One of the biggest enemies of multiplayer games is map fatigue. After playing the same maps hundreds of times, you can eventually get tired of seeing the same thing over and over, especially if you mainly play only one or a couple select playlists, then your variety is even smaller than if you played all modes. You can love a game to death, but after you’ve unlocked everything and gotten your fill and you slowly get tired of seeing the same thing, it gets harder and harder to keep playing.
I thought of a few ways they could spice things up visually for viable maps. While reading these points, just as a visual aid I’d like you to think of Halo 5’s Coliseum while applying said points. It’s an outdoor map and could take full advantage of the points below. Just a disclaimer; these changes wouldn’t affect gameplay or how the maps would be played at all, the sole purpose is to just give variety to each map’s visuals to help reduce map fatigue without disrupting the gameplay flow or strategies.
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Time of day. I got this idea from the Forza series. In Forza Motorsport 7 you can play on tracks during different times of day and it can actually impact the experience quite a bit. I think it’d be cool to experience viable maps in the same way, say morning, afternoon, evening, and night.
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Seasons. I got this idea partly from my love of drastically different terrain in maps, and also again the Forza series, specifically Forza Horizon 4. In FH4 the map changes seasons. I think it’d be really cool if something similar were applied to Halo maps. For example, imagine playing Coliseum the way it is now, sunny, warm looking, nice green grass in areas, then playing a version at night with everything covered in snow and ice.
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Elemental terrain. This partly plays into the seasons point with things like snow and grass. But I think it’d also be cool if they added things like sand or fire damage. Imagine playing Coliseum with sand everywhere instead of snow, or vines and other vegetation growing rampant all over the place, or even after a big firestorm blew through and left everything charred. Hell let’s throw a hurricane in there too, high speed wind and rain for everyone.
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Faction assets. Now this one I’m not sure would be possible without changing the map geometry a little too much, maybe not. I think it’d be really cool if they could somehow design maps so that we could variations using human, forerunner/promethean, and covenant assets. Imagine Coliseum but instead of using promethean assets it used covenant ones. That would completely change the feel of the map, even more so than my other three points.
I think that was it. Now imagine mashing up all these points together. For example one of the variations could be Coliseum at night just after a snow storm with everything covered in snow and ice, under a big black sky full of stars, maybe even throw an aurora in there. Or Valhalla in a desert setting with all the grass replaced with endless sand during the evening with the low sun shining orange rays over the whole map.
Now obviously doing all of this for the whole game is incredibly unrealistic. Mixing up all these points, you could have 100 variations with 10 maps. Not to mention it would take years just to work on map variations. But if they even just did a couple different variations for a handful of high quality maps that deserve it, I think it would combat map fatigue quite well, at least on the visual side. The more variations there are, the less you play each variations, the longer it takes for you to get sick of them, the longer you get players to stick with the game… potentially.