Functional Assassinations

Games Halo 5: Guardians
1

After reading the “If Assassinations Are Back, Stop Stealing” thread, I found myself trying to think of a way to make assassinations more than simply a cool taunt, and an actual addition to gameplay. Then competitive people might not look down their noses at them so much.

I won’t lie: most of this is based off Far Cry 3, a game that I recently revisited when I noticed an unacceptable Gamerscore percentage. I went for the stealth style, leading to many takedown kills, something that I believe was handled very well in the game.

In case you haven’t played the game (which you should, it’s great) then as you levelled up and gained skill points, you could choose skills that gave you different options on what to do after a takedown, basically an assassination at a longer range and under different circumstances. You could drag their body away into bushes, pull the pin on their grenades, pull out their knife and throw it to kill another enemy, grab their sidearm and empty it whilst using them as a meat shield, etc etc.

Obviously, this is in a campaign that supports stealth, so most of these wouldn’t fit into Halo MP at all. Nevertheless, it might be a way to make assassinations “pro”, if you like. If you quickly press a corresponding button after an assassination, you could perform an action that justified having the long animation in the first place. You could choose to back-smack, or pursue the longer animation and gain a reward for your investment if you chose your moment well.

Of course, this could be a custom option, yada yada yada, I know some of you dislike anything new.

These are just a few suggestions on what could be done with this, feel free to suggest more.

-Pull the grenade trigger to trigger the victim’s grenades, possibly then throwing them into the main firefight for an explosive assist to your teammates.

-If holding a sidearm, hold melee for longer to use the body to partially cover yours, slowing your speed but increasing survivability

Anyway, discuss, and try not to hate too much.

2

no, just no.

The time it takes to push the extra button for a new effect is time enough to get killed or for the kill to be yoinked. Not to mention the fact that most assasination as they are now are relatively quick but still give room for someone to kill the target or you (thus saving the target)

You could argue that they could make you invincible during these and the same for the target except to the assassination but that would be incredibly stupid as well imo.

3

> In case you haven’t played the game (which you should, it’s great) then as you <mark>levelled up and gained skill points</mark>, you could choose skills that gave you different options on what to do after a takedown, basically an assassination at a longer range and under different circumstances. You could drag their body away into bushes, pull the pin on their grenades, pull out their knife and throw it to kill another enemy, grab their sidearm and empty it whilst using them as a meat shield, etc etc.

The highlighted is the biggest problem with doing anything like this in MP. There may be ways to expand assassination options/animations in MP beyond where they currently are, but they should neither take more time to execute nor involve any kind of progression system.

> Obviously, this is in a campaign that supports stealth, so most of these wouldn’t fit into Halo MP at all. Nevertheless, it might be a way to make assassinations “pro”, if you like. If you quickly press a corresponding button after an assassination, you could perform an action that justified having the long animation in the first place. You could choose to back-smack, or pursue the longer animation and gain a reward for your investment if you chose your moment well.

I generally dislike mechanics like these in single-player games, as they are merely pre-scripted actions that you initiate . . . and then watch. Cool a couple of times, but irritating quickly thereafter. Dragging a body away should only be there if there is a dragging mechanic present that can be executed whenever you have something to drag (Press X to Drag Object just like Press X to Board Ghost). So adding more RPG-like mechanics in campaign is okay - as long as they are truly mechanics and not just some pre-scripted animation. I don’t see a good way of doing that with the meat shield or knife idea, nor do I see how you can do the grenade activation without making picking up grenades require a button push . . . something I would not like.

But if you want to give assassination animations some more oomph (as long as this does not involve additional time), I’d be fine with that. Even if there were some different melee-type animations that occurred when you meleed a dead enemy - like stomping his head rather than the standard butt-stroke, sure. Just like teabagging, it would add no value to the play, but sometimes doing things like that adds entertainment.

4

I really like the idea of adding some tactical purpose to assassinations, but like anything else it would have to be implemented properly. With poor implementation this idea could yield disastrous results.

5

> I found myself trying to think of a way to make assassinations more than simply a cool taunt, and an actual addition to gameplay.

I think you would actually not even have to develop and implement an additional mechanic to achieve that.

Implement the assassination as the only way to kill a fully shielded opponent with a single melee hit.
Make the animations faster.
And perhaps to make the assassination even more significant increase the count it takes to kill a fully shielded opponent with regular melees to 3 or give the assassination the launch while the regular melee attack doesn’t have one or perhaps even both.

6

I do like the grenade pin assassination. Though you have no control over where the person can be thrown to, so here’s my suggestion.

All assassination, whether in air, the floor or standing will give a button to perform the pin pull. Once you press the button, your player can toss the player a great distance away. Each and every toss will have the same speed and won’t be random. There will be the same button allows you to hold on to the dead enemy for the grenade time fuze, so you can essentially cook the nade.

Before the assassination is completed, you must move the stick in any direction to determine where the player will be launched. Afterwards, your Spartan or Elite will perform a kick that sends the enemy and their grenade towards someone or something of your desire.