The Declining Competiveness of Halo Multiplayer
The Declining Competiveness of Halo Multiplayer
Yes, this is a Reddit link / comment... but I feel the OP has a lot of valid points... In fact, when I first read it, I thought that Drost had posted this in Reddit:
So, I guess I have to start with Halo 2. Halo 2 was the pinnacle of fun gaming to me for multiple reasons, but to avoid rose-colored glasses, I'm gonna stick to just gameplay and general multiplayer topics for this.
Halo 2's gameplay (post-update, BR starts) was simple: every man starts equal, and power weapons are placed around the map in timed spawns (sort of... they actually improved on this in H3). Whether you're playing slayer or oddball or flag, this promotes map control and map movement (if you let them get the rockets, they might slay you and score a flag, etc..).
Halo 2's gameplay was made greater by excellent maps. Open sight lines, clear positions of power (with decently placed weapons), and a general lack of clutter made for a CONSISTENT, fun experience. That's not to say all the maps were good, but this game had Lockout, Midship, Sanctuary, and Turf in it. Amongst a lot of other great maps.
Halo 2 also debuted a fun matchmaking system. You compete (in a consistent game) against peers your equal. That was awesome to me. I love that. You win or lose, based on skill. It was sweet.
Halo 2 was also buggy, and featured tons and tons of cheating. It wasn't perfect, but when it worked, it WORKED.
Halo 2 also featured my favorite playlist ever, Team Hardcore. This was a playlist of fairly competitive settings (but not MLG settings!), that didn't stray from the core game, but still was tuned to be more competitive (removed radar requiring more team chat, different objective gametype settings).
Halo 3 was also pretty awesome. I'm gonna skip through this to get to the Halo 4 stuff, but it was mostly similar to Halo 2, except it added in some stuff that was largely ineffectual (regen pickup, etc). This stuff changed the game some, some hated it, I never really noticed it much. It was meh. The BR was slightly less fun in this because it had a spread and wasn't hitscan (that really sucked, but in retrospect, I would gladly take that compared to stuff now), the maps were decent (more cluttery) but forge was sweet, and the matchmaking (IMO) was slightly better than Halo 2's. It also got rid of 99% of cheating and host problems. It didn't quite have Halo 2's charm, but it certainly was serviceable, fun, and competitive.
Then Reach. Fuck Reach.
Fucking Reach.
Reach made me realize so many small things about Halo made such a huge difference in gameplay. I'll start small (ish). They removed melee and grenade bleed through (I think nades at least, I don't remember perfectly), meaning if you got meleed or naded when you had any amount of shield left, you would only take shield damage. This was fucking absurd. Goddamnit I'm still pissed thinking about this. This meant that if you were in CQC, and you shot, and the other guy meleed, he would win because one melee removed shield in that game. You were essentially down a melee. It meant that if you ran up to someone, double meleeing was more effective than shooting them. That removed all skill from CQC. Fuck that. CQC used to be a dance of shooting and meleeing at the right moment. One false step and you lose. It was a skill. People played Boxer just to be better at it. This killed that.
Then there was bloom. asdklfjkl;asdj. Bloom. you know, I was about to bitch about this a lot, then I realized its not really in Halo 4, so forget it. I hate it, fuck bloom, whatever.
Armor Abilities were the biggest, and most bullshit change in this game. They remove the "every man starts equal". Now every man starts different. That doesn't seem like a big deal. But what it does is remove consistency from the game. Oh, you threw a great nade and removed a dudes shield? Armor lock. Oh, you gained a great position on the map, providing superior cover against the other team? Jetpack. Oh, you went around a corner and got assassinated by a dude in camo? That's fucking sweet. Its not competitive, its cheap. Because you are essentially starting with a power weapon, but its not communicated in any way. The enemy has no way of knowing until you reveal it, allowing you to get an edge without working for it. You aren't winning by skill, you're winning because you started with a trump card. And don't get me wrong, I adapted, I used the cheapest AA's I could, because I play to win. But it took out a lot of fun. It wasn't competitive.
The maps also blew in this game, but hey, we're not talking about Reach.
Reach also started the destruction of matchmaking. While it had matchmaking, there were no skill based ranks. This removed that other essence of fun to me; playing a competitive game, competitively. Now when you win its not because you played a fair match, its because you joined up with your Halo 2 friends and stomped some noobs. Fun at first, but it gets old super quick.
This time I saved myself a lot of grief and eye strain and didn't read it. I've read so many of these and they are mostly the same rant. I truly had hoped Halo 4 would meet the needs of competitive traditional style players. I do see the advantages of all playstyles being served. Having said that, I am more concerned about other parts of the community dying. Creative content is currently more difficult than it was for Halo 3, ODST and REACH. I am seeing some of that community hinting at reducing their involvement and even quitting. Lack of web access to fileshares, complete theatre capabilities and film rendering are hurting grass roots creative Halo fans. Forge has some glitches that could keep maps out of Community playlists. Losing some of the competitive community will hurt Halo 4 but losing all of the little things from the creative community added on to that could prove more serious. A lot of people are putting their hopes in the Feb. TU, the Community map playlist and some new smaller DLC maps. All of this sitting on the hope fence is such a painful cycle of crushing despair. It's not that I don't think Halo 4 is playable. This community is still having a great time playing in customs. Halo 4 is fully capable of generating fun. Even though I am disappointed in some parts of Halo 4, it still looks and feels like Halo to me. I am not going to jump on the rain, drain and pain train that is currently under way. No other FPS has the style, story, mechanics and creative content that I like. My feet are firmly planted. If the Halo population drops to the point it affects me, you'll see me advertising for more players.
Your right it is allot of what has already been said. I know that Waypoint, THC, and this forum have just seemed latley to be a place for people to get together and bash Halo, but if you think about it does thean not make us better fans. Out of ALL the Halo hater posts that I have seen, nobody says that the are less than thrilled with the game because it is old and run it's course. People are voicing dipleasure with the game over things that the game developer went all in on. If we sat by and said to ourselves "Well it not as good as other Halos but 343 did try something new so I will just keep playing it" there will never be any change. I in my post never say that AA. ordanace, sprint, and perks do not belong in the game but without anyway for them to be toggled on and off we will never be allowed what version of the formula we as the consumer of the product like best. So we are left with nowhere else to voice our opinions other than the internet. In my opinion the true core mechanics that we lived in HCE H2 and H3 made the closest to perfect FPS I have ever played. And the community lashing back a huge mistakes made but the development team makes us a great community. We are talking, all they have to do is listen.
I like Halo 4, it's fun to me. But I definitely agree with some of the stuff he says.
I haven't read the wall of text yet, but I agree with you guys' posts.
Reach did more damage to the game than Halo 4 did. We're still getting rid of the jetpack and Armor Lock and, to a much lesser extent, the DMR. Reach did more against the fundamental nature of the game, from how it handled the bloom, to the strength of the grenades, to the quality of the maps, to the healthpacks. Halo 4 has helped roll a lot of that back, but there's still a lot of work left to do. While I appreciate the developer trying to put things in that some folks like, but end up being borderline useless/detrimental (SMG starts, dual wielding, equipment, Armor Abilities), we've got some fixing and tweaking left to do. Lots of it.
And here we thought Reach was the beta.
This is a good thread. I almost totally agree with the Soup's quote.
I actually think that the real damage started at the end of H3. Except for the non-hitscan BR, H3 was still a great game at its core, and probably saw the peak number of competitive players for any Halo. However, for some reason after a couple years there was this change in thinking at Bungie about their approach to the game. They started releasing maps like Ghost Town and Orbital, that had boxes and shit everywhere and no sight lines or sense of organized game play. Then they actually went back and destroyed many of the good maps (Narrows stands out in my mind) by changing them so that the spawns reversed automatically (WTF?) -- this was an effort to keep good teams from getting map position and p0wning. They also made a huge mistake in waiting so long to release a new game, but I think that what must have been going on was that they didn't know what to do next, so they did nothing instead.
Reach was an evolution of this way of thinking: make the game more random. Make the encounters more random and individual and haphazard. Give people random and different abilities. Make it so that skill mattered less -- map position, aim, jumping skill, movement skill, weapon timings, weaker grenades. Deemphasize competitive play. Get rid of ranked play entirely. Heck, they even diminished vehicle skills by making the vehicles out of paper and making the guns overheat after 5 seconds.
H4 is basically the culmination of this process except that you have to also throw in a bunch of 343 growing pains as well: no file shares, broken theater, broken forge, etc. (The H4 BR is awesome though you have to admit that -- but gets almost zero use because they also fucked up on weapon balance.)
I am not sure but I think Halo 4 is setup to reverse team spawning even with static respawn areas.
The BR works pretty good on the community maps. Once the competitive playlist comes out I hope its BR starts only.
343 said alot of the right things while making and testing the game, but at release it just wasn't finished. That surprised me because the game seemed polished at E3. If they can just stick with fixing problems, balancing the game and updating playlists it can win alot of people over.
I feel like once pandora's box has been opened to "extras" like AA's and OD's, it's going to be really hard to put them back in the box for the noobs. They will complain like crazy if Halo 5 is more like Halo 3.
I think there is a lot of validity in this statement. Can Halo ever return to a sandbox with competiveness at its core for future installments now that this flavor of Halo has become what is expected for the majority of people purchasing the game? It seems that the more crap they can pile into a game the "better" they think it will be, where the more important things like balance, map design and purpose take a backseat to all the flare.
I feel that competitive play is paramount to Halo far more than searching for screenshots or uploading maps.
If we take it to the extreme, we'd get these two scenarios:
1. Halo has absolutely astounding community content, but terrible actual play. So people build maps that don't get played, and can easily find screenshots of maps but not of amazing battles.
or
2. Halo has absolutely astounding competitive multiplayer, but terrible community creation options. This would take the game back to the Halo 1 and Halo 2 days where there wasn't forge or theatre. The days when Halo was the game that sold the system, and brough the Xbox into many living rooms, and with its huge sales and following made the Xbox 360 a reality most likely.
I read the wall o'text. I agree with a lotttttt of it. And I'd like to point out (to no one in particular) that my prediction was correct: not a single "CoD" friend or family member switched (back) to Halo with Halo 4 and it's CoD-ish-ness. Not a one.
Did you really expect anything different with Frankie in charge? He thought it was brilliant to have SMG starts in h2.
I'm patiently waiting for a TU.
Frankie was not in charge of the sandbox for Halo 4. His biggest impact was on the fictional side, if even that. He's franshise director.
Though I agree dual SMG starts on the BTB maps was kind of silly, I did like dual SMGs.
Dual anything = moving away from the Golden Triangle of core Halo gameplay.
Heyo,
What may I ask is the "Golden Triangle of core Halo gameplay."? And what is the big deal about jetpacks? And why is 'dual anything' bad? I had a lot of fun with the dual smg's on that warehouse map(I can't recall the name, I can never remember map names) in prior Halo games.
I've been kind of following these Halo4 'complaint' threads on 2old2play and it's all pretty interesting though honestly a lot of the time I just don't understand some of the complaints. Some I get, some I don't.
I'm trying to figure out where *I* fit in as a Halo player now. I've been playing since the first one, jumped into multiplayer in Halo2 with most everyone else. I always remember ranking around mid 30-35 in most game types that I enjoyed playing. Halo2 was IMO the pinnacle of the multiplayer Halo experience for me for a couple of reasons, 1) the people I played with from this site, 2) the fact that I could enter a mp game and expect to hear some talking and tactics, even from people I didn't know, 3) the fact that the maps were not so convoluted I couldn't find my way around.
People seem to want to draw this big distinction between 'casual' and 'competitive' players and I don't quite get that. Where do I fit in? I play every game to win. I try to team shoot when possible, take good positions, communicate when I know what's going on, never quit, and I think most who play with me feel I'm a good sport and never leave a game thinking "man what a dick". I also play to have fun, be social, and on occasion don't mind getting trounced by players better than I. I don't go back and study films of the great players, nor do I run around memorizing all the nooks and crannies of maps. Where do I fit in?
I don't feel like I've been excessively killed by the boltshot, on the other hand I absolutely get that boltshot should NOT be a starting weapon and frankly that should be obvious to almost anyone. However, I kind of like the shorter respawn times in games like capture the flag. Shouldn't be an instant respawn but I'm definitely ok with something quicker than Halo 2. I get killed a lot in objective game types and as a consequence they were never my first choice to play because I felt like I was spending a lot of time sitting on the sidelines. Where do I fit in?
I don't like the seemingly insane amount of vehicles in big team battle now, but due to ordnance drops there are also a seemingly insane amount of ways to kill off those vehicles. So which one gives? Do they remove both things from the game? I also don't like personal ordnance drops because all of a sudden there are 4 snipers on the other team zapping you from all angles, but I do like more random placement of power weapons spread throughout maps rather than the Halo2 type of static spawn that had people fighting over the same weapons and if you lost, well you were generally screwed. So where do I fit in?
It seems like a lot of the changes to Halo are what people don't like. If *feels* to me like those people are calling for what basically amounts to a graphically updated Halo2(but not too graphically updated because then all the fluff in maps can jam up your firing lanes...). So what changes ARE acceptable?
Like I said, Halo2 was the pinnacle of multiplayer for me, but that doesn't mean I haven't enjoyed playing Halo3, Reach, and yes now Halo4. I see some of the downfalls of 4, but yet that doesn't ruin my experience either - so where do I fit in?
- Raider30
Welcome to the club, we're also the people who usually (even though will on occasion) don't feel the need to make long repetitive post on how the game is changing and different and is now garbage. We sit back and read all the comments and might throw in our two cents here and there but for the most part just shake our head and carry on. At the end of a day we like to get on the Xbox find our friends and knock out a few games with a ton of laughs mixed in, sure we try to win every game, and we do win our fair share, but sometimes we don't and are just fine with that.
Its a shame that only the complaint threads get carried on page after page, the "im completely fine with the game and enjoy the hell out of it" threads usually get a couple "me too" comments and then end.
Competitive players made Halo what is was as someone mentioned previously. We love the game for what it is supposed to be. It bothers us that they are basically throwing out all of what made Halo...Halo. It's like all the changes football is making to keep players safe. It's friggin football. These guys know what they signed up for lol. It ruins the game when you start adjusting kickoffs, dictating how players can be tackled.... blah blah blah.
i don't think any of those labels are good/bad.
i look at it like this. if you aren't spending 3x as much time practicing as competing, then you are not a comp player. i played competitive hockey for some time. there is a huge difference between the competitive players and the casual competive players based on that fact.
i'm not trying to offend anyone, but there aren't really many comp players around. it's my opinion, but it is what it is. just because someone plays every day and is part of an organized team doens't make them a comp player. online MM is the recreational league of the gaming world.
that doesn't mean anyone's opinion is worth more/less based on how you play the game. everyone's opinions are only worth what people put on it.
mine is probably worth crap to most people, but it's still mine and worth everything to me.
This is precisely the dangerous sort of relativism that engenders the breakdown of society. The falsity of predicting that opinions do not have a morally absolute weight means that everyone can never be wrong.
Don't let the terrorists win.
That's the problem with building the game they've been doing it these years. Start with the more basic competitive game, and allow folks to add all kinds of vehicles and things in Forge. That, to me, seems to be the answer to stop the backslide.
Competitive Halo was declining in Halo3. Reach may have killed it, but it was already dying.
truth
I have enjoyed the community maps, I think hardcore settings on them would make for some fun games
Raider, I believe that triangle refers to Melee, Guns, and Grenades.
With dual wielding guns, melee and grenades suffer, mainly because if I recall right you had to drop one of your two guns to do that stuff. Also controller setup could be a pain to do those when dual wielding.
As for the competitive versus casual player, I'm not sure what the difference is to be honest. If one says competitive players play to win, does that mean casual players play to lose? I think proper matching of players is the best - get people who are close in supposed skill to be matched together. In any event, I feel that way because its the matches that are close down to the wire that I find the most fun and interesting. I enjoy a match like that far more than winning by a landslide, and more than being crushed. Even if I lose a match, if it was close and down to the last effort, that is still very exciting to me.
Anyways, as far as fitting in, I think the best way to fit into Halo is someone who can play it and has fun doing so. That's it :)
What Wam said, but without the stats, because stats piss me off. Im in that category...or a category Dixon made for me: competitive player who sucks at the game lol
The reference you are thinking of I believe was in the Et tu brute vidoc for H3 (or one around that time).
The real issue lies in the fact that though the people who are buying the games are more casual, they are abandoning the people who made the Halo franchise a household name. The people who have been die hard fans since CE and such are being left in the cold. I know that changes need to be made, BUT adding all the BS that they have added has ruined the competitive aspect of the game. Get rid of ordinance all together and bring back timed weapon drops/power weapons.
The gameplay mechanic has changed, and the sandbox is far too large. Change is good, but change for the sake of wanting to change is never a good thing. Why fix something that isn't broken?
Having to fight for camo/OS/sniper/Rockets was one of the things that kept me hooked on this game over CoD. CoD is enjoyable, but now there really isn't that much difference between the two.
I seriously am awaiting the TU with an open mind. If they listen to the comp community and fix some of the BS, then I may buy another title. If it's utter garbage, I will play H4 to the end of it's cycle since I already paid for what I am sure will be more BTB maps and then be done with the franchise.
I'm not hopping of the bandwagon, I just refuse to support a developer that has dropped the ball this many times on something they were promising would be what I think we all expected to be a stellar title.
Sure, the campaign was pretty good; but so are MANY campaigns with shitty MP.