im going to play halo, the game where you capture Outposts to reveal map icons and unlock Quick Travel

halo is a video game

so the plot of this game is that The Banished have awakened The Punished, and The Punished seek to awaken The Endless

excited for the mind-blowing plot reveals in Infinite 2, when we discover that The Punished are merely the servants of The Harangued, who seek to harness the ancient power of The Impugned, in order to bring about the resurrection of The Canceled

this would be a good videogame if it was not open world lmao

the usual halo shooty stuff feels *great* and being able to zoom around with the grapple is super fun

and then the open-world stuff just.... Makes It Worse lol. adds nothing and takes away a lot

like because it's Open the game just doesn't have level design? Every fight is a Big Triangle Thing in the middle surrounded by 200 randomly-placed shipping containers. Dudes shoot you from every direction and when you kill enough it drops more from the sky, in every direction

there's no Silent Cartographer style carefully-authored map where you drive around between destinations and then jump out to go corridor shooting and then work your way towards the center. There's just a rats' nest of shipping containers and hexagons

also an orc keeps screaming far cry monologues at me

I have no special knowledge here but this kinda feels symptomatic of that article about 343's working conditions? level design is hard enough when you aren't constantly chewing up and turning over talent

real missed opportunity not making the infinite halo a figure eight

i do love the idea of The Master Chief being judged insufficiently Valorous to merit a mongoose with a gun on it

I appreciate that evil cortana has evil shoulder pads

evil shoulder pads are of course the femme counterpart to the evil goatee

I think Far Cry Villain Monologues might genuinely be the actual worst thing that has happened to videogames in the last decade

okay I guess lootboxes are worse but only by, like, a bit

love too be locked in a sequence of rooms where a bass-boosted orc growls endlessly about how pathetically easily he defeated the humans, an event which occurred entirely offscreen before the game actually started

oh wow I finished it

that was... anticlimactic lol

okay all of my earlier criticisms make perfect sense now because this was VERY clearly cut way, way down from something far more ambitious into something they could polish and get out the door

ironically this suddenly means that I like it a lot more lol

they nailed the combat and movement stuff, which is the most important bit, and everything else needed like another year+ of dev time and microsoft clearly wasn't going to give them that

if you have bad level design and terrible writing and ALSO infinite time/budget I get mad (see: the far cries), but if you very clearly had to hack the game to pieces in order to ship it at all, then I'm like oh okay cool high fives yall nice work (see: final fantasy XV)