A solution for us all: Energy.

Games Halo 5: Guardians
1

Since there’s not exactly anywhere else to post this for Halo 6… I want to share an idea I had with you all.

And I want this idea to stay relevant for a long time to come, because I believe it can please every possible party in Halo’s community. Please, give me a chance to explain.

Thrusters. The single biggest change to the Halo formula. This isn’t even debatable, because it gave us the most dividing thing yet- infinite sprint. People have been up in arms about Sprint since Reach, but I’ve never had an issue with it. Same with armor abilities. Thing is, Reach had something Halo 5 doesn’t. A visible, finite resource for these abilities.

It comes back, but using it is a strategic choice. There’s not a lot of strategic choice in sprinting forward, aside from a longer time to get your guard up. We all know you can essentially just press B to evade- which I like! I like that just fine! The hovering is nice, the ground pounding is nice, and really, I just like the thruster mechanics. But there’s no visible meters for what I can do and how long it’ll last. So I have a proposition.

Give each of these abilities a pool of energy that is clearly visible.

Hover, pound, evade, sprint, are all thruster reliant abilities and thus, should drain from a recharging, depletable pool. As a proposition, each second of sprinting takes 15% energy, giving you seven seconds of sprinting total. (Gotta work those 7s in there man!). Ground pound’s stages should each take 50%. The shields-off pound, 50. The kill-pound, 100%. Hovering? As much pool as you’ve got, and given that’s sustaining your entire Spartan IV’s mass that’s about 3 seconds as we have now, so 33% per second. Evade? Just like the pound. It’s a sudden burst, but it’s just as sudden a burst and shift as the pound. Give us two evades, because you can’t evade a spartan charge easily with just one.

But y’see what I’m proposing here? A tactical choice and approach to this new system.

I really want to see something like this happen. Make hovering for more than aiming- make it a way to stop fall damage. Double-thrusting? What a huge way to clear gaps! But all things considered, you might not be able to get that energy back in time to slow your fall after a double thrust- indeed you probably won’t. Want to thrust-redirect out of that Mancannon and then killpound? You don’t have the energy for that.

But for those who are anti-sprint.

This gives players all the incentive in the world to use sprint wisely. Suddenly, sprinting becomes a careful, tactical choice- and not the one you take in combat or to get out of it very easily. It’s a repositioning tactic to get to-and-from dangerous points. If somebody wants to sprint to the power weapon that’s their choice, but they won’t be able to evade the oncoming hellfire or keep up with the guys who haven’t used their energy.

The system I propose does not simply remove the new features, but rather, makes the player question whether or not they should use them and how extensively they should use them. A player should be involved at all times in the heat of battle, and 343i has done a splendid job ensuring all the necessary visual cues are there for them. (Like the fact that you can pretty much always see a sniper aiming for you! That’s GREAT! I LOVE that!)

I want sprint to stay.

But I absolutely do not want to see it take control of the pace of Halo. Reach is sometimes called horrible, sometimes called great. I loved it, and loved that Sprint was a choice you could make instead of Armor Lock or a Jetpack- and I always picked that Jetpack! I loved that vertical option, it made things very interesting for me, and left me wide open for attack if I used it wrong. It punished me terribly when I did, but rewarded me beautifully when I didn’t.

When the Spartans fell in Halo 4’s opening to stop damage? Give us that. When they ran on the vertical surface to escape The Guardian’s birth? Give us that. Give us the tactical, thought out choices.

Let the thrusters and such be the extensions of our playstyles and abilities that they were meant to be. Not the crutch they currently are.

2

I don’t want to put players into a position where they feel they need to do something, yet they’re incapable of doing it. As a Ce fan I believe that the individual should be empowered, not nerfed. The player should never feel weak and vulnerable. So as much as I hate sprint I still might almost vote for a working sprint over an inconsistent one that’s frequently unavailable when people need it the most.

Modern Halo seems to be about weakening the player by slamming them with trade-offs for everything in the name of “tactics”. Your gun kills slower now, better rely on your team to take out enemies. You move slower now, better rely on sprinting at the right opportunities. You can’t jump as high now, better not get caught using clamber. You might as well go the full mile and add movement-slowing ADS and accuracy-increasing Prone. As you can probably tell by my current signature I don’t hold this mentality in very high regard. There’s other ways of making a game tactical than adding these surface-level gimmicks, things that genuinely make the game tactical instead of just putting on the air of doing so. I also believe that the only time abilities should have strong trade-offs is when they’d be absolutely overpowered without them.

Sorry, I’m never going to accept sprint in Halo. Not only is it less smooth for gameplay but I also consider it less immersive. By adding sprint you’re just making Spartans feel more human and less special. Instead of moving swiftly in all directions they now have to lower their weapons and limit themselves to one direction, then possibly take a short breather right after.

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Title is a little misleading towards the article, I’m disappointed to see someone’s well thought out idea go practically unnoticed by the community. I think it’s a very interesting point you made about finding a solution towards all the hate thrown at the sprint feature. I like having unlimited sprint because when an armoury or capture point is being taken across the map I can get there quickly, but I can see how putting a limitation might encourage players to think more wisely about their actions. I think I would prefer one evade because having it now does give ONE chance to escape an otherwise fatal grenade or narrowly escape being crushed by a gravity hammer or even just dodge a speeding ghost. It gives you one chance to use wisely, and it somewhat limits your movement around the terrain. One wrong evade can mean restarting your climb onto the top of a garage warzone, and that limits players that are inexperienced with movement mechanics. But I agree with having an indicator or how much power your suit can exert before in needs to recharge. It would fit into the Halo universe because the MJOLNIR suits can only carry a small energy source to power shields and thruster constantly. It would also open up opportunities for more armour mods like unlimited sprint or increased energy by 25%. But something we need to think about is… Is it too late to change? Now that they’ve shown the suits in the Halo Universe can withstand thrusters being used 24/7, will they be able to change what a standard MJOLNIR suit can do and Show the suits have downgraded with time? The Halo universe does have some contradictions I’m sure, but they do extensively create lore and try to create a realistic representation of what the future holds for humankind. Although I feel this is a really good idea, now that 343i has shown what the suits can do, I don’t think they’ll be able to just weaken the suits potential so long after they’ve established the sheer power and ingenuity integrated into each specialized suit.

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Thruster isn’t as good now and it’s all we have. I used thruster pack more for the downward thrust than evade but they didn’t add the downward thrust in halo 5. The thruster never fit my play style I was more about using the hologram. Thing I hated with halo 5 is I feel like I’m being told to play halo a way I didn’t want to and I had my own style that I loved. Now I can’t play any other halo game with out pressing B to evade.

But I feel like ground pound and Spartan charge break the emersion in the game. Ground pound I feels doesn’t make much sence in terms of how much of an impact you have on an area and I feel it should be more pin point than wide ranged, also it need to drain the energy cause you can just spam it. Spartan charge damage doesn’t bother me but I feel it should work more like splattering. There are many times I’ve thrust away from a charging enemy just right it doesn’t touch me and I’m moving away quicker than their impact when a close range weapon would be too far away but the damage is still done with no change.

I think other abilities could still work with the current system it just they would have to be deployable abilities that could be stored with grenades.

With the req system we could of had a variety of all kinds of abilities with variants and maybe cross overs like imagine a hologram/drone so it would be a hologram that fights back.

A lot of people might hate the fact I’m going to mention destiny but they did energy right. It made the abilities and grenades purely tactical.