I have been playing competitive Halo since Halo CE. Halo 2 got me into Xbox Live and will be forever in my opinion the greatest multiplayer game for any system. While some gameplay changes Bungie implemented over the years have annoyed me, the franchise has always had the best competitive multiplayer.
I was excited for Halo 4; previews looked great. However after playing it, I cannot express how disappointed I am to see what has happened to this franchise. I understand that games change and we can’t be stuck in yesteryear and that developers are always looking for new ways to innovate. However, there are 3 fundamental flaws with gameplay overall that I can’t help but address. Competitive Halo fans, I know you are out there. I browse the forums and I never see these things addressed, so I am doing my best to put this out there. 343, if you are listening and care about the people that have been playing these games for THOUSANDS of hours over the last DECADE, how about a response to the issues that I know that a lot more competitive gamers share with me?
INFINITY SLAYER: This is a great concept. When I first saw it I was skeptical of the instant respawn but interested to see what kind of changes it would bring. That being said, this is a cool PLAYLIST, not something that needs to define the slayer experience for this game. There are countless FPS titles out there and what makes Halo unique from every stupid COD cookie cutter ever created is that there are WEAPONS ON THE MAP. The entire strategy of Halo revolves around weapon placement, weapon management, and dare I say it, skill. I have listened to all of your interviews and realize that you want to make your game move faster. I realize that popping power weapons into everyone’s hands can make the game a lot more noob friendly. There is no reason however, that you cannot put a playlist into this game that retains classic Halo roots:
Default Weapon Loadout: everyone gets the same thing. A lot of these ‘load out’ weapons need to be available on the map only. Cough the one-shot BS Boltshot, the vehicle destroying side-arm plasma pistol.
Weapons spawn on the map: I know this is not something difficult for you people to implement because it happens at the beginning of every game with ordinance drops. Just set up weapon respawns like every other Halo and bring classic strategy back to this game.
There is no reason why you cannot please both casual and competitive gamers. Ordinance drops allow players to get random power weapons at any spot on the map at any point during the game and SERIOUSLY kill a lot of the competitive nature of this game. There is no way to accurately predict what is going to happen to your Spartan as you turn a corner when you have no idea what the hell weapons are out there in the hands of your enemy. I also am delighted when I am at one area of the map and a rocket launcher falls into the laps of the enemy team on the other end of the map from out of the damn sky. That’s fair, predictable, and highly strategic! I thought for sure that your team slayer pro playlist would be classic. I thought before the game came out, ‘infinity slayer looks cool but there is no way they will strip the franchise of the one aspect of gameplay that has totally defined it by not having a classic playlist.’ I could not believe that was my only slayer option.
ROTATING PLAYLISTS: Out of the countless gripes I have with this game, this has got to be one my biggest. 343, you put this game out a week before COD BO2 came out. I have always despised every aspect of COD, but I am quite aware that the majority of the population will throw their wallets at anything that bears the COD logo. Thus, it would make sense to me that you would want to make a great game to compete with COD and get the traffic playing Halo back up close to where it was in the Halo 2 and 3 days; it makes absolutely no sense to me why you would take something as simple as ADDING A PLAYLIST to your game and restrict that in a way where playlists rotate in and out, as if they are prizes that shouldn’t already be included in a game I spent over $60 for. Double Team has always been my favorite playlist and I wait every week to see its ‘debut.’ How much space and time does it take to just add these playlists into the game? Who cares if only 50 people are playing them if THEY ARE HAPPY PLAYING THEM? They are playing your game are they not? If Bungie could accomplish this feat in 2005 and offer more playlists than we knew what to do with, WHY ARE WE MOVING BACKWARDS? This is one of the dumbest things I have ever seen in the history of this franchise. Make people happy, put the playlists in the game and leave them there. You take KOTH out last week because you kept Team Regicide; you act like there is a limit on the playlists you can have available before the servers crash? Get real. Let us play the damn game.
VEHICLES SUCK: I remember during my really competitive Halo 2 days when no matter how good you and the people you were playing were, there was always huge respect for vehicles in terms of their ability to swing the game one way or another. One huge complaint that I have had with Halo since Halo 3 was in the way that vehicle health was changed. I think that Halo 2 was perfect in that no matter how damaged a vehicle got, it could not be destroyed unless you had no shields and died with it. This has been transformed to the total BS where someone could snipe my Wraith TANK 5 times and blow it up. This game does no better justice to vehicles. While you can wreck someone in a Ghost, it is unbelievable how quickly you can get totally destroyed in it if more than one person is shooting you with their rifle. The vehicle has next to zero health. This combined with the fact that you can SPAWN with a pistol that has the ability to totally disable your vehicle, SPAWN with plasmas, and that random weapons are always falling from the sky including rail guns, Spartan Lasers, rockets, Incen cannons and SAWs makes getting in a vehicle a stupid decision 90% of the time. Vehicles have always been a staple of this franchise, why do you nerf them so much? I read a post in the forum that couldn’t have said it better: “[the warthog is the] staple vehicle of the UNSC. It should be the spearhead in an attack, not staying in the back trying to avoid the fight for fear of being shredded in seconds.” Why not link the vehicle health to the driver (again something that Bungie could apparently accomplish seven years ago, yet we get rid of)? Basically, if its not broken, why fix it? If you are going to keep everything else the same, then why not at least give their firepower a bigger boost? Let the gunner be able to kill someone quicker than hitting them for 5 seconds straight so they have a change to get some kills before being destroyed by DMRs across the map.
Are you going to try to save this game 343, or are you happy with the casual gamers that eat it up the way it is? Does it matter if the die hard Halo fans are still playing this game a year from now, or did you already collect all your money from the game and the DLC, and it doesn’t matter either way what the shelf life of this title is?
I write this out of love for Halo. There is a lot you have done right but fundamentals where you dropped the ball.
11 years of Halo strong,
Qsurf
