It stopped in November 2010.
It’s trying to pick back up, and doing a bit better than it was before. But even with the new weapon tuning update… It just isn’t right something’s off. I’m noticing that travelling in a big wolf pack is basically the only way to win a game now, because you can’t rely on a player’s individual skill anymore, so simply playing the numbers game is about all anyone can do.
Reach…
Then it’s all downhill from there.
Reduce aim assist a little, reduce magnetism a lot, and decrease shield recharge delay time.
Individual skill ruled Halo CE and 2. Started to go south with Halo 3.
Try not to confuse bad aim assist technology, poor lighting, unfriendly gun mechanics, and veteran player bias rampant in older halos as making the game “more skillful”.
This post has been edited by a moderator. Please refrain from making non-constructive posts.
*Original post. Click at your own discretion.
ITT: Kids who are bad using “the game takes no skill” as an excuse for their inability to adapt.
Its like getting destroyed in a sport and saying the other team had no skill because they have different/better strategies than you.
And here I expected a lot of fanboys trying to say this was how its supposed to be played. I’m surprised and happy to know I’m not the only one that thinks this isn’t Halo.
> Individual skill ruled Halo CE and 2. Started to go south with Halo 3.
Halo 3 ranked and FFA matches anyone? Sorry if more options ruined Halo 3 for you though.
Halo 4 seems to be all about pretty grafix, armor/loadout customization, and weapon skinz. And when everyone can reach SR 130, who needs skillz? Just get assists and stand there for distractions and get special delivery power weapons delivered to your feet and you’re like the best halo playa eva.
> So I just started about 3 days ago on Halo 4. And other than swat this isn’t halo. Halo used to be about skill and reflexes. <mark>Now its all about grenades and who has the bigger gun</mark>. I miss theoriginal halo and halo 2. That’s when players had skill.
How has Halo never been about grenades and who had the bigger gun? Halo’s golden triangle has always been “Grenades, Guns, and Melee”.
> ITT: Kids who are bad using “the game takes no skill” as an excuse for their inability to <mark>adapt</mark>.
>
> Its like getting destroyed in a sport and saying the other team had no skill because they have different/better strategies than you.
Ok, have you even played another Halo game besides Halo 4 or Reach? Ok, if you did you would know that Halo 4 feels to easy and lacks skill.
Maybe it’s always had skills, it’s just that many people wish their skills was the determining factor.
In halo two I was just fine with just a BR. I didn’t need nor want to use another weapon because I was very efficient killing you with just that. The BR in 4 is no where near as useful as the old one. Aim was the deciding factor in the first 2 halos. Now its more how close much can I -Yoink!- the rest of my team and how many bullets can we shoot at one time so we kill this guy. Its kills by attrition not by aim. Hence the reason O just play SWAT. Its more aim and reaction and an even playing field than the other game modes I’ve played. Oh and it takes the grenade spamming out as well. No Halo hasn’t always been about the biggest gun. I’ve seen many people get ads raped in Halo 2 and CE by smaller guns.
In Halo 3, when they weakened the individual player, made the game more linear, and required players to move in packs to succeed. It took shooting skill, but it didn’t have as much depth as Halo 2, and isn’t even comparable to CE’s depth.
> Maybe it’s always had skills, it’s just that many people wish their skills was the determining factor.
Yeah, every game should have other factors than skill that determine the outcome of the match, such as coin flips, dices and biased game mechanics towards blue team.
There is no specific point when Halo would have stopped being skill based. A matter of fact is, it still is skill based. The better player still has a substantially higher probability of winning. Halo has simply been slowly declining since Halo 2. There is no point at which a new Halo game would have had as large skill gap as the previous.
OP I personally don’t think Halo has stopped being skill based, it’s just that it isn’t the main thing anymore . .
What I mean by that, is that since Reach onward skill has become 2nd and just playing has become 1st.
Post Match Reward system =
Reach onward = Credits for completion and not quitting.
Before Reach = 1 EXP and a possible Rank increase.
The in game Combat system =
Reach onward = An emphasis on pre-game decision’s (Load-Out’s)
Before Reach = Know the map and search for weapons, ammo, power up’s.
The flow of Battle =
Reach onward = A faster flow of battle, more randomness, and a greater emphasis on weapons that require less focus on headshot’s.
Before Reach = A slower flow of battle, less randomness, and greater emphasis on headshot’s.
All of these thing’s contribute to how serious and how much focus people put into getting kill’s and winning a game.
I think skill is still present in Halo games after Reach, but it’s really only there when in a DMR/BR/Carbine/Light Rifle dual I think, two player’s shooting at each other trying to get the most bullets to the head, the one that get’s the most bullets on target win’s the duel.
I think being able to win that kind of duel is where skill is, it’s just that those kind of duels aren’t the most common and encouraged thing’s.
> > ITT: Kids who are bad using “the game takes no skill” as an excuse for their inability to <mark>adapt</mark>.
> >
> > Its like getting destroyed in a sport and saying the other team had no skill because they have different/better strategies than you.
>
> Ok, have you even played another Halo game besides Halo 4 or Reach? Ok, if you did you would know that Halo 4 feels to easy and lacks skill.
Been playing since H1 LAN days. Not that I need that to validate my answer, but I like how things have progressed.
I don’t know, never? It’s not as skill oriented as it was in the past, but to say it takes no skill at all is stupid. But I’d say it all started with Halo 3, since that’s the game that introduced equipment, the root reason we got AA and then custom loadouts. Though really it can be attributed to Halo 2, since that was the game that started the “evolution, not revolution” mentality of building off of the previous game.
> > ITT: Kids who are bad using “the game takes no skill” as an excuse for their inability to <mark>adapt</mark>.
> >
> > Its like getting destroyed in a sport and saying the other team had no skill because they have different/better strategies than you.
>
> Ok, have you even played another Halo game besides Halo 4 or Reach? Ok, if you did you would know that Halo 4 feels to easy and lacks skill.
Speaking as someone who grew up on Quake, Halo has always been a little on the easy side of things. But of course how do you define “easy” when that also applies to everyone else playing as well? That’s why I’ve never understood how Halo 4 is easy but Halo CE was, I’d imagine, “hard.” Was it the skill gap? Can’t imagine how that would be it, since Halo CE was pistol-or-bust. In multiplayer I literally had no reason at all to use anything other than the pistol and a grenade or so. Why CE is lauded as being a paragon of skill is beyond me; like I said, having come into Halo from Quake Halo has always felt comparatively “easy” if that’s the word you want to use.
But I dislike that word because if a game is just easy, then it would also have to therefore be easy for everyone else, and the entire point of it being easy gets cancelled out. There’s no such thing as an “easy” online game, because easy implies anyone can jump in and consistently get killing frenzies, but then guess who isn’t getting killing frenzies? The guys who died to give you that award; I bet they’d say the game was hard. So what happens when you meet someone of your skill level or even better? According to this forum, not much at all because skill, clearly, doesn’t matter, but then you get 2 or 3 kills tops per life and suddenly the game isn’t too easy any more is it?
There are only games with varying degrees of hard. Halo 4 may not be as hard as Quake because Quake offers no hand outs at all–I’m actually convinced it’s impossible to get an online shooter more unforgiving than Quake, tbh–but then, Halo was never that hard to begin with. It’s always been a dumbed down Quake (a far more apt comparison than Halo 4 and CoD because Halo 4 and Quake share a central core as a strafe-centric twitch shooter while CoD and Halo 4 only share peripheral gameplay features but are otherwise two distinct genres) so I guess to me I’ll never understand why Halo 4 is a surprise to anyone. Halo 4 takes skill simply by virtue of the fact that it’s an online shooter where difficulty is the result of the playstyles of random unquantifiable people you happen to come across online, and despite everything, it still takes far more skill than most modern shooters in its moment-to-moment gameplay. But if you think that Halo 4 is somehow bad because it takes less skill than Halo CE (somehow) than one could just as easily say that the entire franchise sucks because it’s miles away from the skill Quake takes.
Which I don’t think anyone here would say, so why bother judging a game based on the skill it takes in the first place? I liked Quake not because of the skill it took or some misplaced sense of accomplishment because I could push buttons better than the other guy, but because it was fun; at the same time I was playing Call of Duty, because it was a different experience and it was also fun. I played Halo and it felt like I was playing Quake, but with a different spin on it; that it took less skill never occurred to me because I’m apparently in a minority of gamers that realize games were designed for a good time and not as a competitive sport. I guess once you realize that no strafe shooter can really get any more skillful than Quake you realize it’s pointless to complain about the skill level of lesser games. Quake hit the sweet spot and after playing it and growing up on it and so many other games, skill just never seemed as important to me. I guess it was the difference between adhering to this notion of “skill or -Yoink-” and thus only be satisfied with Quake, or give up on the whole idea of skill in general and just enjoy whatever games come my way. And I gotta say, being able to just enjoy something without worrying about some imaginary stat and complaining half the time on the forums is a hell of a lot easier and a far more enjoyable life as a gamer overall.
> So I just started about 3 days ago on Halo 4. And other than swat this isn’t halo. Halo used to be about skill and reflexes. Now its all about grenades and who has the bigger gun. I miss theoriginal halo and halo 2. That’s when players had skill.
Blame Halo Reach/Halo4 for this. To be fair Halo cea has a skull where you can spam infinite grenades but yes Halo was once about skill.
> Now its all about grenades
I agree with you except for this. There are a lot less grenades in Halo 4, thanks to the lack of weapons on map. If you do get the “resupply” perk, you still get, what, one? I remember in Halo 3 laughing at all the grenades on the ground. If there was a really big skirmish in one area of the map you would end up with over 20 frags lying on the ground and you could just spam for half a minute lol.
But with the way the game is, picking up grenades constantly would do more harm than good.