I’m not sure if anyone else has noticed. But once the “hype” of the weapon tuning update wears off, I’ve started to notice something… off, or wrong about the game.
Yeah everything is balanced now in a sense. But they balanced it effectively by making the game so lightning fast you can’t tell the difference between one weapon or another. Power Weapons are practically meaningless with the current killtime of standard weapons. At least when you take current aim assist into account. The buffed movement speed may have helped to regulate player movement a bit. But because Power Weapons have slim to no aim assist compared to spawning weapons, it has made them so painfully tedious to use, that for the most part you are more likely to get a quick kill with your trusty BR.
It just feels more like a chaotic cluster____ than a skill based arena shooter, especially on maps designed to cooperate with Sprint at 100% movement speed instead of 110%. Especially when things like instant respawn, and the painfully long shield regeneration time are also taken into account. I’ve even noticed the change in player mentality. Instead of setups and map control, the most effective strategies are to either hole up together in a small room with a player in each corner and wait like spiders in a web, or to traverse the map in a gigantic wolf pack, where “strength in numbers” and being in super-close proximity to teammates is not threatened by grenades, explosive power weapons, or most importantly of all friendly fire.
As well, a player’s limited reaction time pretty much turns the average one on one engagement into “first to shoot, first to kill” meaning if you get jumped, you’re for most intents and purposes screwed. In every single other Halo game, you always had the opportunity to turn the fight around. But in Halo 4 post-update, too many factors lead to fast killtimes that are simply too easy to achieve.
And then there’s the problem of playing on the game’s smaller maps. On Haven, Adrift, Skyline, and even Landfall, the increased movement speed makes it unbelievably easy to run away from an engagement and survive. It’s actually worse than Reach in that respect, and Reach didn’t have shot-flinch on sprinting players.
The Halo 4 sandbox, mapset, and overall gameplay does NOT support increased killtimes, at least not without also making radical adjustments to the game’s maps, physics, and more minor details like aim assist and netcode (I’ve noticed radical complaints about inconsistency since the update, which is pretty obviously related to the game’s already pretty shoddy connection being incapable of handling shot registration in tandem with the increased movement speed). In a nutshell having a better connection, or living closer to the servers, is now giving players an advantage we haven’t seen since some of the laggier games in Halo 2 and 3.
It’s just not working out. Halo 4 needs a complete overhaul for the current weapon settings to work properly. Yes they function bearably in LAN. But on Xbox Live it’s kind of a mess. I’d suggest doing what pretty much everyone suggested in the first place, and simply nerfind the DMR instead of buffing everything else. And next time, make a game WITHOUT Sprint so that you can design maps that support fast base movement speed, and then make a game with a half decent connection (and preferrably dedicated servers) so that you can minimize aim assist, which would in turn support faster killtimes. And for the love of god implement SOMETHING so that the fast killtimes aren’t so easy to achieve a baby could 4 shot. Halo CE had very minimal aim assist, and non-hitscan weapons. Halo 2 had excellent map design, and button glitches to separate the good players from the bad. and Halo 3 had Bullet Travel, so it actually took effort and practice to consistently perform well. Halo 4 has basically nothing to turn every firefight into a measure of skill, and the slower killtimes served to give players the reaction time they needed to change a fight into their favour, as there is so little chance of enemy player error to happen.
I’m sorry, I hate to say it. I’m all for a fast paced Halo. But Halo 4 simply does not have the capacity to support it without a major overhaul to the engine. Next time focus on making a HALO game, and not trying to evolve the franchise unnecessarily, and you will give the fans what they ACTUALLY want and maintain an actually respectable population 6 months after launch.