A Balance of Work in Halo.
Competitive Find a flow of constant engagement. 30 seconds of fun was a common saying back during the earlier Halos, no more
now its 15 seconds of fun. The best most competitive games Ive seen have had Avg Lives of 15 seconds or less. Allowing a team time to really get a hold of large maps grab all power weapons and survive for long periods of time too often isnt pushing their threshold they arent hitting the edge of their ability. They are bullying at that point, not challenging themselves, not overcoming obstacles. Not being challenged = Boring, its scientifically proven!
Creative Allow players to form their Spartan to be used interchangeably in both MP and SP and (Third gametype) giving an increased sense of development and meaning. This means allow them to build their card. Whatevers the current thing? Call symbol/Clan Tag etc. Allow them to purchase pieces allow them to choose the colors of the pieces. Allow them to earn special pieces through campaign and spec ops feats of strength. Ex: Halo 3s Katana was actually earned by earning every achievement this took time and perseverance; it was not giving to them by a grind of points. DO NOT CREATE A GRIND. Create a progression.
Explorative Have a searching field for items, books, logs, terminals. Collect all to learn the story. Have an easter egg undiscovered and untold, something players might find by accident after a long time or search for forever and still be undiscovered.
Busywork Allow an achievement for X amount of kills.
Now when I type work I dont mean traditional work I mean the act of action causing excitement. People sitting around are saying Im bored because non-action leads to boredom, we want to keep the player busy but never at our choosing. They will choose. Also players can get burnt out on gaming, after five or six games of Midship FFA you might be fried from all the decision making and hand action. So the player will voluntarily stop. This doesnt have to mean the end of Halo, there is more work to be done.
Halo isnt just a game, its an art. You hone your skills, you watch videos to learn the ins and outs of the game. You learn how to best your opponents, worse players have beat better players by sheer determination. Practice makes perfect, and the hardwork will pay off.
So we need some downtime activities.
Theater suggestions:
1. Copy CoDs auto-montage reel. We need the ability for theater to go in analyze the film real fast pick out your best plays of the game and create a film of it all very quick. Players can save.upload it to their fileshare, suggest the download to friends, and link it online. Three necessary features. Fourth would be upload to Youtube/Waypoint.
2. We need an option to save the file to the drive after a game in the UI. Not two layers in like Reach and H4.
3. We need group viewing back, no one wants to leave a party to view a clip/film. Halo is about socialism. Real world cannot compete with the fact you can instantly be connected to thousands of players through MM. It needs to take advantage of this.
4. We need campaign viewing back. So much greatness happens in campaign, so much art needs to be shown off everywhere.
5. An option to save, and also have your highlight reel or clip viewable on HaloTV.
6. Everyones PoV.
HaloTV needs to be implemented. You need to pick it off the main menu. It will load a screen where you will be taken to viewing options Random, Snipes, Doubles, BTB, Competitive, Featured, So on and so forth, whatever is fitting for the next Halo. From there have it watch a clip, Have a rating system while watching 1-5 Stars to filter out junk and figure out what should be seen more, weight the chance of better files but still have non rated low rated files show up for people so it has a chance to improve score if its actually a decent clip. Have a report button. After some # of reports it will be removed. Files will rotate and never be static anyways. Hopefully make some way to have certain newly finished CLOSE games become part of the pool of files. Allow the option to save the film you are watching. Bonus points if you can randomly throw people into a MM team to communicate while watching Halo TV if they wish to put on their mics.
What the main purpose of this is to allow players to continue playing Halo after they have been fried from active Halo playing. If they dont have time to or are not in the mood to play a game they can continue their Halo experience.
Regarding the User Interface
Get to a clean H3 presentation with Reachs UI. Active Roster needs to be back, and not hidden roster. Thats all theres no debating this. Theres no advantage to the baseball card Microsoft Smart glass touchscreen Windows 8 theme crap that has been created for Halo 4. Nothing is intuitive about it, it takes way too long to figure out and even when you do not much of it makes sense or is quicker. Theres just simply no point to fixing something that wasnt broken. In fact you took something that was working and broke it. After all this game is about accessibility. Lets make it easy to get where you need to be.
Fresh Content
Now with all this fleshed out we have a game people dont need to leave, can leave on, and can go from active to low activity moments. Possibly staying on between these swings. Complete this all with a proper working fileshare and Developers Favorites page (Bring back the Bungie Favorites)
You have to keep fresh playlists revolving. Halo 4 put everything it had out from day 1. Grifball was robbed, Flood was put out. Snipers was still snubbed like every release. SWAT was MIA. Then judging by population you took some away and added stuff. When you could have just put all of those as 1 revolving playlist with double credits. People would have came back weekly for the new playlist and it would allow you a testing bed for new playlists. Why you still havent added an Instagib is beyond me.
DLC. Halo 4s DLC has been great the only problem is the map packs seem to be bunched. Crimson was nearly all BTB DLC. When Halo 4 already has an abundance of BTB maps. Spread that out. One BTB One Medium One Small per pack. Each a month or two apart.
Keep People on Their Edge
People find themselves having the most fun when they are at the edge of their ability. Think of Tetris a game you literally cannot beat, but people still play. Why? Because the game challenges you, it has a clearly identified scoring system and the AI eventually drops the pieces quicker and quicker until you lose. People dont care about grinding to the highest Spartan Rank by getting XP whether they win or lose. People want to grind to 50 where they were pushed to their limit and overcame a challenge. This means youre going to need to bring back a ranking system with instant feedback. Youll have to figure a way to remove cheating to halt boosting, modding, deranking, and other forms of griefing.
My suggestion would be every other month drop players 5 ranks in every playlist. This doesnt reset the ranks but allows nobody to sell an account as they wont be able to get back up to The Highest Rank also do not allow a highest rank skill in the gamers baseball stats. Reach reset too hard, often by the time you were ranked the season was ending and youd have to start all over just as you were getting decent Trueskill matches. This allows Trueskill to continue working through seasons
I still stick to my guns a system where no one is trying to cheat, is a system that no one cares about. Let them try and game the system; at least theyll be gaming!
Build a Halo game, not the game that gets a 9.8 on IGN
People played games like Pong, Pac-Man, Breakout, Donkey Kong for hours and hours. These games werent graphically rich, the patterns were sometimes very simple to understand and master, yet they continued for hours. They tried to see how long they could keep their game perfect. Halo doesnt need to be so graphically rich. It can still look good but we need to get the frame rate up. Trying to play a competitive game of Halo while having a framerate that varies is the worse detraction you can have in a game. People need to be able to depend upon the game to let them actually play it. The game should not be playing them. Netcode should be improved upon but Halo should be looking at dedicated servers to remove host advantage and let the players good connections take advantage. Lag compensation should be diminished because of this. Less trading and less bullet eating. This not only increases peoples experience, but motivates players to get better connections, fix their settings, to allow them a better experience, and overall increase the connections for everyone.
Additional Reading
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