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Halo: Reach |OT6| There Are Those Who Said This Day Would Never Come

Zeouterlimits said:
There were a bunch of us, but personally I've no interested in giving these asshats the satisfaction of chasing me out of a game I've chose to play. You could say sticking around and trying to resist was just as bad, but I'd disagree (we managed to get a second flag capture after this started thanks to evade and grenade kills).
Filed a cheating complaint as it comes under exploiting.
The same blood runs through our veins.

<3
 
Devin Olsen said:
Only positive that I can see in this... This video is from 2010 and I have not once seen this happen in MM. So it's obviously not to prevalent.

Yeah it's not like h2 or anything, thank god.
 

Karl2177

Member
A first in Halo history has occurred. I enter Squad Slayer alone and get paired with a team of guests. Result: Victory. I may have backpacked like crazy, but it was one of the greatest feelings in the world.
 
Letters said:
Thanks!!! I just happened to log in on my cel and the first thing I saw was your post so as I got up to date on the thread I made sure to squint past his post. :)

Another victory for THE SPOILER POLICE!!!

In stylz defense: that was a sweet gif.

EDIT: left the "e" off for savings.
 

Gui_PT

Member
Zeouterlimits said:

6ACI.gif
 
A27_StarWolf said:
how can they improve firefight next game? Aside from new enemies, what ideas do you guys have that might be fun/cool?

AI assistance, 3 way firefight with the flood covies and you involved, more vehicles to play with. I assume that we will see Forerunners next game so throw them into the mix. :p Interactive maps, like you defend a certain area like a gate, once that falls you have to retreat back to the main building.

Im more of a multiplayer guy but im looking forward to seeing how they handle firefight.
 
A27_StarWolf said:
how can they improve firefight next game? Aside from new enemies, what ideas do you guys have that might be fun/cool?

Realistic expectations should include improved performance in Matchmaking. Beyond that it would be cool to see unlockable AI buddies (like the ODSTs on Installation 04), increased player count, and better anti-griefing and idler-protection.

I don't know how the serious FF types like Ghal would feel about this but I always thought that FF would be the place where CoD and Halo should meet. Let me call in some ODSTs from orbit once I get a running riot or something.

Edit: would also be cool to play as grunts, skirmishers, etc. instead of just Elites in versus. Hell, would be cool to play as Covenant vs. humans as enemies.
 
A27_StarWolf said:
how can they improve firefight next game? Aside from new enemies, what ideas do you guys have that might be fun/cool?
A gametype similar to Firefight VS (which was a wasted chance), maybe in Halo 4 we get a similar gametype with actual multiplayer gametypes like slayer, ctf or assault, friendly AIs could fight and support your team. Just imagine a match of Invasion CTF with AIs on both sides.
We could also have to control a territory in order to get reinforcements (weapon drops, marines...) just like Invasion Slayer.
As Roche said improved performance is also a must.
 
A27_StarWolf said:
how can they improve firefight next game? Aside from new enemies, what ideas do you guys have that might be fun/cool?
-Mini campaign scenarios such as holding various locations for added score multiplier. Multiple locations will increase score greatly, but it will split your squad.

-Weather effects that come in for a few waves/rounds. An actual thunderstorm that reduces visibility and some weapons effectiveness. Forces players to stay indoors, unless they need ammo or want to gain some kind of multiplier in the storm.

-Force players to move. Destructible bases or something like the ammo placements in ODST where camping the infinite ammo box isn't an option.
 

MrBig

Member
Firefight needs progressive objectives (both defense and offense), aggressive enemies, more vehicle support, and allies with decent AI.
 
MrBig said:
Firefight needs progressive objectives (both defense and offense), aggressive enemies, more vehicle support, and allies with decent AI.

Uh...this could apply to all of Reach's MP just about. Makes me sad to realize the truth of it.
 
Bregmann Roche said:
Realistic expectations should include improved performance in Matchmaking. Beyond that it would be cool to see unlockable AI buddies (like the ODSTs on Installation 04), increased player count, and better anti-griefing and idler-protection.

There really should be vote to kick options, especially in FF. I think part of the problem is the auto-cycling though.
 
Devolution said:
There really should be vote to kick options, especially in FF. I think part of the problem is the auto-cycling though.

I'll go one better: what if the game cut you based on the percent of kills+assists you accounted for during that wave/round/whatever?

Karl2177 said:
Good maps primarily. IMO the only good maps are Beachhead, Unearthed, Corvette, and Courtyard.

Reach's FF maps are better than its regular MP maps. Again, I am sad.
 

Karl2177

Member
A27_StarWolf said:
how can they improve firefight next game? Aside from new enemies, what ideas do you guys have that might be fun/cool?
Good maps primarily. IMO the only good maps are Beachhead, Unearthed, Corvette, and Courtyard. Also the ability to customize the ammo crates. For example the ability to limit the amount of ammo - make it more akin to ODST weapon crates. Or make it so any weapon can regain ammo at one.

EDIT: :lol 2177th post
 
drop in drop out firefight with never ending games.

ai marines reinforced every wave/round or so.

covenant dropships come sporadically

vehicles come in from areas.

add dynamic map objects that change the way the fighting is done.

vehicles dropping off ordinance/reinforce vehicles more randomly.

basically you want to make it feel like a war and the last level where you just survive as long as you can.

skull progression.

--

It'd be like Firefight Playlist you enter it choose your map and connect with 3 other players playing that map. They may have just started or been playing for hours. When you drop out someone else gets put in there soon.
 
xxjuicesxx said:
drop in drop out firefight with never ending games.

ai marines reinforced every wave/round or so.

covenant dropships come sporadically

vehicles come in from areas.

add dynamic map objects that change the way the fighting is done.

vehicles dropping off ordinance/reinforce vehicles more randomly.

basically you want to make it feel like a war and the last level where you just survive as long as you can.

skull progression.

Hire Juices.

Seriously, you've gotta stop giving it away for free or they'll never PAY for it. Why buy the cow, right 343?
 

blamite

Member
A27_StarWolf said:
how can they improve firefight next game? Aside from new enemies, what ideas do you guys have that might be fun/cool?
Make it more like ODST. Make enemies aggressive again, in ODST grunts would charge across the map to get to you, in Reach they're more likely to leave you alone unless you provoke them.

Replace infinite ammo shelves with weapon racks like ODST had, so you eventually have to drop your starting weapons and fight with whatever you can pick up.

Tighter, more focused maps like Crater, Corvette, and Alpha Site, as well as maps like Security Zone, with Wraiths shelling your destructible defenses.

Place limited weapons around the map, also like in ODST. Remember making the trip to pick up rockets/extra ammo at the beginning of rounds on Crater? That was fun, and added more tension than being able to spawn with whatever weapon you want.

Basically everything I want from Firefight is in ODST.
 

Stinkles

Clothed, sober, cooperative
Siege mode where the Coveys surround you, cut off your supplies and wait for winter and disease to finish you off.
 

Kuroyume

Banned
Firefight needs Halo music playing in the background. I've always wanted that for multiplayer but I can sort of understand why they never did it with people communicating so much over Live. Firefight could really use it. In campaign it's those moments where the game throws a ton of enemies at you and the music swells that the game really becomes great. It makes you feel like a killing machine. It's a bit too quiet in Firefight and that makes it feel really boring.
 

MrBig

Member
OuterWorldVoice said:
Siege mode where the Coveys surround you, cut off your supplies and wait for winter and disease to finish you off.
You could have it where there are dedicated servers for people to join in a drop in/out style up to 16-64 players in which you have to buy upgrades and defensive structures with degenerative weather conditions (with dynamic day/night cycle based on real world server time) and an unlimited supply of covenant/forerunner AI troops that randomly descend on a large battlefield that is initially a barren rolling plain.
 
I want a reverse-Firefight. The Covenant/Forerunners/Precursors/Your Mother are hunkered down in a base, it's up to you and your teammates to destroy it as quickly as possible, while gaining as many points for kills.

Basically, make it like that Echo mode from Bulletstorm.
 

Karl2177

Member
Blue Ninja said:
I want a reverse-Firefight. The Covenant/Forerunners/Precursors/Your Mother are hunkered down in a base, it's up to you and your teammates to destroy it as quickly as possible, while gaining as many points for kills.

Basically, make it like that Echo mode from Bulletstorm.
Throw in some gametypes from multiplayer as well. Imagine taking a bomb into an AI fortified base.
 

GhaleonEB

Member
A27_StarWolf said:
how can they improve firefight next game? Aside from new enemies, what ideas do you guys have that might be fun/cool?
Some of this has been said, but here goes.

Technical improvements

Netcode, netcode, netcode. Firefight is a miserable experience for anyone off host. The leap from reach to Halo 4 needs to be as big or bigger as the MP mode from Halo 3 to Reach (which was enormous).

Editable maps. Reach uses a different game engine for MP and Campaign/Firefight. If not merged, then Forge needs to be applied in its own way to Firefight. The nature of AI pathing will understandably put limitations on what we can move around. But I would think the following should be player adjustable:

  • Player spawn points/zones
  • Weapon drop locations
  • Ammo crates
  • Health pack locations
  • Crates
  • Vehicle spawn points
  • Objectives (might be limited by AI issues)

Many of Reach's snipping maps would get big upgrades if we could make changes to the above.

Structural Changes

The sleeping Grunts on Corvette has had me thinking about the way Firefight games begin. I'd like to see the opening wave be very different than the rest. Imagine if we enter the map from one location, and it's already populated - we have to clear it, and then defend it. Imagine spawning where we do in Courtyard's Campaign section, and then have to push forward to take out an entrenched enemy, before it's reinforced. And so on with Beachhead, etc.

Closely tied to netcode improvements, I'd love to see more players added to Firefight, and then a renewed emphasis objectives. Generator Defense is a great start, as is Crashsite. I can't tell you how much I want to play 4 v 4 CTF with neutral Hunters patrolling the map.

Let there be other elements on the map. The area Glacier is from in Campaign had Banshees we could jack, and turrets we could activate. Why were those removed?

Allow a steeper or editable overlap between waves. In Reach, subsequent waves are triggered when three enemies are left from the previous one (hazard-triggered enemies are excluded from the count). Imagine if we could edit that to create a crescendo:

  • Wave 2 arrives when 3 enemies remain from the last.
  • Wave 3 begins when 6 enemies remain.
  • Wave 4 begins when 8 remain.
  • Boss wave begins when 10 remain.

This is subject to performance limitations of course, but it would be neat to be able to up the pacing this way.

Game options

Much greater granularity around all things bundled under "hazards". When drop pods land, how often, and what is in them. How often vehicles are deployed, and which ones. Whether snipers on on the map or not. Exactly what gets dropped off as ordnance. I want to design a boss wave where three drop pods and two Wraiths land alongside shock troops from the drop ships.

Editable traits for the ammo crates. I would love the option to limit how much ammo it held (displayed by a % indicator), or (so one player can't spoil it) have a per-player pool, similar to how lives can be shared or allocated.

Scalable AI is a must. Reach's decision to send one squad at a time greatly benefits single player, but it's near disastrous to co-op play. The AI should scale according to how many players are in the game, or (better yet) be able to have that edited. (# of concurrent attacking squads: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, all). Genny defense and Crashsite are set to 'all' in Reach, while all other modes are a just one.

I like Juices idea for ongoing battles to just drop into and out of. I have a list a few times this long but honestly this would be a big enough upgrade for Halo 4 and then some.
Tashi0106 said:
Uhh you guys are taking away my multiplayer maps for this shit lol
Firefight maps are taken from Campaign. Very little design/art resources are pulled to create them. In fact, I'd love to play Firefight on Multiplayer maps. Many of them would work better than some of the shipping Firefight maps.
 

Slightly Live

Dirty tag dodger
Off the top of my head, here's what I'd like to see. I have a million and one tweaking and low level suggestions but here;s the bigger paint brush stuff. Might not be serious.

Firefight 3.0

Forge

They need a Forge mode for Firefight to let us remove the ten dozen crates they will no doubt add to the maps for no reason.

Vehicles

The fact that we had to wait over a year just to get the basic Warthog in Reach's FF blows my mind. Uplift Reserve in ODST was vehicle heavy and easily one of the best FF experiences I've had, nothing in Reach has topped it so far. Either copy and paste the damm thing into Halo 4 do the right thing and include a decent vehicle heavy map.

Innovation

Firefight in ODST was great. Reach's FF took the concept and refined it. Excluding a few really omissions, FF has reached a peak. Anniversary is adding friendly AI to the mix but the next Firefight really needs to add something new, special and fucking awesome to shake things up. Gear's horde mode and COD's Zombie mode are pushing the general concept further within their respected franchises, so Halo really needs to bring something new to the conversation or risk looking stale.

Unique assets. With ODST and Reach, FF re-used campaign assets. Entirely. There's nothing really unique, from a player's perspective, to be found in the mode. So create some unique assets and fill it up. Reach's multiplayer was criticised by the fans because it reused some of the Campaign spaces, I think we should hold Firefight to same kind of standards and demand unique content for Firefight otherwise it will continue to look half-assed next to other game modes with unique assets.

Frames

I want a fixed frame rate in my Halo. In every mode. Unless there's a billion explosions happening on a goofy Forge map, I want and expect consistency. If a campaign level has a shitty framerate, why the heck would you continue and expand the miserable experience and include that same playing space in Firefight? It's not even just one level either. There's no damm excuse for it. Players have to face the realities of latency and networking lag for all kinds of reasons, such as the connection and networking model the game uses. Don't make us have to put up with a shitty frame rate in addition to these other factors.

Inter-nationality

The majority of Halo players reside in the US, but that doesn't and shouldn't exclude the significant amount of players that live in better countries. Also, most folks have "decent" connections, not perfect and not bad, but decent or middling connections that get the job done of the most part. Reach's Firefight is usually a juddering, lagged filled horror that forces groups of mixed nationality players to learn to adapt to the horrible experience. The reality is that US players rarely get to experience the horrors non-US players go through and considering the majority of Halo players are yanks, I think the status quo will continue.

It just feels like Firefight was scrubbed up to the standards that Americans will have a decent time and others just won't. I hope it changes. You can't improve a player's connection, but I'm sure there's some more magic left to conjure up to make things smoother for us superior countried folks.

Half-assed gametypes

How amazing is the Spartan versus Elites Firefight Versus mode? Oh wait, you most likely haven't played it? What about the tiny percentage of those that did play it? Oh. Versus Firefight, just like Invasion, sounds awesome as a concept. Write it down on a piece of paper and you'll want a pat on the back maybe. But it sucks. It just wasn't any fun and little effort was ever spent in trying to make it live up the potential it promises. I don't want half-baked and unfinished game modes tossed into the game, no matter how nice they appear in bullet point form. It it doesn't work, trash it before it sees the light of day or spend the time and resources to make it shine.

Zombies
(Controversial!)

Halo has had Firefight for two games now. And nobody cares. Seriously. Firefight playlist population numbers would make Team Objective blush. There's a significant portion of players that live in the Firefight playlists just to farm credits despite numerous ban waves. And Ghaleon. I'm pretty Ghaleon is responsible for 50% of all Firefight games played in matchmaking
I'm kidding, <3
.

So where is everyone? They are playing zombies. F**king zombies. On default shipping maps. Sometimes there's more people playing Zombies than there is folks playing Slayer games. That right, Zombies, a mode that was probably made in 5 minutes and uses nothing but existing resources is doing hundreds of times more player numbers than both Firefight and Invasion combined (both modes which required significant development resources investment).

What players are saying is that Firefight and Invasion were a waste of time. They wanted to play Zombies. They played Zombies in Halo 2 with honour rules. They played a proper custom gametype of Zombies in Halo 3 along with a playlist that appeared once a month and now with Reach they have a permanent home with thousands of other Zombies fans and always have other players to play with.

Heck, even COD does Zombies these days and the COD has seen the sense to give the game mode significant resources and investment during development. Halo been doing Zombies for even longer and no matter how hard the people that make Halo tell the players what to play, they go ahead and just play Zombies anyway.

I hate Zombies. I quite like Firefight (when it isn't laggy) and I loathe Invasion but I can see sense. If players want to play Zombies, let them play Zombies. Why waste time making levels and stuff if the majority of folks won't care?

Before another Firefight game mode is made, they should have a fully developed Zombies mode up and running first.

-

Halo is suppose to set the agenda, not follow it and I think that philosophy should be found in every significant game play feature.
 

Striker

Member
Tashi0106 said:
Uhh you guys are taking away my multiplayer maps for this shit lol
That's on the developer. There's no reason to limit the MP maps for FF ones. If so that's incredibly lame and a deterrent to the game, in my view.

There needs to be 11-12 maps, at the very least, at launch with the inevitably DLC coming months later.
 

Slightly Live

Dirty tag dodger
Hydranockz said:
Double-kill!

Sorry, Ghal and Dani seemed to wait to post those at the same time lol.

Dammit, Ghaleon's 100% serious reply is far more interesting than my 58% serious reply. =/

But yeah, looks like he was brief. I'm sure he could get a publishing deal with the amount of things he could say about Firefight.
 

Hey You

Member
Hypertrooper said:
I can't wait for the achievement list. When Chad had said you have to do stuff you did after you had finished the campaign, so many achievement ideas popped up in my brain.
Have they mentioned when they are releasing the achievement list?

I thought people would try to take a peak at Halofest.
 

GhaleonEB

Member
Dani said:
Dammit, Ghaleon's 100% serious reply is far more interesting than my 58% serious reply. =/

But yeah, looks like Ghaleon was brief. I'm sure Ghaleon could get a publishing deal with the amount of things he could say about Firefight.
A conversation I had at PAX has rejuvenated my interest in writing a full-on article about Firefight. Not sure if I could finish it before Halo 4 ships, though. :\
 

Woorloog

Banned
It seems that i'm suffering from Halo burnout, again. It was fun playing with you guys for a few days, then i didn't play Halo for almost a week, edit: then i did try to Forge something but my ideas didn't seem to work and gave up, and now i can't even touch it anymore.
I wonder if i've played so much Halo for a few years i burn out very easily. Or is it Reach?
The whole year i've been playing Reach only a week or two at times and then stopping.
I think i played Halo 3 in longer periods.
This burnout includes not giving a shit about the TU and new maps. Or maybe those are the cause? Either i don't see them being enough or because they'd make the current game so much better?
Rather frustrating, don't have much to do otherwise...

*sigh*

PS sorry if this feels like ranting, sometimes i find easier to deal with stuff by speaking (or writing) about it. Maybe.
 
GhaleonEB said:
A conversation I had at PAX has rejuvenated my interest in writing a full-on article about Firefight. Not sure if I could finish it before Halo 4 ships, though. :\
You shipped your campaign review a few weeks ago. We just have to believe. Other question we will get a new firefight map and I hope this time we will get new Firefight achievements: What do you want?
 
Introducing the ragequit medal. Kill someone and they quit less than 30 secs later, earn your ragequit medal. Most coveted medal ever.

5GwqB.png


if you have some critique go ahead and say something =p
 
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