We’ve all been there a hundred times. It’s been a long and hard fought match, armories have been traded left and right. There was a brief moment in the game where snipers were literally everywhere and you couldn’t walk outside until someone spawned a banshee and cleared them all out. You’ve watched marines disintegrate before your eyes, screaming their last. You were there when one of your teammates fearlessly charged a 20ft tall Mantis mech, dodging the earth shaking stop and bringing it down with a single well shoved grenade.
It all comes down to this. “It’s Warden Eternal. We win if we take him out.” A glance at the scoreboard tells you what you already know in your gut. The enemy is within a Warden kill of a win as well.
There’s no time to waste. You grab the best REQ you can afford. A vehicle, rockets, anything that can put the hurt on the Promethean son of a gun. And then the two teams collide. Two friendly scorpions are whittling down his health, while behind them, a lone member of your team fends off boarders with a shotgun and nerves of steel. You join the rest of the team in trying to push the enemy away, keep them away from the Warden. A sniper you’d been saving since you got it in a daily win pack becomes your teams god send. Headshot. Headshot. Hat trick. It takes the whole team, and more than a few casualties, but you push the enemy back and turn your sights on the Warden as his health dwindles. This is it. It’s yours.
A red targeting laser aimed at his back signals the end of the match. The Warden has gotten too close to the- wait, that laser’s coming from the enemy side of the map. No. No! NONONONONONON-
The beam burns through the warden’s exposed weak point, and your heart. The words flash across your HUD, and even though it’s technically impossible, you fall to your knees. “Enemy eliminated Warden Eternal.”
Sorry. Needed a creative writing exercise for the day. But my point being, yes, it’s annoying, frustrating, heart-breaking even when the enemy steals a boss kill. But… is it necessarily a BAD thing? Like, an objectively bad thing for the game? Because as much as it hurts when it happens to you, there are few Halo thrills greater than snatching victory of the jaws of defeat for your team with one perfectly times kill steal. The team that had their boss kill ganked will curse all the way home, but that guy who stole the kill? He or she feels like they’re on top of the world. It’s FUN to steal a boss kill from an enemy. It’s a last ditch tactic or an all out nail biting gambit when it literally comes down to the last BR bullet.
There are hundreds of things in the game that are annoying to have them done to you but incredibly fun to do yourself. While this isn’t IDEAL game design (as Extra Credit once pointed out, in ideal game design, attacks/abilties/items aren’t just fun to use, they’re still fun when someone uses them on you. An example I can think of would be the alien abilities in XCOM. When one gets used on you, it sucks, but its fun because now you’re being presentedwith an all new tactical challenge that two seconds ago you weren’t thinking of.) it’s perfectly common for a game behavior/tactic to be fun for the aggressor and not so fun for the victim. (See anything with “Noob” in its nickname.)
Shoot, plenty of other things in Halo itself, present since the Bungie days, have always felt cheap, dirty, and unfair. I can’t be the only one who gets outright angry when they’re killed with a rocket launcher or shotgun. And yet, they are staples of the franchise because they’re fun to use and meaningfully inform gameplay.
On a different, slightly less relevant note, it’s not like having our kills stolen is a new feeling for us. Let he who says he enjoys getting the wingman medal step forward, so that the rest of us may call him a liar, afterall.
A boss kill stolen from you is annoying and prone to elicit words best not used in front of our mothers, but maybe we should just see it as part of the game. Thoughts?
