I would really love to relive the original Plasma Rifle from Halo CE. The weapon was absolutely perfect. It was fully-automatic, perfectly accurate if the trigger is tapped, but had a lot of spread if held. Spraying shots at a player stunned them, causing their aim and movement to be slowed. When fired single shot, the weapon remained accurate up to medium range when lead properly. Something that more weapons in the game need to do is reward headshots. The Plasma Rifle was able to get an 11-shot kill if just body shots, but aiming for the head and remaining accurate knocked it down to 9.
Now doesn’t that just sound -Yoink!-? So much better than any other automatic weapon in the entire series.
As a big fan of the Plasma Rifle (in pretty much every game), I approve of this!
I would love to see this weapon return for Halo 4. Because they put this weapon in Halo Anniversary but they got rid of the stun effect which made the weapon just suck so bad that I had to pick up the AR again.
No no, it has too much spread, it takes no skill at all…
/Sarcasm
I prefer the Brute Plasma Rifle, but that is just me…
In my honest opinion, the plasma stun isn’t even needed. The weapon would work just fine if it maintains accuracy while firing semi-automatically. The headshot bonus is definitely necessary, too.
> No no, it has too much spread, it takes no skill at all…
> /Sarcasm
>
> I prefer the Brute Plasma Rifle, but that is just me…
In CE it had small enough spread too make it a viable mid-range weapon.
I do love the Brute variant, if only because it is red. I do really like red.
That gun reminds me of an airplane, very effective against Flood too.
What happened to the PR after Halo CE can’t even be described with words.
Now the plasma rifle is probably my favorite weapon from CE, but…
…I’m going to cast a veto in this ballot. “Bring weapon X back, it’ll be totally awesome!” hasn’t been a winning strategy for this franchise ever since the first time that card was pulled in Halo 3. And since it seems to be the only motivation behind the sandbox. ODST flirted with a revamped pistol and Reach took it one step further back to CE albeit with it’s own unique take via bloom but still we didn’t have an evolution of the weapon but rather a circuitous side-step which aimed at a futile regression to a more enjoyed game.
And I think this retrospective look really hinders what we (as in 343) can do moving forward because with the exception of the laser and energy sword/hammer we haven’t had any meaningful advances in the very basic format Halo 1 put together. The needler is still the most “advanced” weapon we have in terms of it’s overall design with respect to the FPS genre and that hasn’t seen anything more than balance tweaks over this past decade. Could we have added more sophisticated homing behavior or more types of interactions between different target and needles? Probably, but no one apparently tried because we’ve had a backward facing point of view for most of this series as very well evidenced by our common will to bring -Yoink- back.
343 even unveiled Halo 4 gameplay with that as the central thesis, so maybe let’s just leave the good old days where they were and ask for a plasma beam-cannon with DoT burn mechanics instead.
In Halo 3 ODST the Plasma Rifle along with the Carbine were among the GREATEST weapons to use in firefight!