To 343, Overly Detailed Level Design.

Games Halo 5: Guardians
1

Dear 343,

Here is a way to make Halo 5 longer, and better than Halo 4.

Put less detail into everything. Don’t stop reading.
I’ve been playing Halo Anniversary lately, and it looks perfect to me.

In Halo 4, all of the levels are overly detailed.
Honestly, some of the doors the player passes through have almost 90 moving parts to them. They expand, contract, light up, split down the middle, rotate, and then incinerate into orange light.

As a player of every Halo game to date I can speak for many when I say that no one would hold it against the level designers if a door just opened normally. With 4 moving parts maximum.

I realize the Forerunner tech requires there to be lots of unique geometry to establish that it was indeed made by the Forerunners. But Halo 4 was bordering the line of utterly ridiculous. Not to mention the lighting on everything is utterly blinding.

Lastly, please stop designing Forerunner structures with “ziggurat” architecture.
Find a more clever way of extending the length of time it takes to complete a level. Put me under siege for a couple of minutes, but don’t make every structure a complete pain in the -Yoink- to get into.

Unless the Forerunners wanted increase their commutes from location to location.

Simplify your level design. It will be okay in the end, it will make Halo 5 better.

2

mate, as much as i respect your opinion, i completely disagree.

I love detail soooooooooooo much

3

Or dont take time away from detail which makes the graphics and the game look so much better. All they need to do is devote more time to map gameplay design

4

I agree with the title, but not for campaign. What I’m against is overly complex/cluttered multiplayer maps, a trend that started with Reach.

5

> mate, as much as i respect your opinion, i completely disagree.
>
> I love detail soooooooooooo much

If your home was made from Forerunner tech, it would take 10 minutes to enter through the front door.

First your front door would be on top of a Ziggurat structure, so instead of going straight to your front door, you’d have to go up, left or right, back around again, down, back up, left or right again, and now your at your door.

But wait, the door can only be opened via a button that is below the ziggurat, so you go left or right, back down, back up, go around, left or right again, and now your at the bottom.

You hit the button, which has 60 moving parts. The button splits, rotates, expands, collapses again, creates a new geometric shape, lights up with blinding light, pistons inward, and then disintegrates.

This whole process took exactly two minutes.

Now back up the ziggurat!

You finally get into your home, but you need to turn on the lights! There are 3 phase pulse generators in 3 surrounding locations you need to turn on the lights in the living room…

…

No really, did you see the last door switch in Spartan Ops?? It was this huge mechanical device with floating parts, shining bursts of light, and expanded and retracted up into itself.

All of that to open a single door. Which in itself opened with 28 moving parts.

6

I would like a return to more simplistic Forerunner designs. Heck, bring back the designs of the ancient ruins we saw in Halo 2 or on maps like Sandtrap.

7

Yeah there is excess devotion to art in Halo 4. Gameplay has and always should be prioritized. Shall I bring up the lackluster Campaign with terribly botched vehicle sections (with the possible exceptions of Infinity and Composer Mantis fights)? Shall I bring up Spartan Ops failure to provide replay value?!

Prominent examples of level design issues in Halo 4 that do not belong in a Halo game:

-being forced out of vehicles (i.e. near the end of the death rivers on Reclaimer)
-exploding vehicles (i.e. Banshee on Requiem, Ghosts at the Lich battle on Reclaimer)
-deloading vehicles (i.e. at the end of the death rivers on Reclaimer)
-deloading AI (i.e. Hunters at the end of Requiem, Spartans on Infinity on the mission Infinity, Covies dropped out of the Lich on Reclaimer)
-lack of friendly AI (no in-game NPC, no memorable NPC, no live sergeants, frail IWHBYD dialogue, crosshair still doesn’t turn red when you betray them)
-lack of checkpoints (whatever happened to repeating checkpoints from CE and Reach? Why is there a great distance between checkpoints? Why only give them when you’re fighting dozens of enemies, not after killing those enemies?)

8

I agree.

First off, regarding the doors:
My frickin’ goodness. What is it with video games and DOORS? I swear, it’s starting to become a cliche, or some kind of ridiculous competition, to make the most complicated doors possible with the most difficult and ridiculous sequence of events to open these doors.

I MEAN SERIOUSLY. IT’S A DOOR. Do we really need to elaborate so greatly on what it takes to OPEN A DOOR? It’s how you get from one room to another. Now I know progressing in the game should be interesting and shouldn’t be nonstop fighting from area to area, but does a door which is difficult to open have to be the means by which game designers achieve this pacing? Honestly? Let’s get some creativity in here and stop elaborating on doors in video games. It’s starting to get ridiculous.

Now regarding level detail/clutter:

I tried playing Halo 3 once. I played the level Cortana. I stopped walking about halfway through the level and started staring at the ORANGE GLOWING SPHERE THINGIES. Yeah. They were really bright. They hurt my eyes, and they confused me. I didn’t know where to go. I was lost.

Can we please redefine what it means to give a game better graphics? Because these days it seems giving a game better graphics involves adding a bunch of random clutter to the level and making things really bright and bulbuous and confusing. I mean seriously, can we have a moderately clean gaming environment that doesn’t cause people’s brains to explode in the next Halo game?

Instead of having a million dynamic objects and a billion doo-dads sticking out of everything everywhere all the time in every angle and color of the rainbow, can you take a more… minimalistic approach, perhaps? Don’t get me wrong, having a lot happening can be cool and effective… if you do it right. But a lot of game designers just make a lot of stuff happening in one place and expect people to be blown away. Please, just tone down on everything. It’ll make a better game.

And with that extra time you can, as others have pointed out, focus on the gameplay. SG has some good suggestions on that, but I’d put things even further to say that there should be a greater variety of scripted events in games. I’d really like to see games, FPS games included, provide a greater range of user input/interaction options. Maybe this isn’t something for the next Halo game, but it’s still on my mind…

Anywho. Those are my thoughts.

Cheerio,
-Mator

9

I agree that the Forerunners seem to take their time when entering a facility. The fact that Spartan ops episodes were so reliant on all this button pressing is most likely due to their once-a-week deadline.They really seem to have been built to last a week,which gives them little replay value.

Regardless;I dont think well be seeing this as often in their next game.

10

> SG has some good suggestions on that, but I’d put things even further to say that there should be <mark>a greater variety of scripted events in games</mark>.

I am frustrated by how there is a lack of varying responses from the -Yoink!- Brute in Halo 3.

I am frustrated by how the Knight giving commands on Infinity in Halo 4 always teleports when approached.

I am frustrated by how the Dawn QTE was not made with all difficulties in consideration. It is a hindrance to replaying the mission. It always plays out the same, and it cannot be skipped. Furthermore, there is no alternative cutscene. Look at H1 mission Pillar of Autumn, on higher difficulties, you didn’t have to wait in the cryo. You didn’t have to take any tests. You didn’t encounter an enemy Elite in a dark room, you weren’t forced to take another route and find a Grunt in front of you with his back turned.

Here’s how I would have done Dawn:

-on Heroic/Legendary, cryotube sequence replaced with cutscene
-on Heroic/Legendary, QTE replaced with cutscene
-on Heroic/Legendary, the sword Elite is prowling around the door
-on Heroic/Legendary, there are more enemies dropped off from the dropships

I am frustrated by how killing allies rewards you with instant death as punishment, compared to previous games where it could yield surprises.

But I have barely scratched the surface. Your post has deeper insight, does it not?

One thing is for certain, the scripting in newer Halo games is becoming a major turn-off. The AI I once loved have turned into puppets.

11

> Simplify your level design. It will be okay in the end, it will make Halo 5 better.

Not necessarily. Longer games can only be said to be better for it if their gameplay develops over time to fill in that extra space.

Case and point: Spartan ops. Simplified levels padding out five times as many missions (for perhaps 2x the gameplay time) but that didn’t result in a better experience because there were only so many things 343 could do with the AI’s and sandbox to make SOPS playable. By the end it was just a grind even with the odd new level or level segment because Halo 4 combat was put through it’s full paces well before the end of the series.

Now you could simply add more variety, more spice, to cover up for limited core gameplay but that’s a lot of effort to solve a problem that doesn’t really need to be fixed. Length in itself doesn’t matter all that much, what 343 should concentrate on is replayability and that can certainly exist along side elaborate levels.

12

I’m not against detail. I thought the floating buildings and disintegrating platforms looked nice. As well as some of the doors.

But not EVERY door has to disintegrate, not EVERY building needs to float in the air, not EVERYTHING needs a complex materialize/dematerialize animation.

Overall though I thought the detail in Halo 4 was fine.

13

yeah, more levels! If not for Halo 5, for Halo 6. Longer campaigns of better gameplay quality are better than beautiful design and graphics.

I LOVED H4’s environments, but hopefully they can just copy paste that graphical awesomeness and focus more on giving more gameplay instead. I ain’t mad tho, H4’s campaign was fine, but there is always room for improving.

14

For me it’s:

Campaign = go crazy with detail

Multiplayer = lighten up on tiny/mid details of geometry and focus on clean encounters and lines.

Firefight/SPOPS = middle ground and design them from the ground up for ODST style encounters.

15

> .
>
> But not EVERY door has to disintegrate, not EVERY building needs to float in the air, not EVERYTHING needs a complex materialize/dematerialize animation.

Honestly, looking at the making of the prometheans trailer, the materialize/dematerialize animation is just a fancy shader-ish effect. Its like how if you’re killed by the binary rifle you start disintegrating exactly from where the shot hit. Its not because they have an animation designed for every possible spot it could hit, its the code can handle it on its own given a point on the model.

Floating also isn’t difficult and doesn’t take away time from designing levels.

Heck, the animators and the actual level designers are likely two entirely different people.

16

We all realize that Halo 4 was 7 levels long right??

Dawn was a prologue. Easily beaten within 15 minutes. Faster if you really try.

With the NEW NEXT GEN GRAPHICS, Halo 5 is going to be even shorter now.

Its okay to have well textured yet simple geometry. Doors can be practical.
In the 2nd Halo 4 level Requiem the final room has excessive detail.
Sure, it looks cool, the walls have 36 moving parts, everything glows, the ceiling looks grand, and I walked right passed it.

No more ziggurats.

17

As Halo 4 was 343 first real Halo game.

They now have the designs and look they want. So level design will be much easier and quicker. And will even look better. Plus running on Next Gen console, should be easy.

Just look at Halo CE. When Halo CE came out, it was the best looking game. But this was only true for the outdoor environments, indoor were pretty plain.

Now look at Halo 2. Bungie put in heaps of work to improve the Indoor environments. Which looked just as great as the outdoor environments. Amazing.

343 should be able to make great leaps as well, but then the next Halo will be a new console, so there will be a learning curve for this. But then Halo 3 was on the 360, and how amazing did that look.

18

The maps are starting to look like all other FPS dusty gore baths. Clean and vibrant arena maps started to disappear in Halo III 12-16 player maps would continue on in their own unique Halo standard all the way unto 343i’s own Reach map pack which is better than any maps in Halo IV for some reason. Though Halo Reach invasion maps completely offset map quality there were gems such as Tempest remaining a top original 12 player masterpiece.

The maps are not creative anymore because there is no clarity in gametypes and therefore no deep strategy in gametypes. Halo staple gametypes: Slayer, Capture the Flag, Oddball, King of the Hill (and their variants FFA, SWAT, 1 flag, etc.) have eroded down, with the additional game mechanics, to silly changes with no solid learning curve which makes for random frustrations and no use of formulating strategy on any maps. The idea of holding down higher ground or “setting up”, timing power weapons, withholding vehicles in the maps is lost because the gametypes do not play to traditional battle proven Halo. Important to note maps are only as good as their gametype (another reason forge maps suffer needlessly in universal gametype playlists).

For simplicity level designers/artists need to use the Infinite Resolution Rendering Engine inside people’s heads. Fog, glass, seamless edges, broad texture, wide pathways is far better than filling in details. Again visual cues may or may not alter geometry, but they always alter gameplay.

All original creative maps that sharpen clarity in gametypes are genius. That’s what makes a good map if the gametypes allow it. Rarely do remakes become legitimate updates to the original design. Often remakes suck.

Examples of Good original maps:
4-10 player range

  • Prisoner (Halo Slayer)
  • Chill Out (Halo Slayer)
  • Derelict (Halo Slayer, Oddball)
  • Boarding Action (Halo Slayer, CTF)
  • Ascension (Halo II Slayer, CTF)
  • Burial Mounds (Halo II Assault)
  • Colossus (Halo II Slayer, CTF)
  • Gemini (Halo II Slayer, KoTH)
  • Lockout (Halo II Slayer, Oddball)
  • Sanctuary (Halo II Slayer, CTF)
  • Turf (Halo II Slayer, Oddball, KoTH, Territories)
  • Citadel (Halo III Slayer, CTF, Oddball, KoTH)
  • Construct (Halo III Slayer)
  • High Ground (Halo III CTF)
  • The Pit (Halo III Slayer)
  • Countdown (Halo Reach Slayer, KoTH)

12-16 player range

  • Sidewinder (Halo Slayer, CTF)
  • Blood Gulch (Halo Slayer, CTF)
  • Gephyrophobia (Halo CTF)
  • Relic (Halo II CTF, Assault)
  • Terminal (Halo II CTF, Assault)
  • Waterworks (Halo II CTF)
  • Sandtrap (Halo III Slayer)
  • Standoff (Halo III Slayer, CTF)
  • Tempest (Halo Reach Slayer, CTF)
  • Highlands (Halo Reach Slayer, CTF)

Examples of good remakes:

  • Elongation
  • Warlock
  • Heretic
  • Last Resort
  • Reflection
  • Battle Canyon
  • High Noon
  • Penance
  • Breakneck
19

I understand, but the detail in some of the past Halo maps made them super amazing.

20

I actually really agree with this and have thought about it myself so I know exactly where you’re coming from.

Whilst I love Halo 4’s campaign and see no fault in the amount of detail, I don’t think it would hurt to make Halo 5 have more missions that have the simplistic, yet atmospheric design of Halo Combat Evolved missions (yet with their own unique feel of course).

Something about the simplicity of the CE designs adds to the mysterious and otherworldly feel for me, and I’d love to see more of that in the next Halo.
I’d like to see a mix of both actually, from the very simplistic/atmospheric, to the very intricate designs of Halo 4.

It reminds me of music and how some songs can be overproduced to disguise a lack of genuis at the very small level (not saying this is what Halo 4 does by any means), but there’s something to be said for the simplistic songs that somehow manage to be completely unique and increidble without having much detail.