I was reading the latest 343i employee spotlight, and these paragraphs caught my eye:
> One of those problems has been the importance of level design knowledge for players to have fun. If I’m playing multiplayer and I play it for the first time and I’ve never played a map, I don’t know where weapons are spawning. We wanted to make it a better experience for players, and we invested into what we call Item Spawners. The Item Spawners are assets like Weapon Racks and Equipment Spawners. It’s nothing new for Halo in terms of what players expect, but we wanted to call out where weapons spawn in the world. We developed these awesome Halo 2-inspired weapon racks, a callback to the Halo 2 announcement trailer where the gun comes out of the wall and Chief grabs it. We put the weapon racks on the walls because we wanted to develop a visual language around scavenging in the game so that players can make split-second decisions around where to find a weapon. Map knowledge is still an important skill to maintain but we wanted to find a way to ease the burden of developing that knowledge by creating assets that pop off the environment enough that you can make quick decisions on what item you want to fight for next.
> Another reason why I think this is a cool system is that we looked at adding new content into the game. With the game being free-to-play now, we really looked at how we could inject content like new weapons or equipment. We wanted it to be possible to spawn a new weapon on weapon racks across all the maps versus needing to wait for that new map to be in the current playlist rotation to come in. So that’s an area where I think we’ve done a really good job of iterating.
So this pretty much confirms that we will have weapon racks similar to Halo 2 in Infinite MP. What do you think about this?
Edit: I don’t know if this would of should go into the same thread as the ping system, it just felt a little off topic for that thread.
I’m all for helping Halo get new players, and having them learn the game so they can have the most fun and hopefully stick around. This seems like a great piece of the new onboarding process.
We see them in a lot in the Multiplayer Overview video. I don’t know how I feel about them, because it limits weapon placement to walls. I don’t remember seeing any weapons picked up in the video that weren’t on a rack or dead player. Feel free to timestamp the video if you see otherwise.
I think it’s a good concept, helps the newer players coming to the Halo scene out. I’m hoping that it’s not going to flood the player with so much information that it becomes less of a help tool and more of an info overload.
I’m sure 343 will find a way to make it not over the top intrusive on gameplay, but my thoughts are there that it could potentially be over the top information, rather than hopping into a custom game and wondering around for 15-20 mins per map to get a feel for the weapons and space.
> 2535449887501541;3:
> We see them in a lot in the Multiplayer Overview video. I don’t know how I feel about them, because it limits weapon placement to walls. I don’t remember seeing any weapons picked up in the video that weren’t on a rack or dead player. Feel free to timestamp the video if you see otherwise.
At 2:55 in the Vidoc the Hammer is on the ground for its spawn (where it is grappled). You can’t see if there is a ground platform.
I don’t think we are going to be limited to the walls for weapon placement, and instead it will likely follow the Halo 5 method. Spawners/racks are not NEEDED for weapons to be placed on the map, instead they are an additional tool.
> 2535449887501541;3:
> We see them in a lot in the Multiplayer Overview video. I don’t know how I feel about them, because it limits weapon placement to walls. I don’t remember seeing any weapons picked up in the video that weren’t on a rack or dead player. Feel free to timestamp the video if you see otherwise.
Not strictly true, there’s plenty of footage in the multiplayer trailer & vidocs of weapons spawning on the ground in Aren or even through drop pods in BTB
Limiting weapons to walls wouldn’t be that much of a change anyway to be honest. A lot of weapons (not all) in Halo are leaning against a wall anyway. But luckily we don’t have to worry about that being a issue.
We saw these in the mp video.
Before the ping equipment was used the rack had a green light and opened up to let the player pick up the commando.
Got watch it to see it in full effect.
We found this out a while ago, from reveal videos. I’m looking forward to it, as it’ll make it easier to see spawn locations. We’ll probably still have particular Power Weapons not in these weapon cabinets.
What’s also a cool feature from the weapon racks is that you can actually see how much time is left before the weapon spawns. If you look in the different appearances in the clips you see:
A green light bar when the weapon is ready and available
A grey bar when its picked up
A white bar that fills the grey until it’s available again
A very simple but useful addition for when you pass a weapon position and it’s already taken and are not sure to wait for the respawn or proceed without it.