Hello,
I’ve been posting suggestions on Halo forums for a while now since Halo 3, always avoiding the controversial topics.
But with Halo 4 coming up, I’ve become more active in my suggestions and I think it’s time to get onto the more touchy topics, but still with an “Easy Fix” approach.
Why “Easy Fix”? We need to understand that the game is nearly done: The only thing we can hope for are tweaks, not overhauls. Beta, internal or public, means data freeze. Nothing goes in except what already works within the pipeline, with minimal work. (AKA settings.). The rest of the work is cutting unusable content and bug fixes.
Now, the reason I choose to talk about Bloom rather than Armor Abilities or Specializations is that those things can be solved quite easily with playlists that don’t include them for those that don’t want them. (Though I admit “Faster Shield Regeneration” should be cut, at very least).
I don’t talk about killtimes either, because frankly, if a 5 shot BR takes as long to kill as a 4 shot BR, it makes no difference: It’s just preferences. Same DPS.
Bloom, on the other hand, is a part of the weapons design, and anything short of a fix or complete weapon customization for custom games (the latter which would be unreasonably complex for players to fiddle with, though still appreciated) would be inadequate.
The game simply can’t ship without this being resolved.
Long introductions aside–and TL;DR–here’s my proposition:
-All precision weapons have zero bloom.
-Instead of bloom, their rate of fire is reduced (this means fires slower/more time between shots) by the amount of time required for their normal bloom value to reset to zero. This is identical to manually waiting for bloom to reset to zero after every shot.
-The bloom visual indicator persists, but is only utilized to indicate to the player when the weapon is able to fire again. I believe this is currently the case for the Reach Sniper Rifle. (The visual indicator could still be switched off in the menus.)
I think this is the fairest compromise possible for these reasons:
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It is probably feasible by 343 using only the most basic settings, thus a small workload.
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Weapons will never fire in a random manner, thus making it a clearer showcase of skill and allowing more skilled players to come on top (larger skill gap).
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Less skilled players will NEVER have to worry about timing their shots, thus allowing the game to be more accessible. Easy to learn, hard to master.
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The carefull balancing that 343 have done while testing the weapons is still taken into consideration.
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Finally, removing the player’s ability to make poor timing choices allows all their abilities and brainpower to concentrate on actual gameplay and tactics rather than rythm games.
(Think of it as casting spells in an action-RPG without the possibility to “fail” casting. Or high-level tennis, where players rarely make flimsy shots and concentrate on combatting their opponent rather than compensating for their own failures.)
I know that by posting this, I’m probably asking for it to be torn apart by savage forumites, but I really think this is the easiest way for us to get along, and is a fair compromise.
While this post only covers Precision Weapons, I may cover Automatic Weapons in the future. I also had a post about playlists somewhere, but I can’t find it.
For now though, I ask for your support on this.
Thank you.
If you agree with this, or just enjoy the read, I also have other, less controversial conversation topics that are thought out with the same easy-fix approach and that I think are worth continuing, despite sluggish view counts (Shameless self-promotion!):
On Assassinations
On Fireshare