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