Part 3 of CruelLEGACEY’s “If I were making Halo 5”, “Multiplayer” delves into issues that Halo 4 has that has fragmented it’s community, and provides solutions and brain food for creating success in upcoming installments of the series.
Posted with permission, following is an excerpt of Part 3. If you aren’t familiar with the series, you can catch up with the first two in the following links.
If I were making Halo 5 – Part 1 [Story]
If I were making Halo 5 – Part 2 [Campaign Design]
~CHa0s
If I were making Halo 5 – Part 3 [Multiplayer]
Posted on October 17th, 2013 by CruelLEGACEY at CruelLEGACEYproductions.com
While the single player campaign is the heart of the Halo franchise, it is the multiplayer and other secondary features (forge mode, theater mode) that gives the series its legs.
Too many cooks…
Halo multiplayer is in a strange state at the moment. The community is vast, and has pulled the game in several disparate directions. To their credit, 343 Industries have made a valiant effort to please everyone. Unfortunately, the results have been less than fans had hoped. Multiplayer in Halo 4 tries to be something for everyone, and ends up mastering nothing.
In my efforts to solidify my ideas for the future of Halo multiplayer, I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about other games that handle multiplayer well. 343 clearly did the same thing while developing Halo 4; Call of Duty influences are rampant. But I think 343 learned the wrong lessons from the competition. Slapping a bunch of unlockable loadout customizations over your multiplayer game will not make it more enjoyable, especially when such loadouts break the fundamental balance that makes your game what it is.
I can see the train of thought that lead 343 to make some of these changes.
- We want to attract new players
- CoD is insanely popular
- CoD has features X, Y, and Z
- If we also have features X, Y, and Z, it’ll make our game easy for new players to get in to.
The problem with this train of thought is that 343 hasn’t accounted for Halo’s inherent complexity. Even stripped of all the bells and whistles (such as customized loadouts and ordinance drops), Halo is a far more complicated game than CoD. So when you take the basic Halo mechanics and add all this clutter on top of it, the results are pure chaos. Of all the Halo games, I feel Halo 4 is by far the most difficult for new players to jump in and actually learn how to play properly. Everybody is using a different weapon each time you see them, power-ups are raining down from the heavens, and players are spawning all around you all the time. The game does nothing to encourage natural teamwork or co-ordination, and map-flow is practically obliterated. New players are quickly overwhelmed, and experienced Halo veterans get frustrated by the chaotic nonsense all around them.
So, how would I fix it? What should multiplayer look like in Halo 5?
Don’t Tell me what I can’t do!
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