tl;dr It’s like boarding action, except the ships are drivable and have turrets placed on them like the elephants from Halo 3. There’s also a center platform for on foot combat.I was thinking of ideas for a map one day, and how 343 was saying that they were adding more interaction into the H2A maps. I thought, “Adding the elephant into Coagulation would be interesting, because it was an interactive vehicle platform/home base.” For some reason Boarding Action came to mind, and I thought, “What if we had elephants… in space?”
My idea was that like boarding action, there would be two ships set in outer space; blue team would spawn on one ship, while the inferior red team would spawn on the other. Like the elephant, the ship would be home base; it would carry the flag, the bomb arming site, etc. Unlike Boarding Action’s static ships, however, players would be able to drive the ships. So like in Sandtrap, you could drive your team’s ship into the other team’s and have epic clashes, most likely with some boarding action involved.
When I say ships, I don’t mean some square thing with little hallways carved out onto the surface. I’m talking a fully modeled cruiser, the size of the mammoth from Halo 4, that acts as a moving vehicular platform. It will have a small bridge on the interior where players will pilot it, complete with a captain’s chair and extra large cupholders.
Like the elephant, the ships would move pretty slow, and it’s pretty impossible to flip the ships over. There would also be a hangar bay housing a couple banshees or whatever new flying vehicle 343 decides to add in H5: as it is set in outerspace, it would be appropriate that there would be only flying vehicles to dogfight with. Add a couple of rocket and machine gun turrets like the ones seen on the mammoth in H4, and you’ve got an interesting, interactive multiplayer playspace.
This might not be enough for on foot combat, so to compensate, in the center of the map there will be a floating, Cairo Station-esque space platform. Think of something like an upscaled Lockout mixed with the asteroids on Impact in H4. It won’t be hard to jump from the ship onto the platform, but be careful - since it’s in space, if you miss the jump you’ll be falling to your death. In case the ships get too far away for players jump onto the platform, there will be teleporters or man cannons that send players back and forth.
This platform will be static and non-moving, and behaves like the central spine-like structure on Sandtrap, in that the ships would navigate and circle around the platform like how the elephants can’t drive on the spine on Sandtrap. So, players that are not piloting the ships or in banshees will naturally want to gravitate towards the center platform and control it for power weapons.
Of course, the ships will obviously have limited mobility. They have to stay near the center platform, so they can’t stray too far away. They also can’t go under or over the center platform either; their vertical mobility is limited to just a few meters of variation so the dummy piloting the ship won’t screw his whole team over.
Players will have normal gravity; none of that low gravity BS that you saw in Reach. It’s not fun when you jump and it takes 15 seconds to land again.
A relatively large sized map, with two drivable ships in space battling each other while circling a medium sized floating platform in the center of the map. A BTB map with a distinct space battle theme. What do you think?