Important People (rolls eyes) getting to try out Halo 4 mutiplayer.

I'm not headlining this next tweet because it is NOT confirmed.

Halo 4 Beta implied. But for who?

KILLA KC Tweets impressions.

http://twitter.com/#!/Killa_KC/status/195364744952156160

http://twitter.com/#!/Killa_KC/status/195365094283165696

http://twitter.com/#!/Killa_KC/status/195365896406056960

http://twitter.com/#!/Killa_KC/status/195369280978681857

Beta Impressions from Louis Wu. Actually it doesn't really sound like a beta in the fashion of the Hao 3 or REACH betas.

Quick overview: There were two maps in rotation, Warhouse and Wraparound (both of which have been renamed, but new names aren't final/public yet) - so nothing new there.

The build was dated March 28 - but Frank said it was pretty much a polished-up version of what Devo and Domino played back at the Spring Showcase. Sounds were all over the map (hmm... bad choice of words) - some were simply awesome (PLASMA PISTOL OMG), some were missing altogether, others had placeholder versions. (The multiplayer announcer was clearly some guy from the studio. Pretty funny, actually... but I'm glad he's not final.)

I had some trouble getting used to finding Sprint on my left analog stick. (There are a million button layouts now, so you can pretty much set things up any way you want; I went with my normal (for me) Southpaw/Southpaw/Inverted setup, and that's where Sprint is. Crouch is on the B button, which is bizarre.) Because of this, I felt really slow sometimes.

This was exacerbated by the fact that I'd cranked my sensitivity way down; at the start, I couldn't hold the reticle on my opponents (felt like the equivalent of a 6 or 7 in Reach, so I turned it down from the default 4 to 3), but this made everything else feel... slower. Things were definitely better by the end of the night, and for people less ancient than me, the adaption will almost certainly happen faster.

Loadouts have a couple more slots than Reach loadouts. (In Reach, you get primary weapon, secondary weapon, grenade, AA - in H4, you get two more slots - I forget what they were called, but they hold things like increased regen and more ammo.) I primarily stuck with the first two loadouts - the first was BR/Plasma Pistol/Plas Grenade, while the second was DMR/pistol/frag. The DMR is a BEAST at range... but much harder to handle up close. The BR is a pretty fast killer up close, but at any real distance, you'll get beaten by a good DMR. The plasma pistol rocks. I don't know if it's just the sound... but DAMN. I was killing people with regular pepper shots (which aren't pepper at all in H4 - they're little mini balls of fire, it seems), and the noob combo is still a reliable annhilator. Overcharged shot seems to track, at least a little bit. (Not as much as Halo 1. :) )

Promethean Vision is actually pretty useful in very limited situations. It DOES let you see through walls (at least a limited number of walls; you can see people sort of near you) - but 1) you don't have very much of it (it runs out really quickly) and 2) it doesn't help you figure out where someone is if the geometry is really complicated. I guess this will become less relevant when we know the maps inside and out. It's really useful when someone dips behind a wall and then tries to fake you out... you can tell where they're going.

It also screws up colors, so if you're in the middle of a multi-person firefight, it adds more confusion than it removes. I'd say used judiciously, it's pretty cool - but as Frank said, a good player won't really need it.
 

^^^^^

That's a NeoGAF post. I was out shopping and didn't catch it.

Good find.

More hands on by Louis Wu.

Killa_KC hands on impressions.

Left joystick/click for Sprint and B button for crouch.

Before I talk about Halo 4, it's very important for everyone to understand this. The developer bashing that happens in our community has to stop. Every time Halo 4 details are released, the competitive community is there to rip apart every detail and publicly blast 343 about their decisions. If this continues, I would not be surprised if the majority of developers walk away from the competitive audience and consider them a community that simply cannot be satisfied. When you see new information on an upcoming game, think about the positives it could bring to the game first. If you're certain it's something that will simply not work, come together with positive feedback on how to improve it or tweak it. Blasting employee Twitter accounts and bashing the game hurts everyone.

---

I was invited by Frankie to get my hands on Halo 4 last night in NYC. Microsoft was holding a very exclusive party with some football players that were here for the NFL draft and some press (tv shows and magazine mostly it seemed). There were a couple of community guys there as well.

The multiplayer was setup for 4v4 and 8-player FFA. We played 2 Maps back and forth. Wraparound and Warhouse. Both of these Maps have been seen in the various videos and images on the web. Wraparound had a center platform that was connected via bridges and air lifts with a circular exterior. Warhouse was a multi-level structure with a few outer rooms and hallways. Both Maps were fairly small in size and played TS and FFA very well.

We were allowed to select from some different pre-set loadouts, but could not customize them. Loadouts were selected very similar to the way they were in Reach with armor abilities. Select at the start of the game or press X when you die to change your loadout. In the menu, you can edit the loadouts (we were not able to in this build). The loadouts had a mixture of the following things (anything not listed here I was not able to play with):

BR
DMR
AR
Plasma Pistol
Magnum
Frag Grenades
Plasma Grenades
Hologram
Promethean Vision

There were no power weapons on the Maps and I didn't see the weapon drop pods. Can't answer any questions about anything other than what is listed above.

I played with default controls that had Sprint mapped to clicking in the left joystick and crouch being the B button. It made crouching difficult, but using sprint, abilities, and everything else really easy. I didn’t take any time to flip through the different controls. Sprint felt less clunky than Halo Reach’s sprint, but overall was similar. You do run out of sprint in which felt about the same amount of time you’d run out of sprint in Reach.

I was explicitly told that weapon tuning is still being refined. This is a very very early build of the game and all the weapons are still being tuned. I'm only writing about what I actually played with.

On Twitter, a ton of people asked BR or DMR. I started playing with the BR for a while. There is no bloom and all 3 bullets are very accurate, but there was some small bullet spread. Also, there is some recoil. After shooting a clip at the wall to test the bullet spread, my reticule was fairly higher than where I started shooting. The DMR was single shot with bloom. However, the bloom reset much faster than the DMR in Halo Reach. I didn't have to pace my shots much at all. Both the DMR and BR were 5-shot weapons in this build. At the end of the night, I preferred the DMR. It shot faster than the BR, took the same amount of shots to kill, and I didn't feel like the bloom made me miss shots all that often.

Promethean Vision is the new see-through-walls ability. When you hit it, a wave of heat-mapping goes out across the screen and shows you nearby enemies. It does not show you all the way across the Map, just fairly close proximity. The enemies are also alerted when you do it. It reminded me a bit of Enhanced Vision from Shadowrun, but not as powerful. Offensively, I would ping the vision before entering a room and then charge in knowing which person to pick off first or whether I should not charge in.

Hologram was very similar to the hologram from Halo Reach. Not much to say here.

Magnum also had bloom and was very similar to Halo Reach. It could be shot very fast, but the bloom would make it very inaccurate. It had 8 bullets in the clip and was a 6-shot kill. The Plasma Pistol shoots a little bit slower now when rapidly pressing the trigger, but each shot seemed to do more damage. The homing mechanism on a charged shot seemed to be toned down quite a bit.

Press X to spawn was in the games I played. However, since they were FFA and TS game types, I didn't notice it much. Not sure if that feature will appear in objective game modes or not.

In the end, the game looks and sounds amazing. At its core, it's the Halo everyone knows and loves. Movement felt great and I had a really great time playing it for the short amount of time I had. Hopefully 343 will invite us to a longer test session with more features available where we can provide feedback.

 

Daimian from This Spartan Life.

So I played Halo 4 last night...

« on: Today at 03:35:25 PM »

 

Not just posting to rub it in (LOL) but I also wanted to share some relevant info. I just played multiplayer on two maps and watched Frankie play campaign (just up to the first battle with the Covenant on the Forward Unto Dawn.) Also attending were Louis Wu and Mig from HBO. Talked to Frankie for a while too. Good times.

First multi-player:
-Frankie said the build was a month old but had some patches in the meantime.
-We played on two maps- Warhouse and Wraparound (according to Wu)
-It looks excellent. Whatever they did to the engine appears to have increased sharpness and resolution considerably.
-Sound was a bit wonky in this build, but game play was already pretty solid.
-Having sprint as standard totally makes sense.
-Look sensitivity is higher now. It defaulted to 5 and I had to knock it down to 3.
-Had loads of fun with the DMR. It made me feel like a halfway decent player for a moment, before several of the NFL guys who were there got into the game and destroyed me. Don't get too close with it though or it becomes unwieldy.
-I found movement and weapon control to be very fluid. Wu had more problems for some reason. Possibly because he kept pressing crouch by accident! LOL.
-This Promethean Vision thing is a gas. Not sure how much it helps see through walls etc. but it looks great. Machinima uses will abound. Mig called it "Moebius Vision" (after the recently departed sci-fi graphic novel artist/writer.)

And campaign:
Can't say too much about this as Frank only played the first 10 minutes. The opening is beautiful. As you probably know, we start on the Forward Unto Dawn where we last saw MC and Cortana hunkerin' down for a long wait. It's 4 years later and she is panicking and wakes him up. He's all grumpy and has to go fight a bunch of Covvies who have boarded.
There are some cool player controlled bits like climbing a ladder rung by rung with the ability to jump over to other places on the way to avoid falling debris. Very cool. Then the familiar battling of grunts and elites, all of whom got nice armor upgrades in the interim.
Cortana looks quite different and far more human. A little less glowy and maybe slightly younger.