What I liked about ODST's Firefight:
- Harder to survive, but depended on the map. Crater (Night) is a test of your Halo skill. Lost Platoon, while the obvious favorite for most everyone, made the game significantly easier.
- Long games. The slow progression of skulls made it feel more like accomplishing something, versus Reach rotating back to zero after each set completes. (This was probably limited by the need to have customization)
- Small maps like Crater and claustrophobic maps like Data Hive mixed things up from Choppermania Lost Platoon.
The downside of ODST's Firefight, I feel, is that it wouldn't have handled being matchmaked well. I swear this is not me excusing Bungie for not having matchmaking for the mode, but I feel some of the good memories are due to all games being with friends and no jerks in MM ruining things, like hiding on Lost Platoon forcing people to quit out, etc
What I liked about Reach's Firefight:
- Customization, obviously.
- Objectives! They weren't much yet, but they were there. Should have had more control over where Generators spawned though.
- Firefight Versus. Even though this made one fleeting appearing in Reach MM, it's still fun as shit to play on LAN.
- The ability for someone to leave without killing the game is a giant plus
- It lends itself better to playing with randoms.
I was really hoping 4 would have the evolved version of Firefight that took what people liked from ODST and Reach and added new stuff on top of that to improve the mode even more. Better objectives, being to play as more types of Covenant, being able to influence the Covies while playing as one, better promotion of moving around the map etc. I also expected them to take a page from Gears of War and make every multiplayer map also compatible with Firefight. We got a hint of that with Valhalla appearing in SPOPS along with Complex. And some sort of basic Forge functionality, even just being able to set up soft kills to be able to deal with jerks would be good.
