Realistic Suggestions for Future Halo Games

Games Halo 5: Guardians
#1

Greetings reader!

I would like to first make it clear that this is not a thread for complaining (we have had enough of those already.)

A lot of people have made suggestions and ideas for future Halo games, however a lot of the ideas are simply unrealistic: they don’t really adhere to the game mechanics, are too hardware-intensive, or simple don’t fit Halo.

I have compiled a list of suggestions by myself and a few others based on issues existing in recent Halo games that have yet to be fixed. I tried to only include actual undeniable problems with the games, opposed to opinions such as “the BR is too powerful.” I also don’t include things that can be changed easily after release, such as starting load-outs in matchmaking etc.

Please share these ideas and help get them implemented in future Halo games! I look forward to reading suggestions of your own!

  • Arbiter 617

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General

Lack of Elites:
When I told people how I don’t like that there aren’t Elites in Halo 4 due to it limiting freedom of customization, they tried to tell me how much armor there was for Spartans in Halo 4. I could compare it to ice cream. Halo 4 gave us one flavor of ice cream (Spartans) with many toppings (the various armor permutations.) Customization doesn’t mean having the choice of 100 toppings on one flavor, but maybe we just want a chocolate instead of vanilla ice cream. Elites really need to become playable again.

Flying UNSC Vehicle:
In Halo 3 we were given the Hornet, which made for crazy fun and a lot of antics, and was later rebalanced to give us the transport version which was less powerful.
In Reach, the Falcon replaced the Hornet which offered much smoother controls, turrets on the sides, and no gun for the driver.
In Halo 4 we had nothing to fly, yet a Hornet flew around and mocked us on one of the maps.

Secondary Weapon Icon:
In Halo 4 the HUD didn’t show what your secondary weapon was. You had to switch weapons to find out. Sometimes you wouldn’t realize you even had a secondary weapon on custom games.

Sprint Meter:
When Sprint became a core feature in Halo 4, we lost the meter which showed how much sprint we had, or how much regenerated it was. This just made sprinting very awkward when you couldn’t tell if you were going to run three feet or halfway across the map.

Same Team Ends Game:
This has been a standing problem for many games now. If you’re in custom games, and everyone switches to the same team, the game ends. This really doesn’t make any sense. Sometimes if you’re playing alone and a friend joins, then switches to your team, the game ends while you were doing something.

Kill Boundaries:
Kill boundaries should all be removable, since Reach gave us that option. The edge of the map should be the actual edge of the map.
Mike and I found perfectly good flat building space way out of Forge World. Sure, the skybox looks weird from out there, but leave it to us to decide if we value a good building space over a good skybox.

Forge

Nudge/Zoom
These two amazing editing features were removed in Halo 4, and really need to return.

Render Lighting in Start Menu:
The option to generate lighting should be somewhere in the Start Menu, opposed to occurring every time you exit forge mode. If you’re testing the distance of a jump, or the height of cover, it’s a waste of time to keep loading the lighting. Also we like to fly out of forge going fast.

Forge Rotation
Shouldn’t snap to center.

Object Quantity Raised:
The object quantity has always felt small, but I never realized just how low it was until I found a modded map with hundreds of wall coliseums. The game was running just fine with all these walls, so I really don’t understand why our limit is so small. Let us place a lot, and if the game starts running slow, leave it to us to optimize it.

All Forge Objects On All Maps:
I remember when Foundry was first released, and it was the first map designed for forge, and we had so many cool pieces to work with. Then we got Sandbox which expanded on a lot, but I was really upset to see we lost a lot of the simpler forge items such as barrels and radio antennas.
Since these objects are already taking up space on the disc, we should have the option to forge all pieces on all maps, within obvious restrictions, such as we don’t need a Falcon on Sword Base.
If the pallet is well organized, no one is going to complain that we have a lot of items to scroll through.

FFA Forge:
Forge should be Free For All. It would be nice to forge while in our actual armor colors, as well as the fact that in FFA games you can have everyone, so no one joins the game and is on the wrong team and can’t hear you. Nobody ever does competitive forging.

Forge Themes:
Halo 4 made an interesting move to have each map offer a different art design, to avoid all maps looking like bland gray forerunner rooms, which was nice in theory. But ultimately, everything went from being all Forerunner, to all UNSC. Even the word “UNSC” was plastered all over the place.
What would be very nice would be an option to swap between “Themes” while forging, so you can enter a UNSC theme to place UNSC walls, or swap to a forerunner Theme to place forerunner walls.

Green Screens:
Forge Islands gave us a long-awaited Green Screen. This needs to become a standard to be placed on every single map, just as spawn points and loadout cams are.
Instead of just greenscreening things out of Halo, I’d personally like to use greenscreens to bring things in, such as set extensions and skybox replacements.
The object has a one pixel texture, is a 6-sided polygon, and isn’t affected by light, so there’s really no reason that we shouldn’t be able to place them on all the maps. Perhaps let us “set color” on them to make bluescreens and redscreens etc.

Map Editing:
It’s not realistic to ask for map editors such as Far Cry’s. That’s beyond the scope of the halo engine. What is possible however, is giving us pieces which can be used to essentially build basic maps. For instance in Reach, people used upside-down Tin Cups to create grass. What if under Natural, we had a “Grass Field” which was essentially a huge flat block of grass. Maybe we could get a “hill” which is just a large lump of grass that we can put on top. This combined with the rocks and trees like in Halo 4 would be basic map editing.

Weather:
Weather is something everyone always asks for, but in reality, it shouldn’t be too difficult to implement basic things. I can understand not being able to suddenly make it snow, because that would require a completely new set of textures for the map. However, we should at least the option to do a nighttime and rain effect. Can’t be that much work to just have the brightness turned down, sun disappear, and rain particles falling.

#2

Custom Games

No Weapon Primary:
We’ve always had the option to have no secondary weapon, but we should also have the ability to remove our primary by setting it to None, just as we set our secondary. There would be a separate animation of the players’ hands by his or her side. Also in this state, players can only melee with the normal melee range, so we can finally make infection games where the zombies can only punch, not lunge with swords or smash with gravity hammerss.

Lowering Weapons XBL:
This has been a huge issue since Halo 3. The only way to lower weapons is to do so offline, which means you can only have four players, or eight through system link, which ultimately means one person is going to be handling a lot of controllers.
In this Halo 4 panel, it was announced that we would be able to drop and lower weapons:

However this didn’t happen. In addition to not supporting online weapon lowering, other than through a Forge Glitch, our lowered weapon had serious issues. When moving or turning it would fly back up. The sword wouldn’t lower at all.

Armor Ability Usage:
Unchanged: Normal.
Disabled: Player cannot use armor abilities.
Infinite: Armor abilities last forever like in Reach. Roll as much as you want, spam holograms, etc.
Limited: The new idea I had. If it was set to limited, you would only get one use out of your ability. So for a dropshield, it would go back to feeling like the Halo 3 bubble shield. Armor abilities would be more like equipment, and could be placed around the map. Armor lock might actually be cool if people only could use it once. Why I say “limited” instead of One-Time-Use, is armor abilities when placed on the map could have a setting on “uses” sort of like weapons having an option for spare clips. You could pick up something with multiple uses, or if you spawned with a hologram, you could pick up more holograms and it would stack up for more uses to not punish people who chose a certain loadout.
2x: Armor abilities recharge twice as fast. This means you’ll be able to place a new dropshield before the last one is broken, or evade around more, but not unlimited.
1/2x: Armor abilities recharge half as fast. This makes them feel more limited, but if you’re doing a fine job surviving you can still use it as much as you want.

First Person Vehicles:
Definitely make it so sideseats can be first person if the player zooms in. By default it would be third person as always, but a lot of us find it really difficult to aim and help out when we’re in third person.
Perhaps even give this option to drivers. Maybe it isn’t complete first person, but at least give them a view that takes them closer in to the front of the vehicle. Sometimes it gets hard to spot targets.

Dual wielding:
This should be definitely be an option to toggle in game settings. By default it would be off, and weapon balancing would be optimized without dual wielding factored in, but there should certainly be a trait to dual wield, so for things like Infection or Juggernaut, a trait given to one team or person, such as the humans in infection or the juggernaut in Juggernaut. Also looks awesome in machinima.

Firefight/Spartan Op Maps:
The maps used in Firefight/Spartan Ops should be available in customs and forge, since the file is already on the disc. If it’s not optimized for multiplayer, let us make it so. Why waste space making something only for FF? Maybe I’m missing something, but I feel like with a little work, we can have a lot more map options.

Party Host Traits:
There should be an option to set Party Leader traits. This way if you can have gametypes where you can be different while showing them off to others, or use them so people can’t kill the party host, or many other things.

Infected Forms:
I have yet to confirm this (I don’t play much Halo 4), yet I was told you can’t play infection without the infected being Flood, which means they can’t pick up weapons or drive vehicles, which severely limits possibilities.

Banshee Rolls:
I hear a lot of people complain that the Banshee rolls to slowly, but in my opinion, the speed is just right. It’s nice and smooth just like in other halos, other than Reach which was way too fast. In Reach you could roll up repeatedly and no one could ever hit you because you moved way too fast.
However in Halo 4 the upward roll barely takes you up, instead just slams you down doing a lot of damage.

Theater

Theater for Campaign and Firefight/Spartan Ops:
In Halo 3 we couldn’t rewind in Campaign, which was extremely annoying, but we could at least take pictures and film things on the first try. In Halo 4 we couldn’t use theater at all in Spartan Ops or Campaign.

Detached Theater Camera:
In Halo Reach, machinima directors were hit with a problem when a detached camera in Theater still picked up announcer sounds and respawn beeps from the player you last detached from. This was a pretty big issue, but in Halo 4 instead of improving this, we now saw medals appear in addition to hearing the announcer. The detached camera should not pick any of these things up.

Nudge in Theater:
Currently the left stick is assigned to the (pan?) option, however this option could be something that can be toggled on and off by pressing one of the D-pad buttons, since you never need to go in and out of this mode continuously. With the left stick free, it should affect the theater camera just like in forge, causing the camera to move at a very slow percent of the speed. This can be useful for getting very slowly moving shots and camera movements.

Phase camera mode:
In the camera settings in the Start Menu, you should be able to enable a “phasing” or “no-clip” option, which allows you to fly everywhere without being pushed around by boundaries and bounding boxes. This would allow you to pan-cam out of a map without doing that crazy combination, or get shots very close to characters or vehicles.
This should be very easy to implement given the nature of no-clip.

Change Camera Controls:
Currently, the bumpers are what control altitude, which are a Boolean on or off movement. It would be nice if we could switch to a setting which swapped the bumpers with the triggers, to make the triggers adjust altitude. The bumpers would now control Boost and FFW. There wouldn’t be a way to play-back in slow motion in this form, but it would be great for gradual altitude changes.

#3

Appearances

User Interface:
In Halo 3 and Halo Reach you could view your friends in the roster to see what game they were playing and how much time was left, however in Halo 4 you can’t check to see how far into the game they are. Players in the roster should also take on the color of their primary color to distinguish easily.
Names of players in your lobby or pre-game are written sideways, which makes it really difficult to read without turning your head sideways too.

Skin System:
The skin system should be redone. My idea is to have the option of skin completely independent of armory pieces. Right under choosing your color, you choose your skin, which basically affects where your primary and secondary colors are on your character. This is good because it allows you to put your skin on all the armors instead of just two skins per armor, and also makes the armory easier to scroll through, instead of having to scroll past both the normal and skinned pieces of armor.

Emblems:

  • Shouldn’t be an unlockable item. It was a neat idea having rewards at different levels, but a lot of people have their own special emblem they want.
  • More emblems: I’m sure it isn’t taking up much space on the disc for an emblem texture, it’d be nice if we had a lot to choose from. Some of us had our special emblems that get cut out of sequels.
  • Option for “none” ???

Armor Art Style:
This isn’t an actual problem with the game, but it was one of the most suggested things to improve for the next game. Armor in Halo 4 just looked… wrong. The Mark 6 helmet took such a drastic shift while Chief was sleeping. When Mark 5 and ODST returned, they were barely recognizable. Something about the visors just looks plastic and fake.

Bonus

[Coming Soon]

#4

POSSIBLE PROGRESSION SYSTEM IDEAS.

social.

1.each playlist has ranks that are 10% more xp each level to go up making progression endless but eventually very slow. eg captain 30wins captain grade 2 33wins. similar to h3 ranks. eg general grade 2 could keep going ( general grade 5,6,7 or other names inheritor, master chief grade 1,2 and keep going. each playlist should have its own xp tally, and a total tally for the service record.

ranked

  1. once a skill rank has been earned it cannot go down, but make people grind for that rank. eg skill 20 needs a 50% win ratio over 20 games to gain skill 21. then 52% win ratio over 25 games for skill 22. each level taking longer than the last with higher win ratios needed. if you fail you do not rank down but start your 25 games again and aim for 52%. the target should be visable to you. by the time someone has a 49 skill (eg 80% win ratio over 100games.) the number of games and win ratios needed would only be achievable to the best players that keep winning. and if you get disconnected, afks, lag, have a bad day etc and you fail to hit the mark you just try again.

you may not like this suggestion but going down ranks in my opinion is the worst thing that can happen in a game. i went down 1 rank in h3 with 20 kills 0 deaths and stopped playing for 3 months, i was so pissed off. playing allday and trying your best only to go backwards does not keep people playing. this will help prevent people giving up making playlist populations higher but still keep lower skilled players from becoming higher than their actual trueskill.

these are just my thoughts on the subject that i think will benefit all parts of the community. if a skill 50 took 2000 games to earn for even the best players that rarely lose games, selling accounts would not be worth it as it would take to long.

#5

I couldn’t agree more with all of this. Actually, I’m going to. Everything listed here is just a perfect example of what could add up to be a perfect Halo game.

#6

Really great post Arbiter. I’m trying to think of ideas to add to this post, but I must say, you have covered nearly everything I can think of. I would suggest expanding on the vehicle section of custom games. I never really understood why Halo had such lack of vehicles in forge. I know why they didn’t add a pelican and a phantom, but why don’t they have troop transport warthogs and AA wraiths? So thats all I can think of… Thanks!

#7

I agree with everything except armor abilities and theater mode control changes. Armor abilities would feel weird if you could only use it once and it would make the game more complicated in a bad way. And theater mode control changes are just unneeded.

#8

FFA Forge is an utterly phenomenal idea and one that I’ve been longing for.Not to mention it’d be convenient and much more functional for machinima directors such as yourself Arbiter.

#9

It’s nice seeing someone posting potential ideas for future Halos which are both similar to mine and not unrealistic.

Personally I agree with pretty much everything but have some ideas that I personally would like to be added also.

Forge,
I share the same thought when it comes to themed pieces, they are great but limit you to that theme, in Halo 4 it was UNSC and in Reach it was Forerunner. However it would be nice to change the theme. You could have UNSC, Forerunner, Covenant, civilian and maybe natural (for rocky/grassy textures).
It also be nice to see dynamic objects (not sure if this is the right word but I’m going to stick with it). These would be interactive objects that can be updated by pressing buttons on the map. For example on Halo 3 in Last Resort you could press a button to lower the barriers, why not allow a similar system that can be forged. For example having a door or bridge linked to a button in the same way you link teleporters. (This is one of the lesser realistic ideas but one that i would love). These would be amazing for both general map making and machinma.

Character models,
When it comes to the appearence of spartans my favourites were from Reach as they looked like they’ve seen battle and had the scars to show it. However Halo 4 made the spartans look strange in my opinion. They were too colourful, for example in the previous halos the underskin (the rubber layer) was black and then the armour could be coloured, however in 4 the underskin was also coloured and all the spartans looked too bright and clean. Also the chest pieces were the worst, imo. They looked odd and included cylindrical objects on the shoulders which I assume were meant to represent the jetpack the spartans had in the trailers but in my opinion looked odd and had no purpose.
In terms of customization I loved Reach armour, except scout looked very different. The armour you had access to was good and the customisation was great, however the customisation easn’t as good for elites, well at least there were elites. For future halos I would love to see the return of playable elites but with the customisation for them from Halo 3 but the armour for them from Reach. For the Spartans I would love to see the setup from reach.

Armour abilites,
I liked the abilities from reach, although I agree that armour lock was over powered it definately looked cooler than the Halo 4 alterantive which seemed less texured and a little boring.
I would love to see a return of the Reach abilities with maybe a mix of the Halo 3 equipment and the thruster packs from Halo 4.
I also love ideas you had for how the abilities could be used.
As a sidenote I would love sprint to be an ability again as it makes more sense to me and is more like previous Halo’s.

I can’t think of anything else to add that you haven’t already covered.
Hope you agree with what I would also like to add and great job with Rots, one the most proffesional machinima I have ever seen. I hope later Halo’s allow you to make even more effective machinima.

TheCorruptGamer

#10

Great list! The stuff on that list is not only stuff that many people want, but is also completely reasonable in its asking. :smiley: I actually had a couple suggestions for forge (I don’t know how possible they are, but it’s worth getting the ideas out there I suppose):

  1. Test Mode - I think it would be a really helpful feature to hit start while in forge and press “Test Mode.” This would then give you the list of gametypes, you select the one you want, and the map reloads as a “testing” custom game. This way you don’t have to leave forge every single time you make a small change to your map.

  2. Object Selection Pane - This may be a bit advance, but it’s my general idea for solving a forging problem. It’s very common to “lose” objects while placing them. For example, I could be placing my spawn points and I accidentally dropped the last one into the ocean. I don’t want to delete all my spawn points just because I lost one. Or perhaps I’m laying down my tenth kill barrier but place it too far phased into a structure that took me hours to build. I don’t want to delete all my kill zones and I don’t want to have to redo my structure. This is where the “Object Selection Pane” comes in. It gives you a list of all the items currently forged with the pieces shown in the order that you forged them. This way you can remotely change the traits of objects (or delete the objects) without disturbing the rest of the pieces.

#11

An absolutely brilliantly thought-out post. I completely agree 100%! :smiley:

I don’t really have anything to add, save an opinion of my own.

For matchmaking, perhaps a ‘classic’ playlist could be added, where there is no armour abilities, or ordinance drops. Gametypes such as BR slayer and KOTH would appear here. Weapons would be found on the map again, and the sprint button would be disabled for this playlist. (If indeed, the sprint mechanic is returning, which it probably will be doing). This way, people who preferred the play style of older Halo games would have somewhere to play their games, while those who prefer the play style of the newer Halo games would have theirs.

#12

Wow! I’ve been caught up with so many conversations about load outs and what not I forgot about all the little things that could be improved upon.

While most of this isn’t major stuff it’d make certain parts of the game less tedious.

#13

As a long time Halo fan and supporter, I couldn’t agree more with every single one of these suggestions.

All of these are very well thought out, and aren’t “Personal opinions”, it’s all genuine upgrades to the games.

#14

I always like the thought of Forge Firefight.

I know it this isn’t a major issue but I think that it was funny that in every halo game we got the Master Chief armor either as default armor or an unlockable, but in Halo 4 we never got Master Chief armor, we got the Mark VI armor. You can obviously see a difference between them. Is it to much to ask that we get master chief armor from the current game and not just a repeat?

Everything that you have listed Arbiter617, totally agree. But one thing I will have to add is a File Share that Actually works unlike Halo 4’s. Reason I bring this up is because, I have slow internet but my Halo Reach File Share works like a charm. Even though they say that this fixed File Share for Halo 4, mine to this very day still doesn’t work. The only thing that ever worked was screenshots, but I can’t get any maps from the Halo 4 file share. Yet my Halo Reach file share works, So whatever they did in Halo Reach that made it work for everyone, they need to do in my opinion.

P.S. look forward to the Featurettes.

#15

While I agree with most of the things you said in the original post(s), I will point out something that I did not agree with: FFA Forging.

During a Forge session with multiple people, it’s extremely important to be able to have maximum communication with your companions. Having Forge be team based allowed you to be able to know your fellow Forgers direct location by being able to view their service tag, and spotting was much more easy.

I’m not against the option to have it, but it shouldn’t be forced under any circumstances.

#16

Skull / Flag / Flood Arm Weapon
Custom Games Option
Standard Melee Lunge
1 Hit Kill

Fists (i.e. no primary)
Custom Games Option
2 Hit Kill

Allow flood to use any weapon (Fists, Flood-Arm, Guns, etc)

Ability to comment / discuss on file share items on Waypoint.

Ability to use screenshots of your map for its thumbnail.

#17

With the technology available to us in this age, and since Battlefield has been doing it already, I think the idea of troop movement via Pelicans and Phantoms should be visited. I don’t own an Xbox one (weird that I’m posting this) but I’m pretty sure that internet capabilities are really easy. Having large maps that can support many players in a large conquest of dominion and using troop deployment would provide a new aspect on halo gameplay. However this would be a separate category in online games. In the infinity menu in would add a whole new section called something like “Base Deployment” or something. The game would pit Spartans and Elites (or Spartans playing as Elites if they can’t do add them)against each other to capture bases. It would provide bigger gameplay for those who get tired of small death zones currently offered.

This suggestion might be a little unrealistic, especially since it involves other hardware. Despite this, I would probably like a forge on the computer with a more god-like view of the map. I personally prefer the computer style of customization with mouse placing and use of arrow keys over console controllers since I feel more in control. Having some software system accessible for free like “Halo Forge” that can link up with your account to transmit what you’ve done to your game would be interesting.
That suggestion is a little extreme to do, but a more realistic suggestion would be to make building buildings easier. I find that when I am constructing bases on forge that I can never manage to connect them and get this strange gap. There is probably something for this, but having some form of automatic magnetic quality when placing building objects would greatly improve my experience (and hopefully other peoples’) on making custom maps.

This might just be me, but if they opened up Elites as playable, then it is only sensible to open up Prometheans as playable as well. The models would probably need to be shrunk so you don’t have Knights looming over tiny Spartans, but this could easily be done I think. There might need to be work done on the models themselves because the backs are enormous, covering the heads from behind. A stretch, I know, and it might cause a bunch of people to flock to this species rather than Spartans, but I would love this to be included. If anyone has a suggestion for how to even out Spartans, Elites, and Prometheans as playable characters, please reply.

#18

I completely agree with all of these except for-

Infection Skins: I personally liked that Infection has finally gotten the visual upgrade of real Flood/Zombie models. It was okay before but they way Infection behaved and looked in prior games made for tons of silly nonsensical gametypes. Which in itself was fine, but always bothered me that it took place through infection, the zobie survival game-type.

I say a new custom/party-based gametype with a massive set of options be made to replace ‘old/silly’ infection. A new ‘party’ game-type would be cool because it would allow players to take a blank gametype and add/change or even splice rules and objectives from all/any other gametypes together into bigger and better possibilities with actually in-game set goals.

For instance, you could make a gametype that behaves like infection- but with regular character models and one of the teams has to also hold a point, or has the capability to capture a flag/object (like capture the Hog in Reach) and bring it to an area on the map. This could really be great for bringing back obstacle based maps.

Or perhaps you could not have it like infection at all and instead make a Vip/Ctf hybrid game-type.

The real point I am making is a gametype that can either be nothing or everything orchastrated together would be real neat and give us something more ‘legit’ to work with other than making a sorta hackme infection game-varient.

I also Disagree with the suggestion involving the Ranking system: I found that while most people loved Halo 3’s ranking system- it was undeniably flawed, and while the following games did their best to remedy the situation, they have never hit a good mark on the ranking system.

I feel that your skill-based rank should be part of a leader board system- sorta like how reach half-implemented. Meaning that the game takes the collective number of ranked-playlist players (who have played enough to earn ranks)and divides the populous into tiers of whatever set amount of ranks are implemented, with the higher ranks allotting fewer people to hold the titles than the previous. Meaning the highest tier rank has the fewest amount of people with the highest amount of skill holding it. Maybe not have the system so fluid that people constantly switch up and down ranks against ppl who are playing more than them- but instead have the system update and re-distibute everyone after so many weeks/months.

This way the system doesn’t take your higher ranks that you played dozens of games to earn- and resets em to 0, but instead you can hold onto your current highest earned rank even if you don’t play regularly until the system updates a few months or weeks down the road and only knocks you down a peg or two depending on the number of people who managed to pass you up.

This way the ranking system is both legitimate and inherently comparative. Also maybe the game could reward you with a service-record medal or emblem that shows your highest ever achieved rank and which ‘season/year’ it was earned.

I am just saying I play games now with ranking systems like this and I find it works very well.

#19

Something that they could easily do would be adding NPCs in custom games. They could be customizable in their objective and playing style. By this I mean you can have 3 NPCs in a king of the hill custom game: one who is set to stay in the hill, one to eliminate other players, and one in a between state. They can be set to different difficulties based on type: easy - Marine, hard - Spartan. And if they have Elites: easy - Jackals, hard - Elite. You can possibly have a different difficulty setting from there, but this is definitely something I’d love to see in the game.

#20

Thanks for all the kind feedback! I hope some of these ideas percolate to the core programmers of Halo 5 and the suggestions become reality!

Keep more ideas coming, I’m enjoying reading them.

> Armor abilities would feel weird if you could only use it once and it would make the game more complicated in a bad way. And theater mode control changes are just unneeded.

No no, the armor abilities wouldn’t all be like that. Under custom game settings, there is an option “Limited” to set it to that. By default (matchmaking) it would be “Unchaged” which behaves the way you know and love. But for custom games it’d be great to be able to place an armor ability which behaves more like an equipment.

As for theater controls, having triggers change altitude would allow theater cameras to raise and lower smoothly. As a machinima director who has filmed for years, I can definitely say this would be useful to switch to for certain shots.

> During a Forge session with multiple people, it’s extremely important to be able to have maximum communication with your companions. Having Forge be team based allowed you to be able to know your fellow Forgers direct location by being able to view their service tag, and spotting was much more easy.

I understand completely. I figured by default there would just be some sort of waypoint on players that you could turn off if you want. I mainly want to force everyone to be able to hear everyone, for the exact reasons you specified about communication. Being able to set it to teams or free for all seems to be a great compromise!

> Infection Skins: I personally liked that Infection has finally gotten the visual upgrade of real Flood/Zombie models.

Maybe the way I stated it was a bit wrong. I agree, the addition of playable Flood in infection was something I was surprised by and welcomed. My problem came when there wasn’t really any way to turn it off. It made gametypes like Cops’N’Robbers impossible I believe. Again, I stopped playing Halo 4 pretty fast, so I may be wrong.