What will make Halo 4 outlive the life span of its prodecessors?
Let’s please all players in the community!
Before reading, please take into account, I am simply a decade-long Halo fan along with many of you who want nothing more than to see the success of 343i’s latest project. I love the Halo storyline and campaigns, and I just want to offer some feedback so that we can receive the best final product possible.
Divisions of Halo:
- Campaign
- Multiplayer
- Custom Games
- Forge
- Firefight
- Theatre
Campaign
It is very difficult for game developers to make a Campaign experience fresh and exciting when the game isn’t an RPG or MMO oriented experience. Halo’s campaigns have traditionally been to complete levels by completing set objectives, and reaching the end level. In the past, I think Bungie has done a very good job with making campaigns replayable with the mechanic of hidden items and easter eggs. Finding skulls is fun. Finding terminals is fun. Achieving a high meta-game score is fun. (okay, maybe the scoring system wasn’t as much fun as it was tedious). Bungie gave players reasons to jump back into the campaign and experience it over and over, and I hope 343i takes all of these past mechanics when coming up with a best fit answer to making the campaign fun and fresh, each play through.
Multiplayer
Seeing as this is where I’ll be spending the majority of my time, I cannot stress enough about how badly I want 343 to nail this one on the head. With that in mind, I want to break this down into a couple categories.
-
Sandbox
-
Competitive System
-
Casual System
-
Service Record
-
Other Features
-
In order for me to enjoy Halo 4’s upcoming Matchmaking experience, the Sandbox is the first step (next to playing environments) to making a good solid multiplayer. I found that Bungie approached the Halo: Reach Sandbox with the mindset to remove any weapons or items that do not serve a unique and meaningful purpose. While this does make for a meaningful sandbox, sometimes its nice to use a spiker for the sake of using a spiker. I would like to see 343 keep as many weapon options in the game as possible just for the sake of options to the players. Why should I have to cater to an Assault Rifle, when I wanted an SMG? (and I want that ODST silencer 343 ;). Balance was the issue that arose in Reach when the bloom was altered. Hopefully 343 doesn’t ship with such a dramatic flaw, and gameplay won’t have to change.
-
As for a competitive system, Halo 2 and Halo 3 really took it home. Reach, brought it back, dug a hole, and buried it. There’s so much room for redemption that I don’t believe it to be a possible feat, that 343 “screws the pooch” as hard as Bungie did with Reach’s. The Arena system was good in theory, bad in practise. I hope that 343 can make a system that prevents as much exploitation and abuse as possible, yet accurately measures player skill to the best of abilities, without altering one’s playstyle (such as individual rating) along with a fun and meaningful rank to go along with it.
-
Bungie nailed the casual system on the head. Make some playlists for players to mess around and have fun in, and too develop, and hone skills to bring into competitive. As long as players have some diversity such as Action Sack, Grifball, BtB, and Infection, the casuals, as far as I’m concerned, have it made.
-
The Service Record needs to adapt the features of Halo: Reach, but with the convenience and visibility of Halo 3’s. I don’t want to break through a labrynth of menus to estimate the skill level of an enemy. That’s horrible and annoying. Fix it, make it so I can (with one click), see some High skill, win % and some KA/D so I can guesstimate others fast.
-
Clans, for the love of god clans. Please. It brings communities together and with one as strong as Halo’s, it can only flourish. Lets be real, how fun were clan battles in Halo 2?
Custom Games
343, Bungie has paved the way to a solid custom game experience. For the love of god however, do not remove gametypes such as VIP for the sake of removing gametypes. The more, the merrier. Give players as many options as you damn well can.
Another way to improve customs, is possibly a mechanic were people can host some lobbies, and other players can search potential hosted custom lobbies just to meet up with players. Just a thought, I know I couldn’t ever get customs together two months into Reach. So yeah, maybe a Host / Find system where anyone can set a lobby description and host some games. Could be real fun.
The rest to be continued by the community… Its to late at nite for me to be typing all this -Yoink-.
Leave feedback on the already posted categories and possible new ones. I would like to see Halo 4 be the redemption of Halo and bring back all the fun times I had with previous instalments such as Halo 2: endless hours of fun, glitching, customs, and power tower!
