My thoughts on crossplay

Whatever the case may be, crossplay should be off by default and the player should decide whether it’s on or not. It’s no surprise that players grow unhappy with the state of PvP in this latest installment of Halo. Part of that reason is the breach in it’s competitive identity.

Halo achieves balance in it’s multiplayer by making sure everyone has a fair chance through a variety ways. One of those is through even starts. By making sure every player is given the same equipment, it lays the foundation for Halo’s staple combat loop; the dance.

I won’t go too deep into the explanation to keep this from turning into a wall of text. In short, he dance refers to the skillful use of movement and gunplay to melt your opponents shielding; landing a final blow to the head. With even starts, this makes sure skill is the primary variable that decides gunfights.

However, this only holds true if everyone starts with the same equipment; aiming peripherals are no exception. No matter how hard some people may try, you cannot balance controller vs kbm. It just wont happen. Cotrollers have aim-assist while kbm can turn 180 degrees in half a second; this directly goes against Halo’s competitive foundation.

Halo multiplayer has held up so well for so long because of how they choose the loadout for you instead of the other way around. I’m not saying one input is stronger than the other. Rather, I’m saying crossplay is breaking the formula that made Halo what it is today.

Hope this makes sense. I’ve spent a good hour or so trying to put together my thoughts on crossplay and making this sound as coherent as possible.

I feel like I did pretty good.

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Honestly, I’m kinda shocked it wasn’t. There’s a lot of industry standards that just seemed to be ignored. Especially within a timeframe and population size that could have supported it well.

It’s clear from Ranked options the framework is in place to allow this in some capacity, but seeing how it’s so limited just leaves me scratching my head.

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Very puzzling indeed. I think crossplay is nice, to a certain degree, but it one of those features that should be treated as an add on.

They way they integrated it seems as though they built matchmaking with crossplay hardwired into the netcode.

Well put.

It’s not relevant which is truly better, the fact remains that the inputs are inherently at odds with one another, and can never truly be equal.

Too many people focus on the specific strengths of each input, rather than questioning the competitive viability of cross-input play.

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At the least give us the option to turn it off.

IMO forced cross-play was due to the prediction of how poorly this game has been handled. With the new model cash grab/battle pass, it wasn’t going to keep a large player base considering what large is for Halo that really isn’t much to brag about, especially knowing its history with 343.