I’ve been hankering for some Reach lately and so, I’ve been playing it and I’ve been having fun - but I have noticed a few areas in which the user interface (UI) just didn’t feel very well thought out, or not implemented as well as it should have been.
For those wondering, a User Interface is stuff like the menus and the HUD that you see in-game. I don’t necessarily have many issues with the HUD, but the menus in Halo could use a little work.
Matchmaking
Specifically, finding a game of co-op campaign in Matchmaking is a test of patience more than anything - finding three other players isn’t all that difficult, but when it comes to level and difficulty selection things quickly become tedious. How long does everyone have to wait until the voting selection gives you the level you want? And then everyone has to try and agree on a difficulty setting. People often quit out because they didn’t get the level they wanted, or they didn’t get the difficulty they wanted. Quite simply: the standard competitive matchmaking way of trying to find a game here just does not work.
Campaign matchmaking needs to be completely different in Halo 4 - you should just be able to pick a level, pick a difficulty, and have matchmaking pair you up with other people who want to play the same (of course, you could just pick “Any” for level & difficulty if you’re not fussy). To speed the matchmaking process up a bit, you should be able to start a campaign game by yourself as a public game so that people can drop in/out whenever they want.
Picking a loadout:
In Halo: Reach you only have a few seconds (depending on respawn time) to pick a loadout until you’re thrown in to the game any way. I was agonising over whether to pick Sprint or Active Camoflague earlier today because I wanted to do some Sniping, but I got thrown in to the game with Armour Lock instead because that’s what I was previously using. If you’re in the loadout menu, you shouldn’t respawn until you’ve picked what you want to respawn with.
And on the topic of resapwning…
Respawning in Invasion (or other modes where you can select your spawn point):
You just press up/down until you get to whatever you wanted and when your respawn timer counted down to zero you’d respawn… sometimes. Quite often though you’d be stuck in this respawning screen for several (sometimes crucial) seconds longer than your standard respawn time - presumably this is the game giving you time to think about your selection before you spawn.
This system sucks because quite often it can cost you the game - two or three seconds extra time to respawn is an eternity in competitive matchmaking.
343i needs to look at something like Battlefield if this system will be carried over to Halo 4 - give people a proper menu that they can scroll through to choose their respawn point - and then let them press A when they’re ready to spawn instead of waiting for the game to decide that they’re ready to spawn instead.
Armour customisation, service tags, etc…
A lot of my friends who played Halo: Reach with me aren’t massive Halo fans and they didn’t look through all of the customisation options available to them - and most importantly, the armour customisation confused the hell out of them, because they were under the impression that different armour pieces would give their Spartan different traits, and I can totally understand why.
When you’re choosing a piece of armour there’s some text that describes that piece of armour in the Halo Lore - the issue here is that I had a lot of people thinking that it would give them different perks - does the Tactical/LRP chestpiece let you carry more ammo? Does the Tactical/Patrol armour let you move faster at the expense of ammo capacity? Does the Tactical/Trauma Kit let you heal yourself on the fly without needing to find a med kit? The answer to all of these questions, of course, is no.
Halo fans might not like this idea but I think that removing this text would give people less confusion - perhaps 343i could implement a codex of come kind in to Halo 4 that describes various species, weapons, and armour should people be interested, but leave the customisation screen as straightforward as possible.
I also had people get confused by the Service Tags - “Why do you have PKMN over yourself?” I think that the Service Tag is a great idea because it results in less clutter, but at the same time this is something that needs to be introduced to the player when they first load the game, which I don’t think it was in Reach (unlike the actual armour customisation).
So that’s my two pence on a few things I’ve noticed over the lifespan of Halo: Reach. Anyone else have any improvements they’d like to see?