I play chess, I’ve played Halo.
Halo 2, and 3, even according to my friends, don’t feel like games of chess anymore.
The slower pacing, the old-holy trinity of Rifle, Grenades, Melee, the tug of war, the positioning,and spacing, gauging when you can make a move forwards, and when you have to make a move backwards, or when you just have to stay put in one spot and opt for neutrality lest you put yourself in a worse spot, all of it seems to have been traded for fast-paced cod-styled frantics.
I think 343 needs to get their fundamentals down again, and revamp the whole game from the ground up, and focus on the fundamental chess-like back and forths that used to make the title great and separate from other twitch-styled shooters, and refine it from that vantage point forwards.
Take the fundamentals and refine it from there.
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Oops, meant to write Halo: infinite no longer feels like a chess match as Halo 2 and 3 once did, typos.
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They… never did?
Unless you’re playing with a really dedicated team, Halo has never “felt like chess”. A mad rush for the power weapons, a healthy dose of betrayals to get those power weapons into lesser hands, and in general eight Lone Wolves mashed together to try and work together.
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It definitely use to feel this way for me. Maybe some have never been team players : P
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Well I mean the very fact that when you are at low HP and you melee each other at the same time you both die at the same time, that sort of points to chess, stalemate and whatnot. You don’t really get that with twitch-shooters where it’s just based on whoever reacts the fastest gets the kill.
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A circumstantial trade-kill doesn’t make the gameplay feel like chess at all. There’s nothing strategic about that, very little (if any) notion of “stalemate” to that, and it’s more a last-ditch act of desperation that just happens to result in a kill. Or a broken controller if you miss the melee. Halo isn’t chess. Never was, even when they tried to make it a gamemode.
The maps no longer feel as methodically crafted as they use to. Maps usually use to have clear pathways, weapons/powerups to grab, and areas to control. Now it doesn’t feel like it matters where you are quite as much. Just compare how the gameplay looks and feels compared to previous games since I doubt I am explaining it well.
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I just made wild statements about tournaments being true tests of skill when the maps they play on are procedurally generated and cannot be optimised and predictable before a tournament.
All these “best in game” teams would really have to pull through on maps they know nothing about.
This is a bad idea to me and doesn’t increase skill gap. In an arena shooter it doesn’t make sense to have them procedurally generated. This is like a basketball court. You would have the three point line and freethrow in random spots to each game. Your supposed to know the layout of each map that makes it fair and competitive, where no one can -Yoink!- and say that they lost due to the procedurally generated map giving the other team and advantage. Although it would be cool to play it and have a random map generator but not in the context of ranked. Knowing all the lil in n out of the map and utilizing that knowledge is key a key aspect an arena shooter.
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It’s more like chess mixed with paintball.