if there is one thing I’ve taken away from seeing halo rise and fall, is that the communities must have some kind of common ground, and someplace where they can all share content.
to a certain extent, halo waypoint fills this role, but it’s outside of the game. you have to look for it and i think that turns a lot of people off.
imagine this, we have the normal title screen, campaign, matchmaking, a co-op mode, and theater. below theater we have a selection called community.
in the community hub, we have access to a large variety of choices. we have podcast, youtube videos, live streams, the ability to record xbox chats, voice recording soft where, community meat ups, community spotlights for all of these things, picked by 343i and the community.
podcasts, youtube videos, and live streams work the someway you can view TV on xboxone, you can shrink them down and view them while playing another game. so why go to all this trouble to bring something that is already on the internet?
a lot of people don’t know halo has this really great community, i haven’t really seen anything like it before. we make all this great content, and a lot of it falls on deaf ears. so we have to get it back out there, and reading it directly into the people that play the game is the best way. it’s right there on the menu, their bound to knowtice it eventually.
returning to podcasts, and just recording in general. the reason we should have Skype or something like that is that is, all people in the community should have the ability to make great content, it should be a inherent trait of the game. look at forge, the reason it is so successful (despite a slight drop in key features) is that everyone that plays halo has it built in. and that is why halo is so good, we are given the ability to exchange and express ideas, in what is probable one of the most cerebral fps’s ever made. giving players the ability to record gameplay, post it, provide commentary (live or otherwise), or the ability to make podcasts, all on the same platform would be revolutionary. the halo 4 community is on life support because there is a distinctive lack in the community in the game, no content is being made about it.
live streams are so important. not really for a casual audience, but for the hardcore competitive guys, its latterly better than cable. if you listen to guys like Gaundy, they are always asking for a way to reach out to their fans. we have to give them that chance, to not only reach out to old fans, but to new ones as well. this is where community voting comes in. if i remember right, Saucy suggested this. players compete for a level 50 in a ranked playlist. once, they get that 50, they have the ability to live stream. from there, to community votes on one player they would like to see lifestream for the week. top three, get picked and anyone can view them from the community menu.
finally community fan meat ups. this is vital. imagine this. each gamer tag now has a subscription box. from that box, we are all knowtified of any updates that they have, like they start a live stream, or host a fan meat up(think of it like a friends list, but without that 100 person limit). fans can message the producers, but in a separate in box, friends list people get one box, while the subs get another, optimized for a much larger influx of messages. if a live stream starts, or they host a fan meat up, a little bleep-bloop pops up, and by pressing the home button we can jump right into it. its like a message.
by the way as an after thought, anyone can lifestream, but only people with 50s in a playlist can lifestream on to the community hub.
the whole point of this is to bring people together, something a community has been struggling to do since the days of halo 3. if this were to go-up at launch with halo 5, it would be a massive hit (i think). just the kind of hit we need, to bring us back from the brink. time to become a trendsetter again halo. lets kick some -Yoink-.