Fixing the Medal System

Games Halo 5: Guardians
1

The current medal system is over-saturated with too many irrelevant and insignificant medals. Due to this over-saturation, medals have a lesser significance as well.

There are two ways I propose that can fix this. For one, we can return to the older medal system of of Halo 2 or Halo 3, or a combination of both, holding on to the principle of only retaining the more significant medals.

My second and what I would consider a better solution is using my first solution, and turning smaller, less important medals (such as headshots and assists) into “symbols” that can appear in the real-time text to help players identify the specifics of something that occurred.

For example, if I headshotted an opposing player, instead of a line of text reading " killed “, or even " killed with a headshot”, it would read something such as " [HEADSHOT SYMBOL] ", or " killed " with the headshot symbol next to the text. Call of Duty uses this system, and it’s useful in determining if my kill was a headshot or not without necessarily being distracting. As for an assist symbol, possibly placing it next to the line of text with a special color can help a player determine if he had a role in someone else’s kill, without any sort of over-saturation to the system of medals.

Let us also not forget about the appearance of medals in Halo 4. They were smaller, and it was more difficult to differentiate between them due to their new designs. Personally, I think medals should be larger as they were in Halo 3 and Halo: Reach, in addition to their classic colors that made each of them unique.

I know I may be making this sound quite complicated, but in summary, I know a good number of us believe that Halo 4’s, and possibly even Halo: Reach’s medal systems were over-saturated, and these are simply solutions to the problem that don’t necessarily fall back on reverting to more classical systems, possibly losing the value of determining certain things like assists and headshots in-game. In addition, the appearance of medals themselves needs to be reverted to their previous likenesses as it was in past Halo games.

What do you think? Should medals stay the way they were in Halo: Reach or Halo 4, or should they be redone to be made more compelling, as well as their look be made more unique?

2

I think medals should go back to their more classic symbols from halo 3. Their appearance in Halo 4 is very… well, ugly. I hate to say it, but I really don’t like any of them. In Halo 3 they were simple, iconic, and easy to tell apart from one another. Reach did a very nice job with its medal system, but I feel like it did add more medals than were necessary. The EMP medal for example. Why make that a medal? I like the feel of special-case medals like Assassinations and weapon sprees, but I think that the medal count should be reduced overall.

In regards to your kill feed question, I prefer the classic " killed " system over the " killed with a headshot" and " [HEADSHOT SYMBOL] " systems. The " killed with a headshot" approach just takes up to much of the screen and takes to long to figure out who killed who, and the " [HEADSHOT SYMBOL] " approach seems like it would get tedious after a while. I mean, when you think about it, you’d need to have a medal for every type of kill. You have medals for headshots and beatdowns and splatters and what not, but what if someone just mowed down a player with an Assault Rifle and didn’t get a headshot or anything like that? What would you do in that situation? And would you make new medals for things like suicides, betrayals and getting killed by the Guardians? I just think we should go back to the simple " killed " system.

3

The medals of Halo 4 are lackluster, generic, and incredibly diluted. Not only are there many useless medals, but the multikill medals are the biggest disappointment. Let’s do a quick comparison of some Killtaculars:

Halo 3
Halo: Reach
Halo 4

We should go back to important/special medals only and have a medal hierarchy system. In the cases where you get many medals, either display them all and scroll through them quickly (like previous Halo titles) or give precedence to the cool ones. For example, you get several headshots with multikills so the headshot medals are shown but the multikill medals are displayed the longest and remain on the screen for a couple seconds.

Help us out here bs_angel! :slight_smile:

P.S. The Halo: Reach medals (large). Look at those beautiful colors and imperfections. Sigh.

4

> The medals of Halo 4 are lackluster, generic, and incredibly diluted. Not only are there many useless medals, but the multikill medals are the biggest disappointment. Let’s do a quick comparison of some Killtaculars:
>
> Halo 3
> Halo: Reach
> Halo 4
>
> We should go back to important/special medals only and have a medal hierarchy system. In the cases where you get many medals, either display them all and scroll through them quickly (like previous Halo titles) or give precedence to the cool ones. For example, you get several headshots with multikills so the headshot medals are shown but the multikill medals are displayed the longest and remain on the screen for a couple seconds.
>
> Help us out here bs_angel! :slight_smile:
>
> P.S. The Halo: Reach medals (large). Look at those beautiful colors and imperfections. Sigh.

Love the simplicity, look, and distinction between medals before Halo 4. All these other medals popping up aren’t special. They just want to make not so good people feel like they are doing something. I think it should have ended with Reach’s medals. I played Halo 3, didn’t do well, but got kills. I checked my stats and was like, whoa I got no medals lol. So I think Halo Reach is good enough. I never cared for medals like, killed while reloading or close calls. Do we even need fuel rod ans rocket medals or sniper kill medals. I prefer the sniper headshot medals more. They need to simplify them again.

5

I liked Halo 4’s point system, but not the medals…
Comeback Kill is an insult and gives you points for dying!
I feel that all these medals should be reduced and put into broad medals such as assist, kill, grenade kill, etc. Not to mention that the art work in Halo 4 for the medals…

6

> Comeback Kill is an insult and gives you points for dying!

I would keep the come back kill metal and add a dishonorable metal for spawn kills so that the come back kill proves something

7

I even found Reach slightly medal saturated but damn if they didn’t look sweet.

4 failed on both of those accounts. What, did someone wipe the files when Bungie split?

The sight of metals stacking up should bestow a player with exhilaration and a desire to continue their streak. It shouldn’t be something common.