Already threw this up on my blog, but I decided I’d also post it here.
Today marks the most recent Matchmaking update for Halo 4: Team Action Sack. A random hodgepodge of games intended to give players the crazy, random, and inventive game types that they have been craving from Halo 3 and Halo Reach. The first offerings are Binary Slayer [Binary Rifles only, Low gravity, and increased speed], Rockets [Rocket Launchers and Jet Packs], and Fiesta Slayer. It is this last game type that I wish to discuss.
Fiesta Slayer has been a beloved game type since Halo 3. Random weapons, infinite ammo, go crazy. However, they didn’t do the same thing in Halo 4. When the game loads, you still get to choose one of your loadouts, but as you do that, you hear “Ordnance Ready.” That’s right. Instead of randomly spawning with your weapons, you get to choose what weapon you spawn with. Ordnance is given to you under two conditions: first, you always get personal ordnance on spawn. That means one weapon of your loadout means absolutely nothing. The second condition is that you get points. It doesn’t matter if it’s a kill, an assist, or a distraction. You get points, you get a weapon. I loved it. Interestingly, the game type also disabled radar, so you had no idea when you were going to get blind sided. It was random, it was crazy, it was fun.
After that, I decided to go in to a game of Infinity Slayer, the standard slayer experience 343 had given to Halo 4. I discovered something. Despite being more “controlled” than Fiesta Slayer, and having a radar, it still felt random. There was no knowing when I was going to be blind sided by a Sniper or a Shotgun at any point. That’s when it dawned on me. The main problem with the ordnance system is that the personal ordnance is too random, and happens too often.
In previous Halo games, it has always been known what is on the map at any given time. Players spawn with this weapon, the map has these weapons. That’s it. Halo 4 changed that. Loadouts allow players to customize what they spawn with, which I think is fine. Everyone has their own play style, let them reflect that. The on-map ordnance, ordnance drops that everyone can see, are fine. I saw the icon on the map, I know it’s there. I know when someone picks it up. Those are fine.
Personal ordnance, however, is never visible to the player unless they called it in. Hidden information about extremely powerful weapons, never to be seen by the opposing team. This is a sudden change, as Halo has always been about a level playing field. Now, it can be hidden that someone has something as destructive as the Incineration Cannon. Sure, other FPS games have hidden, destructive information. Call of Duty comes to mind first. However, the difference in CoD is that these destructive things are one-shot items, and take a long killing spree to obtain. In Halo 4, that’s not the case. Someone could get a bunch of assists and be “rewarded” with a Binary Rifle, which has 6 shots, all one-hit kills no matter where they hit on the player. Wow.
Does this make me like Halo 4 any less? No. I still like the game as a whole. Grifball, Action Sack, Team Throwdown, the objective gametypes. They are all still very fun. However, Infinity Slayer is not a well constructed game type. What do we do, then?
Make personal ordnance happen a lot less often. The randomness, in that case, is fine. It means that about half way through the game, a sudden spike in crazy weapons occurs, then as ammo runs out, everything starts to calm down. It’ll force players to consider when to use those weapons, instead of just spamming those weapons for kills and getting a new ordnance in the process. This means grabbing the weapons that appear on the map is much more important, emphasizing map control. This reduces not only the lone wolf mentality that has been dominating Halo 4 as of late, but also reduces camping, as the best weapons need to be obtained by working together to keep the opposing team at bay. Much better than just sitting in a specific point of the map, waiting until you get weapons delivered to you in your ordnance three to four times a game [Abandon, I’m looking at you].