Big Team Battle is the number 1 playlist in Wargames. And yet it gets no love from 343. Big Team Battle has no objective play, no variants, and no attention from 343 despite constant requests from the community. Worst of all, Big Team Battle has so few maps.
Some say Big Team Battle has enough maps. You have the Valhalla remake, Exile, Meltdown, Lognbow, Vortex, and the three medium sized maps from the Crimson Map pack. Nevertheless, the vast majority of votes are for Valhalla remake or Exile. These votes are a testament to the players’ negative opinions of the other half dozen medium to large sized maps. The un-played maps are simply not suitable for Big Team Battle. They are too confining for vehicular battles. They are also a complete mess to navigate: rock spires everywhere; poor sight lines; and no clear paths to the middle of the map. Even Exile is barely passable as a Big Team Battle map. The ring around the middle is bounded by two bridges and a pile of wreckage, which means players use the Scorpion almost exclusively stay in the open space by the ersatz gate. The Valhalla remake is great, but after so many years of playing the same map like a low budget “Groundhog’s Day”, most players are understandably sick of it.
There is probably no fix to this predicament. 343 clearly designed the DLC maps before they released Halo 4, and thus none of the maps address the concerns of the Big Team Battle community. Perhaps 343 was betting on the Dominion game type to breath new life into the franchise, but littering the maps with so many little bases removes a good area of the map from the remaining gametypes. (The low populations for the Dominion playlist is also a good indicator that 343 made the wrong bet). The final and only hope for Big Team Battle is the Castle map pack. With three maps in Castle, though, 343 is likely to “split the baby” and give us a small map, a medium sized map, and a large map. Is one map enough to save Big Team Battle? Let me rephrase that, is one map from 343 enough to save Big Team Battle?