I haven’t played it yet. The 58gb (!!!) digital download was ready this morning, but I didn’t get a chance to look at it as I had to get the kids off to daycare/school, and then myself off to work. I’m looking forward to playing it with my buddy tonight, and possibly some others. He reports that it is tremendously pretty, but didn’t have much more to add, yet.
You guys let me know what you think. I don’t do preorders anymore, and I’m in no rush to play Halo 5 yet. I loved all of Bungie’s Halo games, but I found 343’s Halo 4 to be a big disappointment. I don’t really play multiplayer anymore (I’m too old and busy to find time to make gaming appointments with friends, and I don’t love playing against randos), so I’m mostly about the campaign. I will say that I liked Spartan Ops well enough, but the campaign I found uninteresting and confusing. I played it co-op with a buddy of mine over several evenings after work, and we got fed up a couple of times, and in the end it took us several months to actually finish the campaign.
And now Halo 5 doesn’t have local splitscreen co-op, so I can’t even play the game with a buddy in the same room and bitch about it. Also Kotaku says that the campaign doesn’t look to be as promising as the multiplayer, so maybe I won’t even bother at all. Last year around this time I was getting all the FPS joy I wanted out of Destiny. You could really tell that Bungie had spent the last 14 years honing and perfecting their FPS design through Halo, and as a FPS Destiny is near perfect. However, the grindy MMO elements and stupid (and barely existent) story turned me off quick. I was stuck at light level 27 for like six months. Even though I’d received both of the first 2 DLCs as part of my preorder, I barely touched The Dark Below and didn’t bother at all with House of Wolves. But then I heard that The Taken King fixed a lot of what I hated about Destiny, so I went ahead and gave it another shot. And yeah, it’s been a lot more fun. But now I’ve leveled off at light level 290, and I think I’ll just ease off on the FPS games for a couple weeks and just wait for Fallout 4. Two weeks from today!
But don’t get me wrong: I’m still a Halo fan. I own a Halo 3 edition Xbox 360, a Halo 4 edition Xbox 360, and a Master Chief edition Xbox One, as well as the green Halo 5 Xbox One controller. If Halo 5 turns out to be any good, you let me know, and I’ll play it with a big smile on my face.
As it stands now, however, 343 is gonna have to earn my sale.
Light level 290 is basically the gateway to fun light level. I really find that I have to pick and choose what I’m gonna go after in the Destiny – and you need to make good choices, getting 1/2 way into a quest for an exotic weapon you’ll never use is pretty frustrating.
I am hoping 343 watched Bungie really closely on Destiny and are giving us a perfected version of that model. Bungie has been pretty cheap about some parts (like level and story design) in Destiny and I feel ripped off. The richness of Halo matched with Destiny’s gameplay and much of the universe would be great. I think the farming could go.
I haven’t yet run out of things to do in The Taken King like I did with vanilla Destiny. Since I play alone (and don’t even own a working headset), I can’t do raids, and am limited to matchmaking with randos on strikes, so many of the endgame things like Nightfall strikes were beyond me. And RNGesus was sooo stingy on vanilla Destiny that I never got lucky with any engram drops. Of the 132 hours I’ve put into Destiny, I think maybe 20 of those hours have been since The Taken King was released, and now I have more than four times as many Exotic items than I had before TTK was released. So at least the game feels more profitable than it used to.
Still, it rapidly becomes a drag to play by oneself.
Yeah, the farming could kiss my ass. The thing I hate most about Destiny is the same thing I always used to hate about Space Invaders: nothing you do makes a lick of difference. Kill all the enemies on the screen, and within seconds they’ll be replaced with the exact same enemies, spawning in exactly the same place. And your super-badass level 293 sniper rifle kills them no more efficiently than your old level 98 one did two weeks ago. Eventually you’ll run into higher-level bullet-sponge enemies that you can’t wear down with 100 shots from your lower-level gun, but even if you completely obliterate every goddamned enemy in the game, they’ll just respawn again.
And the writing is simply awful. I miss Joe Staten’s writing. Did you happen to read the True Story about what happened at Bungie in the year before Destiny released? It’s quite eye-opening, and confirms a lot of my suspicions:
Now I’m visualizing Heart of Darkness with Master Chief as Kurtz. Thank you for this.
That is pretty much where they went in the ads. Master Chief has gone mad! He is actively destroying humanity! Who should we call to stop him? Master Chief 2!
I as much as “I read it on a website” makes it true, I just read the “true story.” It seems kinda par for course to me – they didn’t like Staten’s story and then Mighty Morphin’ Robotech’d one out of the expensive pieces laying around. Sounds like video game development.
The story was horrible in Year 1. It got slightly better in Year 2 but the story is still convoluted and its not clear if people really died or what when Oryx arrived.
What Destiny fixed is a lot of the shittier parts of the director, bounty system, etc. Sadly, for a team that started with games on the Mac, they are really very Microsoft about their UI/nav and it makes things very rough on me. Most of my complaints are issues like that – having to visit the Grand Master Rahool to cash in worthless engrams that never get me anything I want, etc.
Amazon did send me a DVD copy of Halo 5 with my pre-order. It arrived today. If the download is still running when I get home, I can pop in the disc and see what happens.
Yay.
Download was at a paltry 40%. After figuring out how to ditch it, I’m installing from DVD. That’ll likely take til tomorrow.
You might enjoy Forward Unto Dawn (the movie). It’s kinda slight, but evokes the bigger Halo back story pretty well.
I’m presuming the Halo fans among us are familiar with Red vs Blue?
So - I played for about 3 hours last night. An hour by myself, and 2 hours of co-op multiplayer. It definitely feels like Halo. 4 player co-op multiplayer is DAMN fun. And it is beautiful.
I played 1 round of 12v12 Warzone. It is beautiful.
Is warzone the gametype where it’s not just focused on how many kills you get? Because I suck at PVP for that reason, but I’m better in support roles. 
It is an exaggerated Capture The Zones game. I find them easier as objectives put other characters in reliable places. This also has NPC bosses… It was like any level you don’t know the map on, unfun.
My big problem with multiplayer (pvp) online games is that after X amount of time (for decreasing values of X, it seems), the maps get flooded with people that are fucking ridiculously good, and since I only have an hour or two to play a day (at best), I’m never going to get anywhere close to being good enough to compete. I guess it depends on how good the matchmaking is, really.
This is generally true. I sucked at COD the one time I played it online and didn’t fare much better with Gears of War. Even Halo was tough at first, despite playing offline PvP with friends extensively before going online. But once you’re up to scratch it can’t be beat, IMHO.
But as you say, matchmaking should make up for it.
No split screen? Massive downer for me, the missus and I love Destiny but we can never play at the same time (like the problem they have in the film Ladyhawke). It was one of the things I loved about the other Halos, although what stunk up the otherwise brilliant Reach for me was that there was a planned 4 player split screen co-op that had been disabled before release (but I heard you could trick the game into doing it). People do have big tellies these days, big enough perhaps for four player co-op.
I like Masterchief but not because I thought he was a compelling or deep character, I liked that he was just generic super space soldier who didn’t say much that you could pretend that you were when shooting all the things. ODST is still my favourite, if they plan to have Fillion in future Halos it’d be good if he reprised his character from that (and well, wierd if they don’t).
Also, I found out just before this release that with the XBox One you can do game sharing… So awesome to be able to play at the same time with two XBox One’s in the same house without having to purchase multiple copies of the game.
Game sharing is surely a decent feature but my current issue isn’t so much buying more copies of a game, it’s buying more copies of a console. A second current gen machine in the house would be a decadence, I’ve thought about it tho.
I’ve found that it also works in different houses… Shhhh
