Hey guys, I’m going to talk about the campaign, it’s new features and what it means for Halo. Feel free to discuss whatever you’d like but I won’t be talking much about story.
So now we’re in a Squad. A very smart choice by 343. This allows for more characters and story opportunities but for now I want to focus on what this means to YOU, the player. So in Halo Reach we were also in a squad but it didn’t really provide anything new to the gameplay. All that was different is that we now had invincible NPC teammates that would fight enemies and open doors. There wasn’t any squad interaction, which is a pretty big letdown considering that the whole premise of the Campaign was to be in a legendary Spartan squad- Noble Team.
343 has done a great job in recognizing that squad interaction is important in a game about being in a squad. They acknowledge that each character is different and wouldn’t use the same weapons as each other. As normal as it would be, giving Linda from Blue Team an Assault Rifle when her role in the group is being a Sniper would be strange. You would feel a lot less like you are playing a different character. The unique HUDs help compliment this as well. Now each character has their own identity from both a story standpoint and a gameplay perspective, as they each have their own respective Loadouts which helps define them.
Back to squad interaction, it’s very important to have some sort of gameplay interaction with them whether it’s trading weapons, giving ammo, issuing orders or reviving teammates. In Halo 5, 343 decided to add both squad commands and reviving. The thing about squad gameplay in a Campaign that has no interaction with teammates is that it defeats the entire purpose of being in a squad from a gameplay perspective.
You need to have some sort of squad interaction or it’s just pointless and Halo is a perfect game to add these kind of things into. If you have Revive, you don’t necessarily need the Squad Ordering to go with it but if you have Squad Commands then you NEED something like a Revive mechanic to go with it because invincible friendly AI would completely destroy the balance of the game. All people would do when the game got too hard is order their squad to attack while they sat back and did nothing in safety. The AI has infinite ammo and infinite health. Even if they are as dumb as bricks, they’ll eventually whittle down any enemy they are sent to attack.
Granted, you could just have the friendly AI die just like players can but that would look really sloppy and wouldn’t provide the intense moments where you have to save your buddies when they get downed. You’d have an endless wall of respawning meat that could throw themselves at the enemy until they won. When a friendly is “downed” or needs to be revived, the remaining players are forced to either kill all the enemies or rush into a potentially harmful situation to revive their teammate.
This creates balanced gameplay and something new for the series.
Now lets look at the size of areas and number of enemies. Areas must naturally grow larger to accommodate a team of 4 Spartans that have various abilities to quickly traverse terrain. This also provides the opportunity to make areas have more branching paths or areas only accessible by using Spartan Abilities, such as Clambering. 343 clearly seems dedicated on making the players feel freedom in exploring large areas, whether it’s a path to flank an enemy or a sniper perch that requires clambering. To account for larger areas and 4 Spartans being in the game at all times, there has to be either more enemies to kill, more challenging enemies, or tougher enemy positions to break. What’s most likely is a healthy mix of all 3 of these things. Expect to see more enemies such as snipers that can be conveniently countered by ordering your squad to attack them. As far as map space goes, you can definitely expect to see way less cramped areas like many parts of the mission “Dawn” in Halo 4.
Lets take a peek at game difficulty. On higher difficulties like Legendary, the game will most likely be easier than previous Halo games in 4 player co-op as Blue Team because 2 players will always have a Sniper Rifle or Shotgun (until they run out of ammo). The only wrench I can see being thrown into this is the Revive mechanic. We don’t know much about it yet, but there’s a possibility that you can’t actually die and respawn. You might just be stuck in a ragdoll state until either someone revives you or your whole squad gets wiped out. In that case, spawning with a Shotgun or a Sniper wouldn’t be as overpowered as it sounds at first.
Another thing I like about the new Revive mechanic is that it fixes an issue in Halo’s co-op, having to wait to respawn. Normally, you’d have to completely stop fighting just so you could get your friend to respawn. This might not be brought up too much, but it really takes you out of the game and isn’t very fun to do. Either your friend has to stop having fun killing enemies to retreat a mile away to spawn you or he stays and kills all the enemies and you miss out on all the fun. Sometimes the game doesn’t even respawn you when the coast is clear! It’s just not a very good system and I’m happy to see reviving teammates is now an option instead of waiting for the buggy respawn system to decide when and where players spawn. The revive mechanic creates more dramatic gameplay moments and even makes sense with the lore. It wouldn’t make too much sense to see Chief run away from a fight and come back with his friends who just magically appeared. It would make more sense to see him sprint towards a fallen ally, lay down cover fire and then help his companion out.
To summarize, the campaign is looking very well taken care of. 343 has done a lot of work to ensure it’s not only to be played for it’s story. It’s got a lot of unique features that aren’t in any other modes that we know of. It’s a deeper experience now, not just hallway simulator with Chief clones with just basic gameplay features. It’s truly its own beast now. It looks like it will be genuine fun to play and I can’t wait to see everything. This is shaping up to be the best Campaign yet!