With only 50 days to launch, Halo 4 revealed its Covenant weaponry and a trailer showing the weapons in action today.
With only 50 days to launch, Halo 4 revealed its Covenant weaponry and a trailer showing the weapons in action today.
The weapons include a Plasma Pistol (a directed-energy weapon capable of semi-automatic firing and a scaled-burst effect which disables electronics), the Needler (fires crystaline shards that home in, impale, and detonate on soft targets), the Storm Rifle (automatic, direct-energy weapon), the Covenant Carbine (semi-automatic with mid-range accuracy and fires ballistic rounds), the Beam Rifle (an extreme-range sniper rifle), the Concussion Rifle (fires explosive bolts of plasma at close-range), the Fuel Rod Cannon (used against heavy armor), the Energy Sword (a superheated plasma sword), and the Gravity Hammer (a close-range brute weapon).
"The Covenant weapons in Halo 4 presented us with an interesting design challenge," the developers wrote on the Halo 4 blog. "Traditionally, they haven't been as popular as their UNSC counterparts, and they get much less use across the board.
"From a high level, we still wanted them to feel alien, futuristic, and technologically advanced (or at the very least, foreign) when compared to human weaponry, but we also wanted them to be equally viable choices. This was not an easy problem to solve."
The blog post goes on the explain the design decisions the team made to resolve the issues the Covenant weapons presented. The post also contains a detailed discussion between the developers about how each of the Covenant weapons handles.
The trailer introducing the weapons can be viewed below.