After seeing 343’s understanding of the community’s wants (H2A will contain original H2 MP) I have a little faith in them and hope they can make the Halo 5 multiplayer a little bit closer to 1, 2 or 3; games that stayed true to the series’ core gameplay.
Take a look at this:
There’s some really interesting stats over there but most importantly look at the release of Black Ops 2 and the effect it has on the H4 playerbase.
The playerbase nearly havles upon the release on the new CoD.
What does this tell us? There are a few possibilites, but the main one I feel it shows is all the CoD players 343 attempted to bring to Halo preferred CoD over H4 and thus went rushing back to their beloved consistent franchise.
As time goes on you can see more and more players quit. Before long there are under 100k people playing the latest installment of the most popular and loved franchise on Xbox.
“* Halo 4 lasted a whole two entire months in the Top 3 of the Xbox Live activity chart. Halo 3 didn’t fall out of the Top 3 until Halo Reach released - 3 years after it’s release. Halo Reach didn’t fall out of the Top 3 until 343’s title update for the game after they took over the game, 12 months after release.”
Why did Halo 4 fall off so hard then? People moving on? That’s a possibility, but why does CoD only grow stronger with each release? Why did Pokémon X & Y sell 12 million units in half a year?
Because the players and fans of these franchises are given what they want and expect. I understand some may want Halo to evolve but doing it the way 343 did it is just not right and has clearly caused many players, myself and my friend group included, to stray away from the game a month or two after release.
The multiplayer changes were way too big for a game like Halo. 1, 2, 3 and even Reach showed that even with some slight tweaks they can be successful as long as the core and base formula remains what it has always been. Yes there were armour abilities in Reach and a lot of people didn’t like that but the game still played like a Halo game. You all had equal footing. You all had to rush to the power weapons that had set spawns. You all had to fight for control of strong points to hold. Halo 4 had none of that. I dunno about you guys but it really plays similar to CoD. I’m not thinking to myself “Camo is up soon. Better move to green to get control of it”, I’m just running around the map brainlessly and shooting people with whatever I can find, through random drops or Ordnance drops.
The true and ever so fun, competitive core of Halo had been ruined and changed up to something closer to CoD. The maps didn’t help either, as it felt none of them came close to the designs of those in Halo 2 and 3 (Lockout? The Pit? Absolutely fantastic).
Listen 343, I know you may want to introduce a few things to Halo here and there but your main crowd, your main audience, your main set of players are the ones who played Halo 1 and loved it for what it was. Played Halo 2 and loved it for what it was. And so forth. All these old Halo titles were what we expected when we whipped out our wallets. A good old game of Halo.
Please, don’t try to bring others from CoD because you are only going to have these players return to what they know and love. The old Halo players left too, as it was not what they wanted.
How about we go back to our roots? Back to the days of a true Halo experience. An experience that was truly original, fun, enjoyable (to casuals and competitive alike). An experience that we all treasure so dearly from the days of Halo CE.
A game doesn’t need CoD elements to be successful. If people want to play CoD they will play CoD because nothing does CoD better than… itself. How about we make Halo 5 do that? Because Halo 4 is certainly not Halo and the graphs show that.
Go ahead and introduce new fun ways to experience Halo, but don’t let them ruin the main experience that everyone will play with out of the box.
Get the multiplayer back to its roots. Make it very vanilla.
If you want sprint, armour abilities, ordnance drops, randomized weapon drops, custom load outs, tactical packages etc. make them custom settings or something. They could have their own playlist for those that want to mess around with them.
That’s just my opinion. What direction do you think Halo’s multiplayer should take?