Also, most of the H4 map design sucked, except for some of the BTB maps. IMO H4 surprisingly has one of my favorite BTB rosters.
I guess I'm the only one who likes H3's floaty movement. Then again, I could definitely understand why that is.
I'm just very use to it, honestly. I can adapt easily between games, it really wasn't ever an issue for me. I jump a **** ton no matter the game so it felt natural I guess.
I just said that it ISN'T the movement that makes Halo 3 **** ahahaha I mean the strafe is dog but whatever, that's not what I said
Oof I was focused on getting on my flight, but I guess it's a collective effort for most people anyway. H3 had issues we'll leave it at that.
Halo 3 still had solid vehicle health mechanics. Paper maché didn't exist yet. I'll always respect that aspect of it.
Really appreciate the response, and I loved the video. We share a lot of the same ideas and beliefs. This is literally what I've been saying since I loaded up the Halo Reach beta. Simple is successful. I mean look at how simple Fortnite is. It's such a clunky simple game with fighting, but it's #1. And will be for a long time. And they update it constantly to add new things that don't break the core gameplay. It's just like adding weapons and equipment. It speaks volumes when you consider that it is a dumbed down version of PUBG with a sandboxy build mechanic. Also, thank you so much man! I really appreciate it.
Just saw this thread, wanted to give my thoughts. Halo CE has my favourite multiplayer experience, It know what it was and it's limitations. The map design was smart and unique, but focused. Every map set out with different goals and reached these goals through simplicity. Weapons also felt very satisfying and their power encouraged the seeking of them. Halo 2 is a close second in my books, expanding on want made Halo CE great and new ways to play. Maps again set out with specific goals, but more centered around modes and what defined each mode. I'll always look back to Halo 3's map design and what made each map special. This was bungie's best map pool and I'm sure many will agree. The variety of play that this game gave us has (in my opinion) never been achieved since. It had something for everyone. I also enjoyed the equipment pickup this game had, even though they could of been implemented better. BTB was the ****! Invasion. Invasion was by far the best thing in Reach, but it also had negatives on the rest of the game. (BTB suffered the most) Reach is a good lessen for dev's to equally develop each experience of their game without hurting others. Everyone hated the armour abilities only because you spawned with them, they were great on map pickups in competitive play. I'd like to see them return and replace the **** we have now. Halo 4 didn't do anything new... Halo 5 is a very good game. Returning to the focused experience that halo CE had, while retaining the varied aspects of Halo 3. Obviously halo 5 isn't a perfect game. From the cheesy armour abilities to the Req pack BS... But this game had polish, something clearly 343 setout as a design pillar, I hope they continue this level of dedication.
Canadian just reminded me of something else that seriously separates HCE-3 and Halo 5, the original trilogy had way more distinction within its map selections. CE has different maps emphasizing certain characteristics, Hang 'em High was all about long range open battles while Prisoner pushes close-quarters verticality. Halo 2 introduced unique dynamic elements like the conveyor belts moving crates on Elongation, the wheel on Zanzibar, or the train on Terminal. Halo 3 offered amazing diversity in its maps and game types. High Ground was cool for 1-Bomb Assault, The Pit was a go-to 2-Flag map, and Construct offered some really sweaty King of the Hill (why did you get rid of this mode 343?). Now perhaps Halo 5 limits itself by not having many modes to design for in the first place. The Arena map selection essentially works like this: if its symmetrical its for Slayer and Flag, and if its asymmetrical its for Slayer and Strongholds. I could ***** about the game type selection and maybe will later! Anyway, Halo 5 maps don't seem to have much of a clear intention behind them other than to be competitive arenas. I think designs like Torgue/Stasis show that either their designers have just discovered 3-lane design, or that they are playing it too safe. I think a map should offer something fun, unique, and exciting before it is balanced. For any somewhat experienced map designer, it is not that hard to make a balanced map. Create power positions and ensure there are appropriate counters, with well placed weapons offering proper risk/reward to obtain them. Make both sides equally useful, or if one side is to better another, have the weaker side contain the stronger pickups. Done. If you rush to make things balanced too soon in the design process, you lose touch of the inherent imbalances that are often crucial to creating interesting maps. High Ground and Zanzibar give one team an expansive base, while the other gets a beach... does that sound fair? No. It's a damn good starting point for a cool map though! If you think too symmetrically, you don't give yourself the interesting problems to resolve that would lead to bolder designs. Each map in a game should represent a clear concept of its own which through its distinct character will create memorable experiences. There is a big difference between a design that contains within it, an idea, and a map that is just a collection of connected areas: - H3 Narrows is the iconic bridge map that forces players down a central line, which is the only hard connection from one side to the other, making it a great choke point with strong push/pull game play. The top of the bridge is more powerful while the weaker bottom contains the rocket spawn. Snipers spawn either side and there is a lot of exciting crossfire through the middle. Alternatively you can launch to their base with the man-cannon, making yourself ridiculously exposed. These few clear intentional design moves come together to make a successful flag map. (The point here is that you can easily describe and define the type of map and the experience it offers, I feel confident I could do this for any map in the trilogy). - H5 Riptide however is a map I struggle to explain. It's a UNSC facility thingy (like most H5 maps) and there's a bunch of rooms with connections. You can easily camp the blue area while the red side doesn't seem to come into play much for Slayer. The main central area has a power position and a grav lift, with lazy cover blocking some sight lines from door ways to this room. I think they would have been better off making a unique room-based map without trying to maintain geometry from Fathom as it seems like an unnecessary limitation. Torgue, Stasis, Regret, Fathom, Empire, Coliseum and Tyrant all come off as 3-laney Pit and Midship style maps which I don't have much to say about. They have two bases with stuff at the sides. Plaza and The Rig are probably two of the more interesting maps in the game. Plaza has some really cool depth and verticality as well as great areas for Strongholds. I enjoy the danger of Camo spawn on Rig and the sneaky paths by the death pit. Both, particularly Rig, have clutter issues and the flow gets a bit confusing and random at times. I'm not sure what happened to the structure of this post but I hope someone gets something out of this, just getting a few things off my chest!
Well, I haven't done this in a long time, but the title of this thread was just too compelling. So, what did I like and dislike about multiplayer? Halo CE: I like the fact that it existed. Multiplayer was a last-minute inclusion Bungie was... encouraged... to make because the original Xbox had four controller ports. The Playstation only had two (you needed another peripheral to get four players). This meant if you could get three other people (and three more controllers) you could you could play teams against each other instead of against the game. More often than not in any given house there was usually way more than three other people wanting to play, and it was easy to determine who was best. Everyone was playing on the same machine so it was the same game for everyone, glitches and all. At best, if you lost you could blame your controller, but that was about it. The matches were about as fair as it could get, and Halo sold a lot of Xboxs. A lot. I could go on about LAN parties but, you get the picture. We didn't ***** about graphics or lighting or movement speed or weapon accuracy. We loved HALO. We loved HALO multiplayer. We wanted MORE. Microsoft really liked Halo, too. Microsoft liked multiplayer games even more. A lot of people were playing multiplayer games on Windows over this new thing called the internet. The console war was intensifying and MS needed an edge. That edge was Halo, and Halo needed online multiplayer. Bungie had no interest in multiplayer, but they weren't in charge of their own game any more. So once again at the last minute, Halo 2: Halo 2 managed to launch with online multiplayer. Halo 2 also came out on PC. You don't hear a lot about Halo 2 PC multiplayer because on the PC Halo did not stand out. Consoles were more affordable and you didn't need to know anything to make them work. Just load the disk. But multiplayer was relatively new to console gaming. A lot of things weren't... well though out. The internet itself was not fair. With online multiplayer, connection is everything. Halo 2 was also player-hosted. If you had a good connection there was a good chance you were also hosting the game. If you consistently hosted games you might think you were pretty good. This online thing meant you didn't need to have friends over or go to someone else's place to see who was best. But, the meaning of "The Best" had changed from your friends from school to the entire planet. If that wasn't enough, Bungie decided, since it was customary, to include a ranking system driven by wins and losses. This, in turn, lead to everything that sucked about multiplayer. Remember, Bungie was using a game to tell a story. Multiplayer consisted of elements from the campaign. It would be logical to assume that Halo 2 multiplayer would be different from Halo CE multiplayer in terms of gameplay. Some people had a big problem with that (some still do). Halo 2 had more weapons. More kinds of weapons. New ways to fight. When Halo 2 came out I never played Halo CE again (until MCC). To me that would have been like going back to Pong (Pong lovers, don't hate me. Just making a point). Therefore, I can't really ***** about how well the game played since it beat the pants off of any other game sold at the time. I did NOT, however, enjoy the online matchmaking experience. The road to General seemed to me to be way too important for too many people, and a lot of Generals were assholes online and in the forums. I liked that you could play as a Sangheili, although that caused some issues with multiplayer. Halo 3: By now it was clear that Halo was the best shooter. Microsoft had a new Xbox and a new online service and guess who they picked to launch both? In order to do that, Halo would have to push every boundary and give us more than Halo 2 did. Technology had improved performance and made a great deal more possible. Halo 3 needed to reflect that. Again, with the game itself they succeeded. I actually liked playing online (my internet here at home had caught up with the rest of the world so if the game lagged it wasn't me). However, getting into a ranked match was not a pleasant experience if you ended up on the losing team, and worse if you had the least kills. A dichotomy developed over what multiplayer should be like. Ranked players were apoplectic about what weapons should be in multiplayer and which shouldn't. In the end the only weapons that mattered were the Battle Rifle and the Plasma Grenade. Anything else was fluff. Never mind the imagination behind all the new weapons and the skill required to get them to work in the game. All that work to create all that variety that goes unappreciated to this day. The ranking system might have worked if people hadn't figured out they could buy an account. When they did, multiplayer was ruined. Reach: By far my favorite game. Bungie had learned a lot from CE, 2 and 3, plus they tried some new concepts with ODST. The 360 was an ageing machine, but it still had a few tricks up its sleeve. Bungie, who had no interest in multiplayer, still employed every method at their disposal in order to provide the best multiplayer experience possible on a machine that was at the end of it's product life. They called it the game they would have made if they had been able to when they made CE. That was an unprecedented effort for a spinoff game. What was glorious about Reach multiplayer was that once the game was released everything could still be tweaked. That meant if something was OP or not pulling it's weight it could be changed. We weren't stuck with what came in the box. Most fans weren't aware of that because Halo 3 "50's" were screaming bloody murder because their 50 didn't matter any more, and Reach didn't offer one. People were upset because their Spartan III didn't move like a Spartan II. It's too bad. Reach would have been more popular if people had approached it like ODST instead of Halo 4 (a lot thought Reach was Halo 4 right up until they put the disk in the machine for the first time). Thankfully, for me, there was Firefight, which I played the hell out of. At least, until Firefight Arcade. Halo 4: Infinity Slayer, inspired by Firefight Arcade, made me avoid multiplayer like the plague. Too many power weapons acquired too quickly without effort resulted in what 343i dubbed "chaotic gameplay", which they had concluded players wanted based on what they thought would be "fun". I tried Wargames maybe three times then just stuck to Spartan Ops until the episodes stopped, then I switched to Forge. I will say, though, that Halo 4 was written to be server based, and when the servers didn't materialize they hacked the game to make it work player-hosted. That was on Microsoft. Halo 5: All I can say about Halo 5 multiplayer is that clearly those primarily responsible had nothing to do with Halo 4. The experience is much better. 343i is clearly paying more attention to what's important instead of who's loudest. I say that because they gave us Master Chief Collection, and anyone that thinks Spartan Abilities and all the other stuff is just fluff can go back and play Pong... I mean Halo CE Anniversary. That, or Forge a game to suit your liking. I still expect the next game to have more stuff and more ways to do things, and I also expect that if there is something in the next game I don't like I can just filter it out. I've never been all that nit-picky about the online game. No Halo game was perfect. Every one had issues. Bad ones. Still, they were Halo games and in their time couldn't be beat. As always, when the next game comes along I will embrace the changes, not decry them. I hold no nostalgia for games I can still play.
If just some of that philosophy made it into Halo 6... At this point, the original trilogy represents a formula so unique compared to the games of today that were a modern game to embrace it, it would certainly have a distinct advantage. As modern games have become increasingly convoluted, I see a growing appreciation and demand for simplicity. Then again, if 343 are still going by the whole "we hired people who don't like Halo mentality", it's unlikely we'll see the series attempt to reclaim it's identity. I'm curious to see what happens regardless.