I told you guys I was gonna dashboard.

Man, that game. If you guys get the chance, take a few minutes while you're sitting around eating breakfast or whatever and watch that last Team SWAT match we played from my perspective. It's the wackiest shit I've ever seen. There were at least two occasions where I came across three of them crouched on top of one another peeking around the corner like a bunch of stooges.

It'll also serve as a good introspective into the hilariously backwards playstyle of Roflfox. That way when you're about to ask "Fox what the fuck are you doing" you won't have to, because you'll know.

Shake will you be on in an hour or so? I've been up all night/day with little to no sleep which should make for excellent comedy. And by comedy I mean me dying a lot.

e: Oh my god the sequence of events at :40 in the video is the best thing I've ever done

OP updated.

Also I didn't add any of this to the OP yet since it'll take me a while to go through it and it's all 100% rumor, but a ton of stuff is in the Beta files. Aside from the Armor Abilities listed above, there's crazy stuff like Rocket Hogs, Hogpile and Dogfight modes, something that indicates you can create your own custom campaigns and gametypes, insane Firefight modes, and all kinds of ridiculous madness. A lot of it seems legit (there's a lot of mode descriptions, as well as Armor piece names and descriptions), but Bungie knew this would all be torn apart, so there are likely to be some red herrings in there. A likely candidate for example is that there are files that seem to indicate in the game's prologue you play as or with Sgt. Johnson.

I'm glad they're increasing the flag recovery range because at present you have to be virtually standing on the bastard to get it to return and it takes fucking ages. I don't think I've seen a single flag return so far in the beta which on Sword base is no issue since you have to carry the thing a million miles to score but on the other map means the attacking team nearly always scores unless they're either retards or have a couple of members trying to boost their k/d ratio rather than scoring.

I've not fonud invasion to be too unbalanced in the first phase since there's so much cover on the way to the Spartan base for the Elites. Where the Elites suffer is in the third phase since you run soooooo slowly carrying the generator and all it takes is a decent Scorpion driver or a good shot with rockets and you'll never score. If they put in a closer spawn for the Elites you could make the most of the swords but as it is, it's a bit Rourke's Drift at present, with the Spartans being the Welsh Guard and the Elites having sharp sticks and canvas shields. They either need to increase run speed while carrying or let Elites spawn closer to make the matches tight because at present the Elites only ever win when all the Spartans are idiots who don't understand how the game works (Although given the average Halo player you meet as a random, you meet those kind of Spartans alarmingly often at present).

I can only hope that once the full game goes live people will realise that there's more to it than your k/d ratio because we all know how shit I am at Halo and yet in the beta, I'm often coming out as MVP, simply because I'm the only one who plays objective games as objective games rather than slayer, although I suspect the addition of a pure slayer playlist will lessen that.

The issue there is that Halo has never really rewarded players for doing actual objectives beyond their team winning and many people will just go for kills. They've improved that a little, but there still doesn't seem to be much in the way of Credits rewards for objective-based actions.

One thing I spotted yesterday that struck me as rather odd was that they allow splitscreen people into the Free For All playlists, which resulted in one guy winning Oddball by a mile because his mate was clearly acting as a bodyguard. Can't say I was a fan of that particularly.

They definitely need to increase the victory bonus, getting less than ten credits for winning and 150 odd for getting a lot of Sticky kills is just silly and encourages kills rather than trying to win.

I don't think they will; if they incentivize winning too much, people will just quit out if they're not going to win.

That's really fucking backwards and yet also tragically true. :(

Props to Daravon and Toku for rendering this shit. Might as well get it uploaded before the Beta ends.

The first one is the looooooooool double melee spree that I won't be able to do in the final once they fix the melee speed:

YouTube Video

Second one is this guy failing fantastically with a Jetpack:

YouTube Video

and the last one is the Killtacular that Toku rendered in HD (better seen clicking through to YT and selecting the HD option):

YouTube Video

Fake edit: ONE MORE, and probably the best of them all. I can't even describe what the fuck is going on in words but it's from Daravon's perspective in this one match where we were abusing Armor Lock. Apparently I'm Superman now.

YouTube Video

That last one is still fucking amazing.

I've rendered some of my own, I'll put something together in the next couple days.

Just a reminder, the Beta ends at an unannounced time on Wednesday, and all of your saved films and bungie.net stats will be wiped "shortly after." So tomorrow's the last full day of the Beta, and if you want to render/save any films or screenshots from the Beta you're gonna want to do that ASAP. I'm normally off on Tuesdays but need to go in for a few hours in the morning. I should be on around 1-ish if anyone's around, and I'll try to hang out most of the day.

TEAM ARMOR LOCK GOOOO

I'll probably hop on for a final run this evening around 6:30ish.

I'll get on and try to get some games in before Alan Wake and Red Dead arrive.

Head's up: apparently the Beta is ending Thursday morning at 10am PDT. Also confirmed that your stats/files/etc will be wiped shortly thereafter. I already pulled all of my stats and files so I'm completely done with the Beta, but if you still want to get your game on or download/render any videos you got about a day and a half.

OP updated:

Only new thing of any particular significance is that they've said that in the final game Swordbase will be tweaked, especially the flag spawn and capture points (1 Flag anyone?).

As I've said before I'll continue to keep the thread updated, but there will probably not be a huge amount of news. I expect we'll get some new news at E3 (probably Firefight announcement, Campaign stuff and release date would be my guess), but after that it'll probably be a slow trickle at best until a few weeks before launch.

I don't really see what everyone's issue was with Swordbase 1-flag. Yes, it was a tough slog from one base to the other but with no really open areas aside from the middle, the defenders had to catch up to you to stop you and it's amazing how often in their haste to stop the flag carrier people won't spot the guy with invis hiding behind a doorway waiting to assasinate them. It was tough to score but that made a nice change from the other map which being so open was overly easy to score in since if you picked up the flag at a run then even if you got shot straight away it'd bounce a fair way closer to the goal and you had to practically sit on the flag as a defender to get it to return.

Uh, am I gathering from this post that you somehow never played in a game where people just took the flag out and used the bottom middle lift to lift the flag directly into the capture point? I probably saw over two dozen flag captures happen within the first 30 seconds of a round. Except for one hilarious instance I never ever saw anyone do anything BUT that after the first day.

Also a small OP update from this week's BWU. Aside from saying that a host of changes from tiny to large have been made or are being looked it, they did provide a bit more insight into the changes Swordbase will see in the final game:

After everyone got their bearings I only saw that happen a couple of times and that was purely because the defenders all rushed off looking for weapons rather than defending the flag and that can happen on most maps. I didn't really play that many games compared to you though so maybe I got lucky.

Yeah, that was definitely not my experience at all, it happened 99% of the time without fail on both sides. Once you see someone do it once, there's literally no reason to try to go the long way.

If they let you use your armour abilities when carrying the flag it might make other options more viable, although it would perhaps be a bit easy to score with a jetpack. One can only hope they do actually make some positive changes as a result of the beta because it was far from perfect and God knows enough people played it, although given the hilarious discussions on the GameFAQs message board, where half the people thought x feature was the best thing ever while the other half thought it was the worst suggests pleasing everyone will be tricky (And of course on GameFAQs everyone is a level 50 uber-general or something). Thing is, people can bitch all they want but they'll all buy it on day one.

Pretty much.

Being able to use AA's while carrying the flag would be hilariously broken. They've said you'll have a lot of toggles in custom games (even over whether or not flag "bouncing" works or not), I wonder if that'll be an option or not. It pretty much breaks 1-Flag, but Stockpile with AA's being able to carry flags could potentially be crazy.

Additional Spam:
Hacker video showing all of the Elite armors that were in the Beta files. It shows the Spartan ones briefly as well, but those had previously been leaked. Most of the Elite armors look fucking crazy.

YouTube Video

According to AP through Yahoo Reach is releasing on September 14th. Also the Beta had 2.7 million players; for comparison, the Halo 3 Beta had 800,000.

Day 1 freebie Spartan helmet:

http://i45.tinypic.com/t9f7mx.jpg

According to urk it comes with all US day 1 copies, and outside of the US it is a pre-order bonus at certain retailers. A "while supplies last" thing, apparently in the US it will be a code card packed into first run copies (a la Sgt. Johnson from ODST). I guess in Europe the card will not be in the case for whatever reason, which is why it's only a pre-order bonus there.

Europe can suck this dicc.

What.