The first article of this week’s bulletin starts off with news of the Game of the Year edition of Halo 4. I’ve covered this extensively already. However, if you haven’t seen the trailer for this, take a gander:

Next up is the Matchmaking Playlist update. Several things to note here regarding additional maps/gametypes being included in Snipers, and Team Doubles.

Oddball will replace King of the Hill for the rotational playlist starting Oct 14.

The Halo 4 Forge Ricochet Contest is still going on through Oct 8.

Next up is a written tutorial of sorts on how to make Race from Multi team Ricochet. (Too bad Race isn’t just native to Halo 4 instead of having to jump through hoops to make it…). The following text is taken directly from the bulletin:

Ricochet to Race: How to create Race from Multi-Team Ricochet 

While Race will be coming to Halo 4 Matchmaking in December (continue reading for details), we know that Race custom game types have been quite popular amongst the custom game community, so we’re happy to let you know that the designers over at Certain Affinity have detailed the step-by-step instructions to make the Race game type out of Multi-Team Ricochet. First, you’ll want to download the “Ricochet Multi-Team” game type from the “HaloWaypoint” File Share. Next, if you need a crash course on Ricochet game type labels, head here for all the info. Once you’re ready to get started, follow the below instructions:

1) Label a vehicle or vehicles as rico_forgeball to turn them into ‘balls’.

2) Use ForgeZones as the checkpoints for the race, and set up hill_marker objectives and label them rico_forgezone. These are set up so that they disappear and reappear in order that you hit them. Next, number the spawn sequence to set the order. You can award score for hitting each checkpoint, or only for particular ones. See the documentation for additional info.

3) Who is awarded points depends upon the team of the ball and the team of the ForgeZone. If the team of either of these is set, and so is the user data, then whenever the ‘ball’ enters any ForgeZone, the team of the ball will be awarded the points set on the ball, and the team of the zone will be awarded the points set on the zone. This means you have flexibility in how you set up the race.

Scenario 1: A neutral ball and then a series of ForgeZones set to teams.

The players could fight over who is driving the ‘ball’ and whoever is driving can aim for the checkpoints of their team color. The map can be forged so that the checkpoints are next to each other instead of in the same place, so that players avoid hitting the enemy’s checkpoints when they drive.

Scenario 2: Two team balls (vehicles), one for each team, or as many teams as you have on the map, with neutral ForgeZones.

Set the scoring points on the zones themselves to zero, and only use one set of zones. Set the scoring points on the balls appropriately for the teams. After everything is set up, it’s then a question of who is in the lead and hitting the checkpoints so that they disappear first (and getting the scoring points from their ball.)

Scenario 3: Team balls, and team ForgeZones in the same locations.

With this setup, players score when they hit their checkpoint, but the other team’s checkpoint is still available. Scoring points can be assigned to either the ForgeZones, the balls, or both. This can get a bit visually messy with all the different colored zones visible and in the same place, but is guaranteed good fun.

Up next is the Matchmaking Rotational playlist calendar which I just covered previous to this article.

The community gets a spotlight in the form of a remake of Countdown (the music to the vid is a bit annoying to me so I viewed it with sound off):

What follows is an interview with the map re-creator.

The map looks good but not exact to the original. I’d really love to see a Classic Map pack come to Halo 4. There would be MANY Halo 3 maps. However, Reach had a few I’d like to see come back. Countdown being one of them.

Finally we have this week’s screenshot spotlight that focuses on the color ORANGE. Though this is a bit early for Halloweeen. There are a few here I like. Especially “Refracitve FOTUS”.

For the FULL bulletin, go on over to Waypoint’s post too see/read all.

-Sal

Waypoint released these images yesterday showing the rotational playlists for the next few months:

So get your games in and commendations done while you can. Otherwise, it’s going to be MONTHS before you get the next opportunity.

I’m really dismayed by the rotational playlist. If certain ones didn’t have commendations attached to them, that would be fine. Otherwise, it’s almost an exercise in futility trying to complete certain commendations. Case in point, the current one, King of the Hill, isn’t populated much and you can nearly forget about trying to find an evenly matched game late at night (EST U.S. time).

I still say that 343 needs to have a better playlist. Team Objective would include some of these in the rotational playlists. Dominion could easily move to BTB. Multi-team should NEVER go away. Include Rocket Race into that playlist.

As for community Ricochet maps, they can be tested in the current Ricochet playlist. That would leave us just with regular Race out of all of these. That could have it’s own playlist for awhile to gauge it’s popularity.

I’m about 32 King of the HIll wins away from Mastering that. I really hope I can get them done in these two weeks as I do NOT want to have to wait months for it to come back.

Source Link

-Sal

Now mind you a modder found out how to do this. But come on, if they can do it, why can’t 343 just give us a flipping patch for this and allow us to use theater fro Campaign. While they’re at it, Spartan Ops too?

It’s not that they can’t. It’s that they WON’T. You may or may not remember this, but some time ago when questioned about why theater wouldn’t be available for campaign, it was stated (and I’m paraphrasing here) that theater would break the illusion of the campaign.

Okay, I’m going to call BULLSH…..on that. Previous Halo titles had theater for campaign. Did those of us who used it mind if we broke out of the map or saw how Bungie made the illusion of depth for instance? I have to say overwhelmingly NO. In fact, most of us ENJOYED braking out of maps and/or seeing how Bungie created certain things. Same would be said of 343 IF they allowed us to have theater.

I’m not mad at the person who modded the game to figure out how to use theater for campaign. I’m POed at 343 for this. CLEARLY it’s possible, yet they REFUSE to give it to us.

You know, with the population of Halo 4 down as far as it is, it could REALLY use a breath of fresh air like this. It would make replaying the campaign have even MORE meaning to it.

Personally I could rack up HUNDREDS of hours in theater alone taking screenshots or clips. I wouldn’t care at all if I saw that something was done in low-res outside of the map but in the context of the campaign it looks fine. REALLY, it wouldn’t bother me at all. Most campaigns take this kind of shortcut. It’s fine 343.

I’ve gotten out of ALL of the multiplayer maps. Am I mad or disillusioned by the shortcuts 343 made with those? Not at all.

So COME ON 343! Give us THEATER!!!! Like I said earlier, not just for campaign either. Do this for Spartan Ops too and you will DEFINITELY see a jump in people playing that portion of the game…you abandoned… Speaking for myself, you folks KNOW I’m doing a web series based off of Majestic and Crimson squads. I could make that series THAT MUCH BETTER if you enabled theater for Spartan Ops.

I want to thank halo.bungie.org for tweeting this out. Here’s a link to their post on this video.

Here’s what one of their forum posters had to say about this:
I think if you are in the theatre mode, then you are already outside the bounds of needing to keep immersion. I am 100% ok with noticing that the massive structure out in the distance is really a miniature while in theatre mode for example, since I’m not really playing the game. In a sense, there’s no way to ruin the theatre experience with tricks since there’s no ‘experience’ to speak of in theatre mode.

THAT I TOTALLY AGREE WITH!

What’s funny about this is that several of the MODS that have come to light have been turning into in-game functions. Want examples? Mini-Slayer and Race are two of them. Assault has come to light and I’d venture a guess we’ll see this in matchmaking.

So how about not making us wait any longer 343 and flipping that switch to give us theater? (Or a patch or whatever else is required)

Readers, you’ll forgive me for the use of CAPS throughout this article, but DAMN…It’s one way I can express my frustration with 343/Microsoft for NOT giving this to us at launch.

-Sal