I wanted to make this its own section because I don’t think the information the player gets in her HUD* is presented particularly well. It might’ve been just me, but here’s the main problem I was having: Most of the time, there’s simply too much information being relayed to the player. Whether it was Oddball, CTF, or iSlayer, I felt like I was being bombarded by enough information to the point where my brain was forced to tune it all out. I was ignoring everything. Granted, it’s nowhere near as bad as Call of Duty’s, which I also tuned out, but from what I remember there was little clarity. Clarity is a huge part of Halo. Clarity in feedback, clarity in map design, and clarity in game information.
No, you don’t notice the white text. (That begs the following question: If players don’t notice it, why is it there?) For a standard headshot kill, you have the text in the middle with the points, you have X killed X text and the medal showing up at the right of the screen, and on top of all that that you could’ve gotten a triple kill, which will have Steitzer saying that out loud, more text in the middle of the screen, and another medal will pop up, along with who knows what like “Distraction!”.
I understand the need to convey how many points players are receiving given the progression system Halo 4 has, but telling how many points I’m accumulating isn’t critically relevant to the game at hand and would be better served, I feel, by summarizing it all in the post-game carnage report. I can never remember what points I got for what anyway.
Bungie was very good at delivering the most relevant, important information to the player, and doing so in a seemingly sparse way. I paid attention to it all. Putting aside some fun stuff like Steitzer saying "Triple kill!", just give me what I and my teammates need to know.
*As an aside to this, I also think Steitzer says too much. No, he’s not constantly talking in your ear, but there’s definitely a noticeable increase in how much he says, and I think it’s very close to the point of overusing him, if it isn’t already.
