Well, firstly the reason people say its 343i’s job is because it is. They want people to blow their minds but most fans don’t know how; If they knew what they wanted, it wouldn’t blow their minds now would it? Consumers consume, they don’t design.
But okay, here goes;
I want a game that builds on the open world first flirted with in ODST, however instead of a small little area that’s fenced off where you simply just go to each objective in order, I want a massive sprawling campaign. I want a game that has me and my three friends searching the glassed ruins of a destroyed human colony for sensitive ONI data that cant be allowed to fall into the hands of the Innies or the Covenant, where all we have is Intel telling us where it might be and where the enemy might be rather than saying “go here, go there.”
I want to be sneaking through the sewer systems to place a nuclear bomb to destroy all the covenant above like in the Fall of Reach, only I don’t want that to be a mission; I want me and my friends to be able to say “We have a tactical nuke, that’s a covenant stronghold that Yoinking! out units and making out mission hell… Lets blown it to kingdom come.” and then we can go blow it up to make our job easier.
Does anyone remember the Storm in Halo 3, when you had that awesome warehouse fight? Well, why cant I pull rank on these marines, order fireteam B to take BR’s and snipers and hang back while me and fireteam A blast our way through with shotguns?
I want to be able to dismember people with my energy sword, I want that crate I just smashed with a gravity hammer to look like I just smashed it with a -Yoinking!- gravity hammer. I want to jump onto that hunter and punch its lights out, I want to rip off a promethean knights arm and start disintegrating ranks of covenant with it. If 343i is set on making me feel like a Spartan, then let me break down some of the doors and walls in order to flank enemy positions, let me pick up that crate and toss it at those three grunts who scream as it smashes them in the faces and kills them.
How about instead of changing the multiplayer gameplay, we add new game modes instead? Lets have space battles where we have to blow up the enemy ship, only instead of just fighting from the outside let us board it and fight our way across the entire ship, blowing up systems as we go. Imagine how that could go? Me and my buddies are making it down one of the corridors dragging a tactical nuke behind us, the enemy team thinks “-Yoink- no” and opens up an airlock, sucking my mates out into space but I am still alive and I slam the airlock shut by overriding the command and have to fight my way through the ship carrying a bomb, but then just as I’m about to make it to the ships core I get betrayed because some guy who didn’t listen to the plan just fired all his rockets at the enemy ship and caused a hull breach which sucked me out into space and threw me into the atmosphere of the nearby planet where I get burnt up and die. And then my team is yelling at each other while the enemy team is laughing its -Yoink- off. How about we one up the invasion and warzone gamemode, where instead of just being a single isolated game its an ongoing war that lasts a week; At the beginning of the week we decide whether we’re going to be fighting for the UNSC or the Covenant or whatever and we have to fight for control of sections of the planet, and whoever wins the most matches in one of these sectors gets control of the sector, and then the covenant can slaughter civvies by attacking the planets cities while the UNSC have to try and evac them, and if the covenant succeed in slaughtering the civilians yhry can place down a beacon which sends a signal to the ships in orbit and they glass the city which reduces the UNSC morale which causes marine NPC’s to panic more often and retreat, but if the UNSC are winning they can start taking the fight to space and tearing apart covenant ships while the covies have to try and stop the Spartan strike teams from placing bombs on their ships and if the humans win it will reduce the covenant moral meter and cause their NPC’s to -Yoink- themselves because the invasion looks like its going to hell and so they run off more often in battle.
Why don’t we have a gamemode on the other end of the spectrum that’s asymmetric, where four players are Spartans and have to fight their way to an objective while the other play is a Covenant general or a forerunner Monitor and has to command their forces to try and stop them, setting up ambushes and traps, destroying bridges and ordering the forces to set up turrets in an attempt to stop them?
I want a map where the entire fight is done by jumping between the wreckages in the aftermath of a space battle, having to be careful not to fall off and die while also killing your opponents and controlling the power weapons.
Why not allow us to make the terrain in a map editor before we go down in editor mode and start forging the traditional style. And give us absolutely everything, unleash the game and let players go mad. Let us place down drivable scarabs on a battlefield, let us choose what the skybox is, let us make it so a pelican can fly in and drop off a supply of weapons every five minutes.
Why not make it so that in warzone taking points doesn’t just give you points? Remember invasion slayer? Why not do something similar where the bases basically act as supply points. Make it so we can only spawn light vehicles unless my team takes the garage then every few minutes or so a tank or a mantis will be built. Then the enemy team will be like “-Yoink-, we have to take back the garage before it gives them a scorpion!” Or if we took the armoury it would start generating power weapons every few minutes, and if we took like a depot we would gain req faster. And on one map, there’s be like a communications tower we could take, and every five minutes the team who owned it could get a mac targeting beam and call down death from above. On another there’d be a forerunner foundry in the center, and the team that controlled it would get assistance from NPC sentinels. Doesn’t that sound better than just “take zones to get points”? We have that already, its called territories; Warzone is basically territories with more players, NPC’s and the REQ system; a good start for a casual gamemode but why stop there? Warzone is clearly meant to be a casual experience where you just jump in and have fun so double down on it, make it a crazy fun experience where everything has a purpose and holding one point can be the difference between dominating the enemy team and losing, make it so that it is hectic warfare on all fronts by making players actually care about the objectives. Make it so we can do awesome things by controlling the correct points. Doesn’t that sound a lot better than what they’re giving us now, which is a watered down battlefield/territories hybrid with a few npcs thrown in and a points to equipment system?
