: Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. Hope they give you a decent budget this
: time.

: However, looking over 343i's plans for the H2A terminals, I can't get excited
: about them because they're probably going to repeat the mistakes of the
: Halo 4/CEA terminals.

: Short CGI videos are expensive as Hell to make, so they have to be easy to
: find if they're going to be 'hidden' content. Hence the bright flashing
: light giving away the terminals' positions in CEA, and the ridiculously
: easy-to-locate* terminals in Halo 4. There were even achievements handed
: out for finding them.

Easy is relative.

They were easy to find in CEA because everyone and their uncle here knows that game inside and out.

Maybe you got all the ones in Halo 4 in your first play though, if so, great. I know I didn't, and plenty of others who didn't either.

What is obvious to some is not necessarily obvious to all- same with the more challenging ones.

: In Halo 3 and Reach, there was nothing saying "Look! Over here!"
: with the datapads or the terminals. The only way a new player will find
: out about them is by stumbling across them.

I don't recall anything in Halo 4 pointing at them to make them as obvious as you claim.

:Hunting them all down became a community effort. I guess ODST's terminals were given away with flashing
: lights and honking horns, but they also existed as a part of the game's
: narrative.

I enjoyed the inside story for 343GS in CEA. I was especially intrigued by the 'visitors' that crashed on the ring before the Covenant found it. I feel it added well to the story and I really liked the stuff with the flood. Exploring 343GS rampancy was pretty cool.

Halo 4's terminals would have been better received had they not required the player to exit the game to view them- otherwise they would have helped the player understand Halo 4's story MUCH better. So, I'll agree that their implementation was botched, but I don't agree that their content was pointless to the main story. IT WAS the main story.

: On a similar note, the more that is invested into making the terminals, the
: harder it is to justify telling a side-story or delivering background
: information. I think Anniversary got off scot-free, because it already had
: a self-contained story. 343i only had opportunity to fill in some
: backstory with 343GS's logs, and they even managed to mess that up in the
: first level.

Why?

Explain yourself.

: But in Halo 4, some genius thought that semi-hidden
: terminals stored outside the game were the perfect way to explain who
: the bad guy was. That's information that belongs in the story proper, no
: matter how nice the terminal videos look.

It does, and they should have been in game, not out game. I've not met a single person that disagrees with this. I thought the reason they weren't on disc in H4 was space limitations. For Halo 5, why they aren't on disc, that could change or they might tell everyone why.

: Finally... well, let's be honest. Text is a far better medium for delivering
: information than video.

sigh....

No. It isn't. It's not better or worse. It depends on the content, or what you want to leave open to interpenetration by the reader \ viewer.

This is why you hear people almost universally say that a movie adaptation of a novel is not as good as the book itself- why? Because what you see on the screen is never as good as your imagination.

So if that is the core of your argument to all this (and to me, that sounds exactly like what it is), congratulations, you've got company. Everyone loved the forerunners before because no one knew what they looked like. 343 decided to explore that. People don't like their version, it took the mystery away. But that's the way it is. It's not changing now.

They can stomp and cry all they want, but it is what it is.

Michael Bay's Optimus Prime acts and sounds like my Optimus Prime, but he sure doesn't look like my Prime.

That's enough for me to not bother seeing the movies. I'm not going to complain about it because it's widely popular with the masses, and a new generation of kids. I can dig that. I still have the originals I can play forever and not be bothered by it.

:You can peruse and reread passages of text at
: will, but you have to start a video all the way from the beginning.

I just hear lazy.

: Pure
: text also lets you focus on the information that needs to be delivered, so
: you can have a philosophical conversation between the Librarian and Didact
: without worrying about what Forerunners wear or even look like.

Yup. I said that above. Again, your imagination is always going to be better. Some stones have to be overturned to advance the story.

: I guess, in short, reading the Halo 3 terminals felt like discovering
: fragments of a lost epic like the Iliad. Watching the Halo 4 terminals
: felt like watching a bad soap opera.

Really? See, again, I don't think the Halo 4 terminals are great. But, I don't think they're terrible. I also don't think the Halo 3 terminals are great either, I mean, not great like you say they are. They were interesting, but I certainly didn't salivate over them like you seem to, and neither did most other average gamers.

LOL, I distinctly remember watching a friend of mine play, discover one, and say "What the hell is this shit? Fuck this, I want to play the game not read a book" and get out of it as fast he could to keep playing. That might make you and I and other fans here reel in terror, but hey, the average person flat out doesn't like Halo like we like Halo. They don't give two shits about the extended universe, they just care about Master chief and pwning noobs.

Ignorance is bliss.

: *I found all but the last one on my first playthrough, and only missed that
: last one because I stopped caring. Maybe they were easier for me to find
: because I tend to scavenge around the maps, but I doubt it.

I replied in kind above.

: Also: Why did nobody tell me that THIS existed?

I like your enthusiasm, Quirel.

But how "hidden" do you want things to be, exactly? Did you play through Arkham Asylum? Do you know about the hidden room in the Warden's office and how no gamers found it for like a year after it came out, and the developers really WANTED people to find it because it hinted to the next game?

See, if you hide that content too well, people won't find it, or they'll go through the games code and take the fun out of finding it. How bout dat Hayabus armor amirite?

Speaking to CEA and H4 specifically, I can't recall ONE single terminal that was on the main path, that had a big sign on it that said "Hey stupid, look at me!". They were camouflaged enough to not be obvious, to fit in with their surroundings, but still stood out enough to maybe encourage the player to inspect it more. If you are pointing to the first terminal in HCE, you can bite me, because they frickin SHOWED EVERYONE where it was in the announcement.

You know a terminal I missed in Halo 4 on my first play though? It was the one right after you link up with Palmer and you go through the doors and the main path goes left, but the terminal is juuust to the right of the door. Simple. But effective. I'm a seasoned veteran gamer- I KNOW that when a game says "hey, come over here!" that that is exactly where I DO NOT want to go because there could be sweet loot the other way.

And it still got me.

I guess I'll end on this: they're dang'd if they do, dang'd if they don't. And this isn't me being all Rev-thinks-343-can-do-no-wrong , I'm just being realistic why y'all get emotional.

If it really bothered me and other people as much as it bothers you, we'd stop buying their products.

It still boggles my mind here that people would waste more energy on posting about things they hate than going somewhere else to find something they enjoy more.

As Louis Wu said that Cody miller said: "if a game franchise has moved away from what made you love it, and you have a few years' experience telling you that nobody's listening to you when you say that... maybe it's time to find another game."

(I love when I reply to a wall-o-text with my own wall, haha. Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh.)

I'm thankful I'm not a Star Wars fan.