I think the original trilogy (plus Reach and ODST) work because while there’s a ton of lore, the really convoluted stuff is kind of at the background to the moment to moment feel of the game. The most forward facing content is a pastiche of other easily digestible scifi that’s all mixed together in a fun, interesting way. You’ve got conventional humans who feel like a straight expansion of the colonial marines from Aliens up against a diverse and interesting array of aliens. The Covenant are a refinement from Pathways Into Darkness and then the Marathon games. You’ve got the flood as a space zombie change of pace.
It all mixes together well and the more detailed lore can be built on top of it. There are many intentional gaps and hooks which can suggest things without having to be addressed explicitly, leaving room for some mystery.
After those games, the series kind of imploded under the weight of its own lore since the developers/writers chose to bring all of those mysterious elements to the forefront. It gave less interesting enemies to fight, and less motivation to care. I doubt many people have moments from those games burned into their memories the same way moments from the original trilogy are.
The MCC Halo had a graphical remaster on the original engine, that’s why you could swap between original and remaster visuals on the fly. The upcoming project is a remake on a new engine with changes to gameplay and design.
It is tedious, with repeated samey layout and a limited selection of flood enemy types. The mod mixes up the environment and adds more flood enemy types for variety.
In videos he has mentioned both reducing the damage from the sniper rifles so they aren’t one-hit kills, and allowing jackels to use carbines which will replace some sniper jackels.
It was alright. A third person shooter where you are theoretically giving tactical orders to two NPC followers. In reality, good or interesting tactics go out the window in favor of just spamming special abilities as much as possible in a chaotic mess of fights. The story was decent and gets interesting near the end, although for my money after the big reveal it feels like it drags out a bit longer than it needs to. For $3 I got my value.
I’m not saying Clancy stuff is always completely grounded, especially the longer it goes on, but I’m trying to use the Clancy comparison to capture the essence of an idea. COD4 while fictional, and with moments that aren’t wholly realistic if you really hold them up to the most intense scrutiny has the overall texture of realism. MW2&3 and Black Ops games all exist as throwing bigger and more insane setpieces out with no regard to any realism.
It’s a the last COD with a real gutpunch moment that says anything about anything. The nuke going off it a moment of realizing you aren’t a special main character and you die like everyone else, and that maybe war isn’t just a big fun adventure. All the shock moments have been trying to top it are so dramatic that they don’t have the same effect that the nuke did.
While (classic, I’m not counting stuff ghostwritten under his brand) Clancy characters have hyper competence, it’s to be expected given that they are turbo ultra elite soldiers or spies. Their motivations and ability to act doesn’t reach the point of self parody.
For a COD4 example: Nikolai, the Russian that the player rescues early on in the game. He is a mole inside the Russian antagonist faction feeding information to the SAS. He got found out. He’s being kept at a house with a handful of regular soldiers watching him. When you rescue you him he is calm or at least puts up a calm front and thanks you. That’s a pretty believable guy who could have been a real person who is doing something realistic and dangerous.
In MW2 that character can materialize with apparently infinite types of military aviation hardware, and he is also a pilot able and willing to do insane maneuvers. And he is personal friends with Captain price rather than just being an SAS asset. And he is in touch with a friendly militia group in the middle of Europe.
There is a distinct jump from COD4 to MW2, where it goes from Tom Clancy to Michael Bay.
MW2 is still fun, but it exists in an entirely separate tonal reality than COD4.
I’m replaying COD4 and taking notes at the moment for a review I’ve wanted to do for years, coincidentally.
Looking at just COD4 without being influenced by knowledge of the sequels, it’s got a decent story and if you look at the edges you can find contemplations of cycles of violence, and while not to the point of being anti-war it does emphasize the waste of it.
The characters are Tom Clancy levels of larger than life, which is significantly more restrained than what came later. Individually the story beats and scenarios have at least a texture of realism, often loosely based in something real and then strung together in a story that isn’t convoluted.
I could see it being a good movie with the right handling. It probably wouldn’t be.
I bought GamePass just for Outer Worlds because everyone pointing out that’s it’s from the team that made “New Vegas”.
I did a whole review of this game, and one of the first things I tackled was that it is absolutely not from the New Vegas team in terms of writing or design leadership. I completely blame the marketing for setting wrong expectations by creating that connection.
It is a good game, but going in wrongly thinking (due to misleading marketing) that it is New Vegas In Space is going to leave you frustrated.
Similar to the 1997 point-n-click Blade Runner game. The rights to all the aspects of that movie were such a mess that the developers decided not to use any footage or audio from the game because they honestly couldn’t figure out who owned what, and made it follow a new main character which was an obvious “Not-Deckard” who was chasing replicants in a similar but ever so changed variation on the plot of the movie.
That’s why I called it “16ish”. It is probably taking some liberties to improve the graphics that wouldn’t have been available in the 90s, but it is trying get those nostalgia neurons firing. Point is, the aesthetic is intentionally not photo realistic, so missing out on Arnold’s face isn’t the biggest problem in the world.
The headline seems a bit overly snarky and dismissive of a small studio dealing with the kind of licensing problems that just come with big properties and image rights to expensive actors. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened in a game.
It sounds like without the image rights, there won’t be any closeup cutscenes of Arnold’s face, but given that the game play is a 16ish bit throwback aesthetic, it actually doesn’t seem as distracting as it sounds.
Maybe they aren’t allowed to do an accurate Arnie voice impression, but if all the character audio is crunched up to feel more retro, that might not be a problem either.