“Pay to Customize”. You wont be able to buy advantages like weapons or armor abilities, but you will be able to buy stuff like armor and visors and weapon skins. If 343 did that, would you play the game if/ when it goes international? I think this would be a good idea, even in normal Halo games as it could be used to make Map Packs free. Of course some people will still complain, despite how logical the idea would be since if the map packs are free more people will buy them thus they will appear more often in Matchmaking.
Sounds good to me. I hope it turns out this way.
The trailer already confirms that a) you can buy variants of the default weapons, b) different variants have different attributes (e.g. increased RoF, increased accuracy), and c) different armor has different attributes (e.g. increased melee damage). It’s all very subtle and goes past fast, but at the part where weapon and armor customization is shown, if you pause at the right moment, you can see different variants of the same weapons (named, for instance, “RoF BR”, or “acc BR”), and armor attribute names.
[tsassi ninja-ed my response. Oh well, no reason to change it]
Well I’ve got a bit of bad news for you. In the Halo: Online trailer, you can see plain as day in-game currency price rates for Weapon Renting. Not to say this will remain this way either on launch or perhaps for other regional releases, but this game intends to monetise the weaponry along with their cosmetic skins & attachments/modifications. They seemingly are making it work like Halo 4’s Custom Loadout system, where you can buy (Maybe unlock, but who knows if that’s even a possibility) primary & secondary weaponry, resupply them from universal ammo boxes on the map, whilst maintaining the map pickups like the Rocket Launcher & Sniper Rifle.
I’ll bring up the official home for it just so you can have another run through: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=612_qzVHRQg
The real question everyone’s asking (And what 343 Industries probably should’ve made the effort to actually detail, as that’s what most consumers interested in Free-To-Play games want to know more than anything), is how the new player experience & the free players are going to be able to enjoy the game without the paying players having an immediate & unquestionable upper-hand. A valid question, considering not many Free-To-Play shooters offer that even ground.
You’ve got games like Team Fortress 2, which makes it’s weapons highly accessible through common drop rates, significantly low pricing (Apart from reskins of defaults) or be able to craft them, trade them & gift them.
You’ve got games like PlanetSide 2 which allows you to slowly (But not too slowly) unlock everything that has an effect on gameplay, but also offers the convenience of paying a somewhat steep price for the majority of it (A Pay4Convenience if you will), and unlike what we’re seeing in the trailer, you can freely trial any weapon for 30mins every 8 hours & test out everything in a VR Training map to best evaluate your upgrade direction & inform your purchases.
Sad to say, but there aren’t a lot of Free-To-Play games out there that simply sell only cosmetics (Perhaps DOTA 2, but I don’t play that game & thus can’t be sure), because they want players to feel obligated to spend money on the game. That’s fair! But you can guarantee that if you fail to avoid giving paying players the upper-hand, the newer players getting stomped are more likely going to have a blast uninstalling the game instead of chucking money at their problems.
So you know what, you can make a man do some wishful thinking! But I’ve seen enough Free-To-Play titles exploiting a well-known name to gain a quick profit from a poorly fleshed out concept such as the notorious Dungeon Keeper 2 & the highly absent of it’s source material F.E.A.R Online to know this somewhat unenthusiastic Halo 3 multiplayer port to PC (I’ve tried the build everyone’s sending around the net, and I gotta say, the mouse control needs so much acceleration just to be considered even adequate) has every chance to be a poor example of the Free-To-Play model to varying alikeness to the previous examples, so it’s gonna take A LOT more than “We made a Halo game on PC!” before I throw money at what would seem at this time an unpassionate cash-grab (I’m always welcomed to be proven wrong, but the hope is too often a vein one).