Ok, 128 players may be pushing it. But halo 5 will be a next Gen game, and one of the greatest things about bf4 was the MASSIVE online multiplayer. This same kind of idea with a huge battle of Spartans would be spectacular in my view! What do you guys think?
Baby steps. I say we start with 12v12 or 16v16. See how that works.
Anything above 20 people doesn’t sound good to me.
Too soon. 343i needs to bring Halo back to top tier, and going all out like that could be a bad move.
Like Junky said, step by step.
Inch by inch, mile by mile.
I’d love a gametype that incorporated massive amounts of players but not in a competitive setting.
I’ve posted this idea before but I’ll post it again. Having a massive PvE gameytpe I feel would be amazing for halo. It can take place in an urban setting like an invasion of a colony world or it can be like one of the missions the IIIs went on in ghosts of onyx or it can be a giant space battle where we are fighting above a planet. Since the flood is rumored to be back another thing they could have us do is ally with the covenant or whatever and fight to stop a flood outbreak. Make the flood really strong. You could choose to spawn as a covenant/promethean/sentinel (ghosts of onyx) or a spartan.
A battle that lasts a week so you can pop in and out during the duration of it and has some sort of objective to accomplish. Full fledged vehicular warfare, odsts dropping from the sky, mac cannons going off, scarabs, space warfare. It’d allow them to introduce all nee vehicles and bring in some from halo wars.
I’m quite satisfied with the pvp we have now, wouldn’t mind btb getting a bump to 12v12 and 16v16 but it doesn’t make or break the game for me.
Woah there… 128? I agree with junky. If this happens lets start at 12v12 or 16v16.
I would love for a bump in the player cap. Bigger vehicles anyone?
Like others have said, let’s start off smaller, much smaller. 12x12 wouldn’t be a bad starting point, I personally would definitely not want anything over 16x16, though that’s just me. 128 players, definitely is a bit much.
No terrible idea
if they put that mode in then it would be all everyone would play, and the smaller scale arena fights that halo’s known for would be deserted, not to mention the game would suffer from being balanced to work at so many different player counts.
it’s much better to focus on making the experience of play more fun. BTB could be a LITTLE bigger, but not every game needs to be battlefield scale. the quality of gameplay is far more important to nail and improve.
Football wouldn’t be automatically improved if there were double as many players on the field, boxing wouldn’t be improved if there were four guys in the ring at once. It’s not about console power, it’s about design decisions.
NOPE
NOPE
NOPE
NOPE
NOPE
NOPE
Seriously, Nope. Terrible Idea. For the 10000000th time, just because other games do it, doesn’t mean Halo should do it. Halo is where it is now BECAUSE it tried to emulate what other popular games were doing. Before anything new is implemented, 343 needs to take Halo a step back, and return it to what it once was. If you want a game that supports large multiplayer like that, go play a game that ALREADY supports it.
I hate reading threads like these, Halo 5 should be focusing on bringing back the classic Halo feel that made the game great, while at the same time keeping it modern and next-gen. If they don’t, then I doubt there will even be 128 players online, let alone playing this gametype.
> halo 5 will be a next Gen game
Therefore, everything will work and nothing can be broken.
Say goodbye to vehicle combat as we know it if numbers jump that high. You guys think PP/PG combos are frustrating on spawn…
I personally doubt that we would seriously see Halo jump to those numbers in Arena Shooter formula.
> Say goodbye to vehicle combat as we know it if numbers jump that high. You guys think PP/PG combos are frustrating on spawn…
>
>
> <mark>I personally doubt that we would seriously see Halo jump to those numbers in Arena Shooter formula</mark>.
Agreed. Like, ever.
TBH there has been so much attention to Guardians being an arena shooter that I wonder if we’ll even see Big Team Battle.
The short answer is that it is very unlikely that we will see anything beyond a 16 player game even though Reach has the capability to support more.
In order to see higher player counts 343i will have to produce an entirely new game built from the ground up to support it and make it clear at least two years before release that it is NOT an arena shooter. As I have often said in threads like this one, many of us were thinking Halo Wars was going to be what you propose, and when the game released many were disappointed and proceeded to trash the game. This appears to be what is happening now with Destiny because many people assumed it was going to be an arena shooter like Halo although it was never billed as such, and now people are trashing the game because it’s a poor arena shooter.
Games as you propose have been done to death using technology we laugh at today, so there are no technical reasons. The problem, particularly for a Halo game, is that so many people would have us believe that Halo is an arena shooter and an arena shooter only forever and ever amen. If we can get past that mindset and stop talking in terms of the limits imposed by the game we’ve been playing we might be able to consider what is possible.
I’m sure 343i will be squeezing out arena shooters for as long as people are willing to play them, but the Halo Universe has more than enough assets to make any type of game you can imagine, and some that perhaps you cannot. It just won’t happen with Halo 5 or any of the “Reclaimer Saga.” It’ll have to be something separate a la Halo Wars/Spartan Assault.
> TBH there has been so much attention to Guardians being an arena shooter that I wonder if we’ll even see Big Team Battle.
>
> The short answer is that it is very unlikely that we will see anything beyond a 16 player game even though Reach has the capability to support more.
>
> In order to see higher player counts 343i will have to produce an entirely new game built from the ground up to support it and make it clear at least two years before release that it is NOT an arena shooter. As I have often said in threads like this one, many of us were thinking Halo Wars was going to be what you propose, and when the game released many were disappointed and proceeded to trash the game. This appears to be what is happening now with Destiny because many people assumed it was going to be an arena shooter like Halo although it was never billed as such, and now people are trashing the game because it’s a poor arena shooter.
>
> Games as you propose have been done to death using technology we laugh at today, so there are no technical reasons. The problem, particularly for a Halo game, is that so many people would have us believe that Halo is an arena shooter and an arena shooter only forever and ever amen. If we can get past that mindset and stop talking in terms of the limits imposed by the game we’ve been playing we might be able to consider what is possible.
>
> I’m sure 343i will be squeezing out arena shooters for as long as people are willing to play them, but the Halo Universe has more than enough assets to make any type of game you can imagine, and some that perhaps you cannot. It just won’t happen with Halo 5 or any of the “Reclaimer Saga.” It’ll have to be something separate a la Halo Wars/Spartan Assault.
If Halo 4 would have taken off, you would probably see a game like this being made. All Halo Reach and Halo 4 were good for were the bigger battles. Reach had amazing BTB, but H4 has sub-par BTB imo.
Halo however, for it to be the eSports that MS wants it to be, they have to go back to the small 2v2, 4v4 playstyle. Large scale games, which aren’t boring or lame, aren’t as competitive. Sure they can get there, but there is a lack of intensity that has been shown to happen with small tightly woven maps with 4v4 game play.
But like I said above, if H4 would have taken off and been an amazing casual game that people were so enamored with they couldn’t get enough BTB, then 343 would probably build a huge 16v16 or larger playlist. But it just doesn’t work because Halo as a large scale game doesn’t appeal to the masses.
One piece of information I heard a while back was, “You can make a competitive game casual, but you can’t make a casual game competitive.” I don’t remember who said it or anything like that, but it makes sense. People loved BTB in all the Halo games so far. But when it came to the small competitive games, Halo 4, the most casual of all the Halos went south in a hurry. reach had it’s AAs and whatnot that made it casual, but the core of no AAs and custom maps from forge made the game more competitive, especially when Bloom was removed. Some say if ZBNS Reach would have been the default playstyle, then it would have been a bigger game than Halo 3 because it is highly competitive.
So if you let 343 build their super competitive game, then you can add more into the game later to make it more fun and casual with BTB and vehicles and all the other glorious things people love about the BTB games. And honestly, every Halo game has had some form of BTB, so we all know H5 will have BTB, but large scale of 64v64 is a little crazy to even be realistic as anything but complete chaos.
This is an issue that has already been faced in Halo development. Halo 2, and even Halo 3, had massive multiplayer maps that supported I believe 64 players at one point and Bungie scrapped those for the favorable 8v8 max player count. While I would like to see AT MOST 12v12, I think Halo has succeeded for so long because of a formula that’s tried and true. Why try to add something that wont work out in the long run?
The only way I see it being implemented is if there is a beta test open to the public, nothing private, to see what the general consensus is on something like that. Who knows, maybe Bungie was wrong and it will work out.
TL;DR: 8v8 works, give it a public beta to test changes.
> Halo however, for it to be the eSports that MS wants it to be, they have to go back to the small 2v2, 4v4 playstyle. Large scale games, which aren’t boring or lame, aren’t as competitive. Sure they can get there, but there is a lack of intensity that has been shown to happen with small tightly woven maps with 4v4 game play.
This just proves my point. Even though BTB is always the most popular playlist, all the attention goes to 4 or 8 player slayer because that’s what people watch on Twitch.
There has to be people at 343i and Microsoft that can see the potential of a high player count game using the entire sandbox that are not distracted by the limits imposed by tournament-style 15 minute games and Twitch viewership.
Games like World of Tanks have a huge non-American Twitch audience because apparently non-Americans can sit through all the time the teams take setting up for the win, whereas the American audience will tune out if there isn’t constant gunplay. If the goal is to get a Twitch audience the game proposed here may never be made. If the goal is to entice a different subset of players that are interested in more than CoD style games then there might be some hope.
I think 343i/MSFT are so concerned over losing the CQB tournament crowd that the “Reclaimer Saga” will never move beyond 16 players, and that’s only because Halo has had 16 player games since Halo 2 so people will expect it. You can already see, though, that even in this thread people talk about limits as if we’re still dealing with the original Xbox and peer hosting. As such, any game with Master Chief in it will essentially still work like CE. The only way to get around that is to produce a spinoff.
I want 32 players or 64 ONLY in custom games
> Ok, 128 players may be pushing it. But halo 5 will be a next Gen game, and one of the greatest things about bf4 was the MASSIVE online multiplayer. This same kind of idea with a huge battle of Spartans would be spectacular in my view! What do you guys think?
Next-gen doesn’t mean bigger.
Going bigger only moves Halo 5 farther away from the original design of Halo: CE and it doesn’t meld well with the way the game’s core has been designed.
With the negative reaction 343 got from adding new things to halo 4 I don’t think they will add huge battles.