| OfficialIntel | Date: Tuesday, 2012-04-10, 2:56 AM | Message # 1 |
|
Lieutenant
Group: Administrators
Messages: 63
Status: Offline
|
Thanks to a few leaked issues of Game Informer, a lot of Halo 4 information has made its way into the hands of eagerly waiting Halo fans all over the internet.
First off, the multiplayer stuff. Why is it Red vs. Blue for multiplayer? Because it’s all taking place on a 3km long training ship for Spartan IV’s (for reference, Master Chief is a Spartan II and Noble Team were III’s). Nothing sinister or underlying here.
This is also the likely reason why Elites will not be making a playable appearance in the multiplayer. There is a new Regicide mode, though. If you’ve ever played a Counter-Strike game with bounties, you know exactly what this is. For those of you who are uncool, what it involves is the lead scorer has a bounty over their heads relative to their performance and the one who takes them out reaps all the rewards.
In terms of Armor abilities, Sprint is now a standard for everyone. It’s no longer a specialization. The hologram, jetpack, and active camo will be making a return as well. Here’s hoping armor lock doesn’t. There is one new armor ability so far: Forerunner vision. It lets you see through walls. Yeah. It seems like discouraging camping is now the name of the game. helping it along will be that weapon spawns will be completely random. Instead of the rocket launcher and sword spawning at the same place every single time, there will instead be drops randomly scattered throughout the map. This is said to narrow the gap between newcomers and casual Halo players and the top level players who memorize positions and timings of weapon spawns.
Interestingly enough, respawn delay has been removed entirely in favor of immediate respawns in Slayer games. Theoretically, this allows for the killed player to track down their killer and exact revenge before that player has enough of a chance to fully replenish their supplies. But, if video games have taught us anything, everyone else is a hacker and cheating at the game so it’s more than likely going to result in a free extra kill for the killer.
Taking another page from the competitor’s handbook, players can also customize loadouts comprised of primary and secondary weapons, grenade types, armor abilities and modifications. This really does sound quite familiar, doesn’t it?
In terms of metagame changes, there will be Spartan Points. They replace the Credit system found in previous Halo games and will be used in largely the same fashion. The only discernible difference is that these Points can be used to buy what are called Spartan Ops missions. They’re pretty much like the SpecOps missions from Call of Duty but with a more dedicated storyline that will span out over months. This is a four-player co-op mode that seems to be replacing Firefight entirely since there are no plans to bring it back. Important to note is that these Spartan Ops are not DLC. They will be released once a week but they should not require any extra payment.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly from a framework perspective, players can now join in-progress games. No longer will they have to jump into a lobby and wait for a game and then deal with the fallout when half the other team leaves partway through the game.
Now, for the fun single player stuff. Halo 4 takes place four and a half years after the events of Halo 3 when Cortana, who has a new look, wakes up the Chief after detecting an intruder aboard what is left of the UNSC Forward Unto Dawn. It soon crashes onto the planet Requiem, which is enclosed in a Dyson Shell, which unfortunately wasn’t what I thought it was. Though there will be some Covenant around in Halo 4, the main enemy is a new faction who are “kind of elevated in terms of their intelligence and complexity relative to the Covenant.” Which, I suppose, follows the standard trope of fantasy and sci-fi where there’s always worse behind the big bad.
On the technical side, the game will be running at true 720p resolution with FXAA. Main characters will be animated via motion capture. There is a new HUD and special animations to simulate actually wearing a helmet including bob, motion parallax and a few other cues.
Furthermore Frank O’Connor, the Franchise Development Director for Halo in 343 Industries, promises that there will be an interview soon that will clarify many of these new points of information.
|
| |
| |
Tons of Leaked Halo 4 Information Reaches Net - Forum
