I don’t see a lot of people talking about this, which is surprising because custom games played a major role in the longevity of both Halo 3 and Halo Reach. I’m not going to talk about the lack of different game modes, but rather the lack of settings. What made the golden era customs so great was the amount of control put into the creators’ hands with both forge (yes, I know it’s coming…eventually…), and the amount of options the player could tweak when creating a gametype. While Halo Infinite has some very interesting settings you can tweak, there are some very obvious ones which seem absent (most of which have to do with player traits), which is concerning because without that amount of control, customs won’t be anywhere near as good as the golden-era customs. So I’ll list the ones I’ve noticed are missing and I’ll also list ones I think 343 will implement. If some of the settings are already in the game and I just happened to miss them, let me know.
General settings (for all gametypes.)
*choosing whether a character spawns with equipment, what type of equipment, and whether or not it has infinite usage.
*player appearance. (color, camo, overshield, waypoint, etc.)
*grenades, type, whether or not they regenerate.
*vehicles on map (sorted by heavy vehicles, flying, ground vehicles, etc.)
*leader traits
*weapons on map (sorted by heavy weapons, melee weapons, energy, shock, hardlight, etc.)
Oddball:
*tweak ball carrier traits (When I say “traits”, I’m talking about damage, equipment usage, health, shields, etc.)
Capture the flag:
*flag carrier traits
Control:
*control zone traits (tweak the traits of the players who are inhabiting a zone)
Stockpile:
*seed carrier traits
Game not included yet:
Infection (this is the most important to me since infection is awesome.):
*We need alpha zombies to return.
*We need to tweak the traits of both alpha zombies and regular zombies so we can have the return of gametypes like omega journey and drive-or-die.
*We need to have the ability to choose how one gets infected. (suicides count as infections, etc.)
KoTH:
*Hill traits (tweak the traits of players occupying or contesting a hill)
*whether or not players get points from contesting or controlling the hill
Assault (or one bomb):
*bomb carrier traits
I’ll add more as I think of them, but mostly it boils down to letting us tweak traits, vehicle spawns, weapon spawns, etc. Halo 3 allowed us to change these and it pretty much launched an entire community and subculture. They were what set Halo apart from Cod and Battlefield. Without the ability to tweak these, I’m afraid the amount of gametypes we can create will be severely hampered. Custom games will become pale imitations of what they used to be, they will become too generic and stale.
Let’s say we can tweak the control zone traits in a Total Control gametype. I’m already imagining a gladiator style map (created in forge) where you have one control zone spawning at a time, perhaps changing positions on a series of elevated platforms. You have the basic player traits set up so that they only spawn with swords and they can’t do any damage until they enter a control zone. When they enter a zone, all bets are off. Players who rush the zone make themselves vulnerable. To make things more interesting, you could give the players repulsors so they can try to knock their opponents off the ledge. I have no idea if people would enjoy such a gametype, but it’s something that could be done.
Or let’s say you have an infection gametype. You give the zombies 2000% damage resistance, but you make them incredible slow and you remove the shields so they can be vulnerable to headshots. The game initially starts out in an open chamber, so it’s unfair to the zombies at first. But a maze slowly begins to spawn around the survivors as time passes on. The survivors, who are armed with only a sniper rifle and their radar is removed. Hallways and passages build themselves around the map, squeezing passage to claustrophobic proportions, making it harder and harder to see if a zombie is around the corner. (I actually created such a gametype in both Halo 3 and Reach and it scared the poo out of people.)
I really hope more settings are added. That’s the TL;DR version of this topic. Without them, we will not be able to create the kind of memories we had playing Halo 3 and Reach. Nobody talks about Halo 4 or 5 customs, but the bungie-era halo games are remembered fondly for them. Guys, let me know what you think and if you have any good suggestions for 343, I’ll try to add them to the topic. (assuming this gains enough traction. and isn’t immediately buried…)