Want to get a camo Elite and gold Elite together for some merging?

(5:00) Level 5 ('Assault on the Control Room') on Easy. Here's a set-up tutorial for the situation seen in BCM286, involving a bluish silver camo Elite and a gold Elite, ready to be merged. To set the scene, I've stolen a Banshee, triggered the level's first covie dropship, and then flown directly to the twin bridges area (skipping a lot of covie spawning as it wasn't needed). I've used Easy to show the easiest set-up. You'd need more care on higher difficulties.

Released May 27th 2018, gameplay recorded May 22nd 2018.

00:02 (Trigger the sleeping Grunts room) Bring a Banshee, a rocket launcher (for later fun with mergings), and I suggest also a pistol. Oh, and have a full load of grenades. To be able to trigger covies in the upper room, the sleeping Grunts room must be triggered first, so cross the loading point to do that. The music may or may not start. When doing takes for the movie, I found that it most often didn't start.

00:23 (Trigger bridge troops, kill 'em) Come back outside, fly up to the first of the twin bridges, dismount, and trigger bridge troops by going through the door. You can actually see one or two Grunts spawning when doing this. Preferably kill all the troops who spawn - or at least any who could bother you later. You can use the Banshee for some of this if you like. Don't cause any more troops to spawn though. That's for later.

01:28 (Ride in the lift, return, get a checkpoint) Head into the room preceding the bridge, bring the lift up (the sleeping Grunts music will end after it arrives) and ride down. At the bottom, hit the switch to return. The upper room will get triggered (initially there's a Jackal to kill), and there's a checkpoint. Make sure you get the checkpoint, to revert to in case anything goes wrong later.

02:00 (Draw the gold outside and kill him) Draw the gold Elite out to the bridge and kill him. Other covies can be killed or bypassed. On Easy they're not much threat but you'd need more care on Heroic. Around 2:28 you see me decimating the exit troops with a fast-acting frag (partly because it's fun), but you could tackle them another way if you prefer to keep all your frags for later. E.g. you could use a plasma and replace it later, or just charge in with a bit of shooting and quickly get beyond them. Sometimes this group includes an Elite, but other times as here, the Elite spawns in the room.

For drawing the gold outside, it's useful to have a plasma pistol to stun him and get him raging after you. That's why I left my launcher on the bridge, swapped for a plasma pistol. But an alternative is to keep the launcher with you and temporarily use a plasma pistol from one of the exit troops. When the gold gives chase he may sometimes get held up in the passage, possibly losing sense of you, but a shot can draw him on.

03:02 (Trigger and kill the adjacent guard) Trigger the adjacent cloaked guard and kill him. Here I do it in the Banshee, blasting him as soon as the door opens, but an alternative is to land on the deck, let him come out after you, and take him down with pistol fire. There's a chance his spawning will cause the gold's body to be removed, but it seems low so I didn't bother mentioning it in the movie.

03:12 (Blast the bodies down and into position) Blast the bodies down to the snow and move them into the door frame corner ready for merging. You may also like to move the nearby Shade clear.

03:55 (Get a delayed checkpoint) To get a handy checkpoint at the scene, trigger and delay the checkpoint associated with the end group of the first bridge. A low pass will do for triggering them. However, the spawning might cause one or both of your bodies to be removed. The chance doesn't seem high (based on my experience across multiple set-ups), but if you want to guard against that, be looking towards them when doing the triggering - something I demonstrate in an extra clip from a later set-up. I think that'll work, even though the bodies are so far off that you can't really see them.

Both times when I trigger the end group, you can actually see one or more bridge bodies being subsequently removed. You might think, "How come the game is removing bodies which are in sight?" I think it's a flaw in the game. Looks like it hasn't taken the third-person perspective into account. In deciding whether a body is outside your view so it can be freely removed, I think the game actually only uses MC's first-person field of view - which is narrower than the third-person view you're currently getting.

Closing remarks Just to clarify, this gameplay showed the creation of the save used in the first three minutes of BCM286. Except, the final clip shows my checkpointing for the save used in the rest of that movie.

There was one small mistake in my set-up work. Having used up one of my plasmas along the way, I neglected to replace it, though I could easily have done so (e.g. a Grunt dropped a plasma around 2:12, and the camo guy dropped a few too). Actually I'd been expecting to get a replacement from the exit troops in the passage. But unusually, I didn't walk over any, and then I forgot about it.

Originally when wanting to get a gold together with a camo guy, I thought of using the gold on the level's first bridge, and the camo guy from the subsequent room. However, I had trouble getting the camo guy to rage after me, due to his fragility. I was playing on Heroic and he kept dying. Maybe I'll give that another look sometime, but I switched to the level's second gold and he was easy to draw outside, so I stuck with him. To begin with I wasn't using the camo guy from the adjacent bridge though; I was using the one from the end group of the initial bridge. But later I remembered the camo guy opposite, and realized he'd actually be more convenient, and it would leave the far group free for providing a final checkpoint.

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