Anime The mistake a lot of modern boomer shooters make

[GamerCat_]

I think we'll have to agree to disagree a little bit. I wasn't advocating for being able to carry every gun mind you, even merely being able to carry three rather than two would go a long way in alleviating how at times you really only one choice to make in terms of what to carry (unless you choose to go against the designer's obvious wishes and ignore the sniper rifle that'd make your life easier)

Three would both disrupt the elegance of the "swap weapon" button getting you exactly to the next gun you know you have in one press, and would probably just make things way too comfortable in terms of how loaded out you can be. Two forces you to make far more interesting choices. Yes, one level gives you a sniper and overloads you on ammo. You should probably hold onto that thing, it's fun and powerful. But what else do you carry? You think of your weapons in complementary terms this way. Sniper rifle "and what else?" is interesting. More so than comfortably covering your bases with something like a plasma weapon, a ballistic one, and a power-weapon at all times. Carrying something like a rocket launcher is a fairly serious tradeoff. You either use it immediately and then have an empty slot, or you hold it and are mostly bound to one weapon that has to do more work. Or of course you can toss the rocket launcher and come back to it, because everything is so wonderfully physical in Halo for all the simplicity. You can do weapon handling tactics more strongly associated with a game like Escape From Tarkov if you care to thanks to the fact guns are so physically there.

and would still maintain those moments of scrambling to pick up say a plasma pistol temporarily in the middle of a firefight. And on the shields front I really can't see how just sitting behind cover and simply waiting isn't the very definition of passive and more importantly Fucking Boring.

I don't think I've ever found myself incentivised to play in a deeply passive fashion by these games. I've beaten all of the Bungie Halo games on Legendary except for 2, which I think is just silly.

What's boring in an fps is something like my recent experience with Stalker: SoC. After turning off the Brain Scorcher Monolith raided the lab and it felt like about 2/3 of them were just corner camping me with high powered weapons. There is no reaction-window when you're ambushed here. Their guns were too lethal. Meaning sure, it was tense and I had to check corners and such. But this mostly came down to saving and loading. The lethality of this situation did not bring about an interesting dynamic between me and the enemy. It was just gay.

Halo's relatively slow times to kill, slower projectiles, slower movement, loud and bright vocalising opposition, these all enable you to build a pretty quick and solid mental map of every encounter with your enemies, which you can then react to on as much of a strategic level as an action one. I believe that more of Halo's old Myth DNA is present than is apparent at first glance. Halo is all about possible decisions you could be making. Keep in mind everything that's happening and make one of several moves. STALKER was much more about reacting. Both games I believe worked best in more open and busy moments, but for all the memes Halo is not a game I associate with corridors at all. There's the one snow level with its big indoor gauntlets, which I don't mind since they're a funneling peak of the game and serve as a kind of final exam for handling the covenant in a relatively pure series of encounters before the game completely shifts dynamics on you next level.

In Halo I never seem to find myself waiting. The game doesn't really facilitate such tactics. A moment to recover and nothing else to do might happen now and then (especially in the later games, CE is my favourite), but even then these are very quick and you can often do a lot more. And the game doesn't wait for you. The situation is always changing somehow. The covenant are so active, and every few moments the lay of things will be different. What weapons are around, what do you have? Which enemies are left? You shouldn't be waiting, you should be assessing. And even then, it's like 8 damn seconds at most. Takes me longer to load my save in STALKER because the last monolith cornercamped me again.

The extreme example you raise is one brought about by the player, at the end of the day HP is your allowance for mistakes after all, conversely Halo doesn't have that outside of your pittance of a health bar in the first game.

Halo doesn't really weigh you down with heavy consequences between fights. Consistent elements are marine company, your gear, and your little bottom 50% of your HP. You can call this a problem, but it doesn't bother me. I don't see a way to make the game seriously more interesting by playing around with this.

Technically it does with the shields, but because of them regenerating the game has to be balanced like a do-or-die affair where threats are only ever an immediate concern and potentially kill you instantly, which in my experience hardly fosters an aggressive playstyle, it just makes me play conservatively since trying to be gung ho often meant reloading at a checkpoint.

You can always recover. But so can elites. Your covenant counterpart. You can plink grunts to death, sure. But jackals have their hard shields they'll hide behind, elites have regenerating ones, and most weapons and encounter layouts aren't great for enabling cautious ranged tactics of the boring kind. Generally the covenant will try to press you and you'll struggle to deal with them without pressing back hard and clever.

Attrition is a difficult question because so few games actually do it interestingly. Taking damage in STALKER would dig into my medkit supply. But more often it just meant that I died and would reload. So in a sense it's almost better to die than be wounded, and really doesn't make a meaningful difference long term. I could find myself in a situation without heals, but again, I am now incentivised to play far more boringly than even the most uncharitable interpretation of Halo. You could say it's compelling because my past actions got me here, but the fact I've been saving and loading all along undermines that rather severely.

Begs the question, which game do you believe does this element well?

 

[Hell Swarm]

But what else do you carry? You think of your weapons in complementary terms this way. Sniper rifle "and what else?" is interesting.

The BR. Always. There is never a situation where you do not want the BR/DMR or the alien version of it as a weapon. It's accurate over insane range and it one shots everything but elites thanks to the head shot mechanics. One of Bungie's Halos design flaws is the pistol and BR were by far the best non-power weapons and there was never a reason not to use them at any range. I think Infinite is the first time when the AR will beat the BR at close range and even then it's close.

I love the Halo sandbox but on Heroic and higher there is never a reason to use 90% of it. Unless it's a plasma pistol, a BR or a power weapon you're never picking it up. Which is especially true for covenant weapons since they can't headshot and that's essential to clearing the grunts/jackals out. It's even worse in multiplayer because the player base is so rabidly focused on the BR (and who can blame them?) they literally throw fits over AR starts on maps. When we eventually see the boomer shooter Halo crazy I hope the indie devs correct Bungie and 343's mistake with the sandbox. Maybe someone already has and I've missed the Halo indie clones?

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

And what's junk about multimedia? That stuff is cool. What, you like Marathon but are averse to the idea of reading a novel? What's wrong with novels?

I think I can respond to most of your arguments by using this question as a springboard. Novels aren't video games, and video games shouldn't be novels. Towards the end of your post you increasingly accuse me of wanting games to be something a bald (Why this fixation?) high school English literature teacher would approve of, but this is a bad reading and mischaracterization, because I've been saying the total opposite.

Why is Halo degenerate? It is de-generation, a contraction, because removing the clunky computer terminals that had to be crowbarred in with exposition and aspirations beyond that of most shooters isn't a win for the medium or the game. I never said Bungie could have been the John Milton of video games, nor that they should have been, but I don't think that was ever implied. Back when science fiction wasn't about negro transbians showering together it was a genre of big ideas and Marathon took part in that despite the format and limitations. Whereas you'd shoot zombies in the mall from Dawn of the Dead, or blast cultists in the Overlook Hotel from The Shining in Blood, Marathon Infinity had levels inspired by Philip K. Dick novels and its equivalent of level intermission screens from Doom or the logs of System Shock doing about as much as you could within that format.

Instead of experimenting, pushing beyond these limits imposed on them, they retreaded old ground while removing things. As it happens consoles are very receptive to reductions of game formulas originally for personal computers, and so you get the two weapon limit and the like, that people have already said enough about over the years to make it redundant for me to say much about it here.

None of this is about status, or troon academic establishment approval, it's about delivering to and communicating with the player. Where you say Halo is Bungie growing to respect the medium and evolve the Marathon formula I see the opposite. No, a game shouldn't have to call attention to itself as being heady, but it should inform the game and by that I don't mean background noise.

There are very few success stories when it comes to half-decent science fiction being put to video game form, those few that don't half-ass it fuse gameplay with the theming. Homeworld in 1999 provided a far more compelling portrayal of a space opera in the form of a video game, it had understated writing and much being left implied rather than explicit, it was wholly unique in the RTS genre by going fully 3D. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, of the same year, gave us a 4X game entirely built around future visions and distant possibilities. Neither game would be what it is without their settings, theming and pursuit of ideas.

The same can't be said of Halo, rather everything in the background feels more like a cope after having stripped it out from Marathon. I think that's because the genre just isn't a good fit for it and they bent to the formula, rather than making games suitable to their tastes, ideas and aspirations, possibly creating a new genre of games if necessary. Maturity isn't being beholden to convention or whatever is commercially successful at any given time. And when the best parts of your game is in some official game novel you certainly aren't respecting the medium or the audience.

 

[GamerCat_]

But what else do you carry? You think of your weapons in complementary terms this way. Sniper rifle "and what else?" is interesting.

The BR. Always. There is never a situation where you do not want the BR/DMR or the alien version of it as a weapon. It's accurate over insane range and it one shots everything but elites thanks to the head shot mechanics. One of Bungie's Halos design flaws is the pistol and BR were by far the best non-power weapons and there was never a reason not to use them at any range. I think Infinite is the first time when the AR will beat the BR at close range and even then it's close.

The BR is a nerfed CE pistol (lower ammunition carry limit), but it's still a very powerful and versatile tool. If you're being practical it's almost always the right way to go.

In CE it's kind of overstated since it's really only the gun for four levels in the first half of the game, and even then relatively limited. It's a very handy tool but if you rely heavily on it unless you're keeping an eye out for ammunition stockpiles you may use everything you have for it. I don't see the gun's power as a bad thing. For the first half of the game it's nice to have a steady option, and really optimal use requires more interesting play (pairing it with a plasma weapon to get past elite shields). People make this sound like the most obvious thing in the world but I don't think many have actually tried it. I've beaten Halo CE on Legendary while aware of this allegedly game-breaking trick. I rarely found myself doing it. It's actually kind of awkward to do and feels less natural (to me at least) than cycling through virtually all weapons.

But even with its power, you don't get it in the third level, and by the sixth the combat dynamic shifts almost completely away from the covenant while the weapon also becomes a random enemy drop rather than a starting gun. It is now an option, but no longer the option. The shotgun is far more versatile at this point in the game, with even the assault rifle having more general versatility in dealing with the flood.

I think a significant reason why the Halo CE Magnum is remembered is because of how cool it is. Yes, it's very good. On paper incredible. But if you're the kind of powergamer hardcore bald x-man who knows what a "weapon sandbox" is you're discussing an inorganic experience of the game built on metaknowledge. For one I believe that this leads to a disprivileging of how most people actually encounter and handle the game, and how even we can if we approach it in good faith, and secondly this privileges how things are on paper. As I just said, the magnum is only really a naturally excellent choice for the earlier and rather easy first half of the game, when it's even there that is. The idea of Halo CE being a giant procession of plasma pistol into magnum headshots is spread by people who know the game more through weapon tierlists and speedrun footage than actually playing it.

For the sequels, in which combat remains far more convenant focused and most weapons are present in most levels, yes, long range power becomes a far bigger deal and while Bungie tried to address this with a nerf to the magnum (br), the game still largely revolves around these. They even gave the covenant one so that you wouldn't miss it too badly in their levels, or in long stretches where they couldn't justify UNSC gear appearing.

This does limit the amount of interesting weapon handling going on to an extent, but again, organic experience. Halo's 2 and 3 are very Call of Duty Campaign. They're very cinematic games which barrel along at a fast pace. The spread of weapons is still appreciated for sheer novelty's sake. And you can become powerful with things other than accurate scoped options. They added dual wielding in Halo 2. Everyone wanted to do that just for the hell of it. That's really the strength of Halo, like Myth. It makes me want to see what I can do with its parts.

I love the Halo sandbox but on Heroic and higher there is never a reason to use 90% of it.

By "on Heroic and higher" you mean "when I'm tryharding". Here's your answer. Try to win Legendary while having fun. There's no achievement for that. Good way to find out if you actually like video games.

Unless it's a plasma pistol, a BR or a power weapon you're never picking it up.

Again, I pick up everything when playing on Legendary. You can call me retarded if you want, but I do it.

Which is especially true for covenant weapons since they can't headshot and that's essential to clearing the grunts/jackals out.

You can cut those guys down pretty quickly with a plasma rifle. Something I only really came to appreciate while on Legendary. That's that poor neglected weapon's niche. It still cuts through shields very effectively, while also doing far better against flesh.

It's even worse in multiplayer because the player base is so rabidly focused on the BR (and who can blame them?) they literally throw fits over AR starts on maps. When we eventually see the boomer shooter Halo crazy I hope the indie devs correct Bungie and 343's mistake with the sandbox. Maybe someone already has and I've missed the Halo indie clones?

I never actually got too into Halo's multiplayer. I do think that marksman weapons don't work too well with the other elements of the game online. Splitgate tried to address this by just making everything faster and more chaotic. I think that was a pretty good idea. But I'm really not that fussed about Halo multiplayer. Again. "Party mode". A thing that existed to get stupid people to subsidise the actually interesting stuff. For as long as that lasted anyway.

Rewind will need his own reply. Maybe I'll write that now. Maybe later. We'll see if anything else can catch my attention in the next little while.

 

[Hag]

The Northern Journey is a true successor of original Doom as an adventure and exploration game with with fast-paced challenging FPS gameplay.

 

[Hell Swarm]

By "on Heroic and higher" you mean "when I'm tryharding". Here's your answer. Try to win Legendary while having fun. There's no achievement for that. Good way to find out if you actually like video games.

It's not try hard to use the obvious weapon combo that makes it viable to beat the games. MCC Halo legendary has a 'bug' where the enemies fire much faster than the console versions. You can't 1v1 elites and expect to survive a level. Even Grunts and Jackals become serious threats and you need to play whack a mole with a precision weapon.

It's not try hard to recognise the best weapons. It's extremely easy for even a casual player to see a grunt being 1 shot by a precision rifle or a jackal flinching from a hand shot. They're specific reactions Bungie built the monsters around to make sure they were fun to fight so it's the intended way to interact with most of them.

Why is Halo degenerate? It is de-generation, a contraction, because removing the clunky computer terminals that had to be crowbarred in with exposition and aspirations beyond that of most shooters isn't a win for the medium or the game. I never said Bungie could have been the John Milton of video games, nor that they should have been, but I don't think that was ever implied. Back when science fiction wasn't about negro transbians showering together it was a genre of big ideas and Marathon took part in that despite the format and limitations. Whereas you'd shoot zombies in the mall from Dawn of the Dead, or blast cultists in the Overlook Hotel from The Shining in Blood, Marathon Infinity had levels inspired by Philip K. Dick novels and its equivalent of level intermission screens from Doom or the logs of System Shock doing about as much as you could within that format.

Doing a Ring world in a game was using science fiction in a similar way. Maybe not deep but the idea of seeing a ring world stretching out into the sky box was rather novel. Don't forget how early 3D Halo is. We're not long after the PS1 and you have sky boxes pushing the limits of what came before.

 

[Gargaune]

Lemming42, I think the unintentional clue lies in the colloquial naming - Doom and Unreal and Half-Life weren't "boomer shooters", they were just (relatively early) First Person Shooters. Since their day, the genre's moved on and refined various characteristics (for better or worse) to "mature" into the Call of Duties and Halos of today. "Boomer shooters" are more of a caricatural genre, aping a number of outmoded (but fun) designs that were the result of the FPS genre's developmental phase and focusing on them with an almost deliberate disregard for other components. It's not even an entirely new phenomenon, because Serious Sam pulled a similar thing two decades ago.

Basically, you don't really recognise Doom and whatever indie "boomer shooter" as being quite the same affair because they're not fully the same genre. In being a "retro" or "homage" sort of thing to the early FPS, the "boomer shooter" has a very different artistic intent behind it, and that's reflected in the execution - id Software wanted to thrill you with the pinnacle of virtual thrills, whereas many modern indies just want to ham it up with "your dad's shoot-em-up." Their casual disregard for plot and setting is almost emphasised as a feature in this context because it plays into a certain contemporary perception, regardless of whether that perception's historically accurate or not.


P.S. This is a pervasive misstep with "retro" gaming, in my opinion, and it's very evident in artistic direction in the indie space (especially with pixel art being so obnoxiously pervasive). I understand that independent studios have very limited resources, but I'd rather them do the best with what they've got than deliberately underperform with crappy visuals under the cover of some kind of referential humour, and it's why I always draw a distinction between something like Gloomwood channeling Thief's art style while ignoring that LGS were working with cutting edge tech in their time, and Monomyth, which is playing it straight to as much as its budget will allow.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

People give too much credit to the early devs. Things didn't receive the upmost attention like that. Doom's story likely wasn't given weeks of effort. It was probably an afternoon of writing and move on. A bunch of Doom 2 maps are pretty awful and needed a couple of revisions to be considered playable. I love old shooters but lets not pretend older stuff didn't have issues. Even the peak of their eras still had some lazy levels.

Tom Hall spent a considerable amount of time thinking up the story, but because of that, and other creative differences, he got kicked out and they simplified it. Having played another game from that era, the Japanese-only Elm Knight, that does focus on story to the degree that this theoretical version of Doom would, they absolutely made the right decision.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Games like Doom, Hexen, Duke3D or Quake weren't intended to be jokes

Oh, I think Duke 3D had a lot of jokes in it. The fact that one of the expansions ends with Duke Nukem ripping off an alien's head and shitting down it's throat while reading a newspaper clearly isn't a serious moment. If you want to blame anyone for the "joke" stuff in modern boomer shooters, you can thank 3D Realms and the Build Engine games for that. After all, Redneck Rampage is on that list. Even Blood had a lot of gags in it, and it was probably one of the more serious ones. The only one of those that wasn't filled with lots of gags and jokes was Nam, and it was shit.

 

[GamerCat_]

Okay so last night I got tired and some other stuff was going on. Now we can answer this post too. And maybe some others.

And what's junk about multimedia? That stuff is cool. What, you like Marathon but are averse to the idea of reading a novel? What's wrong with novels?

I think I can respond to most of your arguments by using this question as a springboard. Novels aren't video games, and video games shouldn't be novels.

I broadly agree. Which is why I consider Halo: Combat Evolved superior to Marathon.

Towards the end of your post you increasingly accuse me of wanting games to be something a bald (Why this fixation?) high school English literature teacher would approve of, but this is a bad reading and mischaracterization, because I've been saying the total opposite.

You might think you have, but we'll see.

Why is Halo degenerate? It is de-generation, a contraction, because removing the clunky computer terminals that had to be crowbarred in with exposition and aspirations beyond that of most shooters isn't a win for the medium or the game. I never said Bungie could have been the John Milton of video games, nor that they should have been, but I don't think that was ever implied. Back when science fiction wasn't about negro transbians showering together it was a genre of big ideas and Marathon took part in that despite the format and limitations. Whereas you'd shoot zombies in the mall from Dawn of the Dead, or blast cultists in the Overlook Hotel from The Shining in Blood, Marathon Infinity had levels inspired by Philip K. Dick novels and its equivalent of level intermission screens from Doom or the logs of System Shock doing about as much as you could within that format.

This is why I imagine you being traumatised by high school English. You don't just call things good. You don't say what they mean to you, or explain why you like them. You tell me why we should like them. And the answer is "it resembles old prestige media". Were you actually moved or impressed by Marathon, or did you merely recognise literary ambition and feel good that a video game was doing something teacher would approve of?

Instead of experimenting, pushing beyond these limits imposed on them, they retreaded old ground while removing things. As it happens consoles are very receptive to reductions of game formulas originally for personal computers, and so you get the two weapon limit and the like, that people have already said enough about over the years to make it redundant for me to say much about it here.

Actually very little has been said about even the game's bare technical details and how it handles. Twenty years of discourse mostly amounts to "BAWWWWW THIS ISN'T QUAKE WHY ISN'T THIS QUAKE THEY DIDN'T MAKE QUAKE AGAIN I AM BALD RESPECT ME BAWWWWWWWWWWWW". My friends and I are the only exception to this.

Beyond that, if Halo looks like a conceptual regression, that is because you are a bald reactionary retard incapable of recognising anything new. Your idea of bold and ambitious new media is something which resembles old and dead media. With Halo Bungie pushed so far beyond the limits of literature that their work stopped resembling literature. This does not mean they were saying less. It means they were speaking a new language. One which you were too set in your ways and narrow minded to recognise. The language of literature is out. The language of video games is in. Halo's world speaks to you through virtual architecture, incidental detail, the look and feel of things, off-hand lines embedded within in-engine cutscenes. It's all there. But you now encounter it in a manner so organic that it's easy to take for granted and miss. As I may have already said, there is no designated "SERIOUS ART TIME" in Halo. The entire game is immersion in its serious elements.

In Marathon when you open a terminal and see a pile of text you think "oh, okay. I have to get serious now. I'm facing a pile of words like in Mister Norwood's class. Better pay attention and catch all the THEMES and remember and repeat the INFLUENCES (did you know Myth was inspired by The Black Company?)". Marathon, in its defense, was trying the Halo thing. The levels are naturalist representations of what they are actually meant to be. You can learn things and find meaningful details by paying attention to your surroundings. It's not a purely contrived game labyrinth that exists to waste your time. At least not entirely. But that was always the most interesting element of Marathon to me, and it's something they brought to the forefront and refined to an unsurpassed level in Halo: Combat Evolved.

The literary texts in Marathon were a CONCESSION. They were an old and not too interesting way of portraying details they couldn't work out how to present in a more novel fashion that harmonised with the rest of the experienced. Once they could stop writing everything down they did stop writing everything down. There are more interesting and unique opportunities in video games.

None of this is about status, or troon academic establishment approval, it's about delivering to and communicating with the player. Where you say Halo is Bungie growing to respect the medium and evolve the Marathon formula I see the opposite. No, a game shouldn't have to call attention to itself as being heady, but it should inform the game and by that I don't mean background noise.

There are very few success stories when it comes to half-decent science fiction being put to video game form, those few that don't half-ass it fuse gameplay with the theming. Homeworld in 1999 provided a far more compelling portrayal of a space opera in the form of a video game, it had understated writing and much being left implied rather than explicit, it was wholly unique in the RTS genre by going fully 3D. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, of the same year, gave us a 4X game entirely built around future visions and distant possibilities. Neither game would be what it is without their settings, theming and pursuit of ideas.

Fuck off. Homeworld sucks.

Everything you think you appreciate in games like this you can recognise because of how crude and obtrusive the implementation is (that and the memes about how clever they are. Again, bald Xer prestigefaggotry). In the face of actual subtlety you are completely lost to the point you don't even know it.

The same can't be said of Halo, rather everything in the background feels more like a cope after having stripped it out from Marathon. I think that's because the genre just isn't a good fit for it and they bent to the formula, rather than making games suitable to their tastes, ideas and aspirations, possibly creating a new genre of games if necessary. Maturity isn't being beholden to convention or whatever is commercially successful at any given time. And when the best parts of your game is in some official game novel you certainly aren't respecting the medium or the audience.

The genre is a brilliant fit for what they were doing. You're just an unworthy audience. Like most people.

You don't have any arguments here. You missed everything the game was doing and all you can do is unilaterally declare the game a selling-out point with no positive arguments as to why. The future came, and you failed to realise it. 20 years later and you still don't get it. You're an imbecile and you are holding the medium back. I will destroy you, just like I destroyed the Quakebund on 4chan. People in Halo threads on that site will call you bald now if you mention that stupid fucking game. I did that. And I'll do it here too.

 

[GamerCat_]

By "on Heroic and higher" you mean "when I'm tryharding". Here's your answer. Try to win Legendary while having fun. There's no achievement for that. Good way to find out if you actually like video games.

It's not try hard to use the obvious weapon combo that makes it viable to beat the games. MCC Halo legendary has a 'bug' where the enemies fire much faster than the console versions. You can't 1v1 elites and expect to survive a level. Even Grunts and Jackals become serious threats and you need to play whack a mole with a precision weapon.

I was not aware of this bug. I beat the game playing on the MCC and never even noticed. Again, I was playing very off-meta not as a wilful reaction to memes but because it just never felt natural or obvious to do the magnum/plasma-pistol thing. I was 1v1ing elites with plasma rifles, constantly swapping out different weapons, and generally not falling into any of the boring behaviours that Halo allegedly incentivises. Even in this incarnation that's supposedly harsher than Bungie intended.

It's not try hard to recognise the best weapons. It's extremely easy for even a casual player to see a grunt being 1 shot by a precision rifle or a jackal flinching from a hand shot. They're specific reactions Bungie built the monsters around to make sure they were fun to fight so it's the intended way to interact with most of them.

The correct way to use the CE magnum is to headshot grunts, shoot the gap in jackal shields, and headshot shieldless elites, yes. But what's lost on people who study this game on paper and via memes is that the other guns also kill things. Grunts and jackals are very fragile. The magnum being a one shot is treated like an argument that it's the only way to play the game. A grenade going off within a very wide radius of these lesser aliens is pretty much a guaranteed kill. Every weapon shreds them with a bit of direct fire. The intended way to play Halo is to have fun with it. Every weapon gets some kind of reaction and is cool in its own ways.

Doing a Ring world in a game was using science fiction in a similar way. Maybe not deep but the idea of seeing a ring world stretching out into the sky box was rather novel. Don't forget how early 3D Halo is. We're not long after the PS1 and you have sky boxes pushing the limits of what came before.

You're thinking along the right lines. But Halo is a depiction of so much more than a ring world.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Games like Doom, Hexen, Duke3D or Quake weren't intended to be jokes

Oh, I think Duke 3D had a lot of jokes in it. The fact that one of the expansions ends with Duke Nukem ripping off an alien's head and shitting down it's throat while reading a newspaper clearly isn't a serious moment. If you want to blame anyone for the "joke" stuff in modern boomer shooters, you can thank 3D Realms and the Build Engine games for that. After all, Redneck Rampage is on that list. Even Blood had a lot of gags in it, and it was probably one of the more serious ones. The only one of those that wasn't filled with lots of gags and jokes was Nam, and it was shit.

That's not what i meant.

I'm talking about how they approached the development of the game. Everything about Duke3D was intended to be state of the art. Even the comedic aspects weren't as stupid as one might think. Case in point, nu-devs can't capture the humor of the original and when they try all they can come up with is cringe. If it was so stupid, if it was all a joke for the devs, why can't modern devs do the same?

 

[NecroLord]

If it was so stupid, if it was all a joke for the devs, why can't modern devs do the same?

Because it would be highly offensive and problematic.

HONK HONK

 

[spectre]

To add a bit of perspective from way back when, especially when it comes to Doom, cause I was never very much into fps, so never gotten into hexens, heretics, shadow warriors and the whole lot.
What is probably inconceivable today is that Doom was hard at work pushing the technical envelope back in the day. It was pretty much what Unreal did in 1998 and what Crysis did in 2007
- we genuinely thought: holy shit, it's fucking life-like, graphics doesn't get any better than this.

People would upgrade their computers to state-of-the-art, and even buy PCs just to get a piece of this action - the Amiga folks were all salty, heavily coping that their computers were ackshually made for graphic design.
And you could do special movie effects on them, you know. And the 8-bit crowd? They could just cry themselves to sleep.
Everyone was playing this - kids, salarymen, uncles, aunties, because it was so fucking brutal (launching this whole games are bad, mmkay train) - the sound effects, the death cries were like nothing you've heard before.
The shotgun was the best gun ever (only topped by the super shotgun that came in D2, dat reloading animation...), people would nearly jizz all over the chainsaw. And the story? What fucking story.
Doom was fucking everywhere, all hyped-up, followed by a fuckton of wannabe titles nobody remembers anymore.

And to tie this rant in with the actual topic of this thread, this is what I'm feeling we got with the boomer shooter phenomenon, same energy as those titles,
not realizing you can't usurp this feeling of being the fucking first thing ever.
With hindsight, yeah, there is in fact a particular and identifiable feeling to the gameplay, but you need to understand this - very few people played Doom the way it was intended.
Fuck the konami code. I only realized it was a thing years afterwards. When Doom came out, everyone knew IDDQD and IDKFA.
Just these two. Some would recall IDCLEV, but IDSPISPOPD was just too much. This shit was so popular, even some later games would react to the first two cheat codes.

 

[NecroLord]

Guess it's time for another Doom and Unreal playthrough.
The thing about Unreal is that it is truly a atmospheric shooter. Some of the levels are massive outdoor areas where you can see the sun of Na Pali (I think it has two suns), waterfalls, the clouds in the sky, the stars.
The stellar sound design and soundtrack also add to this atmosphere, feeling trapped on a dangerous but also beautiful alien world.

 

[schru]

Guess it's time for another Doom and Unreal playthrough.
The thing about Unreal is that it is truly a atmospheric shooter. Some of the levels are massive outdoor areas where you can see the sun of Na Pali (I think it has two suns), waterfalls, the clouds in the sky, the stars.
The stellar sound design and soundtrack also add to this atmosphere, feeling trapped on a dangerous but also beautiful alien world.

Remember: set to Multitexture false in OpenGL or Direct3D renderers; or with the new version of the OldUnreal patch, I think it's a different setting, something like 'simulate single-pass texturing', or maybe it's a value that should be set to 1. However, the patch isn't necessary, dgVoodoo with the 3dfx Glide renderer is enough, but the wrapper also needs to emulate Voodoo 1 or have the other cards set to use just one TMU.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

People would upgrade their computers to state-of-the-art, and even buy PCs just to get a piece of this action - the Amiga folks were all salty, heavily coping that their computers were ackshually made for graphic design.

Doom is what got me to buy my first PC, a 486DX2/66. Up until then, I had Amigas. My Amiga 3000 even had the 386 bridgeboard card in it, which was pretty cool. I never saw it as for being just for graphic design, that was the Mac. I saw the Amiga as an "everything machine", but Commodore was way too slow in keeping up with what the PC could do. When they launched the AGA chipset, PCs were on the 486 processor, Soundblaster and SVGA cards. DOS was still a pain in the ass, and most games had all kinds of goofy configuration steps to get working with MSDOS still having complete shit memory management support. Doom made it worth dealing with all that extra shit in order to get stuff running which I never had with the Amiga, though.

I still couldn't get near the productivity out of the PC clone, because Windows 95 was still a few years away and was no where near as well developed. I also don't think that MicroSoft would have made a Windows 95 at that time if it weren't for IBM making OS/2 WARP with MicroSoft, which MicroSoft fucked them over on. The PC probably would have eclipsed the Amiga a long time before this if MicroSoft were actually as interested in progressing the PC forward as their commercials used to claim they were. X-Windows had been around since the late 1970s and every other home computer had a multitasking GUI back in the 1980s.

 

[Hell Swarm]

I still couldn't get near the productivity out of the PC clone, because Windows 95 was still a few years away and was no where near as well developed. I also don't think that MicroSoft would have made a Windows 95 at that time if it weren't for IBM making OS/2 WARP with MicroSoft, which MicroSoft fucked them over on. The PC probably would have eclipsed the Amiga a long time before this if MicroSoft were actually as interested in progressing the PC forward as their commercials used to claim they were. X-Windows had been around since the late 1970s and every other home computer had a multitasking GUI back in the 1980s.

One thing I often ponder is how much microsoft held back technology. Today people remember them for xbox and gamepass but back in the day they were incredibly destructive to advancements in pretty much anything computer related. Any new start up with potential they would eat and dissolve with prejudice. Google did (and may still do) a very similar thing now. Valve also has potential to be labeled the same when they would take mod teams and that was the end of new games from them.

In a timeline where these companies didn't fuck everything over how much better would our tech be?

 

[spectre]

Doom is what got me to buy my first PC, a 486DX2/66. Up until then, I had Amigas. My Amiga 3000 even had the 386 bridgeboard card in it, which was pretty cool. I never saw it as for being just for graphic design, that was the Mac.

Well, I'm talking eastern European perspective, Mac were pretty much unheard of (in fact, first time I've ever seen an old-timer mac was a good few years later in secondary school, we used it for DTP-ing the newspaper).
The running joke was that PC were for the boring office stuff, whereas Amiga was the fun, pretty princess with the prettiest games. They even did hollywood-grade CGI on it
(IIRC, the liquid metal morphs from Terminator and some stuff for Jurassic Park). Well, Doom was the wake up call that shook all this up, but some people would still use the muh hollywood cope
rather than admitting that we have a revolution on my hands.

I had the good fortune of jumping straight from Atari XL/XE (casette player and all) to one of the first pentiums. It really was something else.
Also, that feeling of liberation when we no longer had to run shit cleanly from a boot disk, even skipping Norton Commander just to save a few kilobytes of memory.
Even though he might not have actually said that, fuck Gates and his "640K should be enough for everybody" nonetheless.
Over the years, I thankfully managed to forget what the actual deal was with the XMS and EMS thingamajigs.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Guess it's time for another Doom and Unreal playthrough.
The thing about Unreal is that it is truly a atmospheric shooter. Some of the levels are massive outdoor areas where you can see the sun of Na Pali (I think it has two suns), waterfalls, the clouds in the sky, the stars.
The stellar sound design and soundtrack also add to this atmosphere, feeling trapped on a dangerous but also beautiful alien world.

Remember: set to Multitexture false in OpenGL or Direct3D renderers; or with the new version of the OldUnreal patch, I think it's a different setting, something like 'simulate single-pass texturing', or maybe it's a value that should be set to 1. However, the patch isn't necessary, dgVoodoo with the 3dfx Glide renderer is enough, but the wrapper also needs to emulate Voodoo 1 or have the other cards set to use just one TMU.

It's the setting that's some abbreviation of 'number of TMUs' or so. Set that to 1.

 

[Hell Swarm]

The correct way to use the CE magnum is to headshot grunts, shoot the gap in jackal shields, and headshot shieldless elites, yes. But what's lost on people who study this game on paper and via memes is that the other guns also kill things. Grunts and jackals are very fragile. The magnum being a one shot is treated like an argument that it's the only way to play the game. A grenade going off within a very wide radius of these lesser aliens is pretty much a guaranteed kill. Every weapon shreds them with a bit of direct fire. The intended way to play Halo is to have fun with it. Every weapon gets some kind of reaction and is cool in its own ways.

Are you sure you were playing on legendary? The AR takes so long to kill a grunt on Legendary his team mates will chew you up. It's just not viable. And it gets worse as the games go on. Halo 2's elites are even harder than CEs. Grenades are great but you can't use them on small covvie teams since you need them for drop ships or large groups coming into a room. The first ship level is especially bad because you have to nade doors as they open or you get overwhelmed and they're random spawns including invisible elites.

 

[GamerCat_]

The correct way to use the CE magnum is to headshot grunts, shoot the gap in jackal shields, and headshot shieldless elites, yes. But what's lost on people who study this game on paper and via memes is that the other guns also kill things. Grunts and jackals are very fragile. The magnum being a one shot is treated like an argument that it's the only way to play the game. A grenade going off within a very wide radius of these lesser aliens is pretty much a guaranteed kill. Every weapon shreds them with a bit of direct fire. The intended way to play Halo is to have fun with it. Every weapon gets some kind of reaction and is cool in its own ways.

Are you sure you were playing on legendary? The AR takes so long to kill a grunt on Legendary his team mates will chew you up. It's just not viable. And it gets worse as the games go on. Halo 2's elites are even harder than CEs. Grenades are great but you can't use them on small covvie teams since you need them for drop ships or large groups coming into a room. The first ship level is especially bad because you have to nade doors as they open or you get overwhelmed and they're random spawns including invisible elites.

As I said, 2 I played on Heroic, but the rest Legendary.

The Assault Rifle is perfectly viable. I used it plenty. Maybe I'm overly fond of how it looks and feels so I'm handicapping myself, but I got through the game fine with a big of everything. My Legendary playthrough was probably the most I ever cycled weapons. Also as I may have already said, I remember the Assault Rifle working quite handily against the flood.

 

[Hell Swarm]

My Legendary playthrough was probably the most I ever cycled weapons. Also as I may have already said, I remember the Assault Rifle working quite handily against the flood.

You said the shotgun too which is what makes me think something is wrong. Shotgunning the flood on legendary often ends up with you dying. They get more power weapons and run up and splat you first. Maybe you grinded through the library that way?

It's probably viable in some way but it's strange how different people's Halo experiences are.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

One thing I often ponder is how much microsoft held back technology.

That 640k limit was there for quite a while. DR DOS was the first PC OS to actually be able to address beyond 640k, with their EMM386.exe and HIDOS.SYS driver back in 1990. MSDOS didn't have that as a feature until MS-DOS 5.0, released a year later as a reaction to DR DOS. Bill Gates was infamous for saying that PC programs will never need more than 640k RAM, so it's fairly obvious that it took the prompting of a competitor doing it for MicroSoft to finally do this. Even though MicroSoft had Windows 1.0 and 2.0 at this point, they still didn't push forward with using the hardware that was already there for PCs until someone else did it first. MicroSoft was never visionary.

 

[GamerCat_]

My Legendary playthrough was probably the most I ever cycled weapons. Also as I may have already said, I remember the Assault Rifle working quite handily against the flood.

You said the shotgun too which is what makes me think something is wrong. Shotgunning the flood on legendary often ends up with you dying. They get more power weapons and run up and splat you first. Maybe you grinded through the library that way?

It's probably viable in some way but it's strange how different people's Halo experiences are.

I was just playing through, not trying to maximise my viability at any given moment.