‘HALO 4’ DETAILS: Cortana Is Dying, Forerunners, And More.

Take this batch of Halo 4  information upside your head. Take it! It’s full of details, the Forerunners, and Cortana pulling her buttcheeks apart and downloading the Universe into her soul.

Kotaku:

Game Informer’s  Halo 4  issue is now out, and inside are details not just on the game’s singleplayer campaign, but what new developers 343 studios are doing with the series’ multiplayer as well.

Which is blah blah bullet points whatever. More interesting, to me at least, is that a big part of the fourth main game will be dealing with the impending death of your trusty sidekick Cortana.

Apparently complex AIs like Cortana have a limited shelf life, and hers is fast approaching. Seems after seven years spent crunching limitless amounts of data they begin to go crazy, then mad, then they die. So you’ll be spending time with Cortana dealing with her life sentence, and I’m just guessing here, probably try and help her find a way to beat it.

Hopefully not in a  Mass Effect 3/EDI kind of way, because this would then become a love storyreal  fast, and that would be just  weird.

Also noteworthy is a tease that you’ll finally run into some of the series’ mythical Forerunners, and that Halo’s multiplayer set has been completely overhauled, now being based around something called Infinity. Peel back the PR jargon and it appears Infinity is an attempt to tie the game’s multiplayer to its singleplayer, so as to give it more context and meaning within the larger scope of the game.

Infinity is the name of a massive UNSC ship, deployed to the same area that Master Chief winds up in and which you’ll cross paths with a few times during the singleplayer campaign. Boot up multiplayer, though, and you’ll play as a Spartan onboard the ship.

Alongside regular multiplayer battles there’s also a co-op campaign you can play, and which in a neat touch is episodic, with new cutscenes and five new missions being added  each week.

I like the sound of this. I rarely play multiplayer because it all feels so abstract and impersonal. Tie it more closely into a narrative and I may just stick around. Especially since 343 say they’ll be free.

On the technical side of things, respawn times are gone, there’s a whole ton of in-game awards to be earned and weapon drops are now random.

Thoughts? Impressions? Do you even care?