Alright, I’ve been thinking about infection on Halo, and I’ve decided that I’m really tired of standard Halo: Reach and Halo 3 infection, and went towards more of a Dead Space 2 feeling infection. I haven’t totally thought this over, but this is what I’ve come up with. Now, when I was thinking about this, I had it in mind that there are no armor abilities, just a constant sprint for all humans, a zero-g jump pack, and a mid-air armor lock that breaks your fall (if you time it right then you can jump from high spots and live)
Humans start out similar to how they do on Halo: Reach, with shields, shotguns, and a pistol.
Flood (my replacement for zombies) start out as infection forms. They crawl at a somewhat faster speed than on the Halo games, and are able to crawl on walls (similar to the Necromorph Lurker form on Dead Space 2). To infect someone, you have to get within melee range of the human and press X to launch a quick-time event where you press the melee button repeatedly, for five seconds. The only way to counter this is for another human player to shoot the infection form off of you, or for you to press a randomly generated list of buttons (only includes A, X, B, and Y) to counter it. If the flood player is able to infect you before you counter, then you get infected. The scene would look like this: a human player is holding off the infection form’s injector (or whatever those things are called). If the flood wins, it shoves it’s injector spike down the human’s spine or into his chest (you get to see the transformation too!). If the human wins, he crushes the flood in his hand/ throws it on the ground and stomps it/ shoots it with the pistol. When you infect someone, after the transformation, you then become a combat form. The combat form has a tentacle melee attack (no weapon pickup for flood, even combat form), a charge-up power jump, and sprint.
This is where I kind of got lost, so help me out here!
Tell me what you think and give some suggestions.
This has been thought of many times before and I totally agree with you. As well as that I welcome you to repost this idea.
Implementing flood as the infected would be more logical in a game that’s supposively ‘evolving’.
However having the ability to crawl on walls in Halo for flood just seems un-natural even though flood are the best example of contradicting what I just said. I think flood should just be able to do what they normally do in campaign, having the same attributes and abilities as previously seen would be in my opinion more adequate.
I see your point. I myself have always seen the flood as something that was supposed to be scary, and I think making them able to crawl on walls would add to that scary, “I could be attacked from anywhere”, effect, and since Halo is an evolving series, this could be added without too much of a negative response.
Something similar to this worked in Singularity, but it worked there because there were a wide variety of monsters (allowing Phase Ticks – their counterpart to Infection Forms – to serve as a specialist) that were able to provide distractions and fire support, allowing the Phase Ticks to get in close.
If Phase Tick-like Infection Forms were the only form of attack, I’m not so sure it would work very well. They’d have a hard enough time getting in close; the ability to fend them off with something as simple as a quick-time event would make it nigh impossible to possess anyone.
This is why the infection forms would move slightly faster than in previous games, and why I chose for humans to have pistols and shotguns. Shotguns usually don’t do well against infection forms, so people would gravitate towards the pistol, which is a little more helpful against these. And like I said, infection forms wouldn’t be the only flood to play as. Combat forms would also be playable, as well as others. This is where I get stuck though. Should the combat forms be able to infect, and if so, how? And how would you be able to play as other forms?
> Should the combat forms be able to infect, and if so, how?
All Combat Forms have a contained Infection Form, so they could infect by getting close to an enemy, and having the Infie leap out and latch onto the target.
> And how would you be able to play as other forms?
Orbital deployment. It would be assumed that the infected subjects were attacked and overpowered elsewhere.
> I see your point. I myself have always seen the flood as something that was supposed to be scary, and I think making them able to crawl on walls would add to that scary, “I could be attacked from anywhere”, effect, and since Halo is an evolving series, this could be added without too much of a negative response.
I suppose, though adding the ability to climb on walls would take some complicated programming. Hmphh… although I’m sure 343 Industries would have time to do this but just adding the skins and changing the general way the flood (spartans) move and get around would be good enough for most, none the less climbing on walls would definitely be entertaining to both humans and zombies. But is it Halo?
If implemented I could think of one more thing that could be added to add to the thrill of the gametype; automated flood speech that constantly loops and gives the humans the ability to hear their nightmare on approach like the energy sword we could see glowing in reflections.
> I suppose, though adding the ability to climb on walls would take some complicated programming.
It’s already been done, actually.
In Halo Custom Edition, people built maps and figured out how ladders work. All a ladder is is a “sticky” surface. Turns out, they could build a room, flag all surfaces as ladders… And then you could actually walk to the wall, ascend it like a ladder, and then move around hanging from the roof by your head.