Hardlight sounds like a Jackal shield. Combo with a pistol might be nasty!

Dan_Dare wrote:

Hardlight sounds like a Jackal shield. Combo with a pistol might be nasty!

I'd guess/hope you couldn't fire when using it.

Without actually having seen much footage or played the thing, and so being unable to judge if they can balance the vast amount of stuff they are shoving in.  I will just say until then that 343s biggest mistake is not doing the usual public beta.  From a balancing point of view a public beta provides more and better feedback than any amount of paid testing.  From a netcode point of view again, it provides real world data, far more valuable than any amount of paid testing.  Same for bugs.

So I'm not expecting it to be as well balanced as previous Halos (of which none has been perfectly balanced), I'm also expecting it to be buggy and laggy as well.

I just wish they would do the public beta more than anything.

Vastik wrote:

JRPC wrote:

Prom Vision - talked about already by 343. Local Xray vision, essentially.

After playing Ghost Recon FS online, I'm not liking the sound of this.

I suppose the flaw with it in Ghost Recon is that in theory, you're supposed to try and be stealthy. All the gadgets completely undermine that. Not such a big problem in something like Halo, although not certain to work either.

I_R wrote:

Vastik wrote:

JRPC wrote:

Prom Vision - talked about already by 343. Local Xray vision, essentially.

After playing Ghost Recon FS online, I'm not liking the sound of this.

I suppose the flaw with it in Ghost Recon is that in theory, you're supposed to try and be stealthy. All the gadgets completely undermine that. Not such a big problem in something like Halo, although not certain to work either.

True, and radar gives your location away anyway. I just found that on ghost recon, I died many times thanks to someone seeing me through a wall and watching as my head pops out of cover into their waiting sniper scope.

Mod74 wrote:

So it's an anti-camping tool? Sounds good.

Unfortunately it was actually what the campers were using...

Edit: but yeah, it can route them out too.

So many defensive perks. Defensive perks = slower gameplay.

There's four offensive perks and one defensive one.

Mod74 wrote:

There's four offensive perks and one defensive one.

Sorry, I was talking about armour abilties. sentry, vision, regen, hard shield.

From that leaked video the kill times are sloooooow, plus sprint as default (which counter intuitively slows down gameplay as it makes getting away much easier and thus killing people slower) means that at the moment I'm terrified by how slow kill times are going to end up. Frankly, nothing else matters in comparison, if kill times are slow the game will be rubbish. If kill times are fast the game will be good, even with mountains of mud thrown at the Halo wall.

Yeah COD is way too fast for Halo, but Halo 3 and Reach's kill times aren't anywhere near COD, talk of making kill times faster doesn't even need to get close to COD kill times. Halo 3 was too slow for me, mainly as the spread meant the BR rarely killed in 4 even with perfect aim. I can't give you my perfect balance because it depends on strafe speed and aiming difficulty. The harder it is to aim and the quicker the strafe speed the faster the kill times can be. You couldn't have H1 kill times with H3 movement speed and aiming difficulty for example. It's not so much COD's kill times that are the problem, but how easy it is to kill that quickly. CS has very fast kill times but it's very hard to kill that quickly. That means the very act of aiming and shooting is inherently rewarding. You can't say that about COD or certain Halo weapons *cough* AR *cough*.

If I were making a Halo game I'd make fastest possible kill times lower than 1.5 seconds. But I'd also make the average kill time a lot longer than that. So yes if you're good enough you can destroy somebody cross map with your BR equivalent in less than a second and a half BUT you've got to be damned good to do it. People like me would almost never be able to pull it off unless the opposing player was being a numpty and running straight at me or something like that.

Bear in mind that 1.5 seconds feels like a really short amount of time but in reality you can do an awful lot in that amount of time in Halo.

Sorry I didn't mean to just direct that at Knight, it was for everyone too, although it was him that prompted the question, I'd agree about 1.5 seconds at fastest and then the more rubbish you are the longer it gets.  So many factors it's crazy, I remember Bungie being very open about actual specs for the Halo 3 weapons e.g. spread of bullets over distance, rate of fire etc, speed of travel.  It was not just superficial twaddle but very in depth and unusual for a developer to share that kind of information.

100% chance that there'll be:

a. One of the abilities/armor things removed from MM because it's OP.
b. At least one of them nerfed because it's OP.

No way, even with a beta - but billy's right, a beta would have meant beta times (sup NMD) - that they'll get everything balanced right on first attempt. We can only hope it's not so borked that it turns people away (sup vanila reach).

Yeah, they have. Hopefully they change their mind.

My only guess is they are on too tight a schedule to do a public beta and are forced to go the 'buyer is tester' route...

So here's a new one.

Check out the AR kill at the beginning. That's quick, right? Seems faster than the AR's of old I'd say. 

Also the grenade-pistol thing looks like the launcher from Reach. Face will be pleased.