I wasn’t too keen on working with a squad this time around. But working with Blue Team helped me come around. I still didn’t get too excited about it until I realized that Tim Longo is the creative director at 343. Tim Longo is responsible for the only squad based game I’ve ever enjoyed: Republic Commando. If you haven’t played it and still have your 360 I recommend checking it out (it’s an original xbox title, backwards compatible on the 360).
I usually find squad mechanics to be a clunky pain in the -Yoink-, but in RC they were tight, intuitive, and fun as hell. You could position a squadmate to cover and snipe, while ordering another to man a turrett, and command your third squadmate to lay down supressing fire while you flank–and it was all super easy and virtually instantaneous.
So imagine my disappointment when I learned how basic the squad command in Halo 5 was. You look at a spot on the map, press a button, and all three go running.
Anyway, this is a criticism of Halo 5, but I’m bringing it up now because it would be great to see this change in Halo 6. I think the squad commands in Halo 5 are what they are due to only one button on the d-pad being available for spartan commands (RC used 3 of the d-pad buttons), but honestly, the fun provided by RC’s squad commands is worth ditching the Artemis tracker and only having one button to cycle through grenade types.
Is there anyone else that has played Republic Commando that would agree with this?
I think the AI in halo is too dumb to handle those commands
I only played the campaign the day this game came out.
And i will never forget those AI Spartans on my team…
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> I think the AI in halo is too dumb to handle those commands
Definitely too dumb to be much help while making choices on their own. All the more reason to give us the ability to control their actions more than just telling them to “go over there and take your two friends with you.”
Playing with a squad in Halo 5 isn’t much different than having Kat follow you around in Reach. If I’m not given the ability to get tactical with Blue Team, I’d almost prefer they stay home and let chief save the galaxy on his own.
Oh boy do I hate the ally AI in every Halo game to be honest. Squad commands sucked, and the only time Marines are useful is when they’re back in CE with a Sniper. To be more specific, I’d have to tell a teammate to get on a turret, then want another to grab a weapon, the teammate in the turret would respond, and I’d be left facepalm-ing on a Hunter/Warden battle because my teammates are too dumb to figure out their own positions. Better than that, they usually wait in front of the enemy to get themselves killed on Legendary.
I also played Star War Republic Commando. That game was amazing, though I never finished it and I could try now but I’m to lazy to install it on my PC. As for Squad commands, I forgot about those, but I always felt helpless without the other Clones. Especially on that one “sneak through the Super Battle Droid area” mission.
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> Oh boy do I hate the ally AI in every Halo game to be honest. Squad commands sucked, and the only time Marines are useful is when they’re back in CE with a Sniper.
>
> I also played Star War Republic Commando. That game was amazing, though I never finished it and I could try now but I’m to lazy to install it on my PC. As for Squad commands, I forgot about those, but I always felt helpless without the other Clones. Especially on that one “sneak through the Super Battle Droid area” mission.
Yeah, that’s the thing: I don’t remember allied AI in RC too well, because I never gave them a chance to use it–I was always ordering them around. From what I’ve heard, you could play the game without issuing a single command easily enough, but no Idea how the AI performed.
Halo’s friendly AI has never been great, but I can’t think of a game that gets it right. I guess that’s why I’m not so fond of other squad based games. The commands are clunky, but if you let the AI just do their own thing they’re just going to stand there and drool.
Sometimes, I just love that feature. I tell them to go to a spot then I fire a charged shot from the incineration cannon and boom! triple kill with 1 shot. Watchin them burn just makes my day LOL.
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> Sometimes, I just love that feature. I tell them to go to a spot then I fire a charged shot from the incineration cannon and boom! triple kill with 1 shot. Watchin them burn just makes my day LOL.
That sounds…theraputic?
My biggest disappointment: HALO 4 & 5.
It would have been much better if each arrow on the dpad was used for individual members of your fireteam. Then you could position your Spartans in different places and have specific spartans attack certain areas or pick up weapons.
I’ve had Squad members stand over me as I bled out, not even shooting at the enemy, just standing there watching me die. When I heard the announcement about squad-focussed gameplay I thought that meant 343 would be stepping their game up with friendly AIs, but obviously that didn’t come true.
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> It would have been much better if each arrow on the dpad was used for individual members of your fireteam. Then you could position your Spartans in different places and have specific spartans attack certain areas or pick up weapons.
Exactly. That’s how it worked in RC. Ditching Artemis tracker and using just one button to cycle through grenades would free up 2 more buttons on the d-pad. I’m hoping they do this for Halo 6.
Heh, learned quickly that the commands were useless unless it was to command them to stay in good cover next to me incase I went down.
I tried and tried again to get them to snipe a knight far away, everyone equipped with a sniper, only to see them rush out of cover in order to go CQC with the knight, ignoring all enemies around them.
Call me stupid and ignorant but I thought we’d see a more intelligent AI with cloud computing for it. I don’t see how cloud computing makes a difference if it’s even used? I mean, why waste server resources on AI that unintelligent? It doesn’t seem it requires enough power from the hardware that it needed to be freed up.
i343 just tried too much in my opinion, and lost focus on everything, and then I mean, everything.
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> Call me stupid and ignorant but I thought we’d see a more intelligent AI with cloud computing for it. I don’t see how cloud computing makes a difference if it’s even used? I mean, why waste server resources on AI that unintelligent? It doesn’t seem it requires enough power from the hardware that it needed to be freed up.
>
> i343 just tried too much in my opinion, and lost focus on everything, and then I mean, everything.
I’m always disappointed by games that go hard to advertise their advanced cooperative AIs, when the final product ends up not being able to compare to Star Wars: Republic Commandos. Now that game had amazing team AI, and it was for the Xbox Original!