Halo 4 Thoughts Day 6: Co-op, SO/Firefight

Games Other Halo
#1

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Hello everyone. Welcome to day 6 of Halo 4 Thoughts. As a reminder, I’m doing this because I’m working on a wishlist for Halo 5 and want to gather opinions and also to show 343 whether or not we like the direction they’re taking with Halo. Today, I’d like to talk about the co-op, Spartan Ops and Firefight.

Co-op
I think that co-op in Halo is great and makes the game a lot more fun than it is in single player. However, throughout Halo’s online career, we’ve had a big problem with co-op: the co-op lag. In Halo 4, I couldn’t ever play more than 2 player online co-op because the game becomes practically unplayable, which is unacceptable for a game as expensive as Halo. I think that for future titles, 343 needs to get a much better net-code so that even 4 player co-op is as smooth as possible.

Spartan Ops vs Firefight
With Halo 4, 343 tried something that was never done before in gaming (as far as I know): weekly episodic story-based content. I really liked Spartan Ops. It was awesome knowing that every Monday, me and my friend would have 5 new missions to play. The second half of Spartan Ops was especially awesome (Episode 7 is by far the best IMO). However, I think Spartan Ops could’ve been much better. There were too many recycled environments, which made the missions more boring than they should’ve been. Also, the gameplay was a bit repetitive.

So what do I prefer between Spartan Ops and Firefight? I prefer Firefight because of the replay value that it offers. Spartan Ops didn’t have skulls or scoring, which are both huge reasons to replay missions.

So how do I think 343 should implement Spartan Ops or Firefight in their future title?

I think that at launch, we should get the Campaign, Firefight and the Multiplayer. No Spartan Ops. Then, after launch and the staff’s break, the guys who made the Campaign should work on a season of Spartan Ops (free of course, I’ll discuss that in a future thread). A few months after the games launch (so that they can make sure they don’t recycle environments as much), 343 should start releasing those episodes weekly. However, they shouldn’t release all 5 episodes on Monday. Instead, release one mission everyday until Friday. Why? So that players who rely on MM to play co-op can be sure to play a specific mission (instead of seeing 200 in each mission, we’ll see 1000 in the mission every day). When that season is done, update Firefight with maps from that season and start working on the next one.

What did you think of Spartan Ops? Do you prefer Spartan Ops or Firefight? How would you improve them?

-Map Ordnance
-Armor Abilities/Loadouts/Customization
-Ranking System/Playlist Selection/Official Tournaments
-Personal Ordnance
-Campaign
-Spartan Ops vs Firefight
-Forge
-Theater
-Vehicles
-Sandbox
-Maps
-User Interface
-Sprint I was gonna make my own thread about sprint but I find another one that is pretty popular and recent that makes it pretty clear we do not want it back.
-Power-Ups
-Micro-transactions and DLC
-Peer to Peer vs Dedicated Servers
-Classic Halo vs Halo 4 (this will most likely be saved for the last topic)
-Instant Respawn
-Static vs Dynamic Spawns
-De-Scope vs Flinch
-Killcams
-Join in Progress
-Search Options
-Beta test
-Bot Mode

Message to the mods: I’m sorry for all the things that I’ve said about you guys or other forum posters (Road Wulf). I tried to leave but I simply love Halo too much to just give up. I just want to keep giving my feedback and maybe have just a tiny impact on it. That’s why I ask for your forgiveness and I promise I’ll stay cool and won’t insult anyone anymore. Also, I’d love it if you could just unban my original account and give me one last chance.

#2

forge-able firefight

There are 3 maps: a space-, snow- and a map similar to beachhead.
This will make my day if 343 is going to make it.

#3

Co-op

To me, co-op is a necessity in Halo. It makes the campaigns so much more fun to play, and gives the chance for more hilarious/crazy moments. Future Halo games NEED co-op play. Having said that, I do feel as though the difficulty scaling isn’t very well done. I haven’t noticed a huge increase in the number of enemies, nor have I ever felt like they get much smarter.
I can’t say much for online co-op, I tend to just play split-screen/system link. I’ve heard the lag is pretty much unbearable in some cases though.

Spartan Ops vs. Firefight

Firefight, hands down.

SpOps is a mixed bag. I loved the cutscenes, and the story was pretty well done (for the most part) - so for that it gains major points. However, I feel as though the gameplay was irrelevant to the storyline. Recycled areas sucked the fun out of the game (come on, I just cleared that area last week and now we’ve allowed the Covenant/Prometheans to overrun it again/there’s an artifact we missed last time?) and I felt as though it was a “push button, spawn more enemies” exercise. Unlimited lives definitely took the challenge away as well. Later episodes improved on this greatly but it still felt a bit limited.

Crimson was almost completely detached from the main storyline. This was obviously done as a way to allow full customisation of your Spartan, as the cutscenes were all pre-rendered - however I wouldn’t have minded actually playing as members of Fireteam Majestic, it would certainly allow for some more character depth, and the situations they found themselves in seemed a lot more interesting than Crimson’s.

Which leads me to the major problem - characters in SpOps are extremely poorly developed. This opinion has been repeated ad infinitum, but it is extremely valid. Why should I invest myself in a universe when I have no emotional attachment to most of the main characters? Lasky, Halsey, Roland and, to an extent, Thorne were likeable but every other character were either extremely annoying (Dalton/Miller), clichéd (DeMarco) or both (Palmer).

In future titles, I’d like to see a fully customisable firefight mode (enemy/friendly spawns, individual AI placement etc.), preferably alongside a map editor to allow tons of varied gameplay.
I wouldn’t mind a similar story to SpOps, but either it needs to be all cutscene or 343i need to address the issues above.

#4

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*Original post, click at your own discretion.

> forge-able firefight
>
> There are 3 maps: a space-, snow- and a map similar to beachhead.
> This will make my day if 343 is going to make it.

Stay tuned for my Forge thread tomorrow. I think I have great ideas that would work very well with forgeable Firefight maps.

#5

Edited by Moderator - Please do not use alternate accounts to bypass forum bans. Alternate accounts will be permanently banned, and offending users will be subject to both temporary and permanent bans.

*Original post, click at your own discretion.

> Co-op
>
> To me, co-op is a necessity in Halo. It makes the campaigns so much more fun to play, and gives the chance for more hilarious/crazy moments. Future Halo games NEED co-op play. Having said that, I do feel as though the difficulty scaling isn’t very well done. I haven’t noticed a huge increase in the number of enemies, nor have I ever felt like they get much smarter.
> I can’t say much for online co-op, I tend to just play split-screen/system link. I’ve heard the lag is pretty much unbearable in some cases though.
>
> Spartan Ops vs. Firefight
>
> Firefight, hands down.
>
> SpOps is a mixed bag. I loved the cutscenes, and the story was pretty well done (for the most part) - so for that it gains major points. However, I feel as though the gameplay was irrelevant to the storyline. Recycled areas sucked the fun out of the game (come on, I just cleared that area last week and now we’ve allowed the Covenant/Prometheans to overrun it again/there’s an artifact we missed last time?) and I felt as though it was a “push button, spawn more enemies” exercise. Unlimited lives definitely took the challenge away as well. Later episodes improved on this greatly but it still felt a bit limited.
>
> Crimson was almost completely detached from the main storyline. This was obviously done as a way to allow full customisation of your Spartan, as the cutscenes were all pre-rendered - however I wouldn’t have minded actually playing as members of Fireteam Majestic, it would certainly allow for some more character depth, and the situations they found themselves in seemed a lot more interesting than Crimson’s.
>
> Which leads me to the major problem - characters in SpOps are extremely poorly developed. This opinion has been repeated ad infinitum, but it is extremely valid. Why should I invest myself in a universe when I have no emotional attachment to most of the main characters? Lasky, Halsey, Roland and, to an extent, Thorne were likeable but every other character were either extremely annoying (Dalton/Miller), clichéd (DeMarco) or both (Palmer).
>
> In future titles, I’d like to see a fully customisable firefight mode (enemy/friendly spawns, individual AI placement etc.), preferably alongside a map editor to allow tons of varied gameplay.
> I wouldn’t mind a similar story to SpOps, but either it needs to be all cutscene or 343i need to address the issues above.

Co-op
Agree 100%. Playing Legendary with another guy is pretty much like playing Normal alone.

Spartan Ops vs Firefight

Yeah I definitely think Spartan Ops would’ve been a lot more fun without Unlimited lives.

I think that, if Spartan Ops ever returns, we should still play as our own characters. However, instead of having pre-rendered cut-scenes, have in-game cut-scenes where we can see our characters, like in Reach.

#6

Spartan Ops pales in comparison to the Campaign and ODST’s Firefight.

There just isn’t much to do on the missions besides killing enemies from a safe distance or dying again and again, killed by a dozen Elites.

The lack of scoring, scaling, theater, lives, skulls, boss waves, rewarding weapon drops, and forced loadouts, not to mention the abundance of infinite ammo crates, just kills any point in trying to stay alive without dying.

Only these missions stand out to me:

E6C1 - player in cutscene, forced loadout
E7C1 - optional kill objectives
E9C1 - Brometheans, Watchers vs. Sentinels, canonical significance
E10C5 - middle cutscene, trait zone (broken gravity), player in cutscene

Clear evidence of potential.

#7

> <mark>forge-able firefight</mark>
>
> There are 3 maps: a space-, snow- and a map similar to beachhead.
> This will make my day if 343 is going to make it.

343 should really have made Forgeable Firefight. I mean, what’s better than making your own Survival maps to play against AI’s.

#8

OP hit the nail on the head with SO vs FF.

I like both, but prefer Firefight, because it was a challenging survival mode that focused on that “thrill of survival” feeling that you can only get from a true survival mode.

Spartan Ops was fun, but the opposite of a survival mode by having infinite lives. It was basicaly FF Arcade with a story. Fun without the challenge. It would be better off with skulls and custom options. It would also rock if we could make FF in SO by fooling with the settings.

Just my two cents…