Why Halo Infinite would greatly benefit from a return to its roots
- Thread starter Stowaway Silfer
- Start date
There is a product for people who wants old school Halo....(joking)
But seriously I thrust 343i to deliver a great experience
But seriously I thrust 343i to deliver a great experience
I really wish halo 4/5 never happened, the new promethean race 343 created is offensively dull and just boring
Agreed. The reason you posted above regarding Halo:Escalation is why I have not read ANY of the new novels post bungie involvement. I always wished that Bungie added more story depth to Halo 1-3 (they kinda did with 3), but they always seemed to have surface level plot. However, after playing 5, I wish that is what 5 would've done. I mean, how can you bring back BLUE team - the infamous, awesome blue team - and subject their stories just to pathetic group dialogue and a simple reference to the whistle when Cortana was guiding them?! Yeah and the fact the new Covenant leader was taken down by one spartan and with no effort or struggle at all - not even a boss battle?! The only thing I can guess - and hope - is that the production went to crap SP-wise and the team had to salvage what they had. I mean, the adverts were seriously crap and lied to the consumer on the chief/locke story side. Yeah, 343 has a lot of work (And rightfully so) ahead of them SP wise. I read somewhere they called Halo: Infinite a 'spiritual' reboot...i love these vague dev terms that are just going to end up biting them in the butt later.
Yup, we spend too much time in animations that prevent us from dealing damage for that to happen.
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I would argue that enhanced mobility is a must if you want to convey the idead that Spartans are modified humans with super reflexes, mobility and strength.
If the game has sprint, the game is going to be binned faster than Halo 5 ever dreamed of.
You're wrong, but ok... There were many other issues with the game that caused it to be binned hard. Sprint wasn't one of them. Everyone seems to be super excited for Reach MP yet that game had sprint.
People are excited to be getting Halo on PC at all.
Amongst all the excitement is a lot of anxiety about which Reach setting will be on offer by default. The handling of Sprint was one of Reach's biggest criticism.
This is some weird logic. You absolutely do have to get to places, because that's where weapons, powerups and players are. Players moving faster is also an illusion, because the maps are stretched out and designed arround Sprint and other Spartan Abilities. What you also say about it being easier to escape from ambushes is an effect of Sprint, Thruster and Clamber and maps that are full of nooks and cranies. Those drag out the encounters and thus matches and don't make them faster in all scenarios. Plus, this is without even taking the Average Kill Time or Perfect Kill Time into account, which also stayed relatively the same (aside from Halo CE's Magnum, which has a ~50% quicker kill time than pretty much any utility weapon).
I'd gladly illustrate this with supporting data, but since HaloTracker for Halo 3, 4 and Reach are dead and there is no API support for Halo: MCC, this is currently impossible without the help of the developer. Anyways, here is one graph that I found for Halo 5 on this matter:
Pretty much. I look forward to Campaign, a couple Pro Slayer matches and modding support, but I shudder when I have to think about things like Bloom, Armor Abilites and (grey Forge) maps. lol
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The AAA game industry loves to chase trends, but if there is one trend I'd like for them to chase it would "returning to the roots." Trend-chasing has resulted in too many games being all same-y. Last gen it was going after the whole gritty "realistic" modern-day/near-future shooter with loadouts in the multiplayer mode. This generation it was enhanced mobility and, more recently, battle royal modes. In the mid 90s it was gory fighting games attempting to capitalize on Mortal Kombat's success. While there is nothing inherently wrong with adding or changing things inspired by other games, far too often it results in more homogenized game design within genres.
And Halo wasn't spared from this trend-chasing. While the original game was a pioneer that either introduced or popularized things that are now standard in the genre—the guns/grenades/melee triad, twin stick controls, the two weapon limit, level designs that weren't all claustrophobic corridor crawls—recent games in the series have instead leaned more towards being imitators instead of letting the series keep doing its own thing.
Reach and especially Halo 4 were COD-ified Halo, which eschewed the level playing field of the first three games in favor of an unbalanced loadout system. While Halo 5 returned things to a level playing field, it went full-bore with enhanced mobility, which was all the rage at the time, ditching the slow, methodical pace of the original in favor of a twitchy fast-paced experience that had profound effects on map design and the flow of combat. Even Reach and Halo 4 experimented with enhanced mobility with sprint and jetpacks.
I'm all for Halo continuing to evolve its combat, but not in ways that move it too far away from the fundamentals that made the older games so unique. The scale of Halo CE made it really stand out at the time, so maybe future games ought to focus on those sorts of massive, awe-inspiring environments and diverse, large-scale encounters (maybe not outright open-world, but definitely levels that actually do surpass Assault on the Control Room in terms of playable area traversable not just by vehicle, but on foot if the player so chooses). Perhaps Warzone can be expanded upon similarly, by making it a truly large-scale multiplayer experience, like a 16v16 or even 24v24 mode with a wider variety of subtypes on maps that actually do have several times the playable area of Blood Gulch. Maybe more interactive environments like the kind we saw in Halo 2 and Halo 2 Anniversary multiplayer could be added. But the pacing and balance of Halo's combat should remain more or less what it was in the original trilogy, with a level playing field and a slower, more deliberate pace. Halo 2 Anniversary took that old-school gameplay and polished it, and as a result it created what I felt was the best-playing Halo multiplayer mode to date.
I really hope Halo Infinite is a return to form for the series. I love Halo, and it's about the only thing I play online for the multiplayer, but under 343 Industry's watch the series feels less and less like Halo in terms of gameplay and aesthetics. Well, the latter seems to be going more classic in style, so hopefully it's the case for the former as well.
And Halo wasn't spared from this trend-chasing. While the original game was a pioneer that either introduced or popularized things that are now standard in the genre—the guns/grenades/melee triad, twin stick controls, the two weapon limit, level designs that weren't all claustrophobic corridor crawls—recent games in the series have instead leaned more towards being imitators instead of letting the series keep doing its own thing.
Reach and especially Halo 4 were COD-ified Halo, which eschewed the level playing field of the first three games in favor of an unbalanced loadout system. While Halo 5 returned things to a level playing field, it went full-bore with enhanced mobility, which was all the rage at the time, ditching the slow, methodical pace of the original in favor of a twitchy fast-paced experience that had profound effects on map design and the flow of combat. Even Reach and Halo 4 experimented with enhanced mobility with sprint and jetpacks.
I'm all for Halo continuing to evolve its combat, but not in ways that move it too far away from the fundamentals that made the older games so unique. The scale of Halo CE made it really stand out at the time, so maybe future games ought to focus on those sorts of massive, awe-inspiring environments and diverse, large-scale encounters (maybe not outright open-world, but definitely levels that actually do surpass Assault on the Control Room in terms of playable area traversable not just by vehicle, but on foot if the player so chooses). Perhaps Warzone can be expanded upon similarly, by making it a truly large-scale multiplayer experience, like a 16v16 or even 24v24 mode with a wider variety of subtypes on maps that actually do have several times the playable area of Blood Gulch. Maybe more interactive environments like the kind we saw in Halo 2 and Halo 2 Anniversary multiplayer could be added. But the pacing and balance of Halo's combat should remain more or less what it was in the original trilogy, with a level playing field and a slower, more deliberate pace. Halo 2 Anniversary took that old-school gameplay and polished it, and as a result it created what I felt was the best-playing Halo multiplayer mode to date.
I really hope Halo Infinite is a return to form for the series. I love Halo, and it's about the only thing I play online for the multiplayer, but under 343 Industry's watch the series feels less and less like Halo in terms of gameplay and aesthetics. Well, the latter seems to be going more classic in style, so hopefully it's the case for the former as well.
