As long as we are ripping off certain games for ideas for fun multiplayer. Halo 4 needs to take a look at Mass Effect 3s multi to address some balance issues.
Certain weapons in Reach pair up with certain armor abilities to help ruin balance.
Cloak and Sniper
Sprint and Sword
Jetpack and Rockets
Plus, trying to make actual loadouts competitive in Halo wont work. Nobody will pick an AR over a DMR or BR. Lets be realistic.
Mass Effect 3 has weapon weights, which cause the respawn on your abilities to increase depending on your weight.
Halo 4 needs to have weapon weights, which cause your AA to last less time.
So someone carrying a sniper and shotty wont be able to cloak nearly as long as someone carrying a magnum and plasma pistol.
This will help balance some of the OP combos as well as give a reason to use some of the less deadly weapons and add viable varieties to load out options. If I really want to use cloak a bunch, I could select a light weight loadout of a pistol and plasma pistol. Or if I know I wont use my AA much, I can pick the DMR and AR. Using an AR with a jetpack may actually be preferable to using a DMR with one if the DMR reduces the time in the air signifigantly.
Right now, as it stands, loadouts in Halo doesnt make much sense, because everyone in their right mind would choose Halo 4s version of the BR (whatever gun that ends up being, point is, there will be one superior choice that almost everyone picks). Adding weight to impact AA will help balance that.
Also, none of this should be in competitive playlists, at all. That should be standard, classic AA-less, load-out-less play.
I like to believe that given the amount of weapons that we have heard about in the game so far (battle rifle, assualt carbine AND Designated marksman rifle) that they will all have destinct advantages over each other in certain situations, and that very similar to gears of war, players will quickly find a favorite starting rifle that fits their play style best. Specifically I would like to see the assualt rifle graduate to a weapon that the player would actually value, rather than a weapon you hold onto until you find a better one.
I don’t agree with weapon weight interfering with armor ability duration. It’s one thing to balance the game, but it’s something different to not let people strategically pair certain armor abilities with weapons, and thus not let players learn to be on the lookout for such combinations. For instance, if you get sniped across the map by a player in active camo, when you respawn you’ll be much more likely to take cover until you can get up close and take him out.
Also, I really wouldn’t like to have my jet pack time to be cut in half because I was the first one to make it to the rocket launcher weapon drop. It’s advantages like that that make the game interesting.
I’m pretty sure you still have a pretty epic advantage with rocket launcher and half the time jetpacking. You’d just have less of one.
And the weight wouldn’t STOP you from doing any combo, it would just make interesting dynamics and balanced “class builds”. A cloaked sniper plays very different then a cloaked AR. Cloak lasts far too long for a stationary sniper half way across the map to be able to scope the area and line up an easy shot. Halfing that wouldn’t remotely ruin the ability to do that, but it would lessen the OP advantage that combo has.
These combos would still have their advantages, just less so. And someone determined to get the sniper could take a loadout with a magnum instead of an AR as their secondary, or whatever the options are, to decrease their overall weight and lessen the hit theyd get from picking up the sniper.
Halo has always had a bunch of useless weapons. Does anyone use the plasma repeater or the spiker in Reach? The magnum and AR are both more versitile and useful then those. Adding weight impact to AA will give the developers another stat to balance the weapons on. So you have more of a choice than you do now.
As for “getting up close” and taking out the active camo sniper. How exactly are you supposed to do that when he is camoflauged and you have no idea where he is? If he is stationary, sure, but a good sniper will move.
The balance of Reach is far from perfect. Certain AA/Weapon combos work way better than others, and with the current game mechanics there is no way to re-balance them without breaking other combos. The weight mechanic gives them another tool to balance to keep things even.
The similarities to other games is completely coincidental. The system was made so that players could have the option to make their favorite play-style more effective. It also adds variety, something that many older Halo games lacked, not to mention creating legitimate changes to gameplay (i.e. not just adding a weapon or two and calling it a day).
The weapon choice system exists on the notion that the weapons will be more balanced than they have in previous games. Picking a BR will probably be more of a tactical choice in range than in net advantage.
I think that Halo shouldn’t and isn’t ripping off of other games, and these similarities are not intended.
You do realize that like EVERY Halo claimed the AR was going to be new and actually usable compared to its long range counterpart, right? Why should we have any faith that the AR will be so in Halo 4?
In fact, a balanced AR compared to long range weapons…wouldnt even feel like Halo. Part of what makes Halo Halo is the fact that with long ranged weapons teams can focus down an opponent, picking apart the team one man at a time. You dont get this kind of team work in BF or COD because folks die too quickly.
Unless the AR kills ridiculously fast, to almost shotgun levels of deadliness at close quarters, there is almost no way it will be competitive with the DMR or BR. You need more then just “time to kill” to make it a viable option.
Halo 1 had a lot of usable weapons because the energy weapons had slowdown with them. It was something outside of “time to kill” that allowed them to fill a role and playstyle. Since the removal of that, there has been a limit in the amount of actually useful weapons in Halo. So going by past Halos there is almost no way there are enough usable weapons to make “load outs” viable.
I only agree with your idea on weapon weights. Sounds interesting.
I believe the Assualt Rifle should be split into two polar weapons with opposite advantages; the Halo 3/Reach assualt rifle with significantly increased accuracy and a larger magazine, so that it in many ways would be an equal adversary to the Battle Riflfe or the DMR.
Think of gears of war’s lancer and hammerburst as the assualt rifle and BR/DMR: the hammerburst is a more accurate weapon that does more damage with each bullet at the cost of a small magazine capacity, whereas the lancer is a slightly less accurate (but not nearly as inaccurate as he current assualt rifle) weapon that sacrifices damage per bullet for a much larger magazine capacity, so when a hammerburst or BR/DMR user has to pause to reload, the Lancer or AR user has the opportunity to keep firing when the aforementioned is in a vulnerable state. Just like in gears of war, neither weapon is better than the other, it just depends on the player and situation.
In response to your comment about the sniper in camo, I usually take note of where the bullet trace leads when I die and follow it to its source, and if the sniper moves, he sacrifices the effectiveness of his camo. I believe the current armor abilities are pretty fairly balanced, except for armor lock, which won’t be returning in Halo 4, and I’m sure we’ll find some interesting combinations with the array of new weapons and armor abilities… And I don think they should be tampered with by altering the armor ability capacities
I personally think the AR was a good gun in Halo: Reach and Halo 3… you just have to use it at the appropriate ranges
Having the weapons you’re carrying influence the duration of your AAs would definitely be interesting.
As far as loadouts, I feel like there will be one slot of DMR/BR/precision weapons, and then another for a backup weapon like an AR/plasma repeater/pistol/etc; I think people are more likely to have AR as a secondary gun rather than primary. But maybe there will be some system there to decide which combinations are possible off spawn.
For having all the ranked playlists be “classic” without loadouts/AAs…very doubtful. They aren’t going to design and balance all these new features and then not include them in a majority of playlists. If anything, “classic” will probably be 1 playlist, mixed slayer/objective. Possibly ranked but more likely not.