What does Veeky Forums think of the Halo setting?

It was a huge part of my childhood, so I love it. Playing an ODST game would be dope.

There was a shift in direction that is most easily blamed on 343i that I hate, but I've never quite been able to decipher if that was just the nostalgiafag in me, or if it actually got worse. I think the biggest issue is that it felt like they retconned a bunch of stuff. Mostly because there was a good deal of discontinuity between the books and the games.

He says that in the game too. It's just most players are too busy drowning in Flood to notice.

I remember that. Even Chief was astounded to see a regular guy made it so far when he was so hardpressed.
>He says that in the game too. It's just most players are too busy drowning in Flood to notice.
That rocket launcher fucker in the tunnel was way more important than whatever light bulb had to say.
As for the shift, I, opinion incoming, do not think it was "worse", but that there is a disconnect in tone rather than a gradual shift like you saw in ODST and Reach.

its fun

There's also a 15mm (iirc) mass battle game

Man that guy would've made one hell ood a Spartan.

How popular are those, I'm really interested in the 15mm one specially but honestly I will go with whichever has the bigger and most active player base

I didn't know that, where can I find it, I play WH40k so this sounds right up my alley

I liked the way things were going in Halo 4 but then it went to Destiny-tier full-retard in Halo 5

>liking Diadect
>liking Prometheans

I honestly dont get it, explain yourself

The Didact is a cool villain and the Promethean are pretty cool concept for enemies, what's so hard to understand?

>Prometheans

Liked their aesthetics, couldn't give a rats arse about their lore

Also liked the new Storm covenant whatnot

>Long Night of Solace, Shadow of Intent, Truth and Reconciliation
>Forward unto Dawn, Spirit of Fire, Pillar of Autumn

It has the best named ships ever, of all time

>I didn't know that, where can I find it, I play WH40k so this sounds right up my alley
Guys name was... Vort?
Didact could have been handled better. Prometheans weren't that bad a foe, I'd love to see an all out slugfest between everyone and the Flood.

Diadact and Prometheans are just so out of place with the rest of Halo's antagonists, honestly I guess its just more of a issue with 343's designs than with the them as actual villians

that and actually giving the forerunners an actual physical presence just came off as lame and a letdown

>The forsaken

my nigga I loved seeing a Brutilised version of covenant tech

>Dawn Under Heaven, Say My Name, Of Uncommon Courage

It really does

I heard about a fan-made RPG a while back. The book is too big to upload, but here's the subreddit with a download link
reddit.com/r/HaloMythic/comments/3crdyv/what_is_halo_mythic/

Also, here's the character sheet. Looks obnoxiously complicated at first glance.

>Diadact and Prometheans are just so out of place with the rest of Halo's antagonists, honestly I guess its just more of a issue with 343's designs than with the them as actual villians
They should be, they are an entirely different paradigm.

Halo Wars 2 is like a love letter to me. I love covie race lore and they're just going wild with it. The latest Hunter commander is just :ok_sign:

>Halo Wars 2
WHAT. THE. FUCK.
WHEN WAS THIS ANNOUNCED?
FUCK YOU COMCAST YOU NET THROTTLING COCK SUCKERS

>actually giving the forerunners an actual physical presence just came off as lame and a letdown
This was my biggest gripe. It dismantled all of the all of the mystery and myth and grandeur to them that the first 3 games had spent so much effort building up.

Where the fuck have you been son?

I'm really in love with the Banished, and the Brutes in general, but especially the Banished, the whole Brute aesthetic and Brutes as space pirates and Atriox with his Generals, tho honestly I feel that they should had swapped Colony in for Decimus since he is just plain cooler.

I don't follow video games closely anymore.
And I genuinely never expected Halo Wars to get a sequel.

Oh you are in for a dozy, the story is pretty serviceable but I recommend you to get the season pass since it came with 6 leaders and they already upped to 7 plus two DLC campaigns.

They announced it awhile ago and it came out in February. Single Player is kind of underwhelming and stands mostly to introduce the Banished as a faction and to bring the Spirit of Fire back into play.

The multiplayer keeps getting updated with new stuff tho, and it's not just reskins or new leaders with a fancy new power. They're throwing in new units with the leaders. There's a new hunter leader who can do all sorts of shit and gets a bunch of new units.

>Hunter Leader
Yes

youtube.com/watch?v=c7n27qu-Qhs

My worms will conquer the stars!

Thanks anons, off to do errands but today is a good day

I liked it until Halo 3, when there was still an air of mystery and grandeur to Forerunner stuff. I like the idea of two factions fighting over the ruins of something impossibly ancient and powerful, one side for religion, one side because it's too dangerous, and the frightful truth of what all these bizarre cosmic ruins are. I liked the personal and inner turmoils of the Covenant, the elites growing dissatisfaction and their civil war that was just politics, it wasn't tied into some grander Forereunner stuff like I feel everything has to be now, or I guess it feels that way. I think by Halo 3 is started to become too heavily mythologized for my liking and lost some of that grandeur, Arks and unfinished installations and stuff everywhere. Halo 1 still holds the most potential in my mind, everything's so strange and vast and mysterious in it.

I've only read this - imgur.com/gallery/bI6Ih. Pretty awesome lore imo. And now I don't have to bother with playing the games and reading the books, so that's good.

I've been running this for a little while now. It's super crunchy, like fan-made games tend to be, with complicated systems like charts for interpreting Covenant honour rankings, a full page of grapple manoeuvres and a blood stat that needs to be tracked. As a big lore fan I've had a lot of fun though. It has rules for almost everything, even the needler walker that was cut from Halo Wars. Some of my players have next to no experience with the Halo and it's been a delight to demonstrate the setting to them in a way that isn't a first-person shooter.

It was really good pre-343, back when it was Humanity holding on to survival by sheer tenacity and little else.

They all died, right?

The sci-fi setting that I grew up with, along with Star Wars, Firefly, Farscape, and Stargate SG-1. In my opinion Bungie was the pinacle of badass sci-fi armor design.

Bungie also did the best live action trailers. Still get chills from the ODST trailer.
343i doesn't deserve most of the shit they get, but they're definitely lacking in the design department imho.

I kind of wish Halo had 28mm miniatures so I could do an ODST themed army for 40k.

I swear Atriox and the Brutes would fit right-in in WH40K

youtu.be/Adh46ky_-WI

You guys skipped over Two For Flinching

They learnt quickly to treat the game like a military operation and not a dungeon crawl. For the first mission I had the players investigate a research base in the wake of a Covenant attack, so they got a good understanding of the setting's lethality before any combat happened. All of the players are Spartans and most of them chose to take Semi-Powered Infiltration armour instead of MJOLNIR.

>they all chose SPI armor instead of MJOLNIR
So they're a bunch of Spartan-IIIs who are all going to die by campaign's end. Cool.

Vorked, short for vorked grimlock. The last time I saw him on here has to be something like a year ago now. I miss those threads.

I personally like Dark was the Night, The Mantle's Approach, Defender of Faith and Breath of Annihilation

There's Elysian Drop Troopers from Forgeworld or China and you can get not!ODST heads from various places.

SPI was better for being sneeki-breeki and such.

The missions that tended to kill the S-IIIs were the ones where their sneeki-breekiness was compromised.

eh, halos a cool guy and doesn't afraid of anything

Does he still use elites?

Yes at least in some fashion

youtube.com/watch?v=SyOAdrxlPVs

Though you have to wonder why the didn't just get picked up by the Pelican once they got the laser...

That's actually what I was planning to do, but highly detailed official models would have been nice.

They've been playing sneaky to the max. I think they all jumped at an opportunity to play a Halo game as non-FPS as possible.

Yeah but mostly as assassins, and because one of his Generals is an elite that he somehow convinced to join to his cause during the Great Schism after letting himself be captured in order to get his sweet sweet Assault Carrier.

And yes, pic related has energy shield because unlike the prophets Atriox has no problem improving and slapping useful tech everywhere

The like the ones without too much dialogue.
youtu.be/B6A0s6d7F2k

I will agree with this but only with the caveat that they share "Best Armor Aesthetics" with the Necromongers who also had some very nice designs.

I like it. Sure there wa a change between the two studio, one wa moe down to earth sci-fi, kinda gritty, and the other is more full blown sci-fi CHOSEN ONE typical story, but I think the biggest problem 343 is facing is nostalgia. 4 was shit, no qualms about that, but damn if they didn't start with a terrible handicap, coming after a beloved Bungie (nostalgia glasses didn't help).

Also, fuck you, Noble 6 is still alive. I have this whole story in my head where he survives the glassing, goes to cryo sleep, and is found much later, after the war, and has to adapt to the fact that Humanity is actually fighting alongside Covenants now.
Reach is still a traumatic experience for him and he's basically a wild pawn at best and can't be used with Covenant Forces otherwise he goes berserk.
He still met June back on the Infinity and leads a new Noble team, all of them spartan 4's that don't know that Noble 6 doesn't feel like he deserves to command after the defeat he suffered.
Anyhoo, just my little fanfiction about a PTSD'd Spartan.

Reach and ODST definitely had some of the most chills inducing trailers for me. Just thinking about them and the lusic send shivers down my spine because it's so damn good.

Also, did Bungie have something with Hungary? Like members of the studio or whatever?
I mean, these are Hungarians on the ODST trailers (spec ops actually, actuam soldiers) and Jorge and by extension all the natives of Reach spoke Hungarian.
Is Hungary a super power in the Halo setting?

I know it's not going to happen, but I hope Halo Wars 2 is a sign that they may be taking the Halo franchise back to its roots and not just something done specifically for that game.

It seems like for everything besides the Master Chief's armor (which I actually think looks better than it did during Bungie's games), the design aesthetic has just been getting worse and worse.

Which was kinda all of them. The prologue of the book about the Spartan III program was about a hot-drop mission that ended in about 10 minutes with a nuke going off, if I recall correctly.
They gave the IIIs SPI because it was cheaper.

I'm a little confused. Didn't the hunters all side with the elites during the civil war?

At least they acknowledge that and made it possible to use Reach Armors or helmets at the very least.
The MP is better than 4, some say it's the best of the franchise, been too long since I played to argue on that however.
In any case, next one should be the last one. They'll probably blow their lpad on that one and go back to their roots with DLCs and whatnot, porting old armors in game.

It wasn't a bad design philosophy, you don't need a shield if they can't see you. Too bad every mission they sent them on was a suicide mission.

Sorry, I was 19 when the first one came out, so I'm not familiar with it in the slightest.

Is it wrong that I liked Punished Atriox and the Diamond Brutes more than the humans?

>they never remember The Born Loser
He definitely had a thread up a few months ago.

Reqch had the best MP. Both in regard to features and balance. Pre-343 Reach specifically. Highest skill ceiling of the framchise.

The competitive in 5 is too floaty, the additional movement abilities make for a solid arena shooter, but they should have just gobbled the cocks they meeded to and given double jump. The core movement and most of the map designs are just really bad. And don't get me started on visual and sound design.

No, they went with whoever offered them the best deal, or bullied them the hardest.
Hunters were bargaining chips the Lekgolo used to keep the Covenant from bothering them, they literally had no real worth.

That's awesome of them.
Are you planning to eventually stick them in an Enemy-Mine situation against the Flood?

Fantastic post

Little bit of both. I always thought it was lame that Kurt didn't put on his Mark V armor. Like come on dude.

There should be a squad-based strategy videogame, where the player controls a group of normal marines as they fight the vastly superior covenant/flood in urban and rural environments.

Welcome to the ODST game. Mostly, anyway.

It's interesting. I wish there was a good campaign setting encyclopedia I could use for it.

In Amber Clad was one of the best.

Feels like whoever was naming shit in their navy had the Big Book of Poetry and a fat sack of crack and just went at it. Forget the Prophets figuring out the truth about humanity and engineering the whole war to annihilate them out of jealousy, if I'd met a species with ships named that I'd probably decide to waste them on principals alone.

Which halo books are worth the read? I read up through Contact Harvest a while back, and I've always meant to get back to The Cole Protocol, but now there's a bunch more.

Went to shit after the trilogy

Does anyone else feel like the Halo setting represents the best sort of future Humanity could enjoy?

I mean, let's look past the whole genocide thing and the plots of 343, we're talking about an interplanetary Human "empire" that still feels relatable. People shoot guns, people go out to nightclubs, people even drive cars and enjoy real-world cultures or live in houses that look like houses.

It's a universe someone from the present could be transported to and, beyond some mild culture shock, adapt almost right away.

>we're talking about an interplanetary Human "empire" that still feels relatable. People shoot guns, people go out to nightclubs, people even drive cars and enjoy real-world cultures or live in houses that look like houses.
Doesn't sound too different from Mass Effect or The Expanse

>The Expanse
Minus the interplanetary part there at least for the first few books

You know, early Halo really is the best example of the Humanity Fuck Yeah trope. Humanity is militarized, it's fighting, surviving, and even winning an enormous war with an impossibly superior foe, the main characters are idealized paragons of human martial prowess, and none of it feels forced.

Mass Effect feels like everything was designed by Apple, shooting weird Eezo guns and living in luxury shipping containers.

Halo's got grit.

If we get stuck in a future where we both have access to practical FTL, super duper up the pooper AIs, and still use gas guzzling jeeps and NATO standard ammunition we deserve extinction.

>and still use gas guzzling jeeps and NATO standard ammunition we deserve extinction.

Are you suggesting there's something better than the almighty 5.56x45mm, friend?

The jeeps are probably very efficient! What's wrong with a robust and powerful combustion engine when hydrocarbons are extremely plentiful?

I never got the sense that humanity was winning, just staving off the inevitable as more and more colonies were discovered and eventually fell.

Don't get me wrong, humanity could still win but it was never any more than pyrrhic. Even when they retake territory it's so fucked up up from the fighting is it even worth still trying to hold against the superior Covenant reinforcements that are bound to arrive? Besides, if the Covenant are denied the territory they have zero issues just glassing the place.

They have more personality, that's natural, I honesty think they deserve to be a main villain faction for the franchise

That's what I meant, just, that humanity could somehow manage to hold on to their territory so tightly against such a foe, and even push back on occasion, is HFY as fuck.

At least magnetically accelerate that crap. Oh wait, they're rail tech is still hugely experimental. I mean it's not like it's the 26th century or anything...oh wait.

Clearly their jeeps are very efficient and rugged given the rate they flip over if you so much as drive over a pebble and just flick it with your finger to flip it again.

>getting caught was part of his plan

>Oh wait, they're rail tech is still hugely experimental. I mean it's not like it's the 26th century or anything...oh wait.

I don't see the century has anything to do with it, and if you recall the USNC extensively uses rail tech in their ships and stations, most notably with the MAC and Super MAC. It's quite obvious the issue is one of miniaturization and portability which sometimes, as we know in our own history, hits very real and very hard walls.

>Clearly their jeeps are very efficient and rugged given the rate they flip over if you so much as drive over a pebble

That's gameplay and early console physics, don't bully!

Halo 1-3 had good story, and some of the expanded universe was pretty great when it wasn't a Halsey circle-jerk. It should have ended at 3, maybe a resolution piece somewhere that tied up some loose ends.
343 hasn't been literally cancer, but the story has degraded significantly since they took over.

>Gas guzzling jeeps
>implying warhogs run on fossil fuels
Warthogs use Hydrogen engines, senpai.
The fact that the rounds have the same dimensions as is Nato-standard doesn't mean they're the same rounds. Advances in more efficient or powerful propellants would mean that those bullets would hit far harder than their modern-day counterparts. Plus the fact that the standard weapon spits out 7.62 rounds on full-auto with recoil that's actually manageable means that recoil-dampening has improved significantly.
More importantly, Nato-standard was adopted in order to simplify the logistics of fielding large forces with a large variety of weapons. Why adopt a new system when the old one is still working fine and has all the industrial backing already established?

>Also, did Bungie have something with Hungary?

Nah, nothing like that. I think there was film industry incentives in Hungary that made Microsoft decide to make their trailers there and hire local talent.

>mfw that planet settled by Finns

Honestly I love it, and I think alot of it is actually underappreciated. THe visuals are great, and I based my IG army off of ODSTs, though since I can't make their paint scheme interesting to save my life there not in dark grey/black

>I don't see the century has anything to do with it
Time, son, do you even? If you can manage faster than light but you're still stumbling over practical man portable lasers that's pretty sad.