Bringing back that "Halo" Feeling

Games Other Halo
1

Instead of individually debating a bunch of changes that often don’t make sense thrown together, I’d rather discuss a more coherent package that fits together.

1. Aiming

Lower bullet magnetism and decrease hitbox sizes back to Halo CE levels. It’s far too easy to 4-shot and 5-shot in Halo 2-3 and Reach. Fast kill times balanced with difficulty of achieving the fastest kill time gives players way more control of the action.

Also - get rid of aim acceleration or at least make it a toggle option. It feels awful.

2. Movement

Faster please - equivalent to 120% of Reach would be fine. More responsive strafing a la Halo CE / 2. Fall damage that is mitigated by crouching as you hit the ground. Halo 2 / 3 jump height.

3. Vehicles

Vehicles both need to be more powerful and more vulnerable. What I mean by that is that vehicles should be much less vulnerable to main body fire by the utility weapon, since that requires very little accuracy and does not force difficult shots.

However, vehicles should made more vulnerable to accurate fire on certain weak spots. For example, the hatch on the tank protecting the driver should be able to be shot off even without a sniper (like in Halo 2) and you should be able to flip the warthog by shooting out the tires and expose an explosive fuel tank underneath.

This way vehicles are much more protected against standard gunfire, but have weak spots that skilled players can exploit with accurate shots.

4. Utility Weapon

A little variety in utility weapons seems to make sense. Pistol for short-medium range, BR for medium, DMR for medium-long. All 4sk (maybe 3sk if it gets much harder to aim again). No random spread or bloom. All hitscan (bullet leading is better, but unfortunately lag happens). BR gets 2x scope, DMR gets 3x scope, pistol doesn’t get a scope. Pistol fires the fastest, BR is in the middle, and DMR is slowest. So the pistol is the fastest killer, but hardest to use at range, DMR is the exact opposite, and BR is in the middle.

This doesn’t mean they are locked into their ranges. If you are good at shooting the pistol long-range without a scope, then more power to you. People can choose what they spawn with and use what they are comfortable with - each has drawbacks and advantages, and each gives you a chance to fight off spawn at a variety of ranges.

5. Non-Utility Non-Power Weapons

These need to be buffed bigtime to make them useful. Instead of weakening the utility weapon to make it less dominant, let’s make the other weapons better.

AR that is much more powerful but also has way more bloom / recoil makes a lot of sense. Plasma weapons should get the “stun” effect back. Plasma rifle in Halo CE also did more damage with headshots (once shields went down), I think that should come back for the plasma rifle but also for the AR and plasma pistol. Not one headshot kill obviously but maybe 1.5x damage).

Shotgun should get a little more concentrated shot pattern, that way it is less useful at close range (have to be more accurate with less spread) and more useful at short-medium range. Right now it just acts like a de facto sword.

Bring back the grenade launcher as is, it’s great.

6. Power Weapons

Rockets move way too slow - it’s kind of ridiculous and they have zero chance of hitting a banshee. Speed them back up to Halo CE speed, but to balance out the power just make the clip shallower - one rocket then you have to reload. That way people who miss with the first shot are vulnerable to getting killed while they have to reload.

7. Armor Abilities

Sprint - make the delay from sprinting then attacking much longer and also make the player slow down when getting shot while sprinting. That way sprint is just used to move around the map faster, rather than to run away from a fight. Faster potential kill times also help to balance this out.

Jetpacks - custom games only. Break the map design too much otherwise. They might work on larger BTB style maps with lots of open sightlines, making jetpacking a high risk move, but that’s it.

Armor Lock - get rid of it

Evade - I like it but it’s a little too much sometimes, should make the roll distance smaller and a little slower to balance it out

Camo - indifferent

Hologram - indifferent

What packages of changes would you like to see?

2

I like your ideas. I would definitely describe the core of Halo gameplay as being this way, especially about how vehicles need to be less vulnerable to starting weapon fire. That just detracts from the feeling of struggle between infantry and vehicles, which is what made it enjoyable in past games. But I think that armor abilities in Halo 4 will just be sprint and jetpack anyways since I don’t think they want a carbon copy of Reach.

3

I agree with you on everything except for the armor abilities they should not be in Halo 4! i thought 343 said they learned from the mistakes Bungie made with Reach. I even remember them saying that it wouldn’t make since for them to be in Halo 4 since all that technology or whatever was lost on Reach, but i guess not. I think if there gonna put them in there they better make just NORMAL Halo playlist without any of that garbage.

4

Op, I love you, No -Yoink!-.

Anywho, this is the thread I’ve been waiting for. All this time I’ve been harping on about this Halo feel that has been in previous Halo’s but was absent in halo reach. I simply could not put that feel into words to make the thread myself, but you did a great job of it.

Your ideas are pretty much spot on in my eyes and I rather like the compromise you have proposed for the Sprint function.

damn fine thread!

5

> I agree with you on everything except for the armor abilities they should not be in Halo 4! i thought 343 said they learned from the mistakes Bungie made with Reach. I even remember them saying that it wouldn’t make since for them to be in Halo 4 since all that technology or whatever was lost on Reach, but i guess not. I think if there gonna put them in there they better make just NORMAL Halo playlist without any of that garbage.

I agree that armor abilities aren’t exactly “classic Halo” but if they are going to be in there (and 343 has indicated they will), then might as try to find a reasonable compromise to integrate them better into the game.

6

> Op, I love you, No -Yoink!-.
>
> Anywho, this is the thread I’ve been waiting for. All this time I’ve been harping on about this Halo feel that has been in previous Halo’s but was absent in halo reach. I simply could not put that feel into words to make the thread myself, but you did a great job of it.
>
> Your ideas are pretty much spot on in my eyes and I rather like the compromise you have proposed for the Sprint function.
>
> damn fine thread!

Thanks, I hope others feel the same!

7

I liked everything except sprint, if we are at 120% base player speed already, we may not need it, but i would want sprint in there otherwise so looks good to me, make it happen # 1.

8

Since when did they conform AA’s?? Consider Equipment as well. From the looks of it sprint will be a natural ability.

9

I’m not sure about the rest of your post, it did have some good ideas, but the lack of input on jetpack is concerning. It’s clearly one of the most abused and over powered AAs as it pretty much destroys any need of using lifts to go anywhere. I suppose if anything it should be a short burst of extra jump, not like a double jump as such but something to give a jump some extra height when used, rather than letting players have the ability to just fly around the level - reflection is a great example of this as it was a map built for Halo 2, meaning back then you had to use lifts or stairs to get up without jetpacks, but with them you can go straight from rocket spawn to sniper spawn, or from pretty much anywhere to anywhere.

A better example would be if Reach had Construct from Halo 3, controlling the lifts was everything as it allowed you to get a head start on enemies as they came up the lifts, but with jetpack players could just zoom up to any part of the platform, even come around the back of the gold lift. To properly balance the jetpack you’d need to change how maps work, and I’d much rather have a well deserved nerfed jetpack than having to change how the maps in the game work.

Also:

> Since when did they conform AA’s?? Consider Equipment as well. From the looks of it sprint will be a natural ability.

From what I’ve seen and been told Sprint will be a built in ability seperate from AAs. They were confirmed on NeoGAF by Frankie here: Linky

10

> I’m not sure about the rest of your post, it did have some good ideas, but the lack of input on jetpack is concerning. It’s clearly one of the most abused and over powered AAs as it pretty much destroys any need of using lifts to go anywhere. I suppose if anything it should be a short burst of extra jump, not like a double jump as such but something to give a jump some extra height when used, rather than letting players have the ability to just fly around the level - reflection is a great example of this as it was a map built for Halo 2, meaning back then you had to use lifts or stairs to get up without jetpacks, but with them you can go straight from rocket spawn to sniper spawn, or from pretty much anywhere to anywhere.
>
> A better example would be if Reach had Construct from Halo 3, controlling the lifts was everything as it allowed you to get a head start on enemies as they came up the lifts, but with jetpack players could just zoom up to any part of the platform, even come around the back of the gold lift. To properly balance the jetpack you’d need to change how maps work, and I’d much rather have a well deserved nerfed jetpack than having to change how the maps in the game work.
>
> Also:
>
>
>
> > Since when did they conform AA’s?? Consider Equipment as well. From the looks of it sprint will be a natural ability.
>
> From what I’ve seen and been told Sprint will be a built in ability seperate from AAs. They were confirmed on NeoGAF by Frankie here: Linky

Fair point - I think jetpacks are more appropriate in BTB maps than smaller maps, especially remakes of maps from previous games.

They don’t truly bother me since with faster killtimes staying in the air is an invitation to die. That’s what I meant about complete “packages” of changes. In Reach, jetpacks are easily abused since killtimes are so slow. If we have Halo CE-style kill times, use of the jet pack will have to be much more judicious - a desperate attempt to break map control rather than a bread and butter ability.

11

One of the more irritating things that I never see anyone talking about is grenades, which tie in “nicely” with jetpack. Even if you do get killed pretty quickly, you still have time to spam a few grenukes. As Reach gave players a fairly slow movement speed and grenades a large radius and damage, they often become unavoidable, like the martyrdom of CoD4.

I really liked Halo 2/3’s grenades though, as with skill you could get some quick kills but you also had to be smart with them, as it wasn’t difficult to miss. Another thing that they had was that they had a low weighting, which may not make sense practically but it feelsgoodman.jpg in gameplay, whereas Reach grenades are quite heavy in comparison, making bounces more difficult and increasing the chance that if you throw a grenade at an enemy blindly it’ll kill them.

12

> One of the more irritating things that I never see anyone talking about is grenades, which tie in “nicely” with jetpack. Even if you do get killed pretty quickly, you still have time to spam a few grenukes. As Reach gave players a fairly slow movement speed and grenades a large radius and damage, they often become unavoidable, like the martyrdom of CoD4.
>
> I really liked Halo 2/3’s grenades though, as with skill you could get some quick kills but you also had to be smart with them, as it wasn’t difficult to miss. Another thing that they had was that they had a low weighting, which may not make sense practically but it feelsgoodman.jpg in gameplay, whereas Reach grenades are quite heavy in comparison, making bounces more difficult and increasing the chance that if you throw a grenade at an enemy blindly it’ll kill them.

Faster movement speeds should take out a lot of that frustration. Another thing that was nice from Halo CE was that the grenades would only detonate upon coming to a rest - it was a lot harder to hit someone with a spam grenade since the timer was usually longer and movement speed was higher.

13

> I liked everything except sprint, if we are at 120% base player speed already, we may not need it, but i would want sprint in there otherwise so looks good to me, make it happen # 1.

I totally agree, but since we know it is in there, figuring out a way to have sprint that works is imperative. Plus it is nice to be able to move around the map quickly using sprint, it just shouldn’t be used as a way of avoiding a fight that you are losing.

14

Please bring back dual-wielding, I sooo miss dual-wielding

15

Agree.
Agree.
Agree.
Agree.
Agree.
Agree.
Agree mostly. Sprint is complicated.

16

> Please bring back dual-wielding, I sooo miss dual-wielding

The problem with dual-wielding in Halo 2 was that in order to implement it, they made the dual-wieldable weapons useless when single-wielded.

I think dual-wield COULD be implemented well if the trade-off was massively reduced accuracy but no change to the power of the weapons. So basically you would only dual-wield as a last ditch when surrounded by enemies to attempt to “go Rambo” on them in a low probability play.

17

> I’m not sure about the rest of your post, it did have some good ideas, but the lack of input on jetpack is concerning. It’s clearly one of the most abused and over powered AAs as it pretty much destroys any need of using lifts to go anywhere. I suppose if anything it should be a short burst of extra jump, not like a double jump as such but something to give a jump some extra height when used, rather than letting players have the ability to just fly around the level - reflection is a great example of this as it was a map built for Halo 2, meaning back then you had to use lifts or stairs to get up without jetpacks, but with them you can go straight from rocket spawn to sniper spawn, or from pretty much anywhere to anywhere.
>
> A better example would be if Reach had Construct from Halo 3, controlling the lifts was everything as it allowed you to get a head start on enemies as they came up the lifts, but with jetpack players could just zoom up to any part of the platform, even come around the back of the gold lift. To properly balance the jetpack you’d need to change how maps work, and I’d much rather have a well deserved nerfed jetpack than having to change how the maps in the game work.
>
> Also:
>
>
>
> > Since when did they conform AA’s?? Consider Equipment as well. From the looks of it sprint will be a natural ability.
>
> From what I’ve seen and been told Sprint will be a built in ability seperate from AAs. They were confirmed on NeoGAF by Frankie here: Linky

No they were not confirmed. AA in this instance means anti-aliasing, which has to do with graphics.

Just wanted to point that out.

18

i love pretty much all ur ideas

19

On more reflection, I think jetpacks should be in custom games only or very specific maps only. They change map design too much otherwise.

Will edit the OP to reflect this

20

> On more reflection, I think jetpacks should be in custom games only or very specific maps only. They change map design too much otherwise.
>
> Will edit the OP to reflect this

mmhm