I’m not sure how many VIP fans are out there, but I was reminded recently of the fact that VIP was absent from Reach, which disappointed an at-least-noticeable number of us at launch.
I thought that over time, someone would find a way to create one with the lavish array of Game Options available to us, and of course Forge’s huge palette, but from a simple Reach File Search, I could not find a single VIP game type.
So, I went back and recreated a semi-working VIP gametype that I created awhile ago which plays out the way VIP normally plays out, with a few minor fallbacks.
What I did was the following:
I created a Team Slayer gametype and utilized the following settings:
Kill Limit: 1
Kill Points: 0
Suicide Penalty: -1 Point
Leader Kill Bonus: 10 Points
Then I had to forge a map for VIP, specifically, by forging all of the Initial Spawn Points of Blue Team, and all but one of the Initial Spawn Points of Red Team above a kill barrier, kill ball, or any other means by which all except for one player in the game would immediately commit suicide.
Then, I placed the regular Respawn Points within the playable area.
This causes the one surviving player at the beginning of the game to become the Leader or ‘VIP’. Only killing the Leader will reward points. A 10 point-kill on the VIP will cause the offensive team to reverse their negative score to over +1 (unless players manage to kill themselves enough times during the game to get -10 or lower), and instantly meet the One-Kill Limit, ending the round / game.
The only major issue is that there is no way that I currently know of to swap the VIP spawn to the other team without ending the game and manually switching them up.
Then there’s, obviously, the lack of Save Haven zones, if you liked VIP Extraction. Also there would be no particular way to regulate what Armor Ability the VIP winds up choosing.
Other than that, I’m pretty sure it works very well. I never got the chance to test it out thoroughly, though, and unless 343 can work some magic on the other side of the Game Options (much like how Bungie created the Insane Stockpile gametype with options the players do not have), it probably has no place in Matchmaking given its unique requirements to work.
