[Laa-Yosh]

I haven't had the time to play any of the new episodes, but I've watched the videos...

They did WHAT to Halsey???

Seriously though,
I really don't like the vilification of her, this big new plot twist thing is far too much like a soap opera.
What they should have done instead is to get her to meet John again, especially after the sort of setup in a previous episode where she accidentally learned that the Chief was actually alive.


However this ending makes it pretty certain - there will be a season 2 of Spartan Ops, but probably as a paid DLC.

[Silent_Buddha]

Originally Posted by Laa-Yosh

I haven't had the time to play any of the new episodes, but I've watched the videos...

They did WHAT to Halsey???

Seriously though,
I really don't like the vilification of her, this big new plot twist thing is far too much like a soap opera.
What they should have done instead is to get her to meet John again, especially after the sort of setup in a previous episode where she accidentally learned that the Chief was actually alive.

I completely agree. It is one of the main reasons I REALLY do not like the direction that 343i is going with the Halo IP.

Regards,
SB

[orangpelupa]

for me, halo 4 plays like a halo game but does not feel like a halo game. maybe because dont understand most of the story in halo 4.

it was easy to understand on halo reach

[Nisaaru]

Originally Posted by orangpelupa

for me, halo 4 plays like a halo game but does not feel like a halo game. maybe because dont understand most of the story in halo 4.

it was easy to understand on halo reach

Far too small sandbox and the battles lack dramaturgy. The new weapons don't really feel that much different and the opponents are plain boring. The jungle level is a visual mess and some structure details are lost into bloom/reflections. There was an underground level with a bridge structure and a Banshee but the area itself was really too small to operate with it smoothly. The usual vehicle "end" level was a nice homage to old space shooter games but the depth visibility was really bad there. It could have been so much better with a little more effort. The worst joke was the addition of timed reactions as if it was some boss fight in RE4 or Modern Warfare. So many obvious bogus design decisions and flaws.

I've never cared for Halo MP but the SP was special to me since Halo 1. The game has lost this essence because the new people don't seem to have understood what defines the Halo SP gameplay. I'm not sure how many people here still remember Unreal 1 (not the joke called 2). That game created atmosphere just by exploring the huge world and enjoying the environment. Halo had a lot in common with that approach. All gone with 4.

For the new background story is it really so hard to imagine an expanded universe out there? Halo was a SF story with the mystery of a big unknown history. If you reveal more details you must at the same time add new mystery elements to keep speculation alive.

The galaxy is a big playground to not only limit it to the Convenant. Why not expand on that? Or the Flood could have been a weapon sent by some opponents of the Forerunners from the outside and Master Chief would have realized some deeper unresolved threat here.

Sorry for the long rant...

[orangpelupa]

what i dont understand in the story of halo 4 is those things that you just described and the other things that happend on gameplay.

for example:
Chief is rescuing who in the jungle? from what i remember, those soldier just stay there,
why the big tank stopped near enemy base and i need to go there on foot,
etc.

then there's also the annoying QTE. I dont know that i need to press a button there for a few times. i died for not presssing a button on a boss :/

[dragonelite]

Originally Posted by Laa-Yosh

I haven't had the time to play any of the new episodes, but I've watched the videos...

They did WHAT to Halsey???

Seriously though,
I really don't like the vilification of her, this big new plot twist thing is far too much like a soap opera.
What they should have done instead is to get her to meet John again, especially after the sort of setup in a previous episode where she accidentally learned that the Chief was actually alive.


However this ending makes it pretty certain - there will be a season 2 of Spartan Ops, but probably as a paid DLC.

I not a literature guy but i must have anchor points in a universe like main characters, worlds or places. Good lore so to speak and i think this keep people interested and coming back to the series.
Seems to me what bungie does so well they plan out a big portion of the universe and have excellent pacing introducing stuff.

Gonna spoiler this bit..
343 killed or deleted cortana the important anchor for a lot of fans because she was with us for the 3 main games. The new character they introduced are not really worthy as an anchor point maybe lasky is the only one the rest is generic space marine. Now with halsey becoming less of a anchor point for the side you are fighting for i can see a lot of people just let halo slip along/past them the coming years.

[egoless]

Originally Posted by Silent_Buddha

I completely agree. It is one of the main reasons I REALLY do not like the direction that 343i is going with the Halo IP.

Regards,
SB

Is it possible that for Season 2...

Halsey is just manipulating him, telling him what he wants to hear about revenge, but she has a different plan? Afterall, she's never been straightforward, even as she was presented in season 1. She cares for knowledge only.

[warb]

Originally Posted by egoless

Is it possible that for Season 2...

Halsey is just manipulating him, telling him what he wants to hear about revenge, but she has a different plan? Afterall, she's never been straightforward, even as she was presented in season 1. She cares for knowledge only.

This is what I assumed. Halsey never came across as evil or demented, but incredibly manipulative.

[AlStrong]

SpOps story: Meh.

---

Btw:

[Scott_Arm]

Originally Posted by AlStrong

SpOps story: Meh.

---

Btw:

Honestly, the guys explanation of the story is a good example, in a nutshell, of why videogame stories are awful.

[RudeCurve]

Does anyone know how the Spartan Ops MP episode servers are setup? Every time I want to join a MP Spartan Ops game by "find game" it only list Ep 3 game chapters which is weird. There's no way to select any other Ep. Do the servers rotate to the next Ep every week to cater to new gamers and/or different levels of completion? I've already completed up to Ep 5 in MP and want to start Ep 6 MP but the stupid server is at Ep 3.

[Laa-Yosh]

Attended the Halo 4 talk at FMX, will post some notes once I'm back home
Pretty interesting stuff...

[Billy Idol]

Making Halo 4:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/featur...ory_about_.php

[Laa-Yosh]

Okay, so a short summary of the talk at FMX by Matt Aldridge.

It was mainly about the content creation workflow for the human faces, how they decided to rely on scanning to create realistic results.

They did a lot of casting in several steps, requiring 360 degree rotation videos and some facial expressions from the candidates. Reason for the latter is botox - one of the actresses they initially looked into was abusing it so much that she was barely able to move her face at all.

They've built their own setup for the scanning based on stereo photogrammetry and DLSR cameras. Referred to Disney research for the remeshing (in case you're surprised, ever since Disney Animation went all digital they've been doing some very serious work in many fields, worth googling it).
They've scanned a neutral pose with textures, and lots of facial expressions too. They've kept most of the faces asymmetrical except for Cortana who's not a living human. Lots of technical info on combining the separate scans and processing all the various expressions and refitting the lowres game mesh and so on, but I think no-one here is interested in that.

Not a word about their custom solver which interpreted the facecam data from the performance capture and translated it to drive the face rig. All we know is that Corinne Yu has developed it and that she had some twitter discussion about it with Carmack (id working on performance capture too?)

The face rig built in Maya was using a ~3500 polygon head mesh which was shared across all the characters - even the Librarian. They had about 150 face shapes with some corrective fixes pushing it to ~210, and also lots of bones - jaw, tongue, eyelids where necessary (the rigger assigned a bone to every vertex, calling this somewhat overkill method 'nuking it from space').
Matt said he was fighting to have blendshapes in the engine from basically the first week he was hired (couldn't agree with him any more on this one).

They could use such complexity because the Maya rig was never used in the game. They've used Principal Component Analysis to basically compress all the animation data. This created a predefined number of blendshapes and animation to reproduce the deformations, it's a sort of compression tech. They could set the system to use 8-16-32 or any number of shapes, but usually they could get away with 16 shapes for as much as 1000 frames of animation. This means the PCA data was using less memory than a complete bone based face rig, and look vastly better.
They also had a "tension" node, pretty standard in offline work, analyzing how much an area of the face has been stretched or compressed, to drive wrinkle maps. Interestingly they used not only a secondary normal map but a color map too, and the animators had the ability to tweak the strength of the effect, too.

They've also used PCA for a certain, very graphic, character death - Matt has been a proponent to include this scene from the beginning. He was surprised that the ESRB had no problems with it and was more concerned about Cortana looking too naked. Oh and sneaked in some cloth sim with PCA, too.

At the end they were able to get a new head into the game in about 2 days.
The shared mesh/UV data also allowed for a very special internal build, where they took the scan data from the 343 employee who volunteered for the scanning - and put that face on EVERY character in the game. Screenshots were hilarious.
Also, this approach meant that they could drive any character head with performance capture data from anyone. So a character with a likeness of actor A could be captured from actor B. Actually this was the case for almost every character, but in some cases it was decided from the start and in other cases they were changing voice/performance actors during production.
Matt was also asked in the Q&A about LA Noire and pointed out this as the main difference between the approaches. He was very diplomatic about it - but that type of capture/replay tech is a technological dead end IMHO and I believe he thinks the same

Pretty interesting info altogether. The scanning workflow they've developed is totally next gen ready - so expect Halo 5 to have even higher fidelity characters, reproducing more of the huge amounts of data their capture system can acquire.
The PCA stuff is very cool too, with the amount of memory on next gen systems the possibilities are near endless. Cloth sims, muscle deformation systems, whatever, it's all easy to display with even higher resolution meshes.
Also interesting to see how game developers have to get closer and closer to high end VFX approaches, tools and yeah, results.

Had a short chat with Matt after the talk too, thanked him for the info and turned out he was a big fan of our work. Actually the very first slide of the talk was not ingame content but the final frames from the Legendary ending, which I had the privilege to work on

[orangpelupa]

Wow many nice info thanks

drive any character head with performance capture data from anyone

If that incorporated into chat application.... I can chat as Elvis (captured from fake Elvis) or anyone. Sold as a DLC. Monetazion on Chat application.



btw the animation can be done on realtime or its need to be offline? If offline, my dream to chat as elvis are gone