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Adding sprint to Halo is a symptom of a greater problem: 343 Industries do not know how to create a compelling shooter, let alone build a great game befit the Halo series. If you recall, Microsoft did not pick 343 Industries to succeed Halo because of their merit as developers, but rather created them to house, feed, and milk the Halo cashcow Bungie abandoned in 2007. The only notable game made by the in-house development team at 343 Industries, Halo 4, was widely criticized as a terrible multiplayer game, so much so that 343 Industries had to strip it of all its "modernized" features to stymy the mass emmigration of its playerbase.
Now that the Halo 5: Guardians Beta is out, longtime fans of Halo are scrutinizing and dissecting it to see if its core is made of Mjolnir and if its gameplay feels tight. Halo fans see the beta as an opportunity to tell 343 Industries what makes Halo great, in the hope that 343 Industries will listen and work that advice into their game. The Halo community has been told that Halo 5 will revive the Halo franchise with gameplay faithful to the games preceding it, the games that broke Xbox Live records. They've been told that Halo 5 has a year of development time left (at an ambiguous "2015" release date) and that an early beta will help 343i correct gameplay flaws during Halo 5's infancy. If such statements hold true, then releasing a public beta so early into development sends a clear message from 343 Industries to the Halo playerbase: "We do not understand how to recreate the fun of the epic franchise we've inherited. Please explain to us what that Halo is like and how we can build it."
It's a humbling thing for a developer to do, and so long as they listen to fans, it'll be the smart choice for the company's reputation and for the health of the Halo games. But I am nonetheless disappointed by Halo 5's gameplay, and I foresee no great epiphany changing 343i's designs for Halo by the game's release. What I see instead are the same kinks in design and elements of frustration that killed Halo 4's multiplayer. Up till now, 343i have misunderstood Halo--their initial vision for it was as a sci-fi version of Call of Duty, complete with killstreaks and care packages--so I do not believe them capable of making a good Halo game. In fact, I believe 343i are incapable of making a great shooter because they do not understand why Halos 1 to Halo 3 were fun games to play.
Let us put the Master Chief Collection debacle behind us and look at how the internal development team within 343 Industries creates a shooter. Below I list and elaborate on points that, when taken together, speak to an inconsistent game design and troubled multiplayer philosophy for Halo 5. These design choices are the same unwelcome design choices that permeated Halo 4 and persist in Halo 5's Beta; they encapsulate 343 Industries's attempts to "modernize" Halo into the Frankestein-shooter they want it to become, versus the simple shooter that Halo really is.
Sprint: The wrong design choice to build a game around.
Sprint is a contentious topic to Halo players, but it is at the root of nearly all the design problems with Halo 5's Beta. Longtime fans of Halo love to say, "Sprint breaks Halo." But what does such an empty statement mean, and why do so many people love to parrot it? Do these players seriously argue that Master Chief should never be allowed to run? I always thought the sprint detractors made a silly argument: What if we had said, "Dual wielding breaks Halo," prior to Halo 2's launch? But after I spent time playing the Halo 5 Beta, and after I stopped to ponder about Halo, I realized that the community backlash to sprint is not because of the ability itself, but what the ripple of changes the sprint pebble creates when dropped into the Halo pond.
Here is the condensed argument against sprint: Sprint is bad for Halo because it diverts focus away from Halo's core--shooting, jumping, and vehicles--to focus on Spartan mobility. A focus to mobility brings 343 Industries's attention towards making a game centered around the wrong style of shooter, one that is stop-and-go and frenetic in pace.
When you give the player fast mobility (Moreso with the boost from thrusters) while retaining Halo's slow game design, you have to change many ways in which the game plays. Out of all the new mechanics added to Halo 5 to fuse speed with Halo, which one hasn't evolved as a means to curtail sprint's effect on Halo's gameplay? Nearly every design decision around sprint is an attempt to reign in sprint's changes to the Halo formula: Levels are larger, to accomodate for distances covered by sprint; shields do not recharge when running, running stops when shot, to accomodate escapes easily afforded by sprint; players die faster when they're shot at, to accommodate the short engagements created by sprint. Sprint fundamentally changes Halo because Halo was not designed around sprint, so designing sprint around Halo is equally absurd.
343i create these mechanics to limit sprint, but those same mechanics hinder player control as well. Let's look at the charge move within Halo 5, for instance. A player at full sprint cannot melee from sprint but only dash forward, like a football player making a tackle. For a player to melee, he must first come to a complete stop. This mechanic exists to nerf melees because sprint makes melees too strong. In Halo 4, players complained that other players would often run straight at them, through gunfire, to melee during sprint and immediately melee again as their character left sprint. This is how the term "double melee" was born. The charge mechanic was created to fix "double melees", which are only a problem because sprint introduced it to the game.
Why is sprint's charge mechanic a problem for the player? Because it limits the actions he is able to perform in-game. If a player runs up behind someone, he must come to a halt (Fall out of sprint's animation) to melee and kill the guy in front of him. If he melees too soon, he might charge at him, which would only pop his shields while launching him far away, all while the charging player disorients himself. If, in another situation, a player runs across a corner and an enemy appears to his right, his only option is escape to then engage in a gun fight--he'll die if he turns to melee because he'll charge forward into air instead. The casualty to the charge mechanic, therefore, is a player's liberty with melees.
While melees are core to Halo, they are incompatible with sprint, so 343 Industries said melees needed to change. A devaluation of melees marks a shift from Halo's gameplay of "run at a guy as you shoot him" into a gun-game of distance. In older Halos, a gun fight rarely ended until fists started to fly (Barring BR starts, but even then players still clobbered the snot out of each other). Melees were intrinsic to Halo, but as the game underwent incremental changes to fit sprint into Halo's formula, melees became a rarity in large levels and fast gunfights. The loss of melees is an example of a concession 343i made to Halo's gameplay in favor of sprint, and 343i has made many gameplay concessions in Halo's design to make it work at speed. These concessions are the source for many of the design problems that Halo 5 suffers from, and almost all them stem from 343i's decision that Spartans should run and fly.
Adding sprint to Halo is a symptom of a greater problem: 343 Industries do not know how to create a compelling shooter, let alone build a great game befit the Halo series. If you recall, Microsoft did not pick 343 Industries to succeed Halo because of their merit as developers, but rather created them to house, feed, and milk the Halo cashcow Bungie abandoned in 2007. The only notable game made by the in-house development team at 343 Industries, Halo 4, was widely criticized as a terrible multiplayer game, so much so that 343 Industries had to strip it of all its "modernized" features to stymy the mass emmigration of its playerbase.
Now that the Halo 5: Guardians Beta is out, longtime fans of Halo are scrutinizing and dissecting it to see if its core is made of Mjolnir and if its gameplay feels tight. Halo fans see the beta as an opportunity to tell 343 Industries what makes Halo great, in the hope that 343 Industries will listen and work that advice into their game. The Halo community has been told that Halo 5 will revive the Halo franchise with gameplay faithful to the games preceding it, the games that broke Xbox Live records. They've been told that Halo 5 has a year of development time left (at an ambiguous "2015" release date) and that an early beta will help 343i correct gameplay flaws during Halo 5's infancy. If such statements hold true, then releasing a public beta so early into development sends a clear message from 343 Industries to the Halo playerbase: "We do not understand how to recreate the fun of the epic franchise we've inherited. Please explain to us what that Halo is like and how we can build it."
It's a humbling thing for a developer to do, and so long as they listen to fans, it'll be the smart choice for the company's reputation and for the health of the Halo games. But I am nonetheless disappointed by Halo 5's gameplay, and I foresee no great epiphany changing 343i's designs for Halo by the game's release. What I see instead are the same kinks in design and elements of frustration that killed Halo 4's multiplayer. Up till now, 343i have misunderstood Halo--their initial vision for it was as a sci-fi version of Call of Duty, complete with killstreaks and care packages--so I do not believe them capable of making a good Halo game. In fact, I believe 343i are incapable of making a great shooter because they do not understand why Halos 1 to Halo 3 were fun games to play.
Let us put the Master Chief Collection debacle behind us and look at how the internal development team within 343 Industries creates a shooter. Below I list and elaborate on points that, when taken together, speak to an inconsistent game design and troubled multiplayer philosophy for Halo 5. These design choices are the same unwelcome design choices that permeated Halo 4 and persist in Halo 5's Beta; they encapsulate 343 Industries's attempts to "modernize" Halo into the Frankestein-shooter they want it to become, versus the simple shooter that Halo really is.
Sprint: The wrong design choice to build a game around.
Sprint is a contentious topic to Halo players, but it is at the root of nearly all the design problems with Halo 5's Beta. Longtime fans of Halo love to say, "Sprint breaks Halo." But what does such an empty statement mean, and why do so many people love to parrot it? Do these players seriously argue that Master Chief should never be allowed to run? I always thought the sprint detractors made a silly argument: What if we had said, "Dual wielding breaks Halo," prior to Halo 2's launch? But after I spent time playing the Halo 5 Beta, and after I stopped to ponder about Halo, I realized that the community backlash to sprint is not because of the ability itself, but what the ripple of changes the sprint pebble creates when dropped into the Halo pond.
Here is the condensed argument against sprint: Sprint is bad for Halo because it diverts focus away from Halo's core--shooting, jumping, and vehicles--to focus on Spartan mobility. A focus to mobility brings 343 Industries's attention towards making a game centered around the wrong style of shooter, one that is stop-and-go and frenetic in pace.
When you give the player fast mobility (Moreso with the boost from thrusters) while retaining Halo's slow game design, you have to change many ways in which the game plays. Out of all the new mechanics added to Halo 5 to fuse speed with Halo, which one hasn't evolved as a means to curtail sprint's effect on Halo's gameplay? Nearly every design decision around sprint is an attempt to reign in sprint's changes to the Halo formula: Levels are larger, to accomodate for distances covered by sprint; shields do not recharge when running, running stops when shot, to accomodate escapes easily afforded by sprint; players die faster when they're shot at, to accommodate the short engagements created by sprint. Sprint fundamentally changes Halo because Halo was not designed around sprint, so designing sprint around Halo is equally absurd.
343i create these mechanics to limit sprint, but those same mechanics hinder player control as well. Let's look at the charge move within Halo 5, for instance. A player at full sprint cannot melee from sprint but only dash forward, like a football player making a tackle. For a player to melee, he must first come to a complete stop. This mechanic exists to nerf melees because sprint makes melees too strong. In Halo 4, players complained that other players would often run straight at them, through gunfire, to melee during sprint and immediately melee again as their character left sprint. This is how the term "double melee" was born. The charge mechanic was created to fix "double melees", which are only a problem because sprint introduced it to the game.
Why is sprint's charge mechanic a problem for the player? Because it limits the actions he is able to perform in-game. If a player runs up behind someone, he must come to a halt (Fall out of sprint's animation) to melee and kill the guy in front of him. If he melees too soon, he might charge at him, which would only pop his shields while launching him far away, all while the charging player disorients himself. If, in another situation, a player runs across a corner and an enemy appears to his right, his only option is escape to then engage in a gun fight--he'll die if he turns to melee because he'll charge forward into air instead. The casualty to the charge mechanic, therefore, is a player's liberty with melees.
While melees are core to Halo, they are incompatible with sprint, so 343 Industries said melees needed to change. A devaluation of melees marks a shift from Halo's gameplay of "run at a guy as you shoot him" into a gun-game of distance. In older Halos, a gun fight rarely ended until fists started to fly (Barring BR starts, but even then players still clobbered the snot out of each other). Melees were intrinsic to Halo, but as the game underwent incremental changes to fit sprint into Halo's formula, melees became a rarity in large levels and fast gunfights. The loss of melees is an example of a concession 343i made to Halo's gameplay in favor of sprint, and 343i has made many gameplay concessions in Halo's design to make it work at speed. These concessions are the source for many of the design problems that Halo 5 suffers from, and almost all them stem from 343i's decision that Spartans should run and fly.