I’d like to hear everyone’s thoughts on the squad mechanics in Halo 5’s Campaign and its potential return in future games.
Though I feel it’s a cool and innovative idea, I also think it places restrictions on creating a more concise narrative given that the story is now forced to acknowledge and develop many more characters; and takes away some of the awe and mystery of certain missions as squad members will often ask or resolve questions you’ve been asking yourself.
I think it would be interesting to see squad mechanics come back, but perhaps only in Co-op mode - in a way like Halo 3’s Co-op, where new characters are introduced for the second, third and fourth player slots, but now you can revive each other. That way canon doesn’t have to be bent around acknowledging three more characters because we (or at least I) can accept that Co-op characters appearing alongside Player #1 aren’t meant to be there canonically (after all, you don’t see the Arbiter or the other Elites make any extra contribution to the story in Halo 3 Co-op).
If classic Firefight was to make a return in Halo 6, perhaps Squad mechanics would be welcome here too. I’d also find it interesting to see REQ stations and items in a classic Firefight mode.
The question remains of what 343i does with all the extra characters in Halo 5 if they remove squad mechanics. Though I’d like to see more of Blue Team, I think Osiris would be fine as background characters like Lasky.
I pretty much agree on everything you said. While it’s a cool mechanic, I’d only like for it to be in a few missions at most. However, if there was a Spartan Ops campaign where you could customize your team, I’d want the squad mechanic to be in that.
If you played star wars republic commando… you know halo 5s squad stuff is bleh.
Honestly I’d like them to do away with the “always haveing 4 guys with you” thing, lets get it to where you have marines you can command around, and they wouldnt always be a burden to you. That would be cool.
Halo 3 had it great, you would only have 4 guys if you had four players. Occasionally Arbiter was nice to have, (personally i would like more of him running around with us)
If we are to keep it though, lets see it done for marines. It would be nice to tell them to go and protect a position for you and help you out.
Edit: I also wouldnt want a marine spam either. I want marines to apper naturally and not shoe horned in for the sake of haveing these mechanics used.
Halo 1-3 had it great, reach had to many marines (although understandably so) and 4s although limited, didn’t get enough screen time.
Gameplay wise, I found that the squad more often got in the way than helped. I always kept them waiting behind in safecpkaces while playing Legendary, otherwise they’d die off too quickly and screw me over in the process (since the game’s difficulty is entirely reliant on the abuse of the Revive mechanic).