If you can convince them to stop polluting online play with forge maps, that would be great. Yeah, the layouts are fun to play, but it feels so -blam!-ing plastic, and it’s incredibly boring when everything is silver with colored stripes. Even if they let players put in trees and other things to make it less boring, the maps still feel fabricated to a degree that yanks nearly all of the players out of the immersion that they have mastered so well on their carefully crafted maps. The sole reason I, and everyone that I know quit playing Halo: Reach (Bungie, I know) is because the only maps you could ever get were silver palaces on Forge World, and they all feel the same no matter what ‘cool’ features they have individually. Halo 4 had the same issue, though to a slightly lesser degree, but it still ended my playing career and that of all of my friends (all huge Halo fans) very, very early. A way to fix this would be to have a forge playlist, with a couple of sub-options, or just make it rumble pit. But theres no reason to waste beautiful maps that they spent so much time crafting on kids polishing every surface with silver and trying to cleverly change the object stripe colors like a pro. I want to see nature. I want to see the structures that designers who have been in the field have created. I want to infer the story behind the map. I want to see the skybox and feel like I’m part of a greater universe. Those are the things that kept people coming back to Halo 3 and others. Those games would’ve died a quick death (as Halo 4 did) if online consisted of 80% shooting in a steel box with a blue sky above. There are maps in Halo 4 that I NEVER ONCE played online in any playlist in their natural form. Immediately Erosion comes to mind. This map is SO cool. If they simply boxed off the big forge room and left the rest as is with maybe different weapons or vehicles, this map could be a blast. Yet, the only times I’ve ever played that map were during green-tinted grifball, or green-brown-tinted swat/slayer. It had the same effect as turning everything in forge maps into a shiny pile of shimmering forerunner -blam!-, but this time it’s horrid green-brown. When you’re on those maps, you just want to explore the base map instead, or even quit and re-roll. I sincerely believe that polluting matchmaking with forge maps has been a major contributor to Halo’s slow heat death. It is the only constant between the last halo games that saw downhill movement. Halo: Reach was a huge game, and very popular. However, though more slowly than Halo 4, it died relatively quickly for the masses, despite being outrageously fun. That could be attributed to the story veering from Master Chief’s path, but when we return to it in Halo 4, with a pretty sound narrative, too, the game still flopped. We live in an age where multiplayer determines success in shooters (unfortunately), unless you’ve got a story that nobody could conceive of. Obviously the story should be amazing like it usually is, but if you want to keep the community intact, you have to work on their main element of interaction, too. People don’t sell back a game with a bad campaign but a good multiplayer, but everyone sells back a game with a good campaign and a bad multiplayer. Halo has both campaign and multiplayer going for it, yet it’s dying because the multiplayer experience is almost solely channeled through a very narrow preference gap of a handful of community forgers. I realize that I would be committing a logical fallacy to attribute Halo’s heat death solely to this factor, based on it being a constant in the last two games, but the evidence remains. Halo is dying for other obvious reasons, too, like 343’s content feeling spoon-fed and/or forced and prepackaged. Obviously games require that they are prepackaged, but it all feels very linear, similar, and without room for exploration. And when their is room, the narrative is too incessant about you continuing for it to be worth it. I hate to say it because Halo is part of my being, but Halo is becoming a movie with controls. Unless, of course, you’d prefer to play in a giant silver box with pastel stripes. There, you have complete freedom. Please, 343, make multiplayer interesting again. Body thrusters and new power weapons and mechanics are great, but they’re not gonna do it alone. I have faith in you. The video game world is an amazing thing, but it will eat you and your game alive if you aren’t careful. This is not your grave, but you are welcome in it. See you planetside, 343.
