The goal of both the community and 343 should be to increase the replayability of Halo Infinite’s campaign. Fans should seek to provide meaningful and actionable feedback. Anything that does not aim to improve the game is useless.
Now co-op has been delayed to season 3 and rather than be upset I’m glad they would rather take the time to release a good experience than as broken one now. There is a lot to consider with this co-op experience. This is not like the other Halo games. The open world adds new aspects to consider. So I have listed a series of questions that occur to me, some suggestions for 343, and am curious as to the thoughts of other members of the community on these matters.
- Will player teleporting return? If so to what degree?
I think this is the biggest issue. In previous Halo games if a player falls behind normally they are teleported to the other when one player pushes further ahead in the mission. In context to a linear mission this generally makes sense although can be annoying when you teleport to another player you are nearby anyways and in rare cases accidentally kill or obstruct a shot due to teleporting or spawning in front of a player.
- In context to the open world how will teleporting work?
Along the same lines but I wanted to clarify. While teleporting in say a more linear story mission like let’s say Foundations, players are heading along a said linear and defined path, in the open world players can hypothetically work together to attack outposts from multiple sides and carry out multiple objectives simultaneously. Personally this is why I would even lean towards no teleporting on the surface as of the opportunities I think could be robbed by having it.
- How will story missions work with multiple players? What is required to initiate a mission?
Here we have the choice of one player or even only player one starts the mission and everyone is teleported to the mission area, or in my opinion the better solution is make “all players required” at a set location to start a mission
- How will spartan cores and unlocks work?
This one sounds simple enough but does warrant consideration. Unlocks are simply tied to the players log and only one player can find them currently? But what if 4 players head in different directions and start opening spartan cores and lockers? Do all players get the core of the opened cache? Or is all the progression tied to player 1? Does every player need to open every single box to receive the core? Personally I think the easiest solution is to just unlock for all players once any player finds something. I can see some people being against this but considering campaign is against bots I think the unfair or overpowered arguments mean very little.
- Can players drive multiple seperate vehicles?
This is one of the biggest ones to consider and a key consideration as to why I would be against open world teleporting. Personally I really want to be able to do this. Coordinating vehicle assaults in previous Halo games has always been a ton of fun for me and I think it would be a huge waste to not be able to have players work together with multiple vehicles. It only makes sense that if you have greater numbers you should be able to throw more equipment at your enemy, the goal of the UNSC would be to overwhelm Banished forces where possible. If you aren’t imagining what 4 fully loaded warthogs rolling through a camp would do then you are doing it wrong.
- How will player appearance be dealt with?
For me I really care about this but probably for most people who don’t care or consider if something makes sense or not this will not be an issue. In the majority of Halo games additional players just end up being clones of the first player. Canonically they aren’t there because the story is never written for 4 players. Personally I find the clone solution to be lazy, boring, and to make the game less believable. Cutscenes could be incorporated to easily explain additional characters. Maybe Vettel and Kovan survived? Maybe the other players are Blue team? My preference would be for the additional players to be a players multiplayer spartan mostly because it would be cool and to me that adds some replayability to play again as a different character. But just about anything is better than having 4 copies of Master Chief running around. I know everyone loves him but prefer there only be 1 Master Chief.
- Can we get campaign theater?
This of course does not just pertain to co-op but even still, will we be able to theater campaign and take pictures of the enemies or chief with other players
If you have taken the time to read through all of this thanks for your time. I see a lot of posts from people that are just complaining about what isn’t in the game without providing any input on how the game could be enhanced so hopefully we get something productive out of this.