The Rocket Race playlist is now available, and will be playable until January 6th. In this game type, players race with a Mongoose, partner, and Rocket Launcher to each checkpoint. The game type is available on the following maps: Exile, Meltdown, Shatter, Wreckage, Vortex, Ragnarok, Longbow, Harvest, Daybreak, and Complex.
I will say that it is bit frustrating not being able to play on DLC maps paid for. I for one am of the mind that there needs to be a DLC specific playlist. Yes, map sizes vary widely so some DLC maps may be better than others depending on party size.
So I’d suggest a Team Slayer DLC playlist and a BTB DLC playlist.
The maps for each would breakdown as follows:
Team Slayer DLC (4v4):
-Monolith
-Skyline
-Pitfall
-Vertigo
-Landfall
-Daybreak
BTB DLC (8v8):
-Wreckage
-Harvest
-Perdition
-Outcast
-Shatter
Broken up like this, there is a good distribution of maps per DLC playlist. Of the ones I put in for Team Slayer DLC, only Landfall is a bit big for 4v4. However, it’s been used for such already, so people are fairly used to it.
The BTB DLC maps are the biggest of the 11 DLC maps. While a couple of them may seem a bit tight for 8v8, they are definitely a bit too big for 4v4. Now if BTB DLC were actually 6v6 then all of those I put in that list would definitely work.
Regardless, population is low. So how do we get these two playlists without affecting the regular population much?
Consolidate the current playlists a little. We need to have Team Objective again. CTF needs to go into that playlist. It will be the big draw for that one. Then add in Oddball, Regicide, and King of the Hill. With those others also having commendations attached to them, it makes sense to have them in a unified Team Objective playlist. I’d MUCH prefer that than a rotational playlist that comes around every few months.
One thing is for certain, if there isn’t something done to better manage DLC maps, the next game’s DLC sales will suffer GREATLY. I’ve already had many friends tell me they aren’t going to buy DLC for the next game because of the issues with DLC in Halo 4.
I for one look forward to new maps, so not having DLC in the next Halo game is NOT an option for me. However, if the franchise is going to flourish, DLC must be handled much better.
-Sal
This is a partial repost of an article on stuff.co.nz with Phil Spencer of Microsoft:
THE RIGHT HALO AT THE RIGHT TIME
Last year, Xbox 360 owners got to play the first Halo not made by Bungie Studios, the well-received Halo 4 from Microsoft’s new 343 Studios. That wasn’t always the plan.
“A couple of years ago we had the discussion of: ‘Should we do Halo at launch and not do Halo 4 last year?’” Spencer recalled, “But I was committed to getting Halo 4 done last year, and there was no way we were going to turn around with 343 a full Halo game in a year. So that was the plan we set on. I feel good about that.”
The Xbox One will soon get a port of Halo: Spartan Assault, the top-down action game released earlier this year for Windows 8 and Surface tablets. But that’s not a big Halo game. It’s not the huge new Halo teased at E3.
“Unlike some franchises that manage through 1000 people, Halo is 343 and that team obviously has tight control,” Spencer said.
“They are our Halo team. A discussion around having a Halo game at launch – a true Halo at launch, meaning like a Halo 4 or 5-size game – would have been something we’d have had to start two or three years ago.
“We had the discussion, and we thought having Halo 4 come out when it came out from 343 and having them really land their first full version of Halo that they developed internally would be great for the 360 customers, great for 343 in shipping something.”
The Xbox One isn’t backwards compatible to the Xbox 360, but a game like Halo 4 seems like it could have life on the Xbox One. Spencer said that doing a port wasn’t something he wanted for launch.
“I want launch to be about new things that are taking full advantage of the hardware, especially as a first party. Any kind of strategy with the back catalogue was something I thought we would think about later.”
I wondered how hard it even is to do a port of an Xbox 360 game to Xbox One.
“It’s not difficult,” Spencer said, pointing out that Microsoft was developing some cross-platform expertise by making games like the new Zoo Tycoon and next year’s Max and the Cursed Brotherhood for both Xbox One and Xbox 360.
“Whether that’s a port or just dual development, you get a sense of what it means to move games between the two platforms,” Spencer said.
“It’s not just ‘recompile,’ but obviously our controller is very similar, we know our codebase, we’re on a certain number of engines that we’re porting in different directions, so it’s definitely possible to do things like that.”
For the full article (that doesn’t contain any other Halo stuff, but more on XBOX One), go HERE.
end copy/paste
HFFL: So it sounds to me that Phil Spencer did NOT have faith in 343 to turn around a Halo game quick, meaning Halo 4 last year, then Halo 5 this year. So they are using Spartan Assault as a buffer between main games. Do note, that he specifically calls it Halo 5.
Also note that it is possible even “not difficult” to bring 360 games to the XBOX One.
Hmm, I’m still of the mind that Halo 4 should have been release THIS year to coincide with the launch of XBOX One. An extra year of development would have been great. A beta might have happened then as well as a lot of the features that were left out may have been put in.
Regardless, that didn’t happen, so we Halo fans will have to make do with Halo 4, then Spartan Assault, until the next major title comes out. I for one am really looking forward to playing Spartan Assault!
-Sal
Halo 4 modders figured out how to unlock the Headhunter gametype. Check the vid below!
Links for the gametype and a map are at the youtube link above. Now let’s see how long it takes 343 to put this into matchmaking…
-Sal
Vic DeLeon of 343 tweeted the following two pics last night:
He states in his tweet, “Can’t sleep. Making worlds again.”
I asked him if this was for the next Halo game or Halo 4. Waiting on a response, if any.
-Sal
If you haven’t played Halo 4 in the last day you will be prompted to download a title update which addresses several known issues. Here is a breakdown of what is included:
Well,I for one am happy that the loadout issue is resolved. That was a pain in the arse. I do wish that the Champions Bundle armor could now be seen in Spartan Ops…Doutbful that’s going to happen though.
-Sal
The winner of the second Community Choice poll for the rotational playlist is Multi-team Regicide, or Multi-Regicide.
It’s starts today and I’m excited to play this. I need only 31 more Regicide wins to FINALLY unlock that elusive Kingslayer emblem. Seen below:
Hopefully I can knock those wins out in short order.
I’ll be playing a crap-ton of Multi-team these next two weeks until my goal is achieved….
-Sal
So you still have time to unlock the Guilty Spark Emblem.
The issue is that you won’t unlock it immediately as most everyone thought. Nope, instead you’ll get it a week or two later. What proof of that? Here you go, via Twitter:
Now why is this the case?
Okay, yes we’ll get it, but really a week or two out? Folks, THIS is the very kind of thing that is just RUINING the Halo franchise. I have to say that myself and my friends ALL expected this to unlock IMMEDIATELY. Not later, not a week or two from now.
Yes, I’m mildly thankful we get a special emblem, but honestly, it’s not all that big of a deal. What is though is the manner in which it was ‘advertised’ and then to be administered.
Why didn’t 343 SAY it would unlock a week or two from now? You know why…because we’d have all griped about it before hand. Instead 343 once again doesn’t bare enough info and once again it pisses off fans. When will they learn you just shouldn’t MUCK with your fan base like this?
Yes, I hear those of you saying, but it’s something free. Or be thankful. As I said, I am. But seriously, 343 needs to get their shit together. If you’re going to promote an item unlockable through your game for having played a game on a specific date, then it’s DAMN SAFE to assume most if not all expect that item to unlock once they’ve reached the criteria.
Now for those who say it’s not possible…Really? Look at challenges. Daily, weekly, monthly challenges. They are all times events that have locked in dates/times as to when you can accomplish them. THIS IS NO DIFFERENT. Instead of XP, we get an emblem. You’d have to think someone thought enough ahead to make this a timed feature too.
Once again this leads me to ask WHO IS MAKING THE DECISIONS at 343?
-Sal
I’ve already said ad naseum my issues with Halo 4. Yet some “friends” and others try to refute my claim that Halo 4 has failed us. The following shows charts of the decrease of the Halo 4 population as well as certain events that happened during this timeline. It’s a GREAT read and should prove beyond doubt that Halo 4 just wasn’t up to snuff.
What’s better about this is that it IS NOT me saying this. Fyrewulff, was (maybe still is) a community cartographer. So he is a respected member of the community. So don’t take my words for it, read his:
This is a repost of an initial post of a thread on NeoGaf, by FyreWulff:
Well, it”s been about a year since Halo 4 released.
Halo 4 was 343’s first full go at their own Halo title since Bungie left the Microsoft umbrella to go work on Destiny.
The reception of Halo 4 was thus. A graph of Halo 4’s peak population, every day, for the last year:
(all graphs in this post provided by www.halocharts.com , by the way )
Hmm.
Let’s go over the major events in Halo 4’s run. Here’s the big overview:
The First Two Weeks
In the run up to Halo 4’s release, Microsoft seemed interested in getting as many people to play the game as possible. So they took the early perk unlocks from the LE and told people that everyone that played within the first two weeks would get the perk unlocks too. This sets the stage for a fairly big blow to this game, but it’s not the first one.
A week into Halo 4’s life span, Black Ops 2 releases. And half of Halo 4’s population vanishes, never to return. November 12th – a whole six days after the game releases – is the last day Halo 4 will see more than 300k peak population. It won’t take much longer – ten days after release – for Halo 4 to see the last time it goes above 200k, on November 16th.
14 Day Buy and Play
Everyone who has gotten their codes for the first two weeks either redeems them or hands them out. People that wants the perks use the code for themselves. A lot of people, including many GAFers, HBOers, and other Halo communities toss the codes to people that want them, since they’re not too interested in the perk system. The population continues downward.
And then.. the Crimson Map Pack release happens. And something hilarious happens: everyone with the specializations code can download Crimson as if they have the map pack. For free. What? WHAT? Yep. Seems in their rush to get the specializations code out, Microsoft forgot that the software key that unlocked the specializations was the same one that unlocked the map packs for free download. Awwwkward. Okay, it’s a fuck up though, they’ll just fix it right?
Well, they did. But they did it in the worst way possible. Absolutely the WORST handling of a mistake I have seen, and destroyed absolutely any pretension in my mind (and other’s minds) that 343 had any autonomy from Microsoft. So what did they do?
Lie through their frickin’ teeth.
They goofed. We understand humans develop games, so whatever. Patch it up. In less than 24 hours, we went from 343 employees, Microsoft employees, and Xbox Support acknowledging it was a fuckup to Microsoft outright pretending it was not actually a mistake at ALL. They invented a fake program called “14 Day Buy and Play” that supposedly ran at Halo 4’s release (the term didn’t even exist until that day), sent it out as a press release, and Kotaku and most other gaming sites happily regurgitated it as legitimate. So not only had Microsoft fucked up, they then proceeded to tell us no, they didn’t screw up, they meant to do it all along.
They then issued a patch a week later that fixed the bug and took the free Crimson map pack away from the people that redeemed it. Hrmm, for something intended, strange they had to patch the game to end the trial period.
To make it even worse, 343 could have at least poked fun at the whole thing, or acknowledged the screw up was a screw up and they were letting people play it for a bit before taking it away. Instead, they posted the 14 Day Buy and Play press release directly on their website. With a straight face.
343 lost a lot of good will on that day, with a lot of people. It definitively set the tone people treated 343 with after that.
Boltshots R Us
Halo 4 trucked along. At this point, players were getting frustrated. Big, annoying balance issues were identified, such as the DMR being overpowered and the go-to weapon for ranged kills, and the Boltshot being the CQB weapon above all others.. Content share was completely broken; you couldn’t search for files nor could you initiate a download from the website. The game had menus and UI for it, but none of it worked. Along with a lack of campaign films and Forge features being dropped from Reach, this kneecapped the content creation arm of the community.
They would finally fix file search and tagging in late January, 3 months after release. These features worked day 1 in Reach.
Finally, 343 addressed the Boltshot with a title update on Feb 21, a couple of days before the Majestic map pack:
The title update + Majestic caused a minor uptick in Halo 4’s population (the missing days were due to issues recording the numbers). Between the announcement of Majestic and the week after Majestic’s release, Halo 4 would lose another 20,000 peak players.
Tune It Up
In late March/early April, 343 issued another title update. This title update implemented support for death indicators in game (previously relegated to a perk) and the ability for 343 to deploy weapon tuning via embedding the weapon data inside gametypes, allowing them to rebalance guns without a title update. And thus began what was a critical mistake by 343: sticking to the script and not acting like they were bleeding out players.
No, you’re not reading that wrong. It took 343 two months to actually deploy a weapon tune update from the moment it became possible, when the original point of the update was that they could make changes instantly. They would lose 20,000 people in this time period. What did they spend it doing? Hyping up a Community day where they flew out people from the community so they could ‘reveal’ the weapon tune update on a big, advertised stream. Even though the update was in gametypes and could be shared with the community immediately, we had to wait for MS’s marketing department to get their rocks off before we could feel like 343 was actually trying to salvage the sandbox. In a sensible world, the weapon updates would have been thrown in a beta playlist and updated weekly, with the community day just being a nice thing to celebrate the final version. 343 seemed to be intentionally ignoring their dire situation and did not act like they needed to address huge problems immediately. Because..
Stability Perk
The weapon tune update actually did legitimately address a lot of issues with the game. Halo 4’s weapon tune update actually stopped the bleeding, and stabilized Halo 4’s population.
A whole six months after the game came out. Six months of people showing 343 what was wrong with the game, that they could have all identified within the first two months. Unfortunately, 343 never seemed willing to deviate from their marketing and support script. People were walking out the door as 343 said “Trust Us”, and didn’t come back.
Soon after this, 343 would release the Bullseye Map Pack, which was 2 maps. One was a remake of The Pit from Halo 3! Yay! The population didn’t get boosted at all. It also introduced armor that could be bought with Real Money Only and they dug in even more on perks, after backlash from the community over them. Then promised those perks would become available to everyone else, which still hasn’t happened.
The Game of the Year Edition, which released at a reduced price point and includes all of the game’s DLC, came out somewhere in the chart. See if you can find it.
It’s in the second population valley from the left
Some points I didn’t have a good way to write up or didn’t care to:
* Halo 4 lasted a whole two entire months in the Top 3 of the Xbox Live activity chart. Halo 3 didn’t fall out of the Top 3 until Halo Reach released – 3 years after it’s release. Halo Reach didn’t fall out of the Top 3 until 343’s title update for the game after they took over the game, 12 months after release.
* Roughly a year after release, Halo 3 had a 1.1 million peak population day. Reach had a 900,000 peak population day after the same amount of time. Halo 4 clocks in at 20,000 peak for it’s annual checkup.
* 343 attempted to require the Majestic DLC for Team Slayer. The DLC requirement took the playlist from the top 2 in population to almost the bottom. They removed the DLC requirement afterwards and removed the DLC requirements from their weekly playlists after the first weekly playlist struggled to maintain over 150 players in it. Keep in mind the Majestic map pack was included in the map pass…
I imagine a lot of people have a lot to say about Halo 4, I’ll follow up later with my breakdown of gameplay and breakdown of campaign. Thought I’d start the thread off with an overall recap. The storm approaches. I’m talking about HaloGAF
Reference Material
Campaign Screenshots
Dawn
http://imgur.com/a/uVdoj#0
Requiem
http://imgur.com/a/yxFDj#0
Forerunner
http://imgur.com/a/FybUX#0
Infinity
http://imgur.com/a/LYst8#0
Reclaimer
http://imgur.com/a/N8hox#0
Shutdown
http://imgur.com/a/fA2VM#0
Composer
http://imgur.com/a/uiK8d#0
Midnight
http://imgur.com/a/RH2te#0
Character Studies
Master Chief
http://imgur.com/a/Ja0OE
Cortana
http://imgur.com/a/bb1KO
Lasky
http://imgur.com/a/PPYZY
Marines
http://imgur.com/a/3HzX2
Medics
http://imgur.com/a/DLkAr
/copy-paste
So there you have it folks. Reach WAS and IMO still IS a better game than Halo 4. If anything the numbers themselves PROVE that. I’ve said before, I think Halo 4 is a good game, but it’s NOT a great game, and most certainly isn’t even near the top of Halo games. Too many additions that took the game away from what the core of Halo was into being something Halo isn’t just made many long time fans leave. Without them to help carry the franchise along, those casual friends of the long time fans left as well.
There is only so much we the remaining loyal Halo fans can do. It’s up to 343 to make or further break this franchise.
I should be joyous and happy for the 1 year anniversary of Halo 4. Instead, I look back with grim solace over what was lost…
-Sal
Multi-team is the next playlist to come into the rotational playlist for the next two weeks.
It looks like Multi-Team Regicide is going to win the community choice poll as well. I’m SO happy about this. The reason being is that I’ve been trying for MONTHS to finish my Regicide commendations so I could unlock the Kingslayer emblem. (Seen below)
The reason for this is that it’s crucial to my web series “MaC Rounds.” Why? Mac Rounds is a web series that follows the further adventures of Crimson and Majestic Fireteams. Majestic uses the Kingslayer emblem on their armor, as seen here on Spartan Grant’s left shoulder:
With Regicide being picked for the community choice of Multi-team for the next two weeks, I have a better chance of completing the commendation sooner. I only need 35 wins in Regicide to get this done, so you can bet I’ll be playing this playlist a LOT for the next two-weeks. Hopefully I can get it done BEFORE those two weeks end!
-Sal