Let me clear something up: I never distrusted 343. When the GI article came out, I was overjoyed. Halo 4 seemed perfect for me. I was still uneasy with how they presented the info. Maybe Game Informer just stated things wrong, but I felt unsure with how certain aspects of the game would be implemented. It wasn’t the features themselves that were bothering me at all.
I thought about the Armor Abilities. Being a lover of AAs in Reach, I realized that AAs were rather unfair, in this context: you could choose one AA and then get into a situation where the player is worse than you, yet you have the lower hand because of the AA you chose, and thus, you lose. No, I’m not talking about Armor Lock.
Active Camo. As a whole, it’s the most simple AA: You hit a button, you become invisible. There’s also the Radar Jammer that comes with it. Simple. But this concerns me.
It will give a player an extreme upper hand. Quite literally, you cannot kill what you cannot see. If you look close enough, sure, you’ll be able to eliminate an Active Camo user. But if you aren’t paying attention, you’ll get killed.
What if they camp? You could come around a corner, and they’ll ambush you. They recharge their Camo, you come back around after respawning. They’ve moved position a bit, however, and you get ambushed again because you don’t know where they are. If you can’t call out to your team that there’s somebody with Camo there (they don’t have headsets, you don’t have one, etc), then you’re literally screwed.
What happens when there’s a team of campers? I know that 343 will never ever make a Sword Base situation, but there’s a possibility that camo’d team could set up camp around a choke point. Not only will you be unable to find them, but you’ll be unable to kill them, unless your team comes at them with you. Like I said before, without calling out to your team, you are screwed.
There’s a counter to this: eliminate Active Camo from the Armor Abilities and make it a pick-up (maybe randomize where it appears so people can’t camp it’s spawn. Randomize it like they’re doing with all other weapons/equipment). This leaves us with 3 other Armor Abilities to choose from: the Thruster/Jetpack, Hologram, and this new “Forerunner Vision”. This is also good for Armor Abilities because you up the possibility of knowing what the opposing players will choose, eliminating some luck done with guessing (because face it: luck isn’t competitive). This hits two birds with one stone.
Even if this isn’t done to Active Camo, Halo 4 will be an amazing game. But if this is even considered, Halo 4 could be a lot better (I don’t know how it will play yet, but I have a feeling that it will play pretty good. After all, this is Halo).
