Huge controversial opinion, I know. I’m not trying to bash the old Halo trilogy because it was amazing for its time. It will forever be a good series with a balanced formula, time won’t take that away. I played it, you played, nothing else needs to be said about how amazing it was.
But to say it can still hold up against its competitors in the present is not true. Gamers want more. Even if its not as balanced as Halo was. Other developers will give them what they want and then Halo will be left behind. As great as Goldeneye was back in its day, it would be ridiculous to think it could stand against newer games coming out. The same goes for Halo. Jogging, jumping and shooting just isn’t as mind-blowingly awesome as it once was. Neither is using just one gun for every single match (BR). You can say its balanced and you’d be right. But it’s stale now and people aren’t having fun with it anymore. Balance isn’t everything.
I want more viable options when I play a game. I don’t want to move at one speed or use just one gun. I want different ways of traversing a map on foot and more complex combat scenarios. There’s nothing wrong with being simplistic but it just doesn’t have much lasting appeal and other games are going to provide a more complex experience.
Here are some examples and I’m not saying Halo should blatantly copy these ideas
Battlefield lets players customize nearly everything and use an insane amount of guns. Different classes allow you to do different things. The maps are immense and gorgeous. Buildings can be destroyed to provide an extra layer of strategy and it makes the game less stale - a match will never play the exact same way again. The sheer amount of players in game and powerful vehicles at your disposal, each with unlocks and its own learning curve makes the game deeper. One player can be a great sniper while another player is a skilled helicopter pilot.
Dota 2 is a game that has nearly limitless options for its players. With 110 different characters so far- all with their own abilities and multiple strategies. No single character is used for just a single task, making the gameplay extremely variable. Dota 2 is also one of the most balanced games ever made while providing a completely different experience with every match, as there are thousands upon thousands of team compositions, each one of them being completely viable for competitive play (so long as you have certain roles fulfilled). The game is like a fountain of endless entertainment, that is, if you can even get good at it.
What does old Halo multiplayer have to offer?
Sci-fi setting, balanced but simple multiplayer, very few interesting player mechanics, greater emphasis on small teams for arena gameplay.
These aren’t all bad, but they’re just not enough anymore on their own. Halo 5 is taking a huge step in the right direction and I think we are in for a huge surprise with BTB. No game is perfect and Halo 5 isn’t the pinnacle of competitive shooters but I don’t remember seeing the same hate being thrown at things like the Plasma Pistol noob combo. It takes no skill to pull it off yet its been accepted by everyone because it was in the old games. If something like that was new to Halo 5, the hate on these forums would be cataclysmic. It would be labeled as the thing that ruined Halo for being able to noob combo players and even deactivate vehicles.
Hell, people are even hating on the fact that you can’t shoot airborne grenades anymore. Seriously? You’ve never once shot a grenade out of the air on purpose, don’t lie. It was random and frustrating. People hated Halo 4 for being random, why make an exception for this? You can’t just chalk it up to being a “quirk” of old Halo. It was dumb, now it’s thankfully gone.
People are picking apart the minor flaws of the game or just the things they don’t like because they weren’t in the old games and saying it ruins the whole game even though there’s no such thing as a perfect game. Old Halo certainly had its own flaws too, there is no doubting it.
Halo has always suffered from terrible weapon balance, hence the need for BR starts. Dual wielding was just a novelty gimmick and picking up a turret in competitive play just doesn’t happen. BTB on Blood Gulch usually boils down to getting a vehicle right away so you can go on offense and if you can’t, you make a brisk jog to the Sniper Rifle in a vain attempt to have something of worth. If you are left with nothing, you’ll probably sit at your base and wait for the enemies to come or you’ll slowly jog across the map just to get sniped or to see a fully loaded enemy Warthog romp over the hills straight at you. Now I’m not saying that Sprint is our lord and savior and we should pray for it’s blessing each and every day. But something had to be done.
BR starts is something that should always have a place in Halo but with Halo 5’s weapon balancing, it’s becoming unnecessary as the default way to play. BR starts used to be mandatory for Halo because it was the only fair way to play the game. I can’t speak for everyone but for me, week 1 of the beta was much more fun than the later weeks with BR starts.
The way I always saw it is AR starts is there so that the amount of BR’s is limited to just a few people per team. What this does is let people move around the map more without getting locked down all the time from across the map. The pistol is still incredibly useful for cleaning up 1-shots and other tasks requiring precision. It’s the perfect weapon to couple with the AR. AR starts also encourages you to find other weapons because as decent as the AR is, it probably isn’t going to carry you to victory on its own.
With BR starts, there is no reason to swap it out for anything unless it’s a power weapon. With BR starts in MCC you don’t even spawn with a secondary weapon because it would be pointless.
I might sound like a broken record, but that is how a game gets stale for a lot of people, and we’ve been doing it ever since Halo CE with the pistol. Why rely on the BR to make the game fun? Why not just balance the other weapons to add some variety and unique weapon combinations online?
Is it just because people think the BR is the only way to skillfully play the game? Is that what it’s all about? Skill and overblown egos?
If you want to masquerade your hate as criticism, just don’t bother. Constructive criticism is one thing but that’s not what is happening on these forums. “Halo is dead!”, “343 messes it all up once again.”, “Sprint destroys Halo and I’m going to ignore the fact that I can disable it!”.
Sound constructive? 343 knows your opinion already. Sprint is a dead horse topic, bringing it up on here brings nothing but rage and misery.
What are you expecting to get out of blind hate towards 343?
Were you waiting for a personal email from Josh Holmes that goes something like: “Dear Retired MLG Halo Veteran, your blind rage post on the forums about sprint which was buried in hundreds of the same threads has inspired us and opened our eyes. We now see that this whole time, we were actually ruining Halo! We are forever in your debt for sending us hundreds of daily insults over a video game that you probably said you would never play since the story “ended with Halo 3” but then you bought the rest of the games anyway. We are going to appoint you as the new head of 343 Industries. Surely with all your 50’s that you’ve earned, you will redeem Halo and become hailed as a hero by millions of like-minded Halo purists.”