Ever since Halo: Reach, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to accurately balance the new abilities such as sprint and the thruster packs. My first solution to fix sprint was rather harsh. If a player were to sprint, he/she’s shields would decay at a slow but consistent rate which forced them to use it cautiously. I tried it out on a modded Xbox offline but I felt that it wasn’t enough. The second solution only allowed one member of a team to sprint at a time. It worked to an extent but it didn’t fix the problem enough. So after months and months, I have finally created the perfect Ability model. In order to use your abilities, your team must control key positions on a map while picking up Equipment to enable the abilities. It will add a brand new layer of skill to Halo’s core gameplay! Teams will not only fight for power weapons and key points, but also for Ground Pound, Sprint and the thrusters. Since equipment was under-rated in Halo 3, the new ability model will increase the popularity of them and will create many strategies around it. What are your thoughts?
It seems a bit unorthodox to award mobility bonuses for map control. I think how sprint is being handled in Halo 5 isn’t an issue. The issue is if you like sprint or not… The other abilities such as thrusters, ground pound, and clamber are not as heavily game changing which is fine.
Equipment in Halo 3 was the most annoying feature in the game. The bubble shield and regen field always interrupted gun play. They were almost as bad as armor lock… The only equipment that affected movement was the grav lift, which wasn’t featured much in matchmaking. I think the abilities currently don’t need to much fine tuning, at least from the arena footage I have seen.
I appreciate all the thought you’ve put into this, and by no means do I consider myself representative of anyone else, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
One of my fundamental gripes with Halo 3-style power ups, and in fact with the whole idea of weapons-on-map, is that these things act as an accelerator for superior performance. If you’re on The Pit and your team loses the battle over rocket, sword, camo, whatever, then an advantage has just gone to the enemy, who presumably already had a skill advantage to begin with or else they would not have won said battle. I always assumed that winning was its own reward, but obviously that isn’t how Halo works, or how it has ever worked. Now you want to reward good map control with abilities when I would say that good map control is already rewarded, in most cases, with victory.
Halo 4 armor abilities were a good thing, imo, because they added some complexity and unpredictability to the field of battle, and required players to think harder and work harder in order to overcome their effects. But abilities that are essentially just handed over to a player or players because they are better players has no effect except to crush the weaker players even harder and possibly to end the match a little more quickly. Am I oversimplifying this?
I understand your gripes with power weapons and other elements that boost a team’s superior performance, but that is what makes Halo ‘Halo’. It takes skill not only to control key positions on a map, but to also win gunfights simultaneously especially with Halo’s low time to kill. As I said in the first post, the new ability model increases the skill gap because players have to fight over map control, power weapons AND the new abilities. All I’m trying to do is to solve a problem that hasn’t been fixed for five years. Ever since Reach, many veteran players have left the game because it felt too much like Call of Duty.
The Halo 4’s armor abilities however, added a system of random which disproportionately benefited weaker players. Promethean Vision, Jet Pack and the other perks unarguably broke the match especially since players can spawn with them. You seem to have on map abilities and loadouts confused. Spawning with a wallhack/sprint is noob friendly. If a player had to kill an opponent to earn his/her ability to sprint, wouldn’t it require skill to pull off?
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> I understand your gripes with power weapons and other elements that boost a team’s superior performance, but that is what makes Halo ‘Halo’. It takes skill not only to control key positions on a map, but to also win gunfights simultaneously especially with Halo’s low time to kill. As I said in the first post, the new ability model increases the skill gap because players have to fight over map control, power weapons AND the new abilities. All I’m trying to do is to solve a problem that hasn’t been fixed for five years. Ever since Reach, many veteran players have left the game because it felt too much like Call of Duty.
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> The Halo 4’s armor abilities however, added a system of random which disproportionately benefited weaker players. Promethean Vision, Jet Pack and the other perks unarguably broke the match especially since players can spawn with them. You seem to have on map abilities and loadouts confused. Spawning with a wallhack/sprint is noob friendly. If a player had to kill an opponent to earn his/her ability to sprint, wouldn’t it require skill to pull off?
Killing an opponent as a way of “earning” the ability to kill them more easily. Let me think about this for a minute. Yes, that requires skill to kill your opponent. I’m just saying that I think skill, usually rewarded with a win even if the map is stripped of guns and power ups, is its own reward. Winning is its own reward. If I kill a guy because I’m better than him, I don’t want to have “earned” a thing which will just make it easier for me to kill him again.
(Now we come to the myth of armor abilities lending a hand to the weaker player. I don’t buy it. If armor abilities are available to everyone, and in Halo 4 they were, then they can’t disproportionately benefit anyone. Any scenario you can name where an armor ability closes the skill gap, I can name another where it widens right back up again. The abilities themselves don’t make anyone a quicker or better shot, they can only change the pace of engagements where speed and accuracy must be deployed. Sprint can speed up the rate of engagement or slow it down, but it seldom changes the outcome. Camo, likewise, can be used to slow the pace of play, but the weaker player who uses it can only buy himself time - he can’t stave off death forever. Abilities, if available universally, can change the quantity of play but not the quality. A “stronger” player who can’t counter an armor ability, or who refuses to learn how to adapt to their presence, isn’t really all that strong. Maybe he was in Halo 3, but here we are in the future. Adapt or die.)
I guess where I’m headed with this is that, in my opinion, people seem to find it far too easy to confuse greediness for reward with being deserving of reward. To the average player, things are only worth having if getting them deprives someone else of their benefit. Yes, this is a legitimate device for competition. But in the Haloverse we’ve focused on the “unfairness” of armor abilities and the “competitiveness” of everything-on-map without stopping to examine some of the basic fallacies in the logic behind the arguments. We accept that blank-on-map is the best thing because it was the first thing - the way it was done at the beginning of Halo. It is, as you said, what makes Halo Halo. Then we find rationales to support our preferences, and assume that the rationales drive preference and not the other way around. Saying that a player “deserves” something because they’re the “better” player is one approach to competition. But if professional football introduced camo and overshield to the team that made it to the 50 yard line first… what then? Does that make football more competitive, or do millions of fans stop watching because Goodell has done away with the fundamentals that make football football?
There’s no right or wrong here. I’m just trying to get people to look at the question from other angles.