: I love this idea. Allies come in and out of the story like power weapons or
: vehicles. Maybe even keep the main campaign as an entirely single player
: experience (or two Chief co-op for the oldies that insist nothing change).
: Leave the four player co-op to a cooperative side story campaign like
: Spartan Ops or Splinter Cell: Conviction's co-op mode and let that exist
: as your co-op mode alongside Firefight.

: - MacGyver10

I hate the bits where the Chief grovels around on the floor mewling for help. That is just so not the Chief. So I want to avoid that like the plague.

So how about changing the gameplay mechanic...

Have some levels be played with a team but...

The levels have an insertion and an extraction with the notion that time will pass between this level and the next (for instance: a slipspace travel to another planet witch, in the fiction, takes weeks or so).

We have hacked the Forerunner transporter tech but only to the point where we can extract a downed team member; it would be an emergency beamout without a return. (maybe there are no targeting scanners so we can't place them but we don't need to place them to extract them)

If the player charioteer goes down then you can take over the body of another team member and the team carries on with one less character. The down character is extracted via teleport and is patched up between levels.

So maybe we have solo Chief levels and some blueteam levels and, occasionally, the two meet for parts of, Chief solo, levels and the blue team members act, gameplay wise, like having a Scorpion delivered to the battlefield.

I imagine this would happen near the end of levels as it's easy to end a scorpion streak; you just add a door to force the player to leave the tank. But, if you can find a reasonable story reason, then you can limit the teamup time even in the middle of a level. It just takes ingenuity.

So I'd replace the grovel/revive mechanism with an emergency beamout mechanism and you have dwindling resources to complete the mission (for that level).

I wonder how this mechanism would interact with co-op play...