I’ve played a lot of Oddball in Halo 3 and Reach and really enjoyed it, but 343i really ruined in Halo 4, in my opinion.
In team Oddball I find that 6-man teams make the ball too easy to defend, and as a result the scores are almost always ridiculously one-sided. I just played a game where the final score was 300-0. Usually it’s 300-10, 300-20, 300-8, and so on.
Sometimes my team wins and sometimes the other team wins, but after playing a number of games my sense is that having five defenders to protect the ball carrier makes it virtually impossible to get to him, kill him, and get the ball, especially if he’s hiding in some nook at the edge of the map. Even when you some of their team they can respawn quickly enough to keep your team at bay. Basically, the first team to take solid possession of the ball almost always wins.
The other problem, in my opinion, stemming from large teams is the use of large maps. This makes it even harder to get to and kill the ball carrier since everyone on the defending team knows where everyone on the attacking team is headed and it’s often necessary to traverse long distances out in the open to get there, and that makes you easy pickings for the defenders. If you can get the ball and find a decent place to hunker down it’s pretty much game over.
The consistency with which I see these lopsided games tells me there’s clearly a fundamental design flaw in the game.
FFA Oddball is a nightmare. I joined a game in progress once and didn’t even stay the whole game. If you have the ball, you can’t sprint, but everyone else can and you have a waypoint over your head that says “Kill.” It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how that’s going to play out. Before Reach no one had sprint, so you could try to stay away from people trying to get to you, and when they got to you there was a reasonable chance you could get a ball kill. Now you’re rushed by a mass of people who can get to you quickly and move much faster than you can. This is a huge change in the dynamic of the game.
I can’t remember for sure now if we had AAs in Oddball in Reach, but I seem to recall we did and it was a problem there as well, but at least in Reach everyone didn’t have sprint, and those who could didn’t have any other AA.
In my opinion, the Objective playlist needs to reduce team sizes to four or five at most and use smaller maps. Today’s update changed KOTH by extending hill times. They said it was to make the game more about hill control, but I think the real motivation is that traditional hill times on large maps weren’t working well. Even if you had mobility it could take several seconds to get back to the hill if you died, and even to get to a new hill. Without mobility it took even longer. Many times I didn’t bother to even head for it because I knew by the time I got there a new one would be spawning.
KOTH on Ragnarok is nothing like KOTH was on The Pit or Guardian in Halo 3, or Sword Base or Powerhouse in Reach. In past Halo games I loved Oddball, but I dread it in Halo 4.