> First off I want to ask that you read my thread in it’s entirety before you post. If it seems like I’m parsing an aspect of the game you do not like, that is most likely not the case, and the point will become relevant in dew time. With that said. . .
I think a lot of people misunderstand ‘JUST’ what was wrong with Halo: Reach. It wasn’t Armor Abilities, not Armor Abilities on a conceptual level that is. What I mean is, had the game-play stayed like Halo: 2 or 3 and they added Armor Abilities to that sandbox with no changing the game-play, I honestly don’t believe it would have ruined the game, or even been a problem.
So what went wrong?
To understand that we must understand what Halo *is.*Now don’t get me wrong Halo is a lot of things to a lot of people. A fascinating universe with lots of untold story, Custom Games, Firefight, Forge, etc. But for the sake of this discussions, I’m talking about the “3 Pillars of Halo Gameplay.” Movement, Weapon Play, and Maps.
Movement: Speed, Strafe, and Jumping.
Weapon Play: Rate of Fire, Feel of the Gun, Usability of the Gun shown as Difficulty=Power= Rewording Gameplay, Power, Balance, Melee, Grenades, Health, and shields.
Maps: Size, Shape, Ease of Control, Difficulty of Control, Weapon Spawns as opposed to Starting Spawns, Weapon Placement ( do you think it’s a mistake the BR is by that heavily traveled corner on The Pit… . . No, no it’s not.) And general map flow.
Now in order to make a good (subjective I know) Halo Game these core aspects MUST be in place, these are the answer to, What IS Halo? It is a fundamentally well balanced core, that allows for A LOT of adaptation and add on with out destroying that fundamental Halo feel.
So what went wrong? How can Halo 4 have similar game-play mechanics to Halo: Reach and not fall into the same trappings?
The first problem with Halo: Reach starts with the Spartan player model. A 6 foot tall Spartan III, in order to make this illusion work, maps had to be made a bit bigger, jumps decreased, movement speed slowed. Jumps that could have been accomplished easily in Halos old became something of the past. And in my own experience I’ve noticed that many people don’t jump around like they did in Halo 2 and 3.
Now yes, movement and jumps were penalized because of the addition of Sprint and Jet-pack. Again, I must state Armor Abilities at a fundamental level are not bad, HOWEVER in Halo: Reach they were used to supplement game-play for a lack-there-of and were introduced as a core game-play mechanic, instead of doing what they should have done and used them to supplement existing mechanics, IE equipment in Halo 3, or even Custom Power Ups.
This loss of movement speed, also hurt gun-play. Gun-play in the other Halo’s had a rhythm to it, a “1,2,3 ,1,2,3 ,1,2,3, 1,2,3” back and forth, you felt it in the firing of the BR as you swayed back and forth dancing with your opponent. Halo 2 and 3’s gun-play and movement was like a fine dance. Two players of equal footing, and skill, left alone is a sight to see, back and forth S weaving, as the sound of three round burst fly though the air. The movement was just right and timed with the pull of the trigger, in a good strafe it was less about adjusting your aim, and more about adjusting your body. Syncing up with your opponent in a way that allowed you to place just one more shot on them before they got one on you. Even the Carbine had this. In Halo: Reach however, it’s more like two virgins trying to get ‘it on’ for the first time. Slow, or fast, but clumsy, unrefined, lacking in a certain Je ne sais quoi, a certain refined sophistication. Gun-play between Halo: Reach and Halo: 1,2 and 3, is like the difference between a caveman and an educated scholar. Halo Reach as I said is more clumsy, but this goes past the simply utility weapon and how it fires. The ’Dance’ like movement just doesn’t exist in Reach. Everything is out of balance, and barbaric. Grenades are destructive Gods, and destroy map flow. Double Melee ruins CQC, in which a delay like the other games would cause a player to rethink an attempt at Sprint CQC. Now you just instantly mash the melee button twice and it’s a kill. Bloom ensured any true rhythmic rate of fire is gone, with adding in rate of fire, and bloom randomness.
Maps: Halo: Reach is comprised of mostly squad (5-6) player maps, with very few of what could be called “Arena” type maps, and even less that are comprised of single level play spaces. No, most of Reach’s Maps are labyrinth nightmares, with cut lines of sight, jolting verticality that demands the use of the Jet-pack. Lots of ins and outs, that make locking down a lot of the maps harder than in any other Halo Game, hence why you see a lot of the MLG maps are Forge Worlds, and the most played maps are maps like Asylum ( I noticed this a lot more after the Halo CEA maps were added, the older maps, even with there complicated nature, are still easier to lock down because that was a core part of their design. But another flaw to this is map flow.)
Imagine The Pit if you will. ( Or you could just look at this pic
) Now The Pit is a good example of map flow. (and no I’m not saying all Halo Maps need to be symmetrical.)
In the center you have Long Hall with Rockets, Had Green Hall with Camo, Under Training’s Bridge was Over Shield. On each side down long Hall you have Shotguns at each end, and on the exact other side you have, Snip-tower and it’s Snipers. Finally over Over-shield was Sword. The map was large enough to have long line of sights, but small enough that encounters happened often, complex enough that the Sword and Shotgun, if used properly could be effective. At the Start of every 4v4 match the goal for any team was to acquire all the power weapons and power ups, thus having a prominent advantage. Map flow at the start was predictable, but gave this tug of war game play, and even with the power weapons, someone with a good BR could very easily dominate on the map. Grenades didn’t destroy people going down a hall way, it merely warned them impending danger, sure it could get a bit cluster-lucky, but that’s going to happen on any map, in any game.
[Continued in next post]
