Halo has evolved over time with Sprint, and Dive and Clamber and Heavy Artillery.
But Vehicles have not evolved. This is the problem.
COMMON ISSUES:
-map design just doesn’t work for vehicles. Either hard to drive/maneuver in them, or too easy to get to cover and hide for players.
-too many strong guns that are too easy to use on vehicles
-grapple, sprint and faster game also makes them less useful and they are easier to spot
EXPLAINATION
-There are too many ways to destroy common vehicles: Grapple, gravity hammer, skewer, rocket, shock rifle+nades, sniper, heatwave, cindershot.
-What’s the point in getting from point A to B faster only to be alarmingly highlighted on radar and then get overheated and blown up to pieces?
-I drive the Gungoose/Rocket Hog, maybe hit one or two people, and then get rocketed or Shock rifled and disabled (Ghost is not terrible though).
-Banshee/Wasp - too many invisible walls. Hard to maneuver. Slow missles.
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS
(It’s going to sound wild, but I hope you understand the concept and refine and fine tune them to suit the game)
-The ATV needs to have a jump feature.
-The Wasp needs to have Cloak ability.
-The banshee needs shield activated when doing barrel rolls.
-The warthog needs repulsor in the front and back, or maybe over shield can be applied to the warthog.
-The ghost needs a spin move to detach grapplers.
-Maybe have a quicker eject feature, or a eject feature that launches you in the air, that would be fun.
Do something. Anything. Get the vehicles up to the same par as the movement and weaponry.
The vehicles are indeed broken and therefore you have to design a way to fix it.
Correct. There are too many ways to “counter” vehicles combined with bad map design which makes Vehicles feel bad. I’ve been saying this since flight: Vehicles aren’t blowing up enough, and anti vehicle sources are too many in a match.
Take a simple map like Deadlock for example. Just off spawn, each base has:
3 Plasma/Dynamo spawns, with 1 Grapple nearby. This is too many. That’s like 6 chances to shut down vehicles vs a static spawn of 1 Ghost, 2 Goose, 1 Hog.
And not to mention the map sometimes randomly decides the game should have Hydras, so that’s another source of anti vehicle.
And if this isn’t enough, there is usually 1 Hammer or Launcher power weapon too. AND THIS ISN’T EVEN COUNTING AIRDROPPED ORDNANCE.
But that’s just examples to highlight a point: Infinite’s problem is that the map designer doesn’t know the importance of static spawns, and designing pick ups based on the map itself. You don’t just randomly air drop stuff into the map ecosystem and expect it to be okay.
What needs to be done across all maps is for someone to sit down and think carefully what should spawn and what shouldn’t and stop doing random racks. For a map like Fragmentation for example:
Maybe have 1 Anti Vehicle power weapon in middle bunker.
Maybe have only at most 1 set of Dynamos in the middle bunker as well.
Maybe remove all other Dynamos from the map to make the middle bunker a hotspot for controlling powerful pick ups.
Maybe have more Spike grenades spawn at bases so they can use these Spikes to skirmish in middle bunker or Loot caves.
See? This is how consideration for how a map is played shapes the spawns of pick ups on a specific map, rather than randomly giving people all sorts of guns, some belonging in the map and some just too strong to have in buckets.
Is that all you could come up with? I’ll give you some food for thought. Try Halo CE 20-year old vehicles, and then come back to HI’s vehicles.
You will then realize that:
A HI warthog cannot even climb up a short ledge/pavement. So much for a supposedly 4x4 vehicle. It’s no stunt material anymore. You can’t even exit the gunner seat at any angle you want.
A HI ghost can’t climb up a short ledge/pavement either. It’s wheelie is almost useless too.
A HI banshee cannot fly in circles, cannot take really tight turns without breaking, and it’s normal mode speed is slower. Pretty lame.
Outside of a few vehicles. I get a lot of use out of BTB maps. Ghosts, hogs ( LAAG preferably ), wasps and Tanks. ATV’s for when I just need to get somewhere fast.
I can usually get enough done in them to warrant using them, unless I try to over come way more then I can handle. Which is not the vehicles problem, it’s mine or my teammates going somewhere we thought might have one or two enemies but ended up with waaaay more.
Some of these vehicles definitely do not need a buff either. Wasps for instance can be a down right pain to deal with if they play defensively.
I do wish the brute choppe and banshee were a little better, at least in comparison to their counter parts though.
Depending on the weapon spawns, each team could have:
A Hydra
A Shock Rifle
A Sentinel Beam
A Heatwave
A Disruptor
Honorable mention: The Ravager
and in the middle
A hammer
Sniper/Skewer
Rockets/Cindershot
plus stickies and dynamos
Half of this stuff is on like 30s-60s timers. Red pads don’t exist in BTB so if someone has, say, a shock Rifle, you can just wait a minute and get one too.
The vehicles really aren’t that bad, but shock weapons and narrow pathways undermine them too frequently. Perhaps 343 should either nerf shock weapons or set their spawn locations further away from the bases.
I agree with you. The crappy btb map design doesn’t help vehicles at all. Obstacles everywhere, shock and stick nades spawning all over the map, power weapons too plentiful. Maybe if we got some new maps things would be better.
I’ll give you some food for thought. Try Halo CE 20-year old vehicles, and then come back to HI’s vehicles.