Great game mode added to the Halo franchise. Here are the things I don’t love about it and the things that will eventually make me leave the game. Just to be clear, this isn’t an “I hate this game and the designers don’t know what they are doing” thread. So here goes my list:
1 - Cheap game mechanics != harder game mode. Making it possible for AI to kill you from 5 miles away while you can’t do any damage to them and giving you a 30 second respawn timer is more frustrating than it is difficult. It encourages long range game play that makes it impossible to kill certain bosses or finish certain rounds. It also wastes REQS and REQ levels that eliminate the team aspect of the game. I swear the AI have a priority list they use to take out the better vehicles first and sometimes you can’t do anything about it. I have left a garage only to be hit by Pipap from halfway across the make and destroy my vehicle before I even see him. That isn’t something you can just “get gewd” to fix, it is a cheap game mechanic.
2 - Sense of futility. Ever since they have changed the bosses and added WZFF, I have seen more people just give up at certain points because there is no way to finish the round or take the base or hold the base. I have never seen this in Halo (minus the whole farming stuff). I have had teams completely give up on certain rounds because they don’t believe they can finish them. Not the whole team, but enough to truly make a round impossible to beat.
3 - Bullet sponge bosses. This isn’t the normal “bullet sponge bosses are lazy programming and they should be smarter AI” complaint. My complaint is they give a LOT more HP to bosses, but the weapons we have to use are not able to do enough damage before they run out of ammo to make them worthwhile. Vehicles can’t get to most bosses in round 5 so you are stuck with bosses that regenerate HP to full (again, cheap mechanic) and a dead spartan with 0 REQ levels on a 30 second timer and nothing to kill the boss with. I know it can be done with load out weapons (at least people here claim it is possible), but not everyone has SEAL team 6 skills in Halo and it feels cheap more than it feels hard.
4 - Last one, bare with me. Poor placement of bosses and objectives. In both regular Warzone and also in Warzone FF poor boss placement brings out that feeling of futility I mentioned in #2. A boss that feels almost invincible and impossible to get to makes me yell bad things at the TV and has my 4 year old asking me what certain 4 letter words mean. Same goes for power cores or generators that are nearly impossible to defend (these aren’t nearly as bad as poor boss placement)
I don’t claim to have answers for these issues that I am complaining about, but it feels good to vent to a bunch of people who don’t care!! Feel free to list your issues if you have any. Now for a bonus item. Something I would like to see added to a round of WZFF. I think it would be cool if we had a round where we had to take the Garage or assault the Core. Start with lots of easy klll stuff like Crawlers and Grunts and at the end of the assault have some Knights or Hunters. Have a set number you have to kill to keep them out of the objective, but on the Core you always have 2 Knights or Hunters in the Core room.
As a game mode, I love it, but these issues do exist in almost all matches. Like the Warden’s in the core room. If you go in on foot, you get smushed with your good REQs. If you stay away a little with a tank, good luck getting a perfect enough placement to take them out.
My last match against the four hunters in the core. My team was breaking against two of them consistently, I pulled out a tank, and thankfully the distraction of my team gave me an opening to hammer the other two Hunters with enough shots to kill them, but no amount of good placement and distraction could get to the remaining two.
Warzone Firefight is also rather inconsistent with its difficulty. One match could be where you steamroll right through, where you only have to kill a certain amount of enemies and the bosses are relatively simple to kill. Then you could end up with a match where you’re stuck defending objectives from Prometheans and taking down three Wardens or Deacon Pipap with his Knight minions.
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> Warzone Firefight is also rather inconsistent with its difficulty. One match could be where you steamroll right through, where you only have to kill a certain amount of enemies and the bosses are relatively simple to kill. Then you could end up with a match where you’re stuck defending objectives from Prometheans and taking down three Wardens or Deacon Pipap with his Knight minions.
Difficulty between matches is inconsistent.
Although, I’ve seen a lot of dislike for how hard Pipap is to kill. I personally thought that he as a boss was one of the best inclusions to Halo to date! For a multiplayer mode I mean.
There are two ways to kill him; sheer force and pinpoint accuracy. I love that there are two distinct ways of combating him. Splaser his shield canopy, snipe him from inside. That’s best when played with someone who wants to do the whole teamwork shabang.
I always play with teamwork in mind, even when I’m playing solo.
Actually had the best run the other night when I took the role of sniper support for a random teammate. I had light rifle, would take down enemy shields, he’d snipe them, and we ended up adding each other and playing a dozen matches playing support roles for one another.
Good teamwork tends to overrule the inconsistencies I’ve found.
It’s weird to me that 343 abandoned the formula that Halo’s campaign thrives on. The model is that a challenging enemy features an amount of HP that should be depleted in a magazine of ammo – but a section of this health will replenish should the player not maintain damage. The enemy must, to make this work, do things to mitigate damage, either by evading in plain sight or finding cover, both to buy time for its HP to replenish, and do this while attempting to kill the player (which has always generally operated on the same principles, but enemies are not designed to act on it, or players would become irate). It is important for the enemy’s attacks to present a threat to the player. Defeating this enemy should involve accuracy and a balance between maintaining pressure and defensive maneuvers. The result is a fluid, rewarding system. A formidable player could drop this enemy almost instantly, but another player might engage in a prolonged conflict, if they can’t quite finish the enemy off. To be fair, this system can be annoying – but that’s why there are several easily-dispatched enemies around these challenging enemies, so that during this conflict you can make progress even if the main enemy defies you.
Warzone Firefight is pretty much just a meat dial. As the rounds go, they dial the meatiness of the enemies up, until you need more than a clip to take out a single grunt and you need rockets to take out an elite. These end up being the equivalent of “easily-dispatched” enemies, 'cause the “challenging enemy” is the Temple Wraith, the four Phaetons, the four overjacked Knights, etc. These “challenging enemies” don’t dodge or find cover (except by accident), and their HP doesn’t replenish – so they just have as much HP as the devs decided they have to have to fill 5 minutes.
Fundamentally, the issue is Warzone. The REQs. The idea that it’s all about calling in a cool tool. It doesn’t fit with the Halo campaign/firefight experience. To fix Firefight, they’d have to take away the REQs, or at least heavily constrict them.
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> > Warzone Firefight is also rather inconsistent with its difficulty. One match could be where you steamroll right through, where you only have to kill a certain amount of enemies and the bosses are relatively simple to kill. Then you could end up with a match where you’re stuck defending objectives from Prometheans and taking down three Wardens or Deacon Pipap with his Knight minions.
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> Difficulty between matches is inconsistent.
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> Although, I’ve seen a lot of dislike for how hard Pipap is to kill. I personally thought that he as a boss was one of the best inclusions to Halo to date! For a multiplayer mode I mean.
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> There are two ways to kill him; sheer force and pinpoint accuracy. I love that there are two distinct ways of combating him. Splaser his shield canopy, snipe him from inside. That’s best when played with someone who wants to do the whole teamwork shabang.
> I always play with teamwork in mind, even when I’m playing solo.
>
> Actually had the best run the other night when I took the role of sniper support for a random teammate. I had light rifle, would take down enemy shields, he’d snipe them, and we ended up adding each other and playing a dozen matches playing support roles for one another.
> Good teamwork tends to overrule the inconsistencies I’ve found.
Yeah, any Grunt Goblin boss is easy when your team is coordinated or at least knows what they are doing. I just dislike the Deacon because he has so many Knights with Incineration Cannons around him. I’ve take down the shield with the Splaser before on other Goblins, but for some reason I am never able to do it on him. He always gets me with his needles or moves out of my line of fire before I get hit him.