: Hell, we have 2 new weapons in the UNSC arsenal that are more unique than the
: Forerunner weapons: Rail Gun and Sticky Detonator. The Sticky Detonator
: could have easily been a Forerunner weapon: instead of generic explosion,
: imagine remote activated Incineration Grenades that instantly de-rez
: anyone in range. You could have got to use it on more than one level: that
: would have been nice.

That would be nice.

: In the hands of Knights and Crawlers, a weapon that had to explicitly charge
: up and was still an instant kill (i.e. Rail Gun rather than Binary Rifle)
: could have served well too. The Guass Warthog is considerably larger and
: does the same damage. It would have been fine to turn the Rail Gun into a
: forerunner weapon and said "only the forerunners have been able to
: miniaturize guass technology to this degree" or something.

eh, there's already a lot of work going on in that area, so I'd expect humanity five and a half centuries from now to kind of have it down
I was actually kind of surprised it took this long to be a part of the on-foot arsenal, and anyway the Forerunners are supposed to be massively more advanced, the Covenant don't even use railguns, at least not in a way we know them. I agree it could work gameplay-wise though. If they could find another way to describe or just not even really say what it is or does beyond telling you how to use it and showing its effectiveness, it could work.

: The Rail Gun is a weapon that, like the Sentinel Beam, actually has a huge amount
: of range, but is nerfed by a lack of scope. Know what Bungie did with the
: Sentinel Beam? They made the Focus Rifle.

yeah, but if they did that it would basically be a Spartan laser with lower damage that you could reload

: And no it wasn't exactly like the Human Sniper Rifle, but it was still awesome.

eh, it was interesting, but the lack of usefulness (especially when used intuitively or by people who are bad at sniping) kept it from being awesome IMHO

: I'm actually really glad they destroyed Requiem at the end of Spartan Ops: it
: gives them the perfect excuse to completely rethink the Prometheans.

or, you know, give us different enemies entirely

: Besides, if these players are coming from campaign, it's not like you get a
: lot of power weapons there anyway. The vast majority of the time is spent
: with weapons like DMR, LR, Pistol, LightRifle, PP. Any power weapons you
: have to FIND or take from the cold dead fingers of your enemies. You don't
: get them dropped right in front of you - which is more mechanical
: inconsistency. It encourages reckless point-grabbing and playing from
: drop-to-drop.

Well, if that was what they wanted to do, I wouldn't like it, but I'd respect that decision... I'm not sure it was what they wanted, though, and I don't like it regardless.

: Spartan Ops too. Where did 'accessibility' go while making it online only?
: Sure, there are cutscenes which need to be streamed to experience the plot
: properly. But this was guillotining the head off just because the ears are
: ugly from a certain angle: completely excessive.

: What they could have done was made the cutscenes an optional download and
: patch the levels to allow offline accessibility once the season had
: finished. Especially since the servers can and DO go down, and now they
: KNOW a lot of people play it solo. Anyway, if they'd thought about, the
: popularity of Score Attack should have been a tip off to Solo Spartan Ops.

They could also have done something really radical, like taking out the video and audio almost entirely and had them be *gasp* text-based!