The soul of Halo: Grifball

Games Other Halo
1

This is going to be a long post. I am here to discuss the soul of Halo and why so many people seem to be upset by all of the changes, focusing on Grifball as a parallel. If you have any feedback, please feel free to constructively add to the discussion.

Grifball. The official sport of the Halo universe. In my opinion, it is also the best embodiment of the soul of Halo. Not CTF, not Doubles, not Pro playlists, Grifball. There are two teams of four, a common thread with game types before Big Team Battle. Each team member can choose to be a hammer user or a sword user, and can switch between the two whenever they wish. Those are the only choices.

The objective is to score the ball (previously a bomb), and the only team who can is the team that holds the ball, an intrinsic advantage just like map control in slayer, or holding the hill, or having the power weapons. Team work was key.

This is how Halo played. CE was the gathering of a bunch of friends to play a game for the heck of it. There may have been one guy in the group who was the spawn killer, but they all had fun. Halo 2 added a competitive layer, similar to Grifball leagues. Halo 3 was the peak, everyone was in on the game. It flourished.

Then there was Reach. Armor abilities added more personalization, but it would be like adding the same things to Grifball. Thruster Packs, Jet Packs, Shields? Unfathomable. It could still be balanced, sure, but only if everyone agreed to only use certain rules.

Now there is Halo 4. Not only could you personalize your armor abilities, but you can add more. What if in Grifball you could extend your lunge distance with the sword, or increase your speed, or increase the hammer blast range? Sure, certain things would cancel out others, making the game more interesting on a metagame level, but some will think that the game has been corrupted. Then there is ordnance. Could you imagine if one team member in Grifball was randomly given a pistol? A grenade? Sure, the team with the ball (advantage) could be rewarded, but sometimes, that advantage is given to the other team. They are the ones with the ability to turn the game around just because of random chance.

This is why there are a lot of vocal opponents of Halo 4. That soul of Halo has been manipulated to increase randomness to give casual players a fighting chance. A good Grifball team could wipe the floor with a weaker team, or a team of randoms. However, give a random chance of getting a pistol, a long range weapon in a melee centric game, and there is no gauge of skill. Will some players enjoy the randomness? Yes. But not all.

That’s not to say the changes are bad. For example, a slowly recharging Thruster Pack in Grifball would add an element of strategy that was not present before. Give players rewards for doing well to balance play if they get a bad team, for example a slight increase in speed if the player is doing well. It can still be trumped by team work, but does help temporarily.

Halo 4 has tried to innovate a game that is cherished, and though the additions make it interesting, there are some things that can be “broken”. Proper tweaking can rebalance the game, and bring the new mechanics in line. That takes time, however. I like Halo 4, don’t get me wrong, but some will dislike the step learning curve of previous installments, while others will dislike catering to the lower end of the curve. I believe the best option is to have all options available, and I think that is what 343 is doing now.

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Wow, your post is extremely elegant and concisely explains how a lot of the gaming community feels. Bravo good sir! Hopefully 343 takes this to heart with Halo5 so we can have a better game.

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Are you saying you want loadouts and ordinance in Griffball? I’m not understanding the post…

I like Griffball, it’s just a game to pass the time, not really meant to take seriously. The other day I was playing and the entire center of the floor disappeared and you would fall to your death unless you jumped from area to area, that was amazing!

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I was not starting that Grifball specifically should change. I wanted to discuss the response to Halo 4 in a way that was not muddled by a complex sandbox.

The bare bones of Halo can be described with Grifball, hence why I found it to be the soul of Halo. It’s supposed to be an analogy.

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You are pretty delusional if you think Grifball is the soul of Halo.

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Good analogy. Also, I doubt anyone is ruling out Halo change. Quite frankly, it has been going in the wrong direction. Only thing I like about new Grif, is the throwing function.

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> Are you saying you want loadouts and ordinance in Griffball? I’m not understanding the post…

> You are pretty delusional if you think Grifball is the soul of Halo.

It’s an analogy.

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OP the customization isnt needed in halo. It doesn’t add anything that wasn’t there before and in fact has removed many aspects of the game and made them perks (picking up nades, turrets less overheat perk, wheelman perk) or now require a push of a button to use (fast movement being replaced with slow+sprint).

Other changes like flinch and no descope have added nothing but make the sniper OP.

I love H4 but 343 did the same thing bungie did in reach, change things for the sake of change and then see a massive exodus as people leave the game.

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> You are pretty delusional if you think Grifball is the soul of Halo.

It’s not meant to be taken literally as the soul.

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> I was not starting that Grifball specifically should change. I wanted to discuss the response to Halo 4 in a way that was not muddled by a complex sandbox.
>
> The bare bones of Halo can be described with Grifball, hence why I found it to be the soul of Halo. It’s supposed to be an analogy.

For what its worth OP you are very clear in your post. But many here are not too sharp about those things.

I think the best analogy for halo is simply COD. It hardly changes game to game and does amazing. All they have done since MW1 is pretty much what halo did CE-3, add theater, ranks, new maps and weapons.

Why fix what isnt broken?

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> I think the best analogy for halo is simply COD. It hardly changes game to game and does amazing. All they have done since MW1 is pretty much what halo did CE-3, add theater, ranks, new maps and weapons.

Incremental change. Rather than forcing in major elements into the sandbox and “seeing whether it works”.

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> I think the best analogy for halo is simply COD. It hardly changes game to game and does amazing. All they have done since MW1 is pretty much what halo did CE-3, add theater, ranks, new maps and weapons.
>
> Why fix what isnt broken?

You need to add some things in order to keep a game from growing stale. That’s why games like Magic: The Gathering and League of Legends do so well. The problem, I find, was that a large scale test didn’t seem to be a priority when there were so many changes. The more changes you do, the more you have to test, it’s that simple. However, as Scottus said, it seems their approach was more of a “here’s a lot of changes, hopefully you all like it” kind of thing. Probably should have added more about that in my original post.

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> Incremental change. Rather than forcing in major elements into the sandbox and “seeing whether it works”.

Well here’s the interesting aspect. CoD barely ever changes and maintains its communities and audience. People like that it does not change.

But then we have the Battlefield series. There was a massive amount of change between BF2, BFBC2, and BF3; yet the game actual grew in popularity. So even though they brought in massive game changes, they found new fans and consumers.

In the end it comes back to positive changes versus negative changes. In CoD and BF we have seen a general positive change between every game. Even though some aspects change for the worse, most of the game has improved from before.
For Halo we have seen mostly negative changes since Halo3. ODST, Reach, and Halo4 have all tried to add too much to the core and sandbox without properly testing and balancing.

So for Halo5, 343 needs to test more and design less.

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The Soul of Halo: Griball is a bunch of boosters who attempt to raise their K/Ds.

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Is anybody else reading this right? Grifball… is the heart and soul of grifball? LOL omg people on the forums these days.

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Grifball? The heart and soul of Halo? Hahaha not even gonna waste my time reading this