Podtacular

After our little rant last week, we’re talking about one of the things that excites us the most with Infinite, having the Banished being the main antagonist. We thoroughly enjoyed the story told in Halo Wars 2 and the possibility of continuing that story in Infinite is a great way to experience the Banished in a new way and some differences fighting them compared to the Covenant. As usual, we have our Halo and community updates as well.

The past couple of weeks has definitely shaken up the community with the announcement of coatings replacing primary and secondary armor colors and the departure of Chris Lee from 343. While we still don’t know a lot about Halo Infinite and the inner workings of 343, the community is in an uproar and people are trying to spell doom for Halo Infinite. With that said, we’ve taken this episode to talk about how we should respond to this news and any future news we may hear about game development or employee changes. It is time for the Halo community to stop being divided and stirring up dread and find ways we can support people with different opinions and show support for the studio in these challenging times. We all have our concerns and we want to see Infinite succeed, so we hope you’ll listen to the whole show and join us in being a positive influence for the Halo community.

It’s the season of Haloween and there’s some spooky stuff happening in MCC, infecting playlists, challenges and undoubtedly, community content to come. Joining us for our little adventure though the latest community update and content is Andrew from TeamRespawn, on of the more well-known Halo Wars communities. Although the RTS games aren’t 343’s main focus area lately, there’s surprisingly a solid player-base logging in and playing matches every week.

It’s been about three months since we last covered the latest fan project updates so it’s time to dust off the news from fan games and fan mods across the Halo community. It certainly a bit of a smaller update this time around, no doubt to school and universities starting back up, the pandemic and general life priorities, but we were treated with a very special sneak peek during the live recording of this show. Ignivirex from Project Autumn surprised us by dropping an exclusive first look at some of the armor that’s been developed for the project. We’re certainly excited to see development across all these projects, and if you’d like to hear from any of the dev teams, let us know and we’ll get them on the show! As always, we go through the normal gambit of Halo and community news.

The final flight of MCC is just around the corner as Halo 4 is undergoing the final tests before Halo Insiders are able to get their hands on Halo 4 for PC. Make sure your Insider profile is up-to-date as everyone in the program will receive an invite. We’ve got our normal roundup of community news, official announcements and community creations.

We’re back with the latest community spotlight and the release of Halo 3: ODST after taking the week off. DJ has also survived the West Coast fires and is back in prime form. In addition to the routine playlist calendar updates and community news, we have a few new products including a really cool official ODST cosplay guide.

We’ve got a short show, again without DJ as he’s recovering from the smote on the US West Coast, and with us going on break, we just decided to do a quick wrap-up to come back swinging in a couple of weeks. We have several guests and topics we’re excited to cover so enjoy the week off and be ready for a nice comeback. Also, Halo 3: ODST comes out within the week!

It’s time for another book discussion as we dive into the second installment of the Battle Born series: Meridian Divide. We continue our story following the four teens as they attempt to prevent the Covenant getting their hands on the Forerunner artifact on Meridian, but that’s just scratching the surface. There’s not a lot of community for Halo specific updates this week, but we did get the price and release date drop for the Xbox Series X and S.

It’s pretty infrequent where we get a running gag in a show that we can pull off a non-Halo title, but is totally related to the continued running joke throughout. This is one of those time and it just so happens DJ is to blame this time. Between community creation stories and dolphins, this one is certainly a delight. We’ve not got just one, but two community spotlights to pick out our favorites from, new Halo products, Monster Double XP announcement, MCC development update, and plenty more Halo tid-bits to discuss.

A Halo veteran has returned! Joe Staten, the mastermind behind most of the campaign experience during the Bungie era games has returned to Halo development as the Project Lead for Campaign for Halo Infinite after releasing Tell Me Why just last week. Since missing a week due to yet more technology issues, we have a lot of community content to highlight as we work back to a normal schedule. We’ve also got ODST flighting!

All good things come with time and patience and unfortunately with the announcement of Halo Infinite being delayed until 2021, we’re going to have to exercise that patience a little longer. Ultimately, this will ensure the team is not overworked at home because of COVID and we get the product we all want at launch. In the meantime, there’s still plenty of new community happenings going on including the return of the MCC Pro Series and the latest Community Spotlight.

There’s something that hooks us into a franchise and with one such as Halo, there’s many different facets of the game that get fans to dedicate hours to playing the game or investing time in other areas like the lore. While our nostalgia for a franchise can keep us coming back to it time and time again, it can also turn against us as our innate desire to resist change kicks in and any alteration can come across as encroaching on our experiences. In this episode, we discuss how nostalgia hurts a franchise in this two-part series in collaboration with SacredIconHalo. We are pleased to have their hosts Bryansbane and Jovialjoshy on to share their thoughts and contribute to the discussion. Over on there podcast, you’ll find a discussion on how nostalgia can help a franchise, where our very own Dust Storm joins SacredIconHalo for their latest episode.

With Halo Infinite news subsiding for the time being, we have the opportunity to have another guest on the show and this week. We have one of our recent favorite content creators, General Heed on the show to talk about how he comes up with his video ideas and goes about producing them. We’ve got your regular updates and community news in the show as well.

The dust has settled on the influx of Halo news from the last week and there’s so many new tidbits of info that came out after the campaign demo, like confirmed split-screen, co-op up to 4 players, and even after the podcast was done, multiplayer was confirmed to be free-to-play! Of course, the community has it’s fair share of complaints and concerns, some more reasonable than others. We discuss the latest community concerns and 343 responses to the overwhelming questions and criticisms. We highly recommend everyone head over to Halo Waypoint and read up on the Infinite Inquiries blog post. Also, joining the repertoire of DJ’s ever growing list of characters, we are happy to have Craig and the aptly-named Chuck (the grunt launched by the brute) as guests on the show.

The Xbox Games Showcase featured the latest information regarding Halo Infinite including the marketing teaser Become – Step Inside, a campaign demo and a campaign trailer. With the campaign demo, there is a lot to break down including new game play mechanics, weapons, Banished War Chief Escherum, new lore mentions, and an open world concept. Of course, everything we see is subject to change, but it gives us a pretty good idea of what we’ll see come November. It’s awesome to finally start seeing glimpses of what the next Master Chief story will entail. Discussions with and about games on https://nimfomane.org