@Djornson

The artifacts are cool huh, found a really nice one by a waterfall.

4:30 I got to sleep ffs! Was a good laugh alright though. BTB shenanigans always a good laugh!

I honestly don't remember going to bed ha ha

Going back to the boss discussion, I’ve generally not minded them, but the Harbinger is fucking awful.

Yossarian wrote:

Going back to the boss discussion, I’ve generally not minded them, but the Harbinger is fucking awful.

I've only done the one on the ship and the one in the tower, but the were both fucking awful.

The one in the tower might be the worst thing I've ever played in any Halo, so I'm sure looking forward to this Harbinger...

The opposite I found. I had to hide in the middle, otherwise I'd get twatted by an invisible cunt charging at 100mph, and I couldn't get out of the way because I had to use that shitty radar thing rather than the grappling hook.

Halo bosses: not for fuds

Got her.

That’s my legendary run done, so I’m now sitting on two 100% saves.

Overall, this has been superb, and I think it does just about take the spot of my favourite Halo.

Sure, there are parts that could be improved, more set-pieces would have been nice, a bit more could have been done with the open world, in particular the AI in the open world, some more variety in environments would have been nice, another large outdoor traditional Halo level or two wouldn’t have gone amiss, the last boss is terrible and the story is the usual Halo impenetrable bollocks.

But even with all of that going on, I still loved it. The combat is superb, the grapple is just an amazing addition to the sandbox, always allowing you to close gaps with opponents, get out of the way or strip an enemy’s shields. The rest of the equipment all comes in useful too, to finish the game on legendary, I had to employ it all at various points in the game.

While I mentioned above that the open world could have had more done with it, I did love what 343 did do with it. Exploring, finding upgrades and marines to save, digging through weird alien architecture, the larger, wider battles that allowed you to approach them however you wanted, the level Pelican Down in particular, which may be the highlight of the game for me, offering a condensed version of the wider freedom that you experience in the main game.

Beyond that, Forerunner designs have never looked better and the game sounded fantastic, the music is a real highlight.

Looking forward to seeing how 343 build on what they’ve got here.

I didn’t say it did tell you that?

But yeah, use the tracker, just not exclusively the tracker.

Kinda feels like standard Halo game design to me? Give you a set of tools, step back and let you work out how to make the most of them.

I can’t think of a better way myself, except maybe through a pause menu which causes other issues with the game flow. Cycling through a list would definitely be worse.

There’s a bit of effort involved in this in learning the combinations, but once you do, it works pretty well, IMO.

I'd much rather have the cycle through with left or right on the d-pad. It's just not intuitive for me even after I learned it. Even a radial menu would be preferable but it'll do I suppose.

Meanwhile player populations are falling off bad on this one already. Not what they need right now...

I listen to the audio queue. There's a different sound for each grenade. I always default to stickies whenever I pick them up anyway so I only ever press a button once. It just gets annoying when you've got several different grenades in your inventory. Saying that, it was only really an issue in campaign.

Learning the shortcuts for tools and grenades was worth the few hours it took to build up muscle memory as it pays dividends in the end-game against those bullshit bosses.

I enjoyed my run through on the campaign and I am interested to see where they take it, the multiplayer is still entertaining me every other night -- if they can fix the server issues I think it has great longevity.

I went looking for a core and an mjolnir on the far East of the map (both quite close together) and couldn't find either. Weirdly, the mjolnir site had all of the gear clutter you usually get but no armour locker.