Hey 343i team, I haven’t really been active on the forums or anything, but a friend and I were discussing Halo 5 today and a thought occurred to me: Why not expand more on the idea first introduced with Spartan Ops? First of all, with X-Box One, how feasible is it to get up to 8-12 player co-op? I’m thinking of a game type where you have 2-3 Spartan squads working together with asymmetric objectives that change as the mission progresses. Maybe you start with an overall objective (of maybe a dozen or more to keep from it getting stale) of extracting a captured marine team before the Covenant can extract information from them. You’re put on a massive map (Battlefield-sized) and have mini-objectives throughout like clearing communication jammers, providing support for fireteams in trouble, defending weapons caches. Maybe one team has to secure an area they can provide cover fire for the other team as they break into the base or they have to break into security to open the door long enough to let the other Spartan team through. Again, you have many different variants to choose from so you never know which objectives are going to come up through the course of a game.
Smartglass support could come in the form of a commander who has satellite information to feed to the Spartan teams as well as objective updates they must forward to the team in the best position to meet that goal. TV support for the commander could allow for helmet cam footage of the teams on the ground as well as health readouts and arsenal readouts. Heck, maybe he has information about UNSC assets and can have points or some other factor that allows him to airdrop supplies to the teams.
So so far I’ve explained an idea for dynamic co-op missions on large maps with shifting objectives. Now I want to add another layer to it. Instead of stand-alone missions, they could be strung together in mini-campaigns. Failed and successful objectives in earlier missions can lead to different mission objectives and other altered factors. Say your extraction did not occur in time to prevent valuable intel from being gathered by the enemy so the next mission may begin with you supporting the location that was compromised. But you saved a marine fireteam in that mission so they appear to provide support. Maybe you also had a team successfully protect an armory as well, so your commander has access to a Scorpion tank that can be airdropped as well. Conversely, maybe you made it in time to protect the intel. Now you go on the offensive and attack the Covenant base. The culminating mission could have you taking on a group of Scarab tanks or some other large units. Maybe you have to gain access to a mothership, infiltrate it, and destroy it.
These campaigns could cover maybe 3-5 separate missions. Included with this you’d want to have random enemy placement so you can’t use the same tactical measures every time you are on the same map. Maybe some paths are blocked or require different methods to access different parts of the map on different iterations. Toss in control of marine fireteams for the commanders to protect certain key areas (otherwise automated if no one is playing the commander role).
While you would definitely want to encourage working together, there could also be a score competition between the spartan teams. But let’s face it, we need to step away from the same old tired survival and other co-op modes. You can definitely have a Firefight game, but why not make it more fun and dynamic? Why not keep it from you having to design new missions that people get tired of playing after a while when you could just have separate elements that fit together to create a narrative that you and your friends can share with your other friends. That’s always been what I’ve loved about the Halo series: the unexpected surprises that can arise throughout the course of a game. It seems only fitting that you guys should build a game type that also takes varying elements and brings them together into a more dynamic play type. Again, I have no idea how feasible something like this is, but if it can’t make it for Halo 5, why not get a chance to see it in a future iteration? It feels like FPSes are in a rut where it’s okay to just have standard 4-player co-op game types and the same deathmatches we’ve been seeing since Doom with very little real innovation.
Plus, it sucks being limited to 4-player coop when your regular group of gaming friends is 5-6 people and you all prefer coop to deathmatch… So c’mon, it’s a new generation, let’s get a new, improved co-op experience!