODST was 5 dollars on XB1, big that’s a smaller game, I’d imagine the full games will cost more

There's a couple main things I loved about it as a game designer. (Note I only seriously played Halo 1, not the others, so I'll mostly be talking about mechanics present there but AIUI they all stuck around) The health system is probably the best bit. Where Doom, Quake and Unreal give you just a static health bar that has to last the whole level, and games like CoD give you an invisible health bar that heals back up to full after a few seconds of not taking damage, Halo has both health and shields. You've got a shield that recharges itself, but also a small health bar behind that which only health packs can heal. So the game can be extremely light on health packs, because you're expected to not take any more damage than the shield can recharge - where old shooters and even stuff into the Half-Life era have health pickups scattered everywhere, Halo might have one or two per level. And, this system applies to some enemies - Elites actually feel like peer-level enemies, because they also have shields+health. The AI in general is really good. They took the squad AI of Half-Life, and expanded it across a wider array of enemy types. There's fairly few enemy types, but each has very distinct behavior, and a bunch of recolors with different AI tuning. The Grunts are basic cannon fodder enemies, attacking in groups. Jackals are more snipey, hiding behind energy shields and plinking away at you. Elites, as mentioned, are basically peer-level enemies - aggressive, powerful enough to be dangerous, and smart enough to surprise you. And Hunters are your basic miniboss - slow, only vulnerable in one spot, stupidly powerful but easy to dodge. And there's lots of little AI behaviors programmed in - if you kill an Elite that's commanding a bunch of Grunts, the Grunts start to panic. Little stuff like that. There's a lot of Half-Life influence. Mainly in the three-way fights - you'll stumble on a bunch of Covenant fighting a bunch of Flood, and both of them also want to kill you, so there's more strategy than just "kill anything that moves". There's also friendly forces from time to time. The limited weapon carry is less empowering than earlier FPSes where you can cart around every single weapon, but it also forces a lot more strategy. Different weapons aren't just effective at different ranges, but against different enemies - energy weapons take down shields a lot faster, but projectile weapons are better against unshielded enemies. Since you can only carry two guns, you have to make tough decisions. Maybe you take the shotgun and the energy pistol, but that'll leave you badly-equipped for long-range. And there is a lot of long range areas - the level design is much more Unreal than Quake. That long range means vehicles, pretty much like the ones you see in UT2004 and UT3. The campaign includes plenty of time on each of them (maybe 30-40% of the game in total). And you're actually driving, so it's not just some boring rail shooter section. There's also just general high quality in pretty much everything. The level design is good - a bit repetitive in a few places but way less than Quake or Unreal. "The Silent Cartographer" is still one of the best FPS levels ever made. The music is incredible. The sound design is great. All the vehicles feel good to drive, all the enemies feel good to fight, all the guns feel good to shoot. The story, at least in the first game, was just big enough to feel real without piling too much lore onto you. It's just overall a really good game. If you're an obsessive fanboy for the Doom to Quake 2 era of shooters, it isn't really aimed at you. It is definitely a more "modern" shooter. I'd say it's closer to the lines of Half-Life 2 - not quite an old-school shooter, but still clearly not the CoD4-era spectacle shooter we got afterward. If you're just a general FPS fan, it's definitely something to play.

PC gets all of Reach in one go, I mean. Seperate games have to be bought, well, separately.

Ahh ok.

I did

At the time of Halo's peak I didn't have any sort of Xbox, and by the time I got an Xbone, I now hated playing shooters with a controller and Halo didn't really stick out anymore. But yeah, the replies I've gotten don't make it sound like some masterpiece to me. Maybe if I'm bored I'll play it if I get it on sale or in a bundle, but there are other shooters that interest me a lot more.

The Combat Evolved HUD was restored in the big update to be 1:1 with the original Xbox HUD. Before the update, getting headshots was a chore because the reticle was ever-so-slightly off. I find it super interesting that all of these Halo games will essentially be Linux-compatible thanks to Proton.

https://twitter.com/ske7ch/status/1105850496110059520 that shitty motion blur in Reach is GONE

Uh yes, They literally said in the announcement that Xbox will get firefight and multiplayer free and the campaign for Reach will be paid for DLC. PC will get all the games for one price

It says in the Waypoint blog that each game will be purchases individually. Also only Reach MP is free on X-Box, Firefight will be bundled with the Campaign purchase.

It's been a long time since I've actually seen speculation and hype actually pay off. With all the news about Epic fucking everything up it's good to see a game release that I'm actually excited for to be released on Steam. Microsoft just saved PC gaming for me.

Halo was genuinely one of my favourite video game franchises growing up, and one of the only things I miss about the days before I switched entirely to PC gaming. Fucking buzzing right now lads.

I'll give a warning to everyone who's last Halo game was Reach. Go into 4 as if the last few didn't happen, 343 clearly did because the entire history was retconned, and then they visually redesigned everything. Outside of the campaign, the visual changes to 5 are probably the most frustrating thing. It's like some fucking weirdo at 343i was just sitting, waiting till he got in charge to redesign everything, even if it was completely in-congruent with their own changes. Like, oh lord did a single person not look at the redesigned elites and go "What the fuck are you doing?" https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/209841/d86f0a81-3dc2-438d-9a7d-9681b7dcee0e/image.png It's probably hard to tell from this picture, but not only are they like, twice the size, their legs are now wider than the torso of a human, and now walk almost like gorillas. It genuinely feels like they forgot Brutes exist and figured "Yeah, elites are stupid and lanky now". The worst thing though. The worst fucking thing is their armour. I don't even care that they're mostly uncovered now, I'm talking about the fact that, with the redesign, no one apparently cared. Why? Oh, Elites have mandible armour, to, you know, protect their mandibles. Halo 5 elites have armour that doesn't protect their mandibles, and is way, way, way too small. It genuinely feels like the 343 guys went with a "Fuck it, it's sci fi, it doesn't have to be cohesive" mindest

Covenant design in Halo 4 sucks majorly but the history ties in very well...to the extended universe, which is the main problem.

It doesn't extend to just an out-of-lore retcon either, some of their art style changes also bring down the lore of the universe, too. The UNSC art style for example was supposed to be a sort of Alien-Esque relatively low-tech, rough, very human militaristic design with sharp corners, hard angles and something that wasn't sleek and advanced-looking for the sake of it. They decided that the UNSC art style would be better as sleek, aerodynamic and futuristic with rounded sections and all that, but *not just after the Human-Covenant war*. Their are now 2 entirely different competing, contradicting design approaches within the UNSC existing at the same time.

60 FPS cap is very disappointing. Aiming with a mouse at 60Hz feels awful, especially for a fast-paced shooter.

This comparison used to be made between 60 and 30. That 60 was great and 30 was too low. Capping is unfortunate, but to say 60 is awful is kinda melodramatic. And if you play at 60fps for a bit, you will eventually adapt and not really notice it.

The forerunner shit hurts, because you can see old forerunner tech mixed with the completely generic new stuff and it looks fucking abysmal

Armor lock next plz

I guess I should say it's disappointing to me, and kind of unacceptable. For me personally.

wat. a few years ago there were still people saying 30 is fine. I disagreed, but now 60 isn't good enough? I get it that higher is better, but "awful"? come on

The changes to the Elites really bothered me. They were by far my favourite characters in the Halo series, I loved everything about them from their visual design to their zealous alien knights gimmick. I loved how (spoilers for people who never actually played halo, but probably will now, I guess) over the course of the second and third games the Elites had a major reality check when their faction's religious leaders excommunicated their entire race, and ended up joining forces with the UNSC to defeat the covenant and atone for their actions against humanity during their holy war. And then 4 comes out, and one of the first enemies you encounter is a brutish, zealous, Elite- who you murder without a second thought- I can't remember if it was Masterchief or cortana, but one of you quips "a lot can happen in 4 years" and that's all the justification you need to blast any Elite you see from then on. I heard that the reason behind thesehostile Elites is explained either later in the game or in other material, but it still completely undermines the story arc of an entire race just so you can have them as bad guys again.

Not bagging on you, but complaining about 60 hz "feeling awful" kinda reeks of "first world problem" to me. Considering that the vast majority of displays are only...60hz. Its probably an artifact of being from the Xbox One and was never intended to move to PC. And may even be in place to work around bugs in the in the older engines used for campaign. Also motion blur in Reach being gone is going to be amazing. Probably worth playing again.

I think 60FPS is an acceptable compromise considering its a port of an old console game. I think saying its unplayable is being a little over-dramatic

Yeah I can deal with 60fps. Although I have to admit it would have been very off putting had it been any lower.

Halo returning to PC and World of Warcraft Classic this summer, what a time to be alive.

I play Titanfall 2 at 144 regularly, but recently I've been playing DMC3 at 60, and honestly it's not a major complaint – 144 is better, but the difference between 30 and 60 is major.

all i want to know is the release date and price.

That's another thing that really, really shows that they don't understand the original choices and their implications. Forerunner tech was always meant to give a sense of being ancient, mysterious and somewhat religious, it was stone with minimal, simple decoration that gave a feeling of grandness and power. Instead they went "Just make it shiny, random and glowy because they're futuristic aliens!".