(TLDR- Warzone is a cool concept but was poorly executed)
Let me start off by saying I love Halo I love how it brings the community together. That is after all why I am here; thats why most of us are here on these forums we all share one thing in common no matter how different we are from each other and that is the love for this game. We are all here because we want this game to live on and succeed. With all the being said here goes nothing.Not everything is rainbows and unicorns in the land of Halo, and there are several things plaguing the game in its current state. Today I will be focusing on multiplayer aspect or more specifically Warzone.
What brought in most of us to this wonderful game we call Halo, the campaign? Maybe. Firefight? Nah. The thing that intrigued most of us to pick up this game was its amazing, tactical, and balanced (keep that in mind) multiplayer that encouraged everyone to have fun and kick -Yoink-. I’m not just gonna ramble and say H5 is garbage and all copies should be burned, in fact I actually love that the multiplayer is going back to its roots (sort of). I love the fact that the BR isn’t the as dominant as before although I still do have some gripes with it. I love how they introduced new mechanics whilst still maintaining a good portion of the core multiplayer. But there is one thing in specific that I think many people dislike, warzone…oh boy what do I have to say about warzone.
It still amazes me how bare-bones, and thoughtless this game type is. I know it supposed to be more casual but oh man does it sure know how to piss people off. This game mode could have been SO MUCH BETTER!! I have no clue how a game-type so heavily advertised can be so bad. So what makes warzone so frustrating?Well for one lets look at warzone assault.
Its a mess, if you haven’t noticed. WA is basically if Invasion and Warzone had a baby and created an abomantaion. It’s obvious WA was added last second due to the fact that the maps are basically the same as warzone maps! A warzone map should not have a WA map within itself as those two game modes are severely different from one another therefore making one version of the map utter garbage or mediocre. For example look at March on Storm break, great in warzone, TERRIBLE in WA. The attackers on summit (March on Storm Break “remix”) are basically spawn killed as soon as the match starts. Urban (another WA map) was so bad that they had to remove it from rotation! I mean really do you guys really want to defend this mediocrity from a AAA title? Not only that but the objectives in WA are so boring, frustrating and repetitive. Why does 1 person stop the capture of a base in WA (and Warzone)? It makes no sense whatsoever. When my whole team is in the base why can 1 runt hiding somewhere stop a whole base capture? That is such bad game design and further proves the point that WA was a last minute addition to H5. A very simple solution to this would be to decrease the speed of capture when the enemy is out numbered (like the battlefield series) in a base capture, not fully stop it. Second off why not have more variety in the objectives? A simple thing such as adding 2 hardpoints (like invasion from Halo Reach) would increase replay ability and entertainment in WA tremendously! Not only would there be less of a cluster -Yoink- inside bases/hardpoints but there will also be more replay value as you can choose which objective you wish to attack or defend. A more simple solution to WA would be to just add all invasion elements except, instead of getting new classes after every objective you get a baseline of req levels. For example in the first objective you can only get to lvl 3 reqs, in the second objective everyone is limited to lvl 6 reqs or lower, and in the final objective all req levels are available. These are my solutions for WA but now comes time to solving the issue with the big boy, Warzone (in general).
Warzone is a lot of things in one and it has a lot going for it if polished. However in its current state it is very rough and raw. Warzone is a weird but awesome hybrid of slayer, fortress defense, boss battles, and objective based gameplay…although it doesn’t really feel like it. Most of the time your going for spartan kills and none of the previously mentioned goals ever come up which in turn makes it a giant BTB match with reqs.Warzone needs a lot of stuff to become better and one obvious mechanic that can be easily enhanced is more A.I.
During the Warzone reveal trailer I’m sure many of us thought warzone was gonna have constant action with A.i all over the battlefield, explosions everywhere, and utter chaos (the fun kind). However it’s not anything like that. A.I only appear very scarcely, in the same areas and as the same type of A.I enemies. And to make it even more lackluster these A.I spawn locations are in barren and almost untraveled areas. That immediately throws off a ton of immersion and makes Warzone seem like much less than what it could be. How awesome would it be to be fighting the enemy team and then all of a sudden a random dropship appears in the middle of your battle dropping down hunters, fuel rod grunts and elites, and then it becomes a 3 way rumble, and then Tankmaster Rok is dropped and begins decimating yours and the enemy teams troops, so you guys team up for a temporary truce to destroy him and…so on and so on. What I’m trying to say is that AI spawns need to be more randomized and more of a focal point rather than putting them in the corner where no one will ever lay an eye on them. Now that I think I beat down that topic let me talk about the req system.
The req system present in Warzone (And WA) is clearly in its early stages and can be improved tremendously. For one polishing up the req system U.I would help greatly in getting onto the battlefield more quickly and efficiently. But the hard part that comes with the req system is balancing. (Remember I told you to keep it in mind) I understand that Warzone is supposed to be casual but that IS NOT AN EXCUSE to make it an unbalanced gametype! Never in my life have I heard a gametype be unbalanced on purpose! This is not some wacky random gametype created by fans, this is a gametype part of the core multiplayer experience that was heavily advertised and created by AAA developers. Having it be unbalanced purposely is mind boggling! Gametypes that are purposely unbalanced create a disheartening experience for one team in most cases and this in turn leads to a snowball of other issues . The req system is the lead culprit for this sort of unbalanced gameplay and there needs to be measurements taken to prevent these experiences from occurring. One solution to this could be to add the system stated before except instead the baseline of req levels would increase after a said amount of time. (Lvl 3 reqs at start, lvl 6 reqs at 7 min, lvl 9 reqs at 15 min, or something like that). Or maybe instead your only allowed up to 1 req per minute or something, there needs to be something put in place to create a more fair and fun experience because in most cases matches are very lopsided by the end of it all. The current req system also allows for a lot of exploits which cause farming and for those of you that have been living under a rock, farming is a massive issue going on right now and all of this could’ve been prevented if the req system was laid out more thoroughly.