Alright so lets start with what were the aims of current theater design.
- spectator support for anyone to watch anyone.
- hcs.
- sever connected so a game can be spectated by anyone
Now the problem with theater is that its not really helping the people who use it. ie people who want to watch their own gameplay. the problem with that is the lag between players and server is different for everyone. also it is not consistent so we cant be sure if we hit the enemy or not. so here is my theater design that fulfills both those who watch there own games and for hcs as well.
So first things first it will still not feature campaign theater because the AI is dynamic, blah, blah reasons that were there for its absence in h4 and h5.
Secondly now coming to solving problems of players who watch there own games. So we want the theater to represent exactly what happened when we played it in real time but that is not possible so long as theater is online. solution? make it offline. now i know you are thinking its destroyed the main points of h5 theater design as till the match is not complete and theater file is uploaded people can not spectate. just hold on people. back to point. now the theater, now offline will record every match of arena and customs only because that’s really where we want accuracy. it will record everything just like halo 3, odst, 4 did and save it to hdd. I mean if games can take 100gb of space we should definitely have no problems with storing a 4 to 10 mb file.
Thirdly, about the 2 to 3 minutes delayed spectating feature. even though the games are recorded on console itself, servers will still record those matches and every other gametypes that halo 6 will provide, This will surely help in keeping the delayed spectation thing going… though i believe it will be better to drop this feature. i dont think many people use it anyways.
So basically server will still record all games for anything 343 might want to do with that but console itself will record arena and customs for the sake of accuracy.
or even better 343 can just totally drop online theater and make it just like previous halos which I highly doubt that 343 will do as a very persistent habit of tearing down things that truely worked before… just a bit of rant got in the way. anyways let me know what do you guys think of this design? Leave any suggestions you might have about it.