343i - IMPORTANT PLEASE READ!!!

Games Halo 5: Guardians
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Dear 343 Industries and curious players,

I have an idea (two, really) that I believe could make Halo 5/Xbox One the core FPS of the Xbox One. This idea has been floating in my brain for awhile, and I think I have it pretty polished to an extent. I know that 343 probably won’t see this, but I encourage all players to share this and like this so there’s a higher change of staff seeing it. I ran a poll on various sites explaining my ideas and the feedback has been nothing but positive. Here goes…

Recently, games like Minecraft, Project Spark, and other building games have been so popular and dominated their platform. Why? It comes down to one thing: player friendly customization. Players want to be able to create more and more things with greater detail. Halo 3 was the first Halo game to feature forge, which was EXTREMELY successful. I cannot tell you how many hours I spent as a kid making forge maps. I just had the problem of getting them known, (I’ll come back to this later in pt 2). We had Bungie favorites, but it didn’t help too much and I never understood how to get players to test/see my maps. Fast forward. Halo Reach and Halo 4 had EPIC improvements in Forge. Mechanics-wise, it’s almost perfect. I know there will be room to improve but there are two things (1 being a large thing) that would make the next Halo game EXPLODE. The future of Halo, and especially Forge lies with BETTER/MORE customization. I’m not just suggesting the usual “more pieces, pelicans and phantoms, etc.” although we could definitely use them.

Part 1: “The big one”
I’ll come right out and say it. Forge-able/spawnable AI’s. Awesome, right? Let me explain. You set player spawns by pulling it up in the menu and configuring it with more/advanced options. What if there were two pieces (AI’s and players). When you spawned the AI spawn point, it could just be a circle or maybe an elite as a general icon sort of thing. You could go into advanced options and choose the type (grunt, elite, jackal, hunter, marines, ODST, Spartan, buggers, crawlers, Knights, etc.) You then select their primary (and secondary?) weapon, grenade type, etc. Obviously certain NPC’s can’t have certain weapons. Like hunters, Jackals/grunts can only wield certain weapons. Also, you can edit their health, and rank (zealots, generals, etc.). Lastly, you can edit their team. The teams are all the different colors that are in the game. So you could have like 5 diff teams, and you could have hunters and ODST’s on your team against elites and grunts, etc. Sound EPIC, right?!? Yes, I know there are some drawbacks. For example, how to script where the AI’s know to go on player forged maps. There are already games out there that utilize this type of technology such as Project Spark, as mentioned earlier. I’m fairly certain this is plausible. If this worked, you’d literally be able to create your own battles and the possibilities are MIND NUMBING. I guarantee once word of this got out, Halo would be #1 game of the year easily. You may wonder how the console would be able to compute/process the AI’s. Trust me, the capabilities of the Xbox One are far beyond this, and it is definitely viable. Now listen up for part 2…

Part 2: (smaller)
As amazing as part one sounds, part 2 is something that I KNOW people would love and I KNOW this is easy (er) to create than the previous thing, but together they would dominate. Anyway, the idea is: forge matchmaking playlist. Now, hear me out because you might have the wrong idea. Players would be able to either host the map/game type, or join someone who is hosting. There is incentive for both. Obviously forge map makers would want someone to play/test their maps/game types and other players would play to see what kind of cool things people are creating. I know I would love to do both. Right away there are flaws, which I will explain how to easily deal with. One is trolls/bad maps/games. People who host bad/troll maps can be banned. It would be up to the players to report trolls and they would be banned, increasing exponentially with each offense. 1 day, 2,4,8,16,32,64 and so on. Also, players could have a separate rank for the playlist perhaps from 1-100. You could either start at 50 or 1. After the game, players could have the option to rate you based on their experience. All the rank would do is show other players your reputation. Players could leave the lobby before the game started if someone was early a troll or had very low score. Player could stay and see if the map was good, and rate them accordingly. Obviously there are minor kinks which could be worked out in the future.

Again, I want to reiterate that player customization is what the players want in all video games, especially in forge. If 343 could pull this off, the game would be monumental. Thanks for taking your time to read, and PLEASE, like, share and make popular so 343 sees this!

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Part 1: Perhaps, I’d like to mention intelligent systems when it comes to learning a map for bots though. However I think I’d much rather have a more fleshed out firefight system.

Part 2: I don’t think player regulated playlists are going to work that well. First of all, you have the kids who just mash in random objects on a map and call it a day, then make a hasty gametype that doesn’t work properly on their map and jump straight into this Playlist with their map. They’re not a troll but they risk getting banned because of their lack of forge skill. Yes, that’s going to make them want to get better at forging.

Then you also have the fact that players will abuse the report system. If I had 10% trash talk on my Reputation score from a period when I didn’t even have my mic plugged in, or close to 60% Unsporting from winning in Halo 3, what do you think will happen when players have to potential power to ban others?

While it’d be a good idea, I don’t see it working very well.

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As I said, there are definitely issues with it. Not any single player will be able to ban another player. At least several people that were in the game would have to report so it’s more sure they’re bad/troll. After all, I accidentally splatter people in multilayer and get banned/kicked from a single player. As for firefight, I definitely agree I would love to have firefight if suggestion one is viable, i’d definite rather have that than firefight mode.

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I like both parts, however, i think it should be simplified down a little bit. E.g:

Part 1: You go into forge, you hit the forge menu, go to ‘Objects’>‘Respawn point’, set the game label to ‘Spawner’, then there would be another list titled “AI’s” within the advanced settings, which would contain three sublists:

Humans>containing a healthy selection of ‘marines’, ‘ODSTs’, and ‘Spartans’.

Covenant>containing Brutes, Elites, and every other species you just mentioned, and finally;

Prometheans>containing all of their own respective classes, and so on.

Within the AI list, there would also be the option to change the settings from ‘friendly’, to ‘enemy’, this would be absolutely perfect for Machinima.

Part 2: Maybe while forging, if you hit the start menu, there would be three modes to choose from instead of 2 - ‘Player mode’, ‘editor mode’, and ‘testing mode’, whereby you would be able to snap into a view that allows you to review your forge options without having to constantly end the game, and get into custom games to see how certain things look on the outside. Essentially, it would be like a reviewing feature while IN FORGE!! Definitely would be very helpful (P.S. this is not my idea). The only catch here is, you won’t be able to utilise any of the features that you are ‘testing’ so to speak, as it is not a Custom game, but merely a third person analysis. As for rankings and ratings and whatnot, then i guess all i can say, is i don’t have a single clue, so i’m not gonna comment on that XD

I hope that helped, and if not, then fair enough, to each his own, i guess.

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For part 2: Why not a ranking matchmaking system. Instead of banning players, players rate each others maps and get a rating (1-10 stars). Before searching you can filter if you only want to play a 10-8, 7-4, 3-0 star players map. Less abusive imo.

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You guys have good ideas. As I said, there are different ways it could work. It would take some polishing but if any one if these were in the new Halo, it would be glorious and be just as successful as one of the core Halo titles.

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Edited by Moderator - Please do not bump/necropost threads.

*Original post. Click at your own discretion.

-Bump-

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> You guys have good ideas. As I said, there are different ways it could work. It would take some polishing but if any one if these were in the new Halo, it would be glorious and be just as successful as one of the core Halo titles.

Ikr, maybe then people won’t have to modify the game so frequently. Haha. Like i said, the machinima directors would drool over this.

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Your ideas honestly aren’t that bad OP, and would definitely contribute to the game. It would be nice to see the Firefight and standard multiplayer experiences integrated into an expanded multiplayer. Your Forge map testing playlist concept sounds a bit appealing as well.

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Thanks for input everyone. Please remember to comment with ideas and keep the thread alive! Thanks