The Philosophy Behind War Games – A Rebuttal

A few weeks ago, NullPointer was kind enough to post an excerpt from an interview with Kevin Franklin, Halo 4′s War Games Lead Designer, in the Official Halo 4 Strategy Guide (post: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=45337613&postcount=3987). It contained a few bits that I found simultaneously fascinating and frustrating.  Here is the excerpt in full:

Is Halo 4′s multiplayer aimed at the hardcore multiplayer gamer, or have you given thought to the more casual player who is really intimidated by competitive online play?

One of our core goals right from the beginning was called “Halo for everyone”. We wanted to broaden the experience, but its always tricky to do when you have so many high expectations of a competitive game. So our first approach to this was Regicide. I remember back in Halo 3, there (was) a somewhat successful experience where for your first ten games or so, you’d start out in Boot Camp, and it was always a free-for-all, always on one map. As a result, you didn’t have to worry about disappointing your teammates. You just got to go in and fire at the first thing that moved. It was a good entry point, although it had issues later on in the game where players were exploiting the game to get into that hopper so they could kill the newbies. But if you had six people who had never picked up a controller before, it was a good starting experience.

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What I love about FFA is its both highly accessible for new players and very competitive for experienced players.With Regicide, its a free-for-all game, but the player is King and gets a crown over his head. Everyone knows where he is on the map, and there’s a big bonus for killing him. Originally we wanted it because that way, players who were in last place could catch up by making a couple of King kills. We found early on in playtests that most players who were three or four kills back, statistically speaking they had already lost. And we didn’t think that fit with the new player experience. So with Regicide, if you’re a new player and not in first place, you have some opportunities to catch up quickly. Also, in standard free-for-all, we used to find that experienced players would learn to get a sense of who the weaker players were, and would race to kill them off. But in Regicide, the player with the crown is worth so much more than anyone else, they are the entire focus. So it gives some of the less experienced players the chance to relax a bit.

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We thought it would only be for new players, but the more we saw our experienced players playing it, the more we started to hear them talking about strategies. So we added tweaks like giving bonuses to the player who’s managed to stay alive as King, so for example if you are King for 30 seconds we give you an Overshield. It’s ended up being a really unpredictable game type, and I think games come down to the last two or three kills, and lots of big comeback victories.

What makes a good multiplayer game?A lot of things going on there. I think at the deep core design level, I think a near-perfect-loop, for a game that you want people to be playing 5000 games or for ten years or whatever, that loop needs to be nearly flawless. And then, your goal is to fire that dopamine hit, and to make that happen you have to make successes as awesome as possible, and minimize defeats. So getting that player psychology is huge.
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What is it about multiplayer that gets you fired up?
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I have some rules about multiplayer design. One is that strong players should be able to easily dominate weak players. We try to mitigate this with good matchmaking, but nobody likes a drawn out game, especially when you know who’s going to win. The most exciting games are the ones that go down to the last kill, or the last second. Those moments of triumph, stealing that final kill in the last second.So those are the things that a single-player game can’t give you. Those moments.And I think you know you have a good multiplayer game when those moments start happening every single game. You can’t just script that action. It can only emerge from gameplay between humans.

Halo for Everyone – Noble Goal, Botched Execution

Let’s start at the top. Easing new players into the game is an admirable goal, and something that online games are generally very poor at doing.  Most don’t even put in the effort of trying.  Here’s the issue I have with their implementation: You want players to go in and not get frustrated, right?  You want new players to have a fighting chance. Then you implement a progression system where new players will be pitted against players who have more combat options at their disposal. An SR-1 going in will not have access to Promethean Vision, but will inevitably be matched with those who do. An SR-1 going in will not have access to the Stealth mod, which would at least give him a soft counter to Promethean Vision users. You might be saying to yourself, “Well, it unlocks so quickly that you just have to put a few games in before he’s on equal footing!” They’re going after people who are already intimidated by online multiplayer. Will those players put up with more than a few games of being handicapped and not knowing what is killing them? Somehow, I doubt it. This isn’t like Call of Duty where the presets are genuinely useful – most of the Halo 4 MP presets are dramatically less effective than the optimal customized options that people have put together. An AR/Hardlight Shield preset user is going to be relatively useless against a PV or Jetpack/DMR/Shielding/Stability user, and players that aren’t already good at Halo or shooters in general are going to be frustrated. I powered through it, as hardcore players will, because I used years of experience to overcome the handicap that the game placed on me. I suspect others did not fare as well.

If easing players into the game was really a big concern – big enough to fundamentally change the design of the game and its gametypes – why does Halo 4 not have any sort of codified tutorial? Why isn’t there a mode with bots to let players explore the maps and see how a gametype would play out before facing real players in that environment? Why aren’t the overhead maps from the strategy guide layered into the game, displayed during a loading screen before a match, complete with weapon placement and spawn timers? The ATLAS technology exists, why is it ignored in Halo 4? With DOTA 2, Valve is instituting a “mentor system,” where veteran players can sign up to play with new players and show them the ropes in a friendly manner. The MOBA genre is a far more impenetrable one than FPS, and this way a new player gets all the interactivity of a human being with the function and teaching capability of the best tutorial.

There are so many out-of-gameplay methods of giving new players information that allow veterans to completely ignore them if they so choose, but instead 343 chopped off the high end of the skill spectrum and broadened the lower end by removing metagame skills such as weapon spawn timer/location knowledge, spawn zone knowledge, and situational awareness during objective gametypes. The scoring mechanics of Regicide is a great example of this – a “blue shell” mechanic was put into place, as confirmed by Franklin above. The king, who is ostensibly the most skilled player in a match, has dramatically lower scoring potential because the ability to get a bonus is removed from his toolset. Franklin mentions that “a strong player should be able to easily dominate weak players,” yet we see players with fantastic K/D ratios losing Regicide matches to players with fewer kills, fewer assists, and more deaths than them.  The bad player was given a scoring crutch – a waypoint that results in an often-weakend King, and a bounty to easily leapfrog him in position. Team Regicide heavily mitigates this – both teams and every player in each team have the same scoring potential (king bonuses aside) because each King is capable of getting the other’s bounty.

wat.

If a strong team can dominate a weak team, why should the weak team be handed situational knowledge in the form of CTF waypoints? The contradiction between what was said and how CTF plays suggests that our ideas of “dominating” are different in terms of either definition or breadth. When I think of times that my team has dominated another, I think of us having fantastic communication, calling out spawns and taking people out, not letting the carrier get out of our base because we called his location out, supporting a flag run as the carrier snuck out of their base, and just having the upper hand in every category. More than just slaying. When we dominate in Halo 4′s CTF, it is almost entirely the result of us outslaying the enemy, combined with a well-timed push forward.  A team’s cumulative twitch/aiming skill has a massively disproportionate importance placed on it in 4, because team communication is not as vital given the glut of informational waypoints each MP mode (specifically CTF, formerly one of the most player-communication-heavy gametypes) has. Before, a team that was maybe not as accurate could beat a team that hit every shot because they could overcome their weaknesses with strong communication. Now, there isn’t really such a thing as truly weak communication because the important information is conveyed directly from the game to the player. There is still absolutely a gradient of skill there, but it is much easier to get by without talking than before.

The Near-Perfect Loop

Franklin mentions that for players to sink significant amounts of time into a multiplayer experience, the loop has to be as close to perfect as possible. But…what makes a loop perfect? Is it mechanical in nature? That certainly plays a role, and Halo 4 hits a lot of those targets. Structural? For me, I have to feel as though my direct actions and the direct actions of other players are what results in a win or loss, not the system favoring one side or the other. I want to feel like the playing field is level and that I just won a game without having anything handed to me. Player freedom is so incredibly important to my enjoyment of multiplayer games.  I love being set down in a sandbox with a bunch of people who all share the same traits as me, who all have to follow the same well-known rules as me, and seeing who works well within those confines. Halo 4 fails in this regard: Global Ordnance (which I’ve written more than enough about at this point) flies in the face of decisive player action, as do the nature of many AAs and tactical/support mods, and so do many of the randomized elements that the gametypes feature (personal ordnance comes to mind). That isn’t to say that these things can’t work, just that the execution really has be nailed if they’re going to be attempted. Instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and replacing past systems whole-hog, integrate them into a familiar system in moderation. That way, you can cover the weaknesses of each element by mixing and matching.

A point that sticks out to me: “And then, your goal is to fire that dopamine hit, and to make that happen you have to make successes as awesome as possible, and minimize defeats.” So…fellate the player as much as possible? This is a trend in multiplayer games that I have become incredibly sick of, because I think it completely misses the point of what makes multiplayer games awesome.  If everything is awesome all the time and the announcer is constantly shouting “OH MAN YOU ARE ONE COOL GUY/LADY!” then eventually those rewards become meaningless because there is nothing special about them. People don’t need Steitzer shouting because they got a Headcase.  That is not a meaningful achievement. People don’t need a ten second announcement string about a triple kill/headcase/comeback kill combo.  They’re excited because they did that. When Steitzer is reserved for big events (“Triple kill!”) or gameplay information (“Thirty seconds to win!” “Alpha under attack!”), like in past games, his appearance is something of note. I have tuned him out entirely in Halo 4 solely because he just does not shut up.  All things in moderation, 343.

More than anything, I think that quote is a disappointment because it resulted in a game that feels incredibly artificial. Make no mistake, all games are artificial constructs. But there is a difference between rewards feeling forced and feeling natural. Most of Halo 4′s reward systems fall strictly into the former category for me. Here is how it misses the point: When I throw a grenade underneath a Warthog and it goes barreling over my head and off a cliff as a result, I get that dopamine hit.  I worked for that, and something cool happened. When I hit a single headshot and Steitzer shouts “HEADCASE” because he happened to hit the sprint button a second before, I don’t get that hit.  I didn’t do anything of note.  Halo is this incredible amalgamation of gameplay systems that all interact with each other. It is an emergent gameplay generator – put a bunch of players into it, throw in a vehicle here and there and some weapons, and you will get amazing moments. Amazing moments already have an announcer: me, my teammates who witnessed it. We already know it’s cool, we’re already shouting about it. They don’t need to call out mundane things like a headshot on a sprinting player because there is an abundance of cool shit happening already.  All it needs is some space marine cosplayers and a motivation for them to try and kill each other in a fair, balanced rule system. Which brings me to the final section…

Not pictured: +10 GOOD JOB BLUE GUY YOU KILLED EM

“You Can’t Just Script That Action”…but You Sure as Hell Tried

“…nobody likes a drawn out game, especially when you know who’s going to win. The most exciting games are the ones that go down to the last kill, or the last second. Those moments of triumph, stealing that final kill in the last second.  So those are the things that a single-player game can’t give you. Those moments. And I think you know you have a good multiplayer game when those moments start happening every single game. You can’t just script that action. It can only emerge from gameplay between humans.“

Here’s the thing. The above is absolutely true. The best games are 50-49.  The best games have scores in the last second of the match. The best games are the best in part because they are rare, though. The best games don’t have gametypes that desperately try to prolong the action so that the match ends in the last minute.  The best games don’t make offense ridiculously difficult so that every score is important (or a total fucking chore).  The best games don’t inflate the score count so that more “awesome” moments can be experienced. Those incredibly moments just happen.  As a result of well-defined, fair systems.  As a result of player action, player communication. The best games feel like every moment is natural, not as though the game is fighting against the players, shouting “YOU ARE HAVING FUN” at them.  And those things that the best games don’t do, that’s what so many of Halo 4′s gametypes do. CTF offense is so much more difficult than it was before, and it was already very difficult against an equal team. CTF games go to the time limit almost every single game I’ve played of it, because the score limit was increased to 5 on maps and in settings that make getting 5 captures an absolute chore (radar, mostly). The games aren’t drawn out because the players are evenly matched, they’re drawn out because the game says they should be. In old settings, a great team would blaze through a bad team on CTF Zealot 3-0 in 2 minutes.  That happened regularly. In Halo 4, there is a high chance that a great team would get waylaid by the flag waypoint, or by the maps encouraging camping, or by the boltshot, or by an unlucky Global Ordnance drop, or by somebody using Active Camo. Games are more drawn out than ever. “Moments of triumph” have slowly morphed into moments of “fucking finally, god damn” (actual quote, source: me) as the push becomes very hard for players to do.  Meanwhile, Sudden Death has changed so that the game will end even if a player is holding the flag and about to hit the scoring zone, requiring a game to be tied before the timer hits 0:00 in order to go into overtime. That is a common thing in sports like American football, where it works well…but if they’re trying to promote tense moments, why get rid of a mechanic that has resulted in dozens of them over the course of the last 8 years?

This isn’t a problem for a lot of gametypes in Halo 4, so I totally understand people who don’t run into the issues, or don’t understand where I’m coming from. Specifically, CTF, Regicide, and Infinity Slayer variants are where I’m experiencing this conflict between apparent intent and the result. Things like King and Oddball have received fantastic additions and I’m perfectly willing to admit that, so please rest assured that I’m not blindly hating on anything. I still play Halo 4 and am able to have fun with Halo 4, but frustration is starting to mount over some of the moments where I feel the game, not the other players, is what’s fighting me and holding me back. I should also mention that I admire a lot of what Kevin Franklin and the 343 MP team attempted – they had very lofty ambitions.  I just don’t think that some of their execution worked particularly well.  At a certain level, I’m just trying to put into words where some of my frustration is coming from with certain experiences the game offers, and it is all in hopes that something will happen to make them disappear.

On Global Ordnance: Predictive vs. Reactive Player Behavior

There has always been a very special feel to Halo multiplayer.  Part of it is just the player mechanics: a fairly slow, cat-and-mouse game is a rarity these days.  Even past that, though, was a layer of structure within each match that dictated the flow and pace of a match. A large part of this structure consisted of carefully set on-map weapon placement and respawn timers.  Map designers were able to establish fairly predictable patterns of player movement and behavior coalescing around set locations on the map at set times.  This ensured that a strong team was required to employ some degree of movement around the map in order to maintain their lead over the enemy. By separating power weapon spawn locations and powerful points of control on the map by distance and letting the system by which the weapons spawn be fully understood by every player in the match (provided they take the time to learn it), the designer can give both teams a fighting shot, and thus the tide of the match can be reinforced or turned by player action.

Halo 4 did away with static weapon spawn locations and timers, replacing them with a system labeled Global Ordnance.  In the Global Ordnance system, a single power weapon will spawn at a single location on the map every two minutes, rain or shine. It appears at a glance that different weapons have different weightings, and single spawn locations can have their weapon pool tailored to them. For example, on Solace each Random Drop point has a single weapon assigned to it.  Rear right of each base will always be a Sniper Rifle, front left of the snipe ledge will always be an Incineration Cannon.  Meanwhile, most of Haven’s Random Drop points have three weapons each: the Sticky Detonator, Needler, and Scattershot. There are a few exceptions, where either an Incineration Cannon or Sword can spawn, and two in particular that can only spawn Binary Rifles.  There are two possibilities for how a Random Drop point is chosen for a Global Ordnance drop in a match.  Either the system chooses a spot and then uses the tailored list of weapons for that spot to determine the drop, or it looks at the total list of weapons that can drop on every point on the map, picks one, and then picks a point that the weapon in question can be spawned at. Given that a system in which every weapon has an equal weighting and a Needler is no less important than Rockets sounds totally asinine, I’m currently leaning towards the latter.  This allows for the weapons to be weighted based on their impact on the match.

However, given that the drops on symmetrical maps are usually…well, symmetrical (meaning that the possibility for a drop on one side vs. the other is nearly always 50/50 on these maps), there is no guarantee that one side of the map won’t get every single drop in the match, which pretty much hands them the victory in a majority of cases.  While this is absolutely a fringe scenario, it serves as a decent introduction for one of the biggest problems of the system as a whole: in no way can any player ever accurately predict what point is going to be picked at a given 2-minute interval, and the predictive element of Halo multiplayer is gutted as a result. If such a player exists, please direct him to the nearest casino, because someone who can predict the outcome of a dice roll made behind closed doors needs to use their talent for something more gratifying than a video game. The system as a whole is so opaque that the information I’ve given you in the last two paragraphs is the most I think anyone who doesn’t know what the code is can without rigorous gathering of data points to try and find a trend. What this would require is essentially a Forged testbed with a Random Drop point for each and every weapon to try and test their weightings.  Then, hundreds of hours of sitting… and waiting…and watching would be required in order to gather thousands of data points (to eliminate the effects of the random element) and determine rough weightings for each weapon and the rules the system uses (Can a point be chosen twice in a row? Can a single weapon be chosen twice in a row? Is everyone totally off-base with their theories about the fundamental underworkings of the system?) And that’s a big issue.  If the system is so opaque and impossible to grasp by the end user, then as far as I’m concerned, it’s not a satisfying system because it cannot be manipulated. Video game systems are satisfying to the user because they are able to discern the constants and variables, then manipulate those variables in order to achieve a favorable outcome.  When a system basically closes the door, tells the player to input their command through the mail slot, and then something magical happens inside with no transparency, those variables and constants remain a mystery to the player.  Even in something dice-based like tabletop gaming, there are known constraints placed on the dice rolls, and the rolls take place in full view of the player.  When you’re able to see the system at work, even if it is not a precise system, the player is able to better grasp how the system makes its decisions.  Global Ordnance fails to make its inner workings transparent to the user which is frustrating, to say the least. In our small community, we’ve seen highly competent players, who would otherwise be fully capable of understanding whatever system was in place, pulling out their hair because some variables behind the curtain, on the backend, may or may not have changed.  We have no way of knowing, and for my money, I believe that these users are simply seeing unique tendencies of the random system that may never show up again and that are being seen instead as a change in the system’s rules.

That’s not the only issue I have with the system.  I chose the words “predictive” and “reactive” in the title for a very specific reason.  Those two words represent the dominant tone of mid-to-high-level player behavior in older Halo titles and Halo 4, respectively.  Let me explain.  With a system in which all constants and variables are exposed, such as static weapon spawns, the player and his team are able to make very accurate, useful predictions about what players will be doing at specific points of the map at specific times of the match. By enabling players to change their tactics on the fly when they see that the enemy is running up the rock arch on Beaver Creek and allowing them to know that Rockets are about to spawn, you have given them the tools to change the pace of the match while not favoring one side or the other inadvertantly. The tone of such a scenario is predictive because the player is able to use his knowledge of A) the map and B) how players behave in a predictable system and know the other player’s goal and his next step of action. Even something as small as that flash of insight allows the player to compensate and try to gain the upper hand, before even a single shot has been fired.

In Halo 4, players are not able to make that kind of prediction because they cannot prejudge what spawns where.  It instead becomes a very reactive game, where an event, such as rockets spawning on the bottom of Abandon’s tower, and everyone scrambles to get there as fast as they can.  What this leads to is players not leaving the best point of control (in this case, top mid of Abandon) because they are in an ideal spot to start their scramble to whatever the game decides to spawn. In many situations, one team is handed a gift by the system in the form of a sniper or Incineration Cannon landing on their doorstep, while the other team gets nothing at all for two minutes, and may be granted something as insignificant as a Needler on the next drop interval.  Two minutes may not seem like a long time, I get it. When two equally skilled teams are trading pushes in a game of CTF, though, it’s a lifetime, and an Incineration Cannon is nearly a guaranteed capture if used competently. If you’re on that losing team, how can you see that drop’s effect and not feel like the system punished you for not being on the right team as you stare at your respawn screen while your flag exits your base? The game did not give you any notice as to what was dropping where (though this is alleviated through the Drop Recon perk, which still does not in any way make the system acceptable), so there wasn’t any way to beat the enemy team to their own base, and outplaying a power weapon is still a very difficult task, as with all Halo titles.  I can best sum up the change in tone for a Halo match by paraphrasing common radio chatter on a given team per game.  Past Halo titles: “Rockets are going to be up on the arch in 20 seconds, I’m heading there now.” Halo 4: “All right, something is going to spawn somewhere in 20 seconds, get ready to rush it.”  It’s a change in the ability of the player to be specific about what they think is going to happen.

Global Ordnance arose, as far as I can tell, from good intentions.  343 stated that they wanted to increase movement around the map and give newer players a chance against veterans.  But was this the right way to do that?  There used to be several circuits between power weapons and points of control on the map that would be continually active as power weapon spawned throughout the match. Since each weapon had a different spawn timer, the circuits would stagger their activity and often a few were active at the same time.  There was map movement ingrained into the static weapon spawn system.  A team holding the top of Ivory Tower could not just stay put for the majority of the map.  At least one of them had to give up their position of power to gather rockets, the Overshield, and the sword. Priorities had to be set and hard choices had to be made about whether or not it was the right time to push for a weapon or if doing so would compromise their high ground.  If that decision wasn’t made quick, the enemy team had an opportunity to grab the weapon in question and make a push.  With Global Ordnance, only one circuit is open at any given time, and there is no continuous movement, just one reason to move every two minutes. People still have to make the decision whether or not to give up that point of control during those moments, but on the whole a dominant team is able to hold that point more easily because just one weapon is spawned at a time, and there is no guarantee that the weapon will be worth going after.  In that case, the dominant team just needs to play what is essentially a 2 minute round of Firefight, holding their high ground against the enemy team’s advances. If the weapon is worth pursuing, the dominant team is in a superior position to do so by merit of having constantly strong map control.  Take Abandon as an example, as it is the most obvious I can think of. If a team is holding top mid, they don’t have any reason to move if the game spawns a Needler somewhere. If it spawns rockets, they are in a fantastic position to quickly drop down, grab them, and return to the high ground.  If it spawns a sniper on the beach, they can send one guy there and use their line of sight to the entire map to cover him and suppress the enemy team while he grabs it.  This still happened in classic Halo, don’t get me wrong. But there were more moments of opportunity for each team with those multiple weapon/movement circuits, whereas the focus now is on a single loop at a time. As for giving newer players a chance against veterans, that’s the matchmaking system’s job. In my eyes, these systems should be designed with the idea that two relatively equally skilled teams will be going against each other, not that a rookie to the series will be playing against an MLG player.  Even then, such a dramatic change in such an important pacekeeping system doesn’t seem necessary. Introduce a forced playlist that uses those fancy HUD overlays 343′s so fond of to show new players what the weapon spawn times are. Give players a series of maps with weapon placements in the game’s menu, rather than saving them for the Official Guide to Playing Halo: Two Hundred Pages of “Push Up on the Stick and Shoot the Aliens,” or for the website like Bungie did.  Or if you’re hellbent on keeping the random system, give everybody the Drop Recon ability by default so that players get some warning.

What does it mean for Forgers? Spawning weapons using the traditional tools doesn’t work anymore. The weapons will refuse to spawn. You can use Initial Ordnance items with the Resupply Time slider to approximate the old system, but then you have a mess of waypoints cluttering the player’s HUD and you can’t change the ammo per weapon like you could with the other tools.  Forgers are now having to accomodate an entirely different style of play when they make their maps, one where they can’t really predict how the loops are going to work in a given match. Not necessarily a bad thing in its own right, but having the option to at least make a classic map would be nice.

I’ve been asked if I think the ideas present in Global Ordnance are totally incompatible with those present in static weapon spawns.  Of course not. The issue isn’t that the system exists at all, it’s that it exists in replacement of something that was so important to classic Halo.  With Personal Ordnance, I can stop playing those two playlists and be away from it.  Global Ordnance is…well, global.  There are some ways you could presumably integrate the Global Ordnance system and traditional static weapon spawns, and the key is moderation (on both ends). Having largely static spawns but one or two (symmetrical) key Global Ordnance spots that would spawn a specific class of weapons seems like a decent compromise.  If you were playing Haven, and knew that one spot was going to resupply every two minutes with something, it would be better than having no predictive abilities at all.  If that doesn’t float your boat, even just having Ordnance drops on a set rotation (or even a series of rotations where matches could play out differently) would be preferable to me, as long as the Random Drop points are in more or less neutral positions.  Introducing variety to an often-stale formula is a noble goal, but not when that system overrides player agency to the degree that Global Ordnance does.  As with so many things I’ve written about, execution is everything.

Please note that unless otherwise specified, most examples are intended to exist in the context of a Slayer game, as it is a fairly “vanilla” background without any additional elements influencing player behavior.

Some Halo 4 Impressions

I don’t know how useful impressions are anymore just three days out, but hey, I’ll get it out of the way now rather than later.  For those worried about spoilers, the talk here will be very general in nature; I’m certainly not in the business of ruining the experience of others.

Jumping into Campaign first was the obvious course of action.  Let me get this out of the way first:  people who say Normal is the new Heroic are crazy.  Halo 4′s Heroic is fairly easy, certainly not anywhere near any previous Legendary level of challenge as some have said. To keep the difficulty talk together, I did play the first couple of levels on Legendary, and it was no problem.  The difficulty has been overblown pretty significantly (The two campaign challenges this week are completing the first level on Legendary, and completing a mission on Heroic or harder with Thunderstorm on; I combined the two and I died twice on the first level.  Take that as you will.).  Heroic took me roughly six and a half or seven hours of actual gameplay, which is in line with previous Halo games for me.  I found several terminals, though I did not unlock the achievement for finding all of them, so there must have been some places I missed.

A review  was posted in Vire’s Review Thread (which publication it was eludes me at the moment) that stated that Halo 4 is to Halo 3 as Halo 2 is to Halo 1.  I wholeheartedly agree with this as far as the campaign goes.  Those expecting large, Ark-style vehicular arena sections should keep their expectations in check–the vehicle sections in the game are more restricted in nature, though still a good time.  As with the campaign in Halo 2, the game largely focuses on strong interior combat, or at least small-scale infantry battles.  If you were expecting big vehicle sections, Spartan Ops has you covered–the first chapter of episode 1 is a massive vehicle sequence.  That’s not to say there isn’t any fun to be had in vehicles in the campaign or anything, just that it’s not of the scale that some are expecting. The vehicles, by the way, control fantastically.  The Warthog is heavy again–it is heavy like the Halo 2 Warthog, tending to land on its wheels and slam down to the ground, but retains the “ability” to be affected by physics impulses like grenades, the concussion rifle, etc.   Focusing on smaller scale encounters has its own set of benefits, though.  The core infantry combat is as good in Halo 4 as it has ever been in the series.  The former Covenant species still fight with a fantastic mix of styles, and that dynamic is alive and well.  Everybody knows the feeling of popping an Elite’s shield, having him duck away, and being forced to pursue and finish what you started.  It was great.  It is still great.

But what about the Prometheans? 343′s new enemies bring some unique flavor to the combat, flavor that meshes very well with the core Halo mechanics. Here is their combat loop, in a nutshell: Kill the Watcher.  Kill the Watcher, because he’s a dick.  Kill the Watcher, and everything else is cake.  Pop the Crawlers with a single headshot, that’s enough to put all variants of them down.  Then hammer on the Knights until their shields burst, reload, and hit their heads.  I know that sounds simplistic and reductive, but it’s a loop that is engaging, and more importantly, fun through and through.  There is a little less room for improvisation in this enemy set than the Covenant, though.  The Watcher’s death is of vital importance, if only because his Archvile-style enemy resurrection is equal parts annoying, panic-inducing, and terrifying.  There has been some talk about whether or not the lack of variety hurts the replayability of the Promethean-heavy levels, but I don’t necessarily think it does. Look at it like this: better a few well-designed enemy classes than meaningless overlap of function like the Halo 2 Brutes or the Drone/Skirmisher role conflict.  The AI for both enemy factions is still best-in-class, with Knights teleporting to safety as their shields pop, Watchers folding their wings to make their profile smaller as they take fire, Elites ducking behind cover when they’ve been compromised, and Grunts occasionally deciding to enable the Martyrdom perk.  Protip: Kill the Needler guys first, because if there are more than a couple of them you’re going to die. Friendly AI is most certainly not best-in-class.  Following a well-known Halo tradition, UNSC forces are morons.  They will hesitate before firing the chaingun, they’ll target the Ghost behind the hill instead the Wraith that is boosting into you (which by the way, will explode your Warthog now), they’ll even fire at corpses for a good second before moving onto a new target. Someday I hope a game releases with decent friendly AI, but this aint it. Armor abilities in the campaign are often fairly perfunctory, with three of them (jetpack, Promethean Vision, and thruster) being used in what I would consider a tailored fashion, with them being perfect for the scenarios in which they are placed.  Before moving on to very, very loose story talk, I should mention (given previous articles) that damage and weapon feedback is overall nearly as good as it was in Reach, and that is the case for both Campaign and War Games.  The Prometheans have subtler signs of damage that I don’t know I have entirely figured out, but a shield burst effect on the Knights is still readily apparent, and their susceptibility to headshots is indicated by their bright skulls being revealed to the player. They have significant other feedback issues, but that will have to wait until screenshots are available on Waypoint.

Edit: I’ve removed the story section to be as courteous as possible to the readers.  There wasn’t much here, and certainly nothing specific, but I figure nothing is better than something in this case.

I’ll quickly mention Spartan Ops by saying that it seems like it has the potential to be totally awesome. Each of the five chapters of Episode 1 took me about 15 minutes, solo Heroic.  Those 15 minutes consist of one or two encounters with a few narrative hooks in the form of comm audio.  Over an hour of what is essentially campaign content each week (the quality bar is often up there with the campaign gameplay) sounds like a great promise.  At the time of this post I haven’t viewed the the CG episode that accompanies the missions, since at the time my playtime was limited.  I’ll get around to it and try to update this with impressions of that as well.  Challenges for Spartan Ops are weekly, and I would assume that each episode has that week’s challenges tailored towards it (I was able to complete all of the Spartan Ops challenges in one playthrough plus replays of two missions). One of those replays was in coop over Live, after waiting a significant amount of time to find a match for the second mission.  Some bad news:  coop netcode is still awful.  I wasn’t lucky enough to be chosen as host, so I was instead bestowed with a full second of input lag.  I don’t know where my teammate was located, it’s entirely possible he was European, so maybe it wasn’t an ideal scenario in the first place.  I did notice that the enemy encounters were not tailored for player count, so solo players will have a more difficult time than those who play with 3 friends (hopefully on LAN), just as is the case for former campaign playthroughs.

There are some fantastic encounters in the two PvE components of this game. There will be some amazing stories that players will want to tell.  That’s why I hope 343 stays true to the hints they recently gave about patching in campaign theater.  I guess I’ll say that a part of me thinks that the panorama/campaign screenshot community will have a little less joy if it does come back, because the incredibly high-resolution skyboxes and vast 3D backdrops with amazing draw distance that past Halos have done so well are almost entirely gone.  They have, unfortunately, been replaced with relatively low-resolution 2D skyboxes.  I spend a lot of time in Halo games zooming in with an assault rifle and staring into the distance.  This now results in an obviously compressed jpeg appearing in my view  The game looks fantastic otherwise, so I suppose some corners did have to be cut in order to achieve that.  Not a huge deal, but worth mentioning.

I’ve spent between 7 and 9 hours in multiplayer as well, and I’ve reached SR-25 in that time.  The process is accelerated to such a degree that at one point, between SR-8 and SR-13, I had earned five levels in three Infinity Slayer games.  Granted, I was going +25 or more in each, but still. The challenge rewards for campaign and Spartan Ops are such that gaining enough XP to begin crafting a loadout will be much less arduous than I had anticipated (spending the last three months as a Nova in Reach has made me jaded).  I currently have three custom loadouts, each using either the DMR or Light Rifle, and either Jetpack or Promethean Vision, all of which use Mobility and Dexterity.  It’s not that I don’t like the Battle Rifle–I do, but I’ve had such great success with the DMR that the BR will find a place somewhere in my fourth loadout at SR-29 (I believe that’s the number, at least). I want to put something to rest: Promethean Vision is not useless because of the inclusion of the radar. Promethean Vision is ridiculously powerful.  You can see from end to end on Haven with it, easily.  You can see the enemy team spawning on their end of Solace from your base with it.  I’ll get into this when I talk about my time in CTF, but PV is essential for at least one member of each team.  And I abuse it readily while simultaneously being disdainful of its existence. I alternate it and jetpack as my needs shift from match to match.  Take all of this and the following with a grain of salt (anybody who makes a salt joke in their head while reading this is going to be slapped), as none of the MP stuff is even capable of being properly judged until sometime next month when people have figured out the intricacies of each system overlaid above the basic mechanics.

I think this is a good spot to inject a bit of positivity before I go on.  Mechanically, as far as the weapons, player movement, etc. go, Halo 4 is a fantastic game. Everything feels powerful, I feel like I’m in control of my ability to murder internet men, I can make jumps with ease.  That’s what everybody has said at various events that’s played the game and I agree.  If the structure of the matches hearkened back to old Halo games, I’d be hard pressed to find a better Halo multiplayer experience. Having said that, the overarching structure, mostly involving Global Ordnance, starts to diminish that euphoria.

The “Searching for Games” screen is super weird now.  It has player cards that extend off the screen that say either “Looking for Player” or “Incoming.”  You can’t scroll across them as people start to come in, so you have to rely on a small bit of text that says something to the effect of “Players Found – X/Total.”  It’s just a weird change to throw out the classic Halo lobby/matchmaking system and replace it with this. The lobbies themselves are fine in terms of layout, if not necessarily in function.  I don’t love the player cards (they don’t animate very smoothly), but it gets the job done.  I’d prefer Active Roster, but maybe next time (By the way, the chicken emblem is called Active Rooster.  That shit is hilarious.). The voting lobby in matchmaking is the same as the custom game lobby that we’ve all seen, but the top section just contains three voting options. Once you vote, it pulls up the player cards and you can not scroll back up and change your vote.  Two things that bother me:  The service record is still buried, and there is no indicator of who is in a party with who.  I loved that the Active Roster let you know when a team of Inheritors was going to dump on you so I could prepare myself for Banshee abuse.  No longer.  Patch it in!

I can now say that I hate Join in Progress and be able to back it up.  I’ve been matched up with people and gone into a voting screen like classic Halo maybe ten or fifteen times out of thirtyish games.  The rest have all been JIP games, and most of them have been in situations where one team was dramatically outscoring the team I was joining.  I joined a BTB IS game where the score was 700-250.  They had thirty kills left until the end of the game and were 45 kills ahead of my team.  They were a full party, with matching emblems and clan tags.  I was a random on a team of randoms.  There was no way I was going to stay in there after the match was over to get a fresh match with a voting screen, because it would just result in me being put with a bunch of people who very obviously couldn’t keep up with the enemy team. Welcome to Join in Progress if you don’t have a team to play with.  There is no toggle for JIP when searching that I could find.  Patch it in!

I began in Infinity Slayer, after seeing its population of 400 while other playlists, including CTF and Dominion, sat at a sad, lonely 30ish players.  A vision of the future, folks.  I was pleased to see that starting ordnance is static.  The Sticky Detonator always spawns on the top right side (looking from the blue spawn) of Haven.  The incineration cannon always spawns bottom mid on Solace.  Opening rushes are alive and well in Halo 4 multiplayer.  Beyond that, I had no idea what was spawning when or where, and it was frustrating. The initial ordnance spots do not necessarily seem to dictate where future ordnance will spawn, so a Railgun may appear below my team’s snipe ledge on Solace, or a totally different weapon might spawn on their side in a totally different location.  Call me unwilling to change, call me closed-minded, but Infinity Slayer is structurally so different to the classic Halo Slayer match that I was becoming more than slightly annoyed when I would see a poof of smoke on their side of the map and then a bright blue railgun round flying towards my face.  All of the above is Global Ordnance.  Personal Ordnance on top of that just kind of solidifies IS’s place as a semi-wacky fun time gametype rather than a Squad Slayer sort of semi-serious experience.  For me, Halo matches are interesting to me because of the circuits created as players push to weapon locations before they spawn because they have the knowledge to do so.  They can predict, with a relative degree of certainty, what it means when the enemy is at a certain location at a certain time and then (this is key) they can adjust their tactics to compensate. There is still adjustment of tactics in Halo 4 IS, don’t get me wrong.  The difference is that it occurs after the event has taken place, not before.  That prediction element is impossible.  Maybe I’ll grow to love it (though I do currently like it), but it doesn’t leave a wonderful first impression when the alternative is a hyper-stripped-down experience with Slayer Pro.  I like radar, call me crazy.  I like having all the armor abilities and loadout options available to me.  I just don’t like the change in match structure that randomizing drops brings to the table.

After a while, as more people started to get the game, Dominion’s population rose and I was able to get a few matches in. I’ll start off by saying that I really like the idea of Dominion.  I like evolving the Territories concept by making the individual territory important to maintain control of instead of being able to shrug and go for another one to replace it.  The escalating resupplies certainly achieve that.  But here’s the thing. I hate Heavies, I really do.  It has ruined 2 iterations of Big Team Battle for me.  Dominion, as it escalates, basically becomes Heavies, or the third phase of Invasion.  At one point I had a Binary Rifle, there were two other Binary Rifles untouched below the middle base on Vortex, and there were two Incineration Cannons waiting to be picked up at the A base.  On top of that, there were two Wraiths waiting to be spawned. I love the idea of Dominion, I really do. But it turns into Heavies pretty quickly, and that will preclude me from getting very involved in it.

There was a challenge to win two King of the Hill games, so I spent a bit of time in there as well.  King remains largely unchanged, with a few small but important differences.  The spawning is still Crazy King style, as far as I could tell, but the hill does not have a visible constantly ticking timer until it moves.  Instead, each hill has 25 seconds of time that only deplete when someone controls the hill. When that count starts to get low, a new hill marker labeled UPCOMING appears and that’s where the new hill will appear.  It takes some of the guesswork out of KOTH, and is a great change.  I believe there still is an invisible timer where it can change on its own, though.  This is as good a place as any to mention this. I played King on Ragnarok.  It’s a 5v5 playlist.  Ten people, two mantises, two banshees, two ghosts, two warthogs, four mongeese.  It’s kind of ridiculous.  I was hoping that the vehicle count we had seen was just the BTB variant, but I guess not.

I finally got a few CTF games in. I’ve talked about the changes to CTF to death, on this very site no less.  I’ll say this, and hopefully not ramble on too long.  Stealth in CTF is dead.  The games I played all had PV users hanging around their base pulsing it regularly, and I was caught every time I tried to sneak in.  There is no way to sneak in to get the flag (due to PV), or sneak out with it (due to the waypoint). I desperately hope that something is done about this, because stealthing was my favorite part of Halo CTF.  It was, as far as I’m concerned, one of the most important and defining strategies for the gametype.  Let me be clear: New CTF is still fun. But it’s the high fructose corn syrup Coke to classic CTF’s cane sugar Coke.  I don’t know why I use Coke as an analogy for fun.  Coke is not fun, kids.

Aside from some time spent in Big Team Slayer (which I desperately hope gets some objective gametypes soon), that’s the menu I’ve been ordering from the last few days.

Halo 4, judging the base gameplay from a mechanical standpoint, is a great game.  I won’t do the ranking each game in the series thing, because it’s totally dumb, but it has potential to sit near the top of the list that I’m not going to write down ever, largely depending on how they support multiplayer and how well the PvE holds up on replays.  And it manages to get that spot on the not-list in large part because whatever its problems, it’s just a damn fun game when everything is working properly. On a very basic mechanical level, it feels right. I can lament some of the key changes all I want, and I certainly will continue to do so because I think there’s some definite, tangible improvements (even if some of them are recessions to previous gametype iterations) to be made, but at the end of the day I just want to keep playing.  I should be able to get a few more hours in on that Xbox before the game launches, and I’m excited to do it all over again on my own profile, in my own chair, with a full team helping me actually see a voting screen.

Equipment and Powerups: The Merits of Scarcity

Note: armor abilities will not be addressed here — they’re a whole different ballgame.

Multiplayer maps in a traditional arena-style shooter can’t always just rely on using weapon spawns to direct flow.  Often, there are more viable ‘power’ spots on a map than there are weapons that make sense for the type of map, and bloating your map with power weapons doesn’t make a better experience — something that Forgers in the Halo series learned fairly quickly. Luckily, shooters came up with a variety of powerup systems that can occupy these spaces without contributing to the aforementioned weapon bloat.  Quake had Quad Damage, Unreal Tournament had armor and shield belts, and Halo had the Overshield and Active Camouflage powerups. Halo 3 attempted to fill more of the empty power spots on the map with its Equipment system, but unfortunately, it was a system that never felt like it was executed properly, and I feel that’s because it did not adhere to the tried and true constraints of the traditional powerup system.  The way powerups worked was a fairly brilliant piece of design.  What made the powerups work?

• They were on very long spawn timers — 1-3 minutes for OS wasn’t uncommon, depending on the game.
• They were activated on pickup, you couldn’t choose when to use them.
• There were scarce — more than a couple powerups on a map was a rarity.
• They were time-limited.

Contrast this with equipment: Sandtrap’s Regenerators (as an example) are on 30 second spawn timers, Bubble Shields are almost all on 60 second timers (the latter of which would be fine, if there were just one on the map).  To give some perspective on those timers, Regens last 15 seconds once deployed and Bubbles last 20.  What this means is that the downtime on these items is far closer to zero than it should be. With powerups, people called out spawn timers because it was a rarity.  People bothered to learn them because the timers that they were on dictated the pace of the match.  This is not the case with equipment.  There was no rarity.

That lack of rarity was in large part because equipment items were scattered everywhere.  Using Sandtrap as an example again, there are two Regenerators on that map, one per base.  Which is fine, that’s awesome.  But on top of that, there are three Bubble Shields that are placed within ten seconds walking distance from each other.  You could walk a relatively short distance and drop three shields, and that is insane. Equipment was seemingly placed willy-nilly, without regard to what the items actually did.  If someone was getting pinged while walking the rocket elbows between the lifts and the main spine, they had the potential to be practically invincible, bouncing from one bubble shield to the next, rather than outsmarting or outmaneuvering the aggressor by dropping down.  Part of me thinks that this particular instance was object placement apologizing for map design, since spawns near the lifts were common and the entire area around that zone is a dead man’s land, an open killing field.  That doesn’t excuse the placement, at least not for me.  Longshore, an 8-12 player map, features two Regenerators, a Bubble Shield, a Power Drainer, and a Gravity Lift in combination with both an Active Camo and Overshield.  You cannot sneeze on that map without running into a powerup, a pause-button item or a supergrenade item.  When you consider that these items are used not to replace powerups, but to complement them, you can start to see how it looks like a pinata just burst open above the map and littered the ground with equipment-shaped candy.  There’s always an argument had that “equipment required map control, so it was fine.”  And I guess depending on your definition of what map control is, you might have a point.  But when the items are scattered everywhere and are coming back with such frequency, I honestly don’t think map control played much of a role at all.  Picking up a piece of equipment wasn’t an event, it was commonplace.

The three Bubble Shields, so close together.  Not pictured: Two Power Drainers, one Grav Lift, one Trip Mine, all hidden by geometry in this shot. All within 30 seconds of each other.

That isn’t to say that all Halo 3 maps overdid it, of course.  Guardian and Epitaph (yes, Epitaph), just as two examples, had smart equipment placement.  Guardian featured a single Bubble Shield, and Epitaph had two pieces of equipment, one at each end of the map.  Note that the spawn timers for these items was still relatively short, but the placement was well-considered.

I mentioned before that powerups were time-limited, and I think that element in combination with their activation-on-pickup use model is incredibly important to understanding why they functioned as well as they did.  Powerups did more than encourage movement to different areas of the map, they dictated the pace and flow of a match.  When you picked up the OS on Beaver Creek in a CTF match, you knew that the OS was immediately going to start depleting, wasting valuable durability, and that it wasn’t going to be back for a long time.  You knew that you were never going to have a better opportunity to make a push into the enemy base.  This caused an ebb-and-flow style match pace to appear, where aggression peaked as powerups spawned and gradually waned to a more base level.  When you grabbed Active Camo, you had 30 or 45 seconds of cloak to either sneak as quickly as you could, or just be aggressive in general.  It introduced a time pressure that is simply not present with equipment, or armor abilities, for that matter.  When you can just drop down a Bubble Shield at any time, which is honestly more effective than an Overshield to begin with, being an area effect that blocks 100% of damage inflicted on it (something that the Drop Shield improved on, not that it’s any better overall), there’s no pressure to use it.  You save it until the last second when you need a get-out-of-jail-free card.  And honestly, that’s the biggest difference between the two systems.  Most of the focused-on equipment items promoted defensive behavior, not offensive pushes.  The ones that could have really given the player tools to go on offense, like the Flare, Radar Jammer, and Grav Lift were either removed from matchmaking entirely or just not given the attention that they deserved.  Those items didn’t let you kill anyone any more easily unless you used them exceptionally well, unlike the Power Drainer (which had a mile-wide radius), and they didn’t inherently make you an immovable tank like the Bubble or Regen did.  Items that could have changed the playing field without being overpowered were left to rot, and that’s one of the biggest bummers of the series.  Nobody would have cared if a Grav Lift was on a 60 second timer, it was just a movement enhancer, not a combat enhancer.

The pinnacle of dynamic gameplay.

Both of these systems have gone the way of the dodo.  Which, even with all of my trepidation over how equipment was handled last time, is a huge shame.  The focus on reusable abilities means that unless the game totally changes, the abilities have to be inherently less of an event, which is just giving up on the opportunities that were lost by equipment and used to great effect with powerups.  Bungie has a bit of a history with making these ideas that are wonderful and full of potential on paper and not quite hitting the execution, but I sure would like to see them take a second shot at it.

Halo’s Audiovisual Feedback, Part Two: Waypoints, the Multiplayer Announcer, and Overexposure

Hot off the heels of the last feedback post, it’s time to take a look at the other two primary feedback and information systems that Halo uses: HUD waypoints and the multiplayer announcer.  Unlike the previous systems, which were handily integrated into the art and action of the game, these systems lie a layer above, trying to stay balanced between being helpful and being intrusive.  The games up to this point have managed this with varying degrees of success, but recent showfloor videos of Halo 4 matches are worrying in this regard.

Waypoints and HUD indicators have traditionally been used in very specific, often time-limited roles in order to portray information on gametype objectives, and they’re very effective at it.  Things like the location of dropped flags, of bomb arm spots, of Oddballs and their carriers, of hill and territory locations, and even of ordnance drops in Invasion gametypes.  The word “unintrusive” is of extreme importance when discussing how well waypoints do their job.  The very moment they become a distraction, or obstruct the player’s vision and interrupt their actions, they have failed.  A good example of where waypoints fail is Reach’s firefight ordnance indicators. These are persistent, not disappearing until the weapon has been picked up, and they are fully opaque, blocking view of any enemy behind them.  When I set up at the end of the Walkway on Courtyard in order to funnel the enemies to me, there’s often a big, green cube labeled “ORDNANCE” obscuring my vision.  This isn’t helpful, it’s annoying.  Yeah, I goddamn know there’s a target locator there, thanks.

Most of the time, Halo has used waypoints to great effect, and very sparingly.  They are used to convey extra, useful information, like the time left to return a flag, and they do it subtly by (for example) integrating the reset bar or time left until hill reset into the HUD element art itself.  In Bungie’s Halo games, the highest number of waypoints I can remember encountering at once is five or so, in Territories gametypes, spread across the map.  The waypoints did not follow the player by appearing at the edge of the screen when he turned away, and even then, that many was specific to that gametype.  In a normal Objective setting, there might be three on the screen at very fleeting moments, max.  Note that this is discounting player service tags, since that varies from playlist to playlist and isn’t indicative of a design philosophy as such.

How does this contrast with what 343 is doing with Halo 4?  I love them to death, but they are littering the screen with Reach Firefight ordnance-style waypoints.  Consider the screenshot below, and my deepest apologies for the quality — I’ m workin’ with what I got here. It was taken from a video off of Bravo’s YouTube channel showcasing CTF on Exile.  Note that there are seven waypoints on the screen, and this was taken mere seconds into a match.  Those weapon waypoints only disappear when the weapons have been picked up, and grenade spawns will be indicated by another waypoint when the player gets in closer, while these power weapons are visible from any location on the map.  These indicators follow the player when he turns, appearing as icons with arrows as can be seen in the screenshot.  If that’s not enough for you, a grenade thrown in your vicinity will pop up yet another HUD element.  Additionally, the two flag indicators have the potential to flash — a change I think is a great, unintrusive way to draw the player’s attention towards the most important elements of the match.  But you know what?  When taken in combination with the half dozen other waypoints, it just seems ridiculous, even comical, as a whole.  Note: a direct feed match viewed later did not have any waypoints at all, which makes me wonder if they are not visible in Theater.

Information overload is a real danger.

This isn’t to say that I disapprove of all the changes.  Far from it.  Even apart from my approval of the flag waypoint being flashier than the others,  I think that drawing the player’s attention to drops is a totally valid method of making them aware of the state of the battlefield.  I love that they brought back a HUD element that has been missing for five years: the flag return times being visible and obvious.  But I also think that doing pushing out all these drops at the front makes for a very messy experience.  Yes, you give players the ability to choose which route they want to take based on which weapon dropped where, and that’s great.  But I don’t think it’s necessary in the context of how Halo has traditionally handled power weapon spawns.  That system being changed did necessitate giving additional information the player, but I think that in combination of having so many ordnance weapons spawning in at once at the beginning of a match and giving each of them a waypoint, you run the risk of overloading the player with information.  Something like Coagulation in Halo 2 had three weapons that I would consider giving a waypoint for:  the two snipers and the rocket launcher.  Here, on a map that is much smaller, you have seven.  Even things that might not be that useful to fight for, like the SAW, get a waypoint.   As someone who hasn’t played it, it’s hard to tell if these new elements are necessary given how little I know about the weapon spawn system at this point, but I can’t say I’m a huge fan as it stands.

Another key element that Halo has used to convey information is the multiplayer announcer.  Jeff Steitzer’s iconic voice has served a dual purpose in past games:  he announces important moments in objective gametypes, like the flag being stolen, and he congratulates the player on feats of skill.  With every game he has been given a larger and larger role, moving from solely multi-kill and killing spree notifications in Halo CE to a whole plethora of congratulatory announcements in Reach.  Even then, it seemed like some of them were unnecessary.  Did he really need to shout “HEADHUNTER” every time I brought even a single skull to the capture point?  Proooobably not.  Gripes aside, he was usually relegated to moments that the player would naturally have felt elation during, while more mundane moments were just given small, unobtrusive medals to fellate the player.  So what has changed with Halo 4? It seems to me that Steitzer has contracted a case of motormouth.  Things that were previously rewarded with a simple medal, like headshotting a sprinting player, now warrant a hearty “HEADCASE!”, accompanied by the controversial middle-of-screen text. I can understand why they want the announcer to have a bigger role, I really do.  It’s cool to have someone there saying “Hey, you did a cool thing!” But I also think that rewarding the players with it for very mundane things, like a flag carrier kill, dilutes the reward for truly amazing moments.  If I can get him to shout out from a Headcase and have that little burst of dopamine, what makes him saying “Overkill!” any more inherently satisfying? There’s still something resembling a feeling of accomplishment about it, but the more things he shouts, the less important each line becomes.

Well, duh.

The thing that prompted this post, though, is that the game deems it necessary to shout “CARRYING FLAG” at the player as if it isn’t immediately obvious that a flagpole is in your hand.  Guys, blind people don’t generally play a lot of multiplayer shooters, and adding both an audio cue and giant, always-present text informing me that I have the flag is a little condescending.  There are some truly fantastic ways that they’ve improved the announcer’s role in CTF, truly.  Having him directly state, “Protect your flag!” or “Kill their carrier!” when your flag is dropped or stolen, respectively, is incredibly important.  “Flag Taken” and “Flag Stolen” are ambiguous, they have the potential to confuse people who might not play CTF all that much.  This is a simple, unintrusive way to eliminate that confusion without being annoying about it.  But those two announcements are in distinctly different categories than picking up the flag, they really are.  They are things happening in the environment that the player doesn’t have direct control over, and might be happening large distances away from him.  They’re more warnings than announcements.  When you pick up the flag, it’s in your face, it’s obvious, you performed an action to make it to the flag and grab it.  It is purposeful, not passive.  I’m 100% sure that it was not intended as sounding patronizing.  But…it kind of feels that way, the same way that the constant rewarding text that occurs in combination with medal rewards feels patronizing, and artificial, or pandering.  Pick a word.  343 are making the game accessible, and that’s a good thing…but some of the ways they’re doing it doesn’t sit very well with me as a longtime player.

As with most things, there have been tremendous strides forward with what 343 has done and how they’re carrying the series forward.  And as with most things, there have been some very strange additions that I don’t feel add to the experience, and in my opinion, detract from it.  There’s a strong chance that everything I have a problem with is a total nonissue.  I certainly hope so, and I’d love to see it in action.

Halo’s Audiovisual Feedback, Part One: Damage Indication

I’ve been playing through Halo: CEA lately. The effort that it took to bring that game forward into the current generation is impressive – the visual layer, while maybe not always tonally appropriate, is certainly gorgeous.

But that’s not the point.  The game has some serious, basic shortcomings that got me thinking about how the Halo series has portrayed damage information to the player via visual feedback.  We’ll get into what makes the feedback of CEA so lacking in a bit, but first I think it’s important to do a stupidly, totally unnecessarily exhaustive runthrough of how Bungie evolved their feedback mechanisms as the series progressed.  Each Halo has conveyed the information on damage states in the same fundamental ways, but there were small but important improvements made with each subsequent “main” release. Why is this information necessary?  Players need to know that their actions are having an effect.  They need to know when to change tactics.  They need to know the current damage state of their target.  Proper feedback gives the players the tools they need to be effective and predict the outcome of the battle while it is being played out, but it doesn’t, or shouldn’t, spell out every little detail.  Things like Gears of War’s shots causing a fountain of blood or the staggering of Halo’s Grunts all tell the player that their shots are landing and doing damage.  More importantly, though, Halo is able to portray current damage states in a way that other series haven’t quite figured out yet, and it’s all because of the shield system.  So how has the series used the shield system to give players feedback?

An Elite’s shield flaring.

Halo CE offered a very simple but effective system, most of which has carried through to modern releases. Undamaged players or shielded enemies had no visual indicator, the unaltered model offered a baseline to draw immediate comparisons to.  Upon being damaged, the shield immediately flared to maximum, and you knew that damage was being inflicted.  You had a very obvious visual indication.  There could be no confusion, your attack was effective.  That continued until the shield popped, which had a sort of gaseous burst effect.  The player was then immediately aware that a headshot would finish the job.  Additionally,  the magnum, the primary precision weapon, was given large, almost explosive shot decals when the bullets landed so the player was always aware of where their shots were going.  Halo 2 took those elements and added two important visual effects: characters with depleted shields had small “spark” effects dancing around their character model, and when a character’s shield was being restored to full, a series of glowing rings moved upwards around the character model, giving a clear indication that the enemy was no longer vulnerable.

Bungie continued adding small touches to subtly give the player information on damage states with Halo 3.  In a multiplayer context, when a player’s shields were low, but had not yet begun the recharge process, various small, white lights on the player model would glow brightly so that players knew before engaging them that the targetwas not at full strength.  The shield recharge graphic changed, but served the same function as before.

Pop!

Finally, Reach continued the tradition with some of the most masterful additions to the feedback system.  As the shields lowered further and further in a firefight, the shield flare grew brighter and brighter, and the ‘bubbling’ effect of the shield flare grew larger and larger.  For the first time in the series, counting shots is unnecessary.  I intuitively know that at a particular brightness, this player has three shots on him.  This time, the depletion of the shield was accompanied by a bright, flashy “popping” effect and a loud, distinctive clanging sound effect.  The sound effect, which had not been present in any game previously, immediately alerted the player that he was vulnerable to a headshot or a single melee.  The shield recharge effect was yet again changed, this time rapidly flaring to maximum brightness and slowly settling to nothing.  It may seem simple, but that recharge effect is a stroke of subtle genius – it’s subconsciously obvious as being the inverse of the shield depletion effect.  If you interrupt the process early, the shield flare is brighter once again because the settling effect, which occurs in time with various stages of shield recharge, hasn’t completed, showcasing the visual consistency the Reach feedback system has.

So what makes CEA different, how did it regress?  Saber Interactive’s new, aesthetically appealing graphical layer does away with all the improvements that Bungie made over the years.  That would be at least acceptable on its own, but they removed fundamental elements that existed even in Combat Evolved. Those explosive decals from the magnum?  Gone, your shots are much, much harder to track now as the unexaggerated markers often get lost in the foliage.

That bright shield flare that is so incredibly vital for knowing whether or not shots are landing, whether or not an enemy is taking damage?  Gone.  Replaced, though.  But with a paper thin, pixel-width blue line.  Can you tell the elite above is shielded?  At a glance, I sure couldn’t. Essential information, removed for no apparent reason.  The only thing they kept, of the half dozen elements that Reach has, is CE’s original shield pop effect.  And it’s helpful, for sure, but it is nowhere near enough to make up for the loss of the most basic feedback element the series has.  This isn’t limited to Elites, either — the shielded Sentinels from Two Betrayals have a tiny, almost unnoticeable blue oval surrounding them.  And it is maddening.  I want to play that game with the new graphical layer and enjoy it, but it is so annoying that I end up, almost without fail, switching back to the classic mode because it is flat out, inarguably better from a gameplay perspective.  It isn’t horribly obvious what the game is doing wrong during gameplay, but things just feel…off.  In bringing a beloved game forward in time, a bit of the magic was lost when it could have been preserved.

Of course, player feedback certainly isn’t limited to damage indication.  Halo has often used a variety of methods to convey information to players.  Two of these methods, HUD waypoints and the multiplayer announcer, have been used very sparingly up to this point.  Next time, we’ll get into what 343 is doing with Halo 4 and how giving the player too much feedback can be harmful to the experience.  The two halves of that sentence are more related than I’d care to admit.

Changes to CTF: You Guys Did What Now?

Yesterday folks got their first hands-on with Halo 4′s CTF mode, which 343 has updated in a whole bunch of ways.  Some of them good, some that terrify me as an avid Team Objective player.  So, what changed?  Let’s list them out and then get into what’s good and what isn’t.

• Flag carriers now have full movement speed.
• Flag carriers are now armed with a pistol.
• Flag carriers are unable to drop the flag.
• Flag carriers have a large waypoint labeled “KILL” over their heads at all times.

From the top, I guess.  Increasing the flag carrier’s movement speed is something that should have happened two years ago with Reach.  In a game with players who have a sprint ability, giving the flag carrier, the primary target, cement shoes is a crime.  There’s a fine line between gimping the carrier (which we’ll get into very soon) and forcing teamwork naturally.  Halo 2 and 3 made the carrier just enough of a lesser combatant to demand teamwork while not diminishing the individual.  It does not look like 4 is continuing that tradition.  In short, full speed is a good thing.

Giving the flag carrier a weapon is an interesting one.  If they wanted to make the flag carrier feel like he could defend himself, then great, that’s a way to do it.  If it means that the flag is no longer a single-hit kill, then fantastic, I’m all for it. But here’s where that design falls apart.  The guy can’t drop the flag and use his normal weapons, the ones he could have fought so hard to acquire.  He is inherently a lesser combatant because an inferior weapon is forced on him.  In previous games, it was important to make the choice early on in a flag run whether you were just going to go for it, balls out, and hope you made it to cover, or if you were going to drop the flag and engage with your precision weapon, hoping to outplay your pursuers.  That choice is entirely gone.  Out the window.  You’re forced into using a six-shot clip, five-shot kill, blooming magnum instead of the rifle or rocket launcher or whatever that you have in your back pocket.  You’re an immediate target who is inherently less capable of defending himself, not naturally, as was the case before (flag carriers usually took a few bullets before they were able to drop the flag, turn around, and start engaging), but because someone said so.

Here’s the doozy.  You’ve picked up the flag.  You’ve got this weapon in your hand that you’re stuck with.  Maybe you can take out one guy with it, and that’s all okay by itself, or acceptable, at least.  But where you would make a very significant and core choice in previous games, there is nothing to decide: do I sneak the flag, or juggle it?  Juggling lets you take a direct route at full speed at the expense of giving away your position to the folks that want to kill you.  Lots of people do it because they think the risk is worth it. Personally, I’d rather keep my stealth and use a route they might not expect.  Take the flag up the camo tower on Zanzibar rather than using the wheel well, try and run the flag through the back hallway on Headlong instead of dropping down, whatever.  It was one of the most basic and obvious risk/reward mechanics in the series, one that Bungie was never able to accept.  And it looks like 343 wasn’t willing to either, because the giant waypoint over the flag carrier’s head at all times eliminates any concept of flag sneaking.

The flag carrier was always a high priority target, and it was always important for the team to protect him.  They could do it in a direct way, by intercepting attackers as they tried to chase the carrier, they could spawn trap them so the enemy is forced to turtle up, or they could cause a distraction on one end of the map so that the carrier could sneak away.  That last option is off the table now.  There’s no guesswork and dramatically less map knowledge required to intercept a flag.  Where previously you’d have to perform a quick judgement call on which route the carrier is most likely to take (Did he take it straight through the middle on Sanctuary?  Would he have gone through the shotgun tunnel or up onto the brige?  Maybe the rocks?), now the game points out his exact position, practically shouting “HEY, YOU SHOULD PROBABLY BE SHOOTING HIM.”  The carrier was a big target, always has been.  Now he is an artificially-crafted beacon that can barely defend himself.  Now, there’s no incentive to use anything but the most direct route or the one with the most cover.  Options, player agency, those have been limited due to a HUD element, one that Halo 4 seems to be overly fond of (but that’s a topic for another time).

Flagsassination, you are no Cheneymania.

Combine the flag carrier being constantly visible with the fact that he can’t drop the flag.  That means the waypoint cannot be removed until he dies.  The flag is auto-pickup now, so you might be trying to grab that rocket launcher beside the flag but be stuck with a magnum instead.  You’ve just marked yourself for death in a game where anybody with half a brain is going to spawn with a long-range rifle, and you can’t undo it.  There’s certainly an argument to be made that this promotes teamwork.  But remember what I mentioned before?  There’s a fine line between gimping the carrier and forcing teamwork naturally.  The flag carrier was always the key to winning the game.  He was always going to be something people wanted to protect.  But now the options that you have to protect him, the very definition of the word “protect” is diminished, narrowed, because the carrier has fewer options than ever before because he is broadcasted to the world and cannot defend himself at the level of anyone else in the match.

Offense is naturally harder than defense.  You’re assaulting an entrenched position with a small number of possible entrances that the enemy can set up shop near, and they’re just waiting for you to make your move.  Reach Objective offense is ridiculously difficult against a similarly-skilled team, Asylum CTF matches, the most common, end 0-0 with alarming frequency due to the effectiveness of the main weapon, grenades, and the player count all being focused on a singular point on the map: the flag that’s being contested.  Teamwork was already a requirement if you wanted to be serious about winning matches in that playlist. What does this do but make offense even more difficult through introduction of an incredibly artificial mechanic?

The waypoint is the big deal to me.  Everything else could work well enough if that were not in the mix. There’s giving your players good feedback, and there’s giving them too much information.  This falls strictly into the latter category as far as I’m concerned.

Caveat:  I haven’t played the game.  It might be awesome.  I don’t know.  I can only put these changes in the context of previous games in the series and how I would feel about them then.  I feel that it generalizes well enough to make my predictions accurate.  Maybe you disagree, and that’s fine.  Just know where I’m coming from.