Greetings to all bypassing 343i members and halo fans,
This post will be used for ideas that haven’t quite been made or rarely see the light of day in the forums. The aim here is to relay suggestions/feedback for features that would be beneficial to the social aspect of Halo as a whole, this includes the games & official website Halo Waypoint.
Before we begin I want to be clear that this post is not intended to be a rehashing of current criticisms, feedback on game play loop, current game play systems, & the monetization of the game. That said such topics will come up for the sake of giving ideas as some of these ideas do have some relevance in some of the listed fields. A bulleted list of no particular order will be present should the current reader (you) wish to look at something that may warrant personal attention.
*Halo Spartan Companies
- Spartan Company Rewards & Structure of Rewards
Starting off will be a call back to a previous feature that saw its debut in Halo 5: Guardians, this feature was primarily present only through Halo Waypoint, but it also had some implementation into the game itself in the form of showcasing in small text below a players emblem the spartan company they belonged to. The idea of spartan companies was incredibly promising & the fact that there were exclusive in-game rewards for being apart of one was even better, that said it did need some work as the requirements for these rewards (the Achilles spartan armor predominantly) were really steep & realistically required almost a full company (the limited being 100 players in a company) to fulfill in any meaningful timely manner. It’s not enough to say spartan companies should come back with exclusive rewards, they need to come back with a bigger emphasis on player achievement, retention, & community driven features, but what would that encompass? First of all the reward structure, there needs to be more than just a few rewards, one idea is that at the start of every season if spartan companies get implemented again, there will be a full set of new armor, coatings, emblems, attachments, etc. for players to earn through not only primarily team-contribution, but there could even be room for rewards based on meritocracy (provided that 85% of the rewards are not meritocratic in nature) towards the spartan company. I want to make it clear that at the very least if Spartan Companies were to return, that the full armor set & coatings should be tied to team-contribution for all players, this also includes new players who join with a Spartan Company after the initial goal is passed, to extrapolate on what is meant by this further, in Halo 5: Guardians, if a player joined a Spartan Company after a goal was met, they could not get that goals reward as it had already been passed. In this new Spartan Company system players would have an individual, but team tracked structure of sorts for the goal, for instance if there was say a rare armor coating that required the team to get multiple Sniper, Br, Storm Rifle, Shock Rifle, Mangler, & DMR kills, the new player to the Spartan Company could still get that reward even if the current members have already received it because while it is team tracked, their own personal viewing of team-tracked would start at the date of them joining, however if this proves to be too difficult to implement (I am not a game designer so I do not know how easy it would be) then at the very least make it to where if the reward goal is met, allow new joining players of the Spartan Company that have already received the reward to get it after being a member of the company for 5 days or so, don’t completely lock them out & have them at the mercy of an active company who is fresh & new as there were a lot of problems with that in Halo 5: Guardians. Further more to touch on the rewards each season, it would not do for these rewards to have FOMO (expiration of rewards) attached to them, but rather allow them to be present for each season even if challenges overlap sometimes, nobody is going to complain about earning two coatings at once or close to two armor sets.
Side Note: Rewards could even be made for Halo: MCC & future Halo Games akin to how the reward structure for Halo: Reach was when logging onto Halo Waypoint back in 2010, but primarily I believe Halo: Infinite should be the focus for now.
2 Spartan Company Features on Halo Waypoint
There is still another aspect of Spartan Company’s that I would like to discuss, & that is their presence & features on the Halo Waypoint website. The Spartan Company format on the Halo Waypoint website can remain similar to Halo 5: Guardians structure, but it should be taken a little further, in my opinion I think a page should be taken from Destiny 2 or even Phantasy Star Online 2s book when it comes to their clan/alliance system features, which is the creation of a unique emblem that represents the Spartan Company, this would of course be created on the Halo Waypoint website & could even show up on a players service record both in-game & on the website. That however is not the end, when it came to the home page of a Spartan Company, the leader could select pre-made banners for their company, but this should be further built on, allow a Spartan Company’s leader to choose between pre-made banners (preferably new ones get introduced every so often) & allow the leader to upload screenshots that were taken in-game on Halo Infinite, Halo: MCC, & future Halo releases such as Halo Wars. This would foster many unique banners of Spartan Company’s showing off either their company as a whole or a banner of something cool for the company.
Side Note: Pre-made banners for the Spartan Company home page could also be tied to a small portion of rewards where a particular banner is released to a company following their completion of a particularly hard achievement or all goals, but that is just food for thought.
This concludes my future ideas for now, but I plan to revisit this post when I can think of other social features ideas that may not be currently listed or hardly spoken of, with a bit more in-depth extrapolation. Again this post is solely for suggestions/feedback, any & all criticisms, bug reports, & General game feedback should go to their respected current forums. If any of you who have read this like these ideas, please feel free to share them to friends, other community members, & 343i members themselves to make it more likely to be seen & thought on. Also feel free to further comment on how said features could be improved.