Hey everybody.
I made this thread hoping I could get peoples thoughts and opinions of ordinance. Where do you stand on it? Do you think it could improve with the next game? Could it be changed up to still give a sense of reward but keep it from being random?
What do you guys think?
I understand that there are some more hardcore “competitive” gamers that don’t like the idea of ordinance. I for one do understand what it brings to un/fairness and that balancing it can be difficult and thus doesn’t make it that worthwhile to even try to incorporate it into halo. But I think ordinance can be improved for the next halo game.
I have this idea as an example.
Strikes:
A renaming of ordinance. This would be nearly the same in terms of how they are earned but they would differ in the sense that they aren’t anything that the player directly controls and they could even be map or score based. Each one would NEVER give any major advantage or have randomness like the current ordinance system. Any advantage would be very minor.
Ideas for strikes and the reason for their name:
There are just that, strikes. You’d call them into the wargames or into multiplayer.
They could be something like maybe dropping a few odst NPCs onto the map. They’d do much less damage with their weapons and die relatively fast compared to other players but they are still capable of killing you if you face two or more recklessly. Nothing major see. No extreme gameplay advantage at all but the idea of calling in your own odst strike sounds awesome right?
Something else could like a sniper strike. If you’re exposed and in the open for longer than a couple of seconds you’d get body shot by a sniper. Another 2 seconds and you’d get shot again for the death. This strike could be tweaks for how long it’d be active. Anywhere from 10 to 20 seconds or whatever seems best for balancing. Again not gamebreaking but sounds awesome.
I have few more ideas but these came to me the fastest. Just something different. Please feel free to agree or disagree and/or even give your own ideas as to how ordinance can be improved.
I would kind of like the idea of dropping an NPC into combat. IDK at first i thought that takeing out power weapons and replacing thme with loadout weapons and AA’s would do the trick but if i did that the desire to get them would kind of diminish. IDK i would reather then just go back to the Arena style gameplay with a gametype for a couple of weeks and take input online about how they could improve or make ordinance its own thing without destroying the core Halo gameplay. All in all perks are the biggest problem for me AA’s are actully balanced and have their pros and cons, I was thinking imagine if we were back to old Halo 3 fixed loadouts and ordinance only dropped the 3 AA’s used in MLG settings and could be obtained a bit faster. It would be perfect in my opinion. putting power ups and non ordinance AA’s on the map as well would be awesome to bt would require some hardcore redesign for map design. Sprint could also be nerfed a bit so you dont really run as long make it more of a dash ability. thats how i would fix it IMO
Well the ideas sound a bit too similar to killstreaks, but the possibility of getting working NPC’s in a multiplayer match is intriguing, and I’d like to 343 look into that as a custom option for Halo 5.
> Well the ideas sound a bit too similar to killstreaks, but the possibility of getting working NPC’s in a multiplayer match is intriguing, and I’d like to 343 look into that as a custom option for Halo 5.
It does sound a little too similar to killstreaks/scorestreaks. I could both defend and attack how COD handles their version, with me leaning towards attacking, but I feel that it wouldn’t be a big leap from ordinance and the idea just sounds cool.
Maybe strikes could be fixed to the map? Kind of like crysis 2. The predictability of the strikes could do well for counter strategies as well. Which would seriously help with the, at times, frustrating randomness of the current ordinance system.
I know there could be smaller things to be done to ordinance to balance it but I’d like to see balance and improvement in the idea of it. Dropping in NPCs sounded like one of those improvements.
No future ordnance please. I mean this in a respectable way. The whole ordnance thing is going way toward cod. I hope it doesn’t turn into kill streaks.
So OP, if I’m reading this correctly… what you’re saying is: “make Halo even more like Call of Duty?”
Sorry, but I just can’t look at it any other way. I honestly don’t think I’d be comfortable with this being in Halo’s multiplayer either… though at least you’re coming up with ideas to try and improve the game (instead of complaining over minor issues) which I like to see.
The current Ordnance system is rather frustrating I’ll admit, but with certain changes I think it could work out. If we’re talking about Initial & Random Ordnance Drops, I think the best course of action would be to separate these.
Initial Ordnance should be used in team-specific gametypes, with resupply timers, and they should act like the old power weapons/powerups placed on the map. With Random Ordnance, perhaps they would work better in ffa-specific gametypes, as there really isn’t a need for PW/PU to be placed in fixed locations.
However, if we’re talking about Personal Ordnance… having this in a more “social” environment is fine, but I don’t think it really fits well in the small, competitive 4v4/FFA arena, especially if we’re dealing with ranking. I feel that it would be better suited for BTB Slayer, Dominion, or similar gametypes with large teams, in a large environment.
This is where loadouts would also work better as “classes”, and each loadout/class should have it’s own specific Personal Ordnance, which gives you certain weapons & equipment designed for that role.
I believe this would work out much better, though I don’t expect many people to agree with me.
I should say that my idea was meant more for the general populace. People like to be immediately drawn in, expecially with all the amazing games out there now compared to the halo 1-3 days. You can’t win a major population on the old halo formula alone anymore. At least not initially. I would always prioritize movement and gunplay above anything else in halo. (In halo 4 even as fun as it was for me, I was disappointed with the first shot thing. Usually if players were of similar level if you’d get the first shot in well you’d win. That bugged me because that wasn’t nearly the case in halo 3. Gunplay, nades, and melee. In that order. That’s my priority before anything else.)
That being said. People have lost interest in halo. I could only assume, and it’s even pretty clear, that 343 tried implementing tried ideas into halo 4. It could have worked if they prioritized skill and then added the more social, “fun” stuff but in an even more unique way than halo 4.
With my idea, even if it’s lacking in areas, I want fun and fairness. Thank you for being considerate ^_^.
I do like your idea. That itself sounds fun to me. Knowing that a class specializes in something and that your weapons and equipment would be based off of that. If it could be balanced I see this being great. It has potential.
I had a similar idea to this a while back but that’s for another time.
Looking over it again, your “Strikes” idea sounds like it might work, if properly executed. Definitely not in arena style gameplay, though perhaps it may have a place in BTB/Dominion, on large-scale battles. One idea came to me just now…
I think it would be great to have squads, and squad points. These can be obtained through teamwork; healing teammates, supplying ammunition (I wish 343i would make an ammo box AA), assists, etc… and when your squad reaches a certain no. of points, the Squad Leader can call in a strike. I think it would make the game more team-oriented, and would be rewarding as well.
This would probably require an increase in player count, as 8 per team doesn’t seem large enough to accommodate squads. I think raising the team size to 12 or 16 would make it work… assuming the netcode can handle it.
I really don’t think that halo is going back to the classic arena style anymore. I can’t say that’s either a good thing or a bad thing.
Strikes would have definitely been meant for a more social playlist. As I stated I would prioritize the “golden triangle” before such a thing as ordinance or something like strikes. If that triangle stays perfect then by all means throw some cool stuff in there. As long as it’s balanced
Haha I like that idea too. It reminds me of battlefield. It is it’s own thing though. Who would be the leader?
Oh how would you tweak the current ordinance settings to be better? Or anyone else for that matter?
> I really don’t think that halo is going back to the classic arena style anymore. I can’t say that’s either a good thing or a bad thing.
I really hope that this is not the case. Traditional arena-style gameplay played a major part in most of Halo 4’s predecessors, and I would hate to see it thrown away.
> Haha I like that idea too. It reminds me of battlefield. It is it’s own thing though. Who would be the leader?
Naturally, a player which creates a squad should assume leadership, but it is up to them to lead their squad members. If they cannot fulfill their role, then you can simply leave and create your own if you believe you’re a more competent leader.
There are two ideas that I have for ordinance. Either it should reward a player based on how they play (use DMR/BR to pick off enemies at long range… get a sniper rifle of some kind. Kill enemies at shorter ranges, get weapons like swords or shotguns. Get a bunch of support medals like assists, get a damage boost, etc), or to have ordinance be strictly player augmentation and not weapons (speed boost, overshield, damage boost) and bring back weapon spawns (even if they still use ordinance fanfare to announce that the weapons have arrived on the map).
As it is right now, it’s very frustrating to get blown away from a binary rifle that was earned at the beginning of the match by some one that got a splatter spree on knuckle-dragging BTB players.
What they could do is, and this is just could if they were intending to keep ordnance forever, they could make it so each player could customize their ordnance drops, give them six choices and they can make it any six. They wanna get damage boost every single time, let them set every slot to damage boost, they want to run in guns blazing, let them make it the SAW and shotgun. Each person would have their own slots to choose, so someone who really wants to snipe just has to fill their slots with snipers and it doesn’t rely on the randomness, but still have a randomness to it so that no matter what, if they really want that weapon every single time they better make it their only choice.
I’m a competitive player at heart but I see the need to change. While I hate the ideas of AA altogether I can see a way to improve ordinance for competitive players while still keeping it fun for casuals. First up, I hate the randomness. You should have 3 options, each with a specific reward. Kind of like COD killstreaks except it’s a weapon. That way competitive players can pick weapons that are more skillful like the sniper. Of course this depends on the weapon sandbox. If there’s a decent amount of weapons that are harder to use but more rewarding, then competitive players can pick those weapons, being able to make a much larger use of them than a casual player can. (This however is a generalization. I realize that just because someone is a casual player doesn’t meant that they are bad at the game, but from my experience this tends to be the case.) Then casual gamers could use “easy” weapons like the needler. Of course, there is something else I would add. A large part of the game is realizing where you are, where your enemies are, and what weapons they have. One negative effect of ordinance is you can’t really predict what weapon your enemy has until you actually meet him. So to counter this, in the bottom left corner, where they say stuff like so and so assassinated so and so, it would also say so and so obtained such and such weapon from his ordinance. This will add the skill of memorizing who has what weapon before you even meet them.
