In Reach, we had a fairly big problem of people who didn’t want to buy the DLCs, causing them to hardly show up outside of their DLC playlists. This resulted in even more people refusing to buy them because they couldn’t get their money’s worth.
Unfortunately, this problem still lingers around in Halo 4, although a little bit better, so the question is: How can we fix it?
Well first I’ll go into a suggestion that many people are going to make: Halo 3 system, ie DLC requirements on almost all playlists. This was effective in Halo 3, but it won’t be effective anymore for this reason:
> Halo 3 was the big dog: it dominated Xbox Live until COD surpassed it well into its life, so if you didn’t want to buy the DLC, and you couldn’t play most playlists, you couldn’t just jump ship over to another game, because no game really could compete.
> Today is different, COD is at the top, not Halo, so if you have a player who is on the fence who suddenly sees he is restricted to two or three playlists, he’ll just leave, especially since his friends will likely be on COD as well.
Obviously the BEST option is free DLC, but it shouldn’t be required everywhere, even if it is free, although it still should be in most playlists.
The reasons why is because someone who just bought the game isn’t going to want to sit through a download, as well as the fact that many people don’t have a Hard Drive, but rather the tiny 4 GB of flash memory they give you, so they may not be able to actually fit it on there along with all the War Games and Spartan Ops files.
Crimson especially can be free at this point, as most of the Halo community considers it mediocre and not many people are really going to buy it anytime soon. Another thing worth noting is that every map pack that ever came out before Halo 4 should also be free.
But unfortunately, I don’t see it happening though, which is depressing, so there is one more option that MAY work: DLC Playlists
I know that they didn’t work in the past, and I’ll speculate why…
- Most of them had only 3 maps
- The ones that had more maps made players buy more than 1 map pack
- They attempted to find a middle ground player limit that wasn’t the optimal limit
- Players had to constantly switch playlists if they wanted variety
To fix these, each DLC playlist should have the DLC maps, forge maps, and base maps with the best gametypes, so that players can just play those playlists instead of having to switch between Infinity Slayer and a small DLC playlist. However, the focus should be on the DLC maps.
There should also be more than one playlist at a time, so the maps can all reach their potential, so for example…
> Premium Battle
> -4v4 or 5v5
> -Magestic required
> -Skyline
> -Landfall
> -Monolith
> -Haven
> -Adrift
> -Solace
> -Abandon
> -A couple forge maps
> -Gametypes (on best maps for them): CTF, Slayer, Extraction, Oddball, KOTH, Team Regicide, SWAT, 1-Flag (pretty please), and maybe some stuff like Rocks N Rails, Binary Slayer, and Fiesta
>
> Premium Big Team Battle
> -6v6 to 8v8
> -Crimson and Castle alternate requirements, but the maps of both are always there.
> -Daybreak
> -Outcast
> -Perdition
> -Wreckage
> -Harvest
> -Shatter (which needs Warthogs)
> -Exile
> -Ragnarok
> -Meltdown
> -Complex? (also needs Warthogs)
> -Vortex
> -Longbow
> -some forge maps
> -Gametypes (on best maps for them): CTF, Slayer, Team Regicide, 2-site Extraction, Snipers, 1-flag (pretty please), Oddball with 2 or 3 balls?, and maybe some stuff like Rocks N Rails, Binary Slayer, and Fiesta
>
> And then an FFA list that floats around a bit.
Before you get called stingy for making people pay for BTB Objective, add objectives into BTB.
Additionally, to give players a good enough incentive, I’d involve the retailer pre-order armors, CSR, and some more goodies in there instead of double XP, since you rank up so fast in this game…
TLDR
-People aren’t getting their money’s worth
-Halo 3 system won’t work
-DLC Playlists work better if…
-More than 1 DLC Playlist with more maps and best gametypes on maps
-Goodies for motivation rather than 2x XP
So what are your thoughts Waypoint?