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Ok, so what are your opinions about the changes that 343 industries will be making to Halo 5, seen in the blog post here: How Fans Helped Shape the Multiplayer of Halo 5 Guardians?
Personally, I think that 343 industries is still missing the point on a LOT of these changes. Here’s why:
Halo is a game about options. You can choose how you want to play it. For campaign, the best missions are when you’re provided with an environment, a whole bunch of weapons and vehicles to choose from, and an objective. So, how many ways can you take down a Scarab? How much of the Silent Cartographer island do you want to explore? Which objective should you go to first? Should you go on foot, in a ground vehicle, or fly? Sometimes, options are more limited, but there’s always more than one way to complete the campaign mission–or there’s supposed to be, anyway. Training sections are different, [PoA, how to jump and crouch, The Armory: these are your shields, this is how you aim. Dawn: This is a quicktime event. You need to know how to deal with these, because we’re going to give you another one at the end of the game.].You get the idea. Custom games and Forge giveyou as many options as possible so you can change the game yourself.
Matchmaking is the same thing. You have a variety of playlists. Pick one. Vote for the map and/or gametype. Start the match. Choose a playstyle that suits you. If there’s vehicles, you don’t even need to enter a vehicle in the entire match, because you have a number of ways you can counter them on foot. Don’t like sniping because you can never kill anyone? That’s fine. Don’t use a sniper weapon. Prefer not to melee? That’s fine, you can dual-wield weapons–or you once could, anyway. I think you get the idea.
Take a look at what 343 industries has actually done:
- Increased base speed (faster base movement)- Increased strafe acceleration (faster, more responsive strafing)- Reduced top sprint speed (narrow the delta [change in velocity] between base movement and sprint)- Modified Ground Pound controls to prevent conflicts w/ crouch jumping- General tuning & bug fixes for all Spartan Abilities (Thrusters, Clamber, Ground Pound, etc.)- Sniper Rifle: improve scope experience to making it less “clunky” and faster to scope- DMR: adjust position of the scope to improve visibility- Bring back the SPNKr Rocket Launcher as a legendary version of the weapon- Reduce bonuses for automatic weapons in Smart-Link & w/ headshots- Remove grenade detonation in mid-air based on weapon fire- Ability to turn on/off vibration feedback for weapons- General tuning and bug fixing for all weapons- Post-death replay: this will become an opt-in feature. After death, players will see a traditional follow-cam and have the option to view a replay of their death from the killer’s perspective (as long as the feature is enabled within the playlist)- Medals: decrease frequency and number of medals displayed in the medal feed- Spartan chatter: players will have the option to turn this on or off in the settings menu- Adding highlights to placed/dropped weapons to make them easier to see- General tuning for announcer and Spartan chatter to reduce the frequency of events and focus on the information that matters most to playersMost of these fall under “tweaks.” As, in “we’re tweaking the experience, not adding anything new to it, because the idea itself is just fine in our opinion.”
Let me just touch on the italicized points. Medals exist to provide the player information they didn’t already know, or may have had difficulty deducing. Killing Sprees, Muti-kill medals, kill from beyond the grave medals, skill medals [like headshots], are those sort of medals. Medals like “close call” or “supercombine”…*.*or “assassination” or “distraction” are not necessary. You may as well have a “You died!” medal.
Adding highlights to weapons? Wouldn’t need them if the lighting was better.
Sprint? You’re narrowing the gap between the two speeds so there’s less of a difference between using it and not using it? Why not go all the way? Just make the Spartan animations look like they’re sprinting all the time, and maybe have them sit down in the middle of a match for a cup of tea, because they’re so tired after running so fast all the time. Seriously, you’ve added sprint, you’ve tied it to shields, you’ve made it infinite, you’ve removed the cool-down timer.
You’ve made it so that you can’t move and shoot at the same time in an FPS–which is ridiculous and applies to vehicle boost abilities, too–take a look at the Gungoose, it can certainly accelerate whilst firing its weapons, as can other UNSC vehicles–and Covenant vehicles could always move whilst shooting in Halo CE, so I don’t get this fascination with “oh, you are moving faster, so now you can’t fire your weapons.”
You’ve made it a base player trait. How does reducing the difference between sprinting and not sprinting help? It’s like you’ve now got a button which allows you to move slightly faster, but whilst using it you can never recharge your shields or fire a weapon. Wow. That’s useful. I can’t see how that would satisfy anybody.
Ok, now how about the bolded points? Most of these are actually examples of 343 industries adding options in to the gameplay which should have existed in the first place. Spartan Chatter. Don’t want it? Turn it off. Weapon Vibration, Post-death replay, etc. Don’t want it? Turn it off. Don’t like the new rocket laucner? Here’s the old one as well. [Btw, weapon and vehicle redundancy is a good thing–I loved having the Heretic Banshee and Brute/Elite Plasma rifles, etc, etc in H2A. Weapon skins are popular, you know.] Want to crouch-jump instead of Ground pound? Here are the controls for it. [Still think they’re missing the point with tying Charge/Slide to Sprint–why can’t you just crouch down, then activate thruster pack to Slide?]. This is good.
But then we have these other points: Reduced bonuses for automatic weapons in smart link with headshots. Not sure what’s going on here–automatic weapons should never be precise enough to get a headshot in except entirely by accident, anyway. They shouldn’t be that precise. Removing the ability to shoot a grenade out of the air? Really? After you went to the trouble of putting in the “use a grenade explosion to fling the weapon towards a certain location” back into the physics engine, now you’re removing another great physics-based game mechanic entirely?
Options, 343i, options. Always give the player more than one viable option in any circumstance. The only time in gameplay when the player should be out of options is when they are dead. The only time in gameplay when there is only one option should be "move to this location to start the awesome cutscene that gives you information, and then opens up the next area. Continued in next post.