Weapon Placement and Holstering

Games Other Halo
1

First off, let me say that I’ll be talking about the way weapons are stored on your character visually, not weapon placement on maps. One of the reasons I love Halo is for its customization and its awesome graphics/models. I loved when they added visible weapons on your character in Halo 3, and I think it should be slightly improved upon in Halo 4. I’ll be using (poorly made, quickly thrown together) images throughout to help visually explain my point.

I’ll start by sharing ideas for weapon placement. I think that all weapons, whether big or small, should be stored on your back vertically, off to one side; not diagonally in the middle as they are now. A perfect game I’d like to use to reference this in the Rainbow Six Vegas series. Say if you’re holding a BR and an AR, they would be on your back vertically. In my opinion this gives it a nicer look, and place for another weapon to be when you holster your weapon (a feature which I will explain in the next paragraph). Even small weapons like SMGs and Spikers should be put on your back, but placed higher up to allow a believable reach-distance.

Now onto the ability to holster all of your weapons. There should be the ability to holster your weapons in custom games and forge. This would be great for machinima, and casually hanging out on a map talking with friends. It should be able to be done over Xbox Live, but only in customs and forge. It should be something simple like pressing right or left on the D-pad.

I don’t think either of these features would be “wasting” dev time or disk space. The game has been in development for 2 years already and has 1 more year to go, so I’d believe 343 knows exactly where they’re going with their time. Also, with Microsoft’s new disk format, which Halo 4 will most likely use, there will be an extra GB on the disk for the developers to add new content. So I don’t think 3 animations would hurt that (Idle standing, walking, and running with guns holstered). Also, there are people who strictly play Halo for forging and playing custom games with friends, so this feature would add a perfect casual touch to the game.

Here’s another spare picture I made, to show holstering a big and small weapon.
Heavy weapon and large weapon
Two heavy weapons
AR and Energy Sword

2

Weapons on the side are much better but i like the br and ar thing

3

In my opinion is not a good idea. It was fine for games like Gears of War because the characters are robust and can carry two weapons in the back but in Halo the characters are thinner and in my opinion it would look a little strange.
PD: Sorry if my english is not very good xD

4

I like the holstering option.

5

I want to be able to choose where my small weapons are holstered, like on the leg, shoulder, or ankle. I’d want to have a magnum on my ankle all the time.

6

Using parts of the D-pad to drop and holster your weapons.

7

I’m sorry, but for halo, it does not work. No offense to the OP, but I felt that the verticle weapon placement looks ugly. Besides that, from a practical standpoint, it wouldn’t work.

8

The barrels should be up, the physical action to grab a weapon would be to swing it down and around.

9

I’ll give you props for stating your thoughts clearly and even providing visual representation of your idea; however, I have to agree with those who are against this idea. While I find the dual holstering of larger weapons to be aesthetically pleasing, it’s impractical and seems like it would feel cumbersome on someone who needs to be agile. As for the SMG and Spiker, idea… that’s just, it doesn’t look right and the thigh holsters were fine. A Spartan is large enough to for it to be reasonable.

With that aside, your ideas on being able to holster your weapons when not in use is something I’ve always been for in the name of machinima. Down on the D-pad always seemed like a reasonable place to put such a thing.

10

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I did notice when I was making the pictures of the larger weapons that they looked kind of awkward. So maybe the weapon placement isn’t as good of an idea. I do think the holstering of weapons is almost essential though. Lets throw away realism for this, and just have the weapon your holding currently on your back.

11

A vertical carry of a gun on your back is also referred to as a climber’s carry, I believe climbers need to be agile.