To me Halo Reach felt like an incredibly rushed game, filled with glitches, flaws and frankly questionable features. I’m not trying to slag off Bungie here, there’s no doubt they put as much effort into Reach as they could. I think one of the main problems is the fact that they were spread far too thin during Reach’s development.
Halo: Reach had a huge selection of modes and features including campaign, multiplayer, Firefight, Custom Games, Forge and even custom games just for Firefight mode. However Reach was still made in roughly the same time span as its predecessors. With all these new modes Bungie were under even more preassure as they were essentially managing all of them at once, this is why Reach feels rushed and lacklustre. Halo 4 will likely have one or two new modes to bring to the table on top of all the above mentioned for 343i to get done in the same time period. Which begs the question: Does something need to go to make Halo 4 great?
The majority of the modes such as campaign, multiplayer, forge and customs are essential, meaning it would come down to FF and the new game mode, invasion. While I love Firefight, I think it ate up way too much time in Reach’s development. After all, at launch it had its very own map selection of approxamatly equal size to the multiplayer map selection. Meaning that if FF never made it into Reach, Reach’s multiplayer map count could have potentially doubled.
Another point to note is the fact the population count of FF playlists is significantly lower compared to multiplayer, the last thing developers can afford to do is waste time. And it would seem that FF used up a lot of time and disk space, yet in the end fewer people actually prefered it over multiplayer, so shouldn’t the time be instead focused on multiplayer?
On the other hand if Firefight does stay then another possibility is to make all maps compatible with all game modes, that way both Firefight and multiplayer would get a large selection of maps (and one thing people complained about at the launch of Reach was the suprisingly small selection of maps) and the developers time is spent much more efficiently.
However this raises another issue: Would the quality of maps suffer due to the fact that they are trying to cater to multiple entirely seperate modes? Much like how while Boneyard is a great map for invasion, it falls flat on other game modes. Over half the map is completly unpopulated and ignored the vast majority of the time, possibly due to the fact that if one team spawned on this area of the map, they would immedatly have an advantage due to easy access of the high vantage points in the middle of the map. However isn’t this an indicator of bad map design?
It all comes down to quality against quantity: Would you rather have a large selection of modes, of lower quality and map selection than there could have been if just one of those modes were scrapped? Or would you like the maps for these seperate modes to be available to all modes at the possible expense of map quality?
TL;DR: Would you like a large selection of possibly lower quality modes like in Reach, or a slightly smaller selection of modes with one mode removed (possibly firefight or invasion) to allow for higher quality on the remaining modes with a larger map selection? Or would you like 343 to make maps which cater to all modes at the possible expense of map quality?
Discuss.