The opinion of a humble halo fan

Games Other Halo
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So we are at that point again where everybody is creaming their pants and literally losing their s*** like to two middle aged woman in a Yoplait commercial. And although I’m as just as excited as the next Halo fan for the continuation of our beloved series, I thought that I should take some time and address some issues that our new awesome friends at 343 might want to think about while making Halo 4.

I know that 343 really wants to take the Halo franchise and make it completely their own, and I’m all for them taking it in a whole new direction. However what I am very worried about is where that destination will lead to. Those not too active in the community may not be as aware but right now Halo is in a divided state. From pro-bloom people, to anti-bloom people, from the casual gamers to the MLG players, from the forgers to forum dwellers, from the montage people to the machinima people, this community runs deep but is nowhere near as unified as it used to be. Instead of helping each other out, everyone is at each other’s throats to get their name big in the media world. To roughly quote Sundance, Bungie left us with a game that was a disservice to the Halo franchise and it has impacted everything from the experience we see every day to the sales from Microsoft. Many say that the community is dead, or at the very least it’s dying.
So what can we do about this? 343 continues to do their best by releasing the weekly bulletins and updating the matchmaking playlist every month, the pro players are doing their best to keep feeding content to the community, machinima and montages makers are doing their best to perfect their art and release new videos frequently. But for some reason that all goes unseen or at the very least, it just isn’t enough. What we need is a revitalization of the Halo series. We need 343 Industries to step up and make Halo 4 the game we have been wanting for ever since Halo 3 came out.

For the following section I would like to address some issues that for years Bungie never addressed but that I hope and pray 343 will in Halo 4. Let’s be honest, we know what the men and women in 343 want as a game developing team. They want to make a game that will have a huge impact on the gaming world, they want to make themselves an established and reputable company, they to please their fans, and mostly importantly, sell money; among others things of course. With that being said I would like to point out the small things the majority of the community wanted to see implanted and/or fixed but was never brought into fruition by Bungie.

Multiplayer:
I don’t think I have to delve too much into this topic but basically what creates a successful multiplayer is a competitive multiplayer. I remember a time during the Halo 2 era where if you had an Xbox you automatically had a copy of Halo 2. And yes I do know that the market was much smaller back then but you can’t deny the feeling you felt when you achieved a rank you had been coveting for months, only then to be awestruck by being in the same party with someone who had a much higher rank than you did. To be blunt, Halo 4 needs a truly competitive ranking system like Halo 2. I know that the system was not perfect and cheating was abundant in the higher ranks but rank back then was the best indication of skill we’ve ever had in the Halo series. I would talk about Halo 3’s ranking system but I believe everyone knows how horrid and inaccurate True Skill was and how winning 13 games in a row to not rank up really made me question the competitive worth of AR starts. I personally love what Halotracker has done by showing the old Halo 2 number ranks for each competitive playlist: http://www.halotracker.com/Reach/ReachStats.aspx?GamerTag=BxSouijah
Now I’m not saying that 343 should recycle this system, but instead implement something eerily similar to it (i.e. you win a couple of games you get a higher number, you can see exactly how many more games you need to win to rank up on Waypoint) would make just about everyone happy. Combine that with some military symbol to show how many games you’ve won or something like that would be perfect in my eyes. Remember: simpler is better. I think a lot of people were upset with Reach because it was an obvious copout to the Call of Duty franchise where the credit system was supposed to keep you playing for years. But when people realized that there was no point in gaining Inheritor because it didn’t give players the slightest idea of how good you were; people just gave up. And you honestly can’t blame them; you need something that people can fight for, something that will motivate people to play the game and get better. Bungie did that near perfectly with Halo 2’s ranking system. I firmly believe that if 343 emulated this experience and gave us something to strive for, people will play with more of passions and will continue to play the game for much longer. Also please no more arena divisions, that…was just…I don’t even know…

Weapons:
The starting weapon for Halo has been a one of the most hugely debated topics in Halo ever since we noticed that our BR bursts weren’t actually hitting our opponents faces. I don’t remember all of the technical details of the Halo 3 Battle Rife inconsistency (something about dropped shots, hitscans, netcode, etc.) but I do remember the frustration I felt day after day of losing BR fights that I knew I should have won. I know that 343 is bringing back the Battle Rifle but to me the Halo 2 BR was the best starting weapon in the entire franchise (Relax, I’ll bring up the H1 pistol later). The button glitches that were associated with Halo 2 and the Battle Rifle made it a crazy versatile and effective weapon. The button glitches added a fighting element to the game; which is one of the reasons why it was so competitive and popular. If I was down a shot but had the skill and finesse to pull off a double or quad

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shot before my opponent could kill me, that was crazy but at the same time very skillful. Combine that with a multitude of other button glitches that could be performed on the fly and in succession and you’ve accidently created a large skill gap that was hugely positive for the game. This all ties back into striving for something in matchmaking. If you create a game with a big skill gap and something worth playing for, (even a small virtual number) people will want to play the game. You won’t have to shove content and DLC down our throats.
Ideally what I think would work best for Halo 4 in terms of starting weapons would be a Battle Rifle start that kills people in 4 headshots and the Halo 1 pistol as a secondary that kills people in 3 headshots but fires slower than the BR. Now these two weapons would kill a player at the same time, just the BR would do it in 4 headshots and the pistol would do it in 3. The closest we got to this was Anniversary Squad slayer but bloom just made it difficult and awkward. I guarantee that if people heard that the starting weapons in Halo 4 was the Halo 2 BR and the Halo 1 pistol, so many gamers that have abandoned the franchise in the past would come back solely for that reason.

Skill Gap:
I remember a picture I saw a few years ago that defined the competitiveness of the Halo series perfectly. Basically Halo 1 was like playing a chess match, Halo 2 was like playing a game of checkers, and Halo 3 was like tossing a coin. If you’ve played a few multiplayer games of each than you know how true this sadly is. This can be seen as a sellout by Bungie; in order for more people to buy their game they made it easier for the causal gamer to pick it up and play. The skill gap greatly and noticeably decreased with each installment of the series and it has frustrated veteran players of Halo since 2004. This is not what we want and it is not what is best for the gaming world. People want a challenge, people want to explore and find things out for themselves in a video game. We don’t want our kills to be decided by luck, rather we out to out-smart and out-skill our opponents. Force feeding information and making it stupidly easy to pick up a gun and start owning is not what made games like Halo 1 great and revolutionary. I could talk more about this but to keep it short, don’t do what Call of Duty did and just appeal to literally person on the face of the Earth and make it so there is little difference between the professional player and someone who bought the game yesterday.

Bloom:
I know this topic has been beaten to death; it’s just another similarity to Call of Duty that no one wants. In short: DON’T DO IT, DON’T DO IT, DON’T DO IT, DON’T DO IT, DON’T DO IT, DON’T DO IT!!!

Load outs:
The Halo Reach, Call of Duty-like load outs were pretty nice until you realized that armor lock must have been an idea from Satan and Jetpacks can’t really be performed if you play of Bumper-Jumper. I personally don’t like them but I know other people do and I also know that 343 is going to keep them in the franchise. Although I don’t know how they’re going to implement armor abilities with the Master Chief, since he is supposed to have IV armor now, but I just hope it’s not like Reach and therefore not like Call of Duty.

Campaign:
It’s no secret that Halo 1 had the best campaign out of any Halo game. And in Reach we were promised “massive battles” with “hordes of enemies”. And of course, we were severely disappointed with the amount of active AI on the battlefield at one time. We want to fight the kinds of battles that we read about in the novels. We want ninja-like scenes in the heart of an enemy ship just how we also want literally hundreds of enemies fighting hundreds of marines and Spartans on the other side. Ever since Halo 2, I feel like no one has bought Halo for its single player or storyline; and that’s a shame because the campaigns have been relatively great and the Halo universe is so rich with back-story. I know that Halo 4 is a continuation of the storyline but I think I speak for every hardcore Halo fan when I say that we want to see the books in action. We want to see the other Spartan IIs in action with the Master Chief, we want to see the rest of Blue Team and their fate, we want to know more about Spartan IIIs and how the first two companies were wiped out, we want to know more about the Covenant Empire, we want to know more about the Insurrection, we want to what happened to all the Spartans that are MIA, we want more space battles. Mainly we want to see the loose ends left by the books, graphic novels, and other Halo media all tied.

Maps:
Whew, where do I begin? The community has been mostly split down the middle on this issue. Do you give multiplayer maps that are small and symmetrical so as to fit in with MLG and thus designed to be played competitive (Like Midship, The Pit, Lockout, Zealot, etc)? Or do you make large scale maps so people die less often and thus aren’t as frustrated with the game (Headlong, Blood Gulch, Standoff, Forge World, etc)? The obvious answer is both. Ship a game with half the maps being perfect for completive play. Ideally, maps that MLG can pick up and use on the competitive circuit with the least amount of forging and editing as possible would be best. And the other half goes crazy with objects and hills!
Also don’t do what Bungie did with Halo Reach and shortchange the consumer with barely any maps on the disc and then hardly use the DLC in matchmaking later on. Give us a solid amount of maps to start with and release a little DLC later with some freebee maps too. Nobody wants badly forged

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maps shipped on the disc and even worse remade maps in forge. Seriously how do you mess up the remakes for Sanctuary and Ascension? You guys made the original maps!
So please learn from Bungie mistakes. Personally I loved the Anniversary DLC and would love proper remakes of Lockout and Ascension, shipped with Halo 4. Take a note or two from this article: http://www.majorleaguegaming.com/news/best-and-worst-halo-map-remakes-all-time

Controller settings:
I never understood why we couldn’t have custom controller settings. It can’t be that hard to implement. Let us assign buttons to actions and people will be very happy.

Matchmaking:
For years Bungie has changed their playlist settings. They’ve added things, removed them, and then re-added them again. All this inconsistency makes us distrust a game developer and leads us to believe that they don’t know what they are doing. Don’t do this. When Halo 4 is finished and released we want to see a multitude of playlists, most “ranked”, few “unranked”. After time things may need to change, playlists may need to be updated with newer maps and settings but adding and removing playlists on a whim after we’ve put so much time and effort in is inexcusable. Everything else I’ve said ties into the matchmaking experience so I’ll just end this part with my personal preference of what I’d like the “ranked” playlists to be: Team Slayer, Team Doubles, Lone Wolf/Rumble Pit/FFA, Team Objective, One vs. One, Big Team Battle, Team SWAT, Team Snipers, and MLG.

Quitting from games has always been a big problem in online video games. I feel that this article showcases perfectly how the problem can be reduced: http://misriahsolutions.com/articles/quitting-halo/

I also think it would be beneficial to Halo 4 if it had bots like the Unreal Tournament series. Just a thought.

Forge:
Give us color palettes. There you go. We hate gray maps.

Theater:
Please let us skip forward chapters; it’s so annoying to have to hold down the right trigger to see my game winning no scope.

Now I don’t want to seem like a Bungie hater. Halo Reach won best multiplayer in 2010 and personally I enjoy it 10x more than I did with Halo 3. But majority of the community would agree that the enjoyment value and competitiveness of the series only decreased with each installment. And please, please keep listening and taking to heart what the community and fans have to say. Basically you don’t ever want to get to this point: Watch the best in esports live - MLG

Or even worse, this point: Watch the best in esports live - MLG

If you make a game where people do speed runs on a competitive level 10 years after a game is released then you know that you have succeeded:

Conclusion:
Give us what we want while simultaneously doing what you guys want. Thus everyone will buy the game, we will play it for years, and everyone will be happy :slight_smile:

Thanks for reading. There’s a lot more that I wanted to write but can’t remember right now. Leave comments, feedback, questions, etc.

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This was not written in the form of a letter addressed to 343 Industries. You lied to me.

Also, it’s a tad on the long side, even for someone of my prodigious attention span.

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You’re right, I’m sorry. Title has been changed.