Posts on Current Forum | Archived Posts
|
|
|
||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
| Frequently Asked Forum Questions | |
|||
|
||||
|
|
|||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| Search Older Posts on This Forum: Posts on Current Forum | Archived Posts | ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| Campaign Balance in the Halo Series | |
| Posted By: Train Dodger <NOSPAMtmesisrevenge@gmail.com> | Date: 1/16/12 7:19 p.m. |
|
If there's one thing that Anniversary reminded me of, it's how good it felt to be so powerful. In the first Halo, the Chief really felt like a walking tank. From Halo 2 onward, Bungie thought it would be better if the player died after being exposed to about two seconds of enemy fire. In retrospect, there were a number of other changes throughout the series that I didn't much like. In Halo 2: - Dual-wielding was added, so naturally, almost all of the dual-wieldable weapons are nearly worthless on their own except under special circumstances. - Frag Grenades were made into almost completely useless cherry bombs with a teensy little blast radius. - Plasma Rifles could basically kill you instantly. - Beam Rifles could also kill you instantly. - Elites could kill the player with a single stepping melee blow while holding the Plasma Rifle, which makes Spartans look just plain wimpy. Oddly enough, Flood Combat forms holding Plasma Rifles could do the same thing to the Arbiter, even though they melee with their whip-arm and not the Plasma Rifle itself. Basically, any enemy carrying a Plasma Rifle was automatically awarded a one-hit-kill melee ability, for some reason. It felt like they just threw it in late in development, as if someone arbitrarily decided that "we should start punishing players for getting too close, so they have to hide and pop out of cover all the time like wee little babies". Yes, it can be sidestepped, and you can melee them in the back, but that isn't good enough. I want to beat them down from the front. - Shotgun was massively nerfed, and was only effective if the barrel was practically touching the target. Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST went a long way towards fixing some of these issues. Halo: Reach almost completely reverts things to Halo 2 levels, only it gets even worse. In Halo: Reach: - Elite melee attacks are almost impossible to dodge or counter, and very damaging. You can't just walk up and bash an Elite's skull in like in the first game. - Elites carry concussion rifles that do massive AOE and stun, but seem useless when the player picks them up and wields them. Also, Covenant dropships fire the same absurdly powerful, accurate projectiles, forcing you to dance around like a chicken or hide inside a building whenever one is nearby. - Frag grenades are, once again, almost worthless, especially when compared to how they were in the first game. You can toss a frag grenade in front of a Jackal's shield and they don't even flinch, whereas they used to get tossed high into the air no matter where the grenade landed. - Damage is highly locational. You can melee the front of a Jackal's shield, and watch as it does precisely nothing. The force of the impact should go right through the shield and break the little bastard's arm. - Jackals almost never run away for any reason, even when an Elite is killed. - Enemies who are shot while holding a charged plasma pistol or throwing a plasma grenade never "fumble" and release the charge or drop the grenade at their feet, like in previous versions of the game. They hold onto the charge unless you kill them, and the grenade just miraculously pops out of their hands at full speed even if they're stunned. This particular change is a major pet peeve of mine. If you see an enemy charging a plasma pistol or throwing a grenade, your first impulse is to nick them with a couple rounds to get them to let it go. Halo: Reach eliminates that mechanic entirely, forcing you to just plain kill them. This actually makes the game seem less tactical, since your priorities for surviving almost every fight go from weakening, suppressing and minimizing key targets to - quite simply - killing before you're killed. - Hunters take absolutely ridiculous amounts of damage, and their weak spot seems smaller and far more difficult to hit. Two rockets to the face is no longer a guaranteed kill. Their melee attack has absurd range. You can step outside the range of the melee animation and still die. Their reach is far longer than the graphics would seem to indicate. It is also almost impossible to sidestep their melee, as they re-orient themselves while attacking. Even if you aren't directly hit by the melee attack, you may be sent flying backwards, making it more difficult to access their vulnerable spot on their back. Basically, if the player is forced to use every grenade on the map to kill one of these things, something's wrong. - Except for its seeking ability against aircraft, the Rocket Launcher is almost totally useless when compared to the Fuel Rod Gun. It does only a small fraction of the damage and AOE it used to, and you can hardly find enough ammo to make it worthwhile against Hunters. - Armor abilities are somehow supposed to make the player feel awesome, but to me, it felt like they "parted out" a bunch of attributes that you're supposed to have by default. In the first game, you were relatively fast and nigh-indestructible. In Reach, you have to choose between fast (Sprint), or indestructible (Armor Lock), or from any of the other relatively gimmicky abilities that don't really seem to have much effect. Jetpacking is fun, but makes you quite vulnerable to enemy fire and slow on the ground. Camo now acts like the Jammer equipment from Halo 3, so you can't tell where the enemies are without line-of-sight. Holograms don't trick AI opponents nearly as often as they should, either. Drop Shield is handy, but once again, you sacrifice mobility. Most of the time, I just held on to my Sprint and ignored the other abilities unless I was forced to use them. It would have been better if we simply unlocked these abilities as we went along and could toggle between them with the D-Pad or something. Sure, that might not be so good in Multi, but it would've been great in the campaign. What really soured me on Halo: Reach was the Elites. Yes, I realize we're playing as an S-III, and are therefore supposed to be "weaker", but that's no excuse, especially when you consider that Halo 2's Elite encounters felt almost exactly the same way, only Reach's are even worse because they're almost impossible to stick and they dart around and soak up damage like they're on a powerful cocktail of cocaine and PCP. It's almost as if someone at Bungie basically fell in love with Elites back in about 2003-ish during Halo 2's development, and decided that, without reservation, they should be totally superior to Spartans in every single close-combat encounter in all the subsequent sequels. Right. In the books, that is most certainly not what happens. The last thing we need is for Bungie to help stroke the already planet-sized egos of the annoying community of Otherkin/Furries that have sprung up around Halo's Elites. As for me, I'm of the "Spartan fans rule, Humanity for the win" persuasion, end of story. I mean, seriously. I still remember when the Elite fans were all complaining that they didn't have any armor customization options for Elites in Reach, besides armor sets. I would give up all the Spartan customization options if it meant that Spartans got a boost in melee damage and melee resistance in the Campaign in exchange. Keep in mind that I've beaten Reach on Legendary on numerous occasions, and I can finish it on Heroic rather casually in about four to six hours while killing everything in sight. I just find it disappointing how there are so few options when dealing with specific enemy types, especially at close range. You're basically forced to noob combo Elites above Major rank if you want them out of commission as quickly as possible, or assassinate them, or use a power weapon of some kind. In the first game, you could add grenades, melee beatdowns and even basic weapons to that list. At least the Shotgun is halfway decent again, though I'm not sure why it has that massive tube magazine on top if it only loads six rounds. Also, I don't really appreciate this emphasis on having the player scamper away from head-on gun battles and slip behind cover every couple of seconds when their shields go down. This isn't Counter-Strike. In the first Halo, you didn't take cover. You were cover. The Marines could stand a better chance of survival by hiding behind you and letting you tank the damage. That was the key difference that really set it apart from the sequels, in my opinion. If there's one wish I have for Halo 4, just one, it would be for them to bring the walking-tank feel from Halo:CE back to the series. The reason for this is simple. Even though I don't completely dislike the balance changes they made (the Halo: Reach campaign and the campaigns in the rest of the sequels were a whole lot of fun, IMHO), I just don't feel that they mesh very well with the whole idea of playing as a Spartan, story-wise. You're supposed to be augmented, and I could barely tell the difference between playing as an S-III or as an ODST. In fact, the ODSTs in Halo 3: ODST felt far more powerful than the S-IIIs in Halo: Reach, because the AI was a lot less aggressive. For that matter, ODST felt the closest to Halo: CE out of all the sequels. I suppose I just have a thing for games that let the player seriously Hulk out and go nuts, like Prototype, Infamous or Crackdown. It seems as if a lot of developers these days want the player character to expire if they're only momentarily exposed to enemy attacks, and I'm not so sure I like that trend. In Halo: CE, I was always in complete control of the situation, and the story itself seemed to pay heed to this fact. It wasn't a question of surviving a fight, because that was almost certainly a given. It was a question of how creatively and sadistically I would bring about the demise of my enemies. Each level was a canvas upon which I would paint tales of carnage and devastation, using their blood as the medium. In each subsequent sequel to Halo: CE, I can feel more and more of that power slipping from my grasp. The tables are completely turned. Instead of being the hunter, I feel hunted, relying on underhanded tricks and unrewarding gimmicks to save the day. In Halo: Reach, even if I win a fight quickly, the game finds some way to shame me; some way to make it seem like a near-run thing instead of an overwhelming victory. Yes, I killed an Elite, but I used the Plasma Pistol Overcharge/a Needler/Assassination/A Plasma Grenade/Shotgun/Fuel Rod Gun, so it doesn't count. So, to avoid that feeling, I end up subconsciously limiting myself to only those few weapons that I don't deem unsporting, like melee attacks, DMR, AR, frags, etc. Then, when I inevitably die from limiting myself to those options, I feel even more embarrassed. The first game never felt like that. It isn't so much a gameplay thing. It's an immersion thing, a story thing. If I can't kill a Hunter with a rusty spork, I'm no Spartan. I'm a toddler in powered armor. Just my two cents.
| |
|
| Replies: |
The HBO Forum Archive is maintained with WebBBS 4.33. |