Halo is a first-person sci-fi arena shooter.
Arena shooter.
That implies even and fair starts, map control, and competing to get more points than your opponent. By literal definition, Halo is a competitive shooter. Those of you saying Halo isn’t competitive hasn’t done their homework. I should also note that in the most recent interview with 343 going over Halo’s future, when a focus on competitive aspects in the game were brought up, their reply was that (roughly) “Halo is a competitive shooter, but that doesn’t mean leaving behind the casual players. That’s not what it means. what it means is, having fair starts and a level playing field so that teamwork and skill will bring you the win”.
That quote is not word for word, but if you go back and watch that vid, that is pretty much exactly what they said.
343 never left behind the casual players. If they had, custom games and modes like Infection and Fiesta would never be in the game.
well due to ignorance and/or stupidity I think the conversation has became a casual vs competitive thing but in reality its far more nuanced than that.
Halo has arguably never been designed solely with competitive/Esports in mind, even if you got back to Halo 5 (what one 343i employee dubbed “the greatest Esports title of all time” lol) most of their resources were spent on expanding and improving Warzone, if you look at Infinite for example BTB had to have taken 3/4 of the MP team’s time, and Campaign itself takes most of the real work that goes into Halo. So 343i at best spend maybe 10-20% of their time and energy into competitive 4v4 MP, but one could absolutely argue they favor the Esports scene over say the BTB scene in certain ways.
Bandit Rifle/Shroud Screen were clearly meant moreso for competitive play than casual, that doesn’t mean they won’t be fun or interesting casually, but you can’t look at a precision rifle and an equipment that blocks FOV as “casual” undertakings. So 343i have slowly made their Halo’s more competitive focused over time, now when they make maps they typically (shoutout to Launch Site and Behemoth for being exceptions to this with Infinite) favor maps that can be put into Ranked, they favor equipment that has some utility in Esports, they favor weapons that aren’t too nooby.
Just to clarify the word ‘competitive’ is just a vague and ambiguous word used for all sorts of things, in modern day gaming it implies certain features or design philosophies moreso than something antithetical to casual play, it implies things like balancing, testing, and basic things are paramount over something that’s just there for giggles. I absolutely would say that 343i has become more Esports focused since 2012, but there are a LOT of features that casual fans enjoy that the comp scene uses, there are also a LOT of features the casual community appreciates that they are not entirely aware of were meant for competitive play.
tl;dr its a more nuanced and interesting conversation. Bungie/343i have NEVER put competitive first, they put way too many resources and time into casual modes or experiences for that to be the case.
Its competitive in a way that any versus MP is comp. But you are missing the core fundamentals that bungie used when making Halo MP. Fun, social mp with teams consisting of a mixture of skill levels. Halo has always been a fun social mp game first. Comp has always come after that. Comp always carved its niche from the core which is fun social gaming.
I think the Bungie founders might take issue with your Arena shooter premise. Halo is a fun little game. That it is marketing itself as competitive is evidence that the mass market has abandoned this game.
I have heard many conflicting arguments. Some devs say it was built to be competitive, some didn’t. Halo is a contradictory series, on one hand you have 4v4 competitive maps and gametypes, on the other you have BTB. Its a series that attempts to please a wide range of players. They’ve always spent most of their resources and time on casual stuff though obviously, Campaign’s are not competitive features lol.
NO it’s not! The Bungie devs themselves said Halo at its core is a social/party shooter, and the competitive scene emerged from it. Stop trying to say being competitive is part of Halo’s DNA.
Trololololol.
The designers of the game dont agree and the arguments out forward in other threads as to why halo isnt at its core competitive are far more co.pelling than this.
No1 said it wasnt an arena shooter of sorts.
Nor that it could not be competitive.
This reads like somone reacting before they actually engaged in the discourse on other threads.
Halo at its best and most popular was not particularly concerned with competitive game design and that just the reality.
No 343i game has understood that party game philosophy and its been pointed out by the community since halo 4 dropped.
I think you should read what others have said in other threads and really read what people have been saying.
Halos identity is not that of a competitive arena shooter and to suggest so only mirrors the issue the xommunity has with 343is approach to design fundimentals in relation to the franchise
This post smells of CAP. Halo was made to be a causal couch party game first and foremost. A game that the developers had fun playing and it was added in last second before the game when gold. Bungie have said this like a million times.
Now does this mean the game can’t be competitive? No. Some of the most causal game are also the most competitive (look at Mario Party). Same thing with Halo.
Out of curiosity- what do you think people mean when they say it is not a competitive shooter?
Do you think they mean there isn’t shooting, and that there isn’t a competition between teams every match? Surely you know they say “It’s not a competitive shooter” while also seeing these things. Surely you know that the way you’re using the phrase isn’t matching up with the way other people are using it.
Interpret generously. Ask what people mean. Figure out where the difference is between observable facts and things people are saying that don’t make sense to you.
It was a poor choice of words. What you’re suggesting they meant is absolutely correct, but instead of directly stating things like this, they left the definition of “competitive” and “social” completely up to interpretation.
Were they suggesting that Halo was always supposed to be like ranked and HCS, out of the box? Are they suggesting that the games were not social in nature, and were instead always competitive by design? Or were they suggesting what you’re suggesting, where the competition is derived from the in-game objective of outsmarting and outplaying your opponents?
It was disorienting, at least. Reading further into what you have to say, I do have to agree.
Any game that is two sides attempting to beat each other, whether that’s a 1v1 or 16v16, is a competitive game.
However.
There are two areas we need to address here: Competitive play means Ranked. This means that the players are fighting one another for increased Rank or some benefit beyond the fun of the game. Casual play is when players are playing to win, but they’re doing so not for any real reward - neither monetary nor for increased Rank on a ladder. Starcraft 1 and Starcraft 2 are great examples of opposing design philosophies - Starcraft 1 was a fun game that you could screw around with your buddies in custom games, while also having a strong competitive scene due to the capability to play both sides of the coin between casual and competitive. Starcraft 2 was designed from the ground-up for competitive play, and it shows in design decisions ranging from maps to unit balance. This resulted in the absence of features that would have fostered non-competitive play, such as social systems and clans.
There’s also a difference between a game that is designed for competition, and a game that is designed for casual play. Halo was originally designed, at least from what I can see in Halo 1-3, for casual play, with competitive play being built up off of the bones of the casual experience. It was simple and easy approach for the newbie, complex and difficult to master for the pro. Halo 5 and Infinite (less so 4), had a higher emphasis on competition, and that winning above having fun was the ultimate goal. Even in regular matchmaking, Halo 5 made me feel like I had to sweat hard to win, because winning was the only way I could have fun. Infinite carries this forward in a bad way - every match, even in Social, is a mini-competitive match where winning instead of having fun is the ultimate goal of the match.
Some of these feelings are subjective, but I think most can understand what I’m getting at here - games that designed from the ground-up to be competitive have a focus on winning and performance as the ultimate goals of the match. Games that are designed from the ground-up to be social and casual have a focus on the player experience being fun and enjoyable to a wide variety of players.
Sean W doesn’t know what he’s talking about, respectively. He acts as though Halo 2/3 were not good competitively out of the box, yet conveniently forgets that those games had some of the best competitive maps in the franchise, forgets the button combos, forgets the ranking system and the features that supported competitive play.
Edit: Halo 2/3 are not good examples of casual games, CE one could argue was designed to be more casual, yet even then it still had large tourneys and a dedicated group of people that consider it the best competitive title due to the Magnum and the cool maps and so on even today.
A Bungie Dev (singular) stated this. The Act Man has a point bringing this up, ultimately Halo was designed to be fun for anyone who wanted to play it, but that hardly puts it into the category of ‘party’ game. A competitive shooter can be a social experience, the problem is the current direction favors the former more so than the latter.
Halo can be whatever the players playing it want to make of it, but the core baseline experience does promote a competitive experience by definition. You can bring people together in a competitive space without it being purely for blood and glory.
Competitive:
-relating to or characterized by competition.
Competition:
-the activity or condition of competing.
Compete:
-strive to gain or win something by defeating or establishing superiority over others who are trying to do the same.
Halo’s core gamemodes going back to even the first game revolve around beating the other team.
However, that doesn’t mean that the direction that Infinite is going in with SBMM (or the rest of the industry for that matter) is ideal for the level of competition that players want to pursue.
That doesn’t sound like Halo was ever created to be a “competitive shooter”…
[Hardy LeBel’s curriculum vitae, Game Designer: Halo: Combat Evolved (2001), Microsoft Game Studios, Creative Consultant: Halo 2 (2004), Microsoft Game Studios]
This is a case of “both things can be true at the same time.” In a way, every type of game that includes more than one person is competitive in some sense.
that’s one developer. Why do you consider his words as representative of the whole studio?
Lets not forget even Nintendo titles have massive competitions.
The developers at Bungie were aware of tournaments/LAN’s, now you could argue that in 2001 it wasn’t as important to them as say 2004 and onwards (lets not pretend that Lockout or Guardian or Midship were just casually designed maps lol, they clearly became more competitive focused over the years) but the developers didn’t just design CE to be an entire casual game. If they did it wouldn’t have had MP at all, tons of games back in those days didn’t, yet they insisted on putting in tons of maps for local MP.