Many people often say that they dislike playing MLG because of its lack of ‘weapon variety’. I admit, MLG does primarily only use a few weapons - DMR, NR, Pistol, power weapons.
I want to talk about weapon variety in Halo 4. In Halo 3 and Reach, MLG took these weapons out partly because they’re full automatic weapons not requiring much skill, and partly because half of Halo 3’s and Reach’s weapon sandbox are just reskinned versions of other weapons, albeit slightly less powerful.
Look at the weapons in Reach. For medium-long range, you have the DMR and the Needle Rifle. For short range? AR, Plasma Rifle, Plasma Repeater, Needler, Spiker, Plasma Pistol, Shotgun, Sword, Hammer. Sure, a bunch of these weapons are pretty much melee range weapons but even still the hammer and the sword barely do anything noticeably different when actually used.
To have a good balance between skill and damage, a general rule is this: the more skill it requires to use, the more damaging it should be to an opponent. In Reach, aim assist and bullet magnetism is so great that there’s no point in using one of the easy full auto weapons like the Plasma Rifle or Spiker because the DMR is only slightly harder but is so much more effective.
In Halo 4, firstly, aim assist and bullet magnetism need to be turned down. This means that worse players will not be able to use the skilled weapons as well as better players, so they will use the easier but slightly less effective weapons to get kills, which will result in weapon variety.
The weapons also need to be based around unique ideas, and not all do the same thing.
For example, let me take a few weapons from Reach’s and Halo 3’s sandbox and you’ll see how much more variety there is. Remember, aim assist and bullet magnetism are turned down on all weapons. These are just ideas to show that all weapons do not need to be the same.
Gone is the old Pistol. New Pistol is 8 shot kill, semi automatic, with explosive bullets which do a small amount of area of effect damage. It kills slower than the DMR but obviously can now damage multiple opponents if they are clustered.
Gone is the Plasma Rifle. Bring back the old one which stuns you and slows movement considerably when hit.
A new weapon. Quite a slow killing weapon, but completely ignores shields. It goes straight through to health (and obviously when all your health is gone you die) so it would be a useful counter to someone with overshield (which I hope makes a return in Halo 4.)
SMG has reduced range but slightly buffed damage so it’s not just a reskinned AR.
In a few minutes I’ve come up with a few unique ideas for weapons which would probably be used and would create more ‘weapon variety’.
Sorry for the very jumbled post, I didn’t plan any of this before writing it down and so it kind of came out as I thought of it. Basically, remove all the weapons that are just reskinned versions of another weapon and replace them with useful and unique weapons which serve their own purpose and so will be used instead. And reduce aim assist and bullet magnetism so that it’s worth using the easier weapons if you’re not very good with the harder to use precision weapons.
