It’s so that the objective isn’t a power-up. The point of Oddball and CTF is to be asymmetrical in team setup. a team that performs in a 3v4 and wins against the 4 is the better team.
Obviously, there are wrong ways to play this mode as well. Like just, holding the ball and NEVER helping.
I mean, the Ball and Flag used to make it so that you had no ranged offensive capability at all while simultaneously moving slower - you can’t shoot, you can’t throw grenades, all you can do is melee. Throwing two grenades on someone with the Flag or Ball who is stupid enough to camp in a corner is enough to kill them, at least in Infinite.
The trade-off is that if you get into a close-range combat situation, then the Ball Carrier is going to kill you. So don’t. Flush them out with grenades (of which you have 4 max), take advantage of sightlines, bring a Shotgun (that used to be one-shot at close range…), utilize power weapons like Rockets to get them out of their hidey hole. There are a LOT of options for dealing with entrenched enemies in these games, far more than people give them credit for.
The issue with current Oddball is that the Ball Carrier is just sorta… Useless. They can’t really defend themselves at close-range, and have to drop the Ball (meaning no more score) in order to fight back offensively. The Ball Carrier is also slow, meaning that you have to defend them more. The better strategy with Oddball now is to position the carrier over a death pit, and then have the carrier throw the ball into the pit so it resets the Ball to its original position because then the enemy is busy dealing with the Carrier, and then the rest of the team can secure the Oddball and go to a different death pit (a strategy that’s particularly nasty on Catalyst)
Oddball has changed from whatever it used to be, into VIP. CTF is relatively unchanged (minus the ability to Sprint), but the Flag Carrier is far less powerful. For Casual play, this is especially annoying because you can’t rely on off-com teammates.
I know how it used to work. I’ve been playing since Halo 2.
I think Infinite does it better.
I too remember the one hit kill fondly.
But it was OP. And in the end kind of useless because any opponent with a modicum of skill just didn’t go near the carrier.
Sure, there would be ball kills in close when teams were scrambling for the ball. First in first served. But that still happens in Infinite as the players second to the ball typically have damaged shields / health.
Infinite encourages team play. It gives you confidence to go after the ball carrier. And I would go as far to say there are more melee kills with the ball in Infinite than in one-hit games.
Good players still dropped the ball to help their team when it was a one shot kill in H3. It makes the game go faster if one team is holding control of the ball the whole time minus a few seconds here and there. Games take way longer if both teams keep breaking eachothers setups
Because UberNick never play Halo 1, 2, 3, or Reach and they hired him and look flag and ball aren’t one hit kills like they are supposed to be.
Hiding behind a desk on the streets map.
Because you aren’t supposed to be killing people with them. Flag and ball are team based games, you aren’t supposed to get a power-up for doing the objective. You feel weaker because you are.
If someone attacks you while holding the ball, drop it and kill them or play it off the map.
If someone attacks you while you are running flag, hope your teammates kill them or drop it and fight.
Thats exactly what ive been trying to hint at.
Breaking setups is offenses’ job.
They’re both a two-hit beatdown. The melee speed with the ball and flag is faster than with any weapon. Close to close combat benefits the objective holder every time.
The game modes are designed so that teamwork is pushed to it’s limits. The carriers are supposed to rely on ally help. Its been this way since halo 2.
Sometimes the right move.
Sometimes the way to gurantee that one team ragequits when your buddies coordinate hard enough to ensure that no one can get into the room.
You’re debating hearsay instead of why the developer did it. If we’re going to talk then let’s talk about it in full context.
Smh, nobody found the developer quote. I thought it was a blog post but it’s a Reddit post. Here’s the two statements I found. They’re by 343karnivore on November 2021. I’m going to quote the first link in full. The second one is a followup about how the developer has read a lot of replies about it but can’t directly reply without complicating things.
https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/qvc6pb/comment/hkwyz7h/
https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/qy8l4p/343_dev_explaining_decision_behind_2shot_oddball/hllrm8v/
Good thread, but I’d encourage everyone to keep it civil and “out of the weeds” with historical semantics. It’s not quite accurate that either of those objects have always been One-Hit-Kill across history, but more importantly precedent is only a small piece of the puzzle.
Of course, it’s annoying to come into something with a certain expectation, have it unmet, and then feel like you need to re-learn something “needlessly” BUT it’s more important that we put forward the best gameplay experience we can with the data and resources we have.
OK with that out of the way –
I tried OHK on both of those objects for a while, as well as several other iterations in the vein of [give the objective carrier more power fantasy] – because naturally players ask for the primary thing the game tells them to do to be packed full of personal reward. It makes sense, and even though I didn’t end up with OHK in the end, it’s still a valid design path to go down.
Anyways, the net result of OHK for either item tends to increase snowball-size too much – the team with the objective-advantage has an easier time completing their goal and their opponents feel the task of rubber-banding the scenario back in their favor too difficult or too far and few between.
Add to the puzzle that OHK is also somewhat dependent on levels and it’s an even messier problem – levels with lots of hard-angles, for instance, add a bunch of power to one-hit-kill and pretty much in the least fun way.
If I could sum the feedback and data for OHK in very short terms: objective carriers tend to report having a better time, but overall matches are less compelling or fun.
I’m going to end up making this post too long but I’m trying to keep it short –
OHK tends to make being the objective-carrier more personally rewarding or fun for 1 player while hurting the experience for the other 7; for teammates your assistance with the main goal is less important, and opponents’ efforts can feel too futile.
So, I went with something more indirect –
In CTF, you can “Contest” the flag’s automatic-return by standing within the visible boundary. This means that if you need to hot drop it and fight that you don’t need to manage the flag’s return-state at the same time. In the past you could lose track of the return time and make a major mistake in letting the flag return home because you were too busy managing the firefight. I personally feel this added too much mental interference within carrier-decision-making. Ideally this makes dropping the flag for a fight a lighter and more comfortable decision to make.
In Oddball, the skull has a quicker melee so almost any melee vs melee fight should favor the flaming skull. Ideally this means camping a doorway is less cheesy, but chaotic skirmishes lean a bit toward the objective carrier.
Not that these are perfect solutions, S-tier gameplay design, or anything like that – just wanted to share some of the journey and insight.
In essence, I’ve intentionally chosen to emphasize teamwork rather than deliver lots of power-fantasy to the objective carriers. Maybe it was the wrong choice. Maybe it skews too far toward hardcore team-work. Maybe there’s a middle-ground somewhere not yet discussed here… hrmmmmmm
The intent is to cultivate the game for a long time, though, so please don’t take away from this “it can’t or won’t ever change”
Keep creating discussions like this one. Keep giving your feedback. Stay awesome to one another though.
Thats really cool, however, I am not reading all of that if you’re not gonna organize it to reply to each of my points.
It’s just what the developer said. To actually respond, I’m curious about the animation cancel melee thing. Wasn’t that patched? Is there still a way to melee faster than normal?
Yes. I actually did it accidentally yesterday. Surprised the hell out of me.
Last I checked, it still melees slightly faster because the devs assumingly do find value in it, just not as much as there was during the flights.
I didn’t notice until I watched a video that brought it up along with some other combat glitch tech stuff.
That trait doesn’t matter much if you phase through the enemy or if the dysync has it to where your melees doesn’t register until AFTER you die
Finally, someone who understand’s the oddball objective lol.
Yeah but, you’re also at a really extreme range disadvantage, on top of carrier movement penalties.
If it weren’t for the fact that many of the maps oddball is played on are poorly balanced with camping spots
Oneshot on the ball would be mostly balanced.
Classive Oddball matches were usually about chasing a moving goal post,
since everyone’s limited mobility and access to powerful weapons capable of forcing people to move around or be flushed out violently.
The devs are balancing around bad maps, not the mode itself.
