Halo 1.5 ideas & suggestions

[CaptHawkeye]

The ammo restrictions in the subsequent games were retarded. It felt like they were forcing you to just not be able to use some better guns because they were too lazy to balance them.

[Stark]

Some of the Reach-first guns (the plasma repeater etc) were quite nice, but had laughably small ammo capacities and were barely worth using. The ammo situation is partly why the only weapon to use is the rifles.

[Lord Relvenous]

In the original Halo multiplayer, it was possible to shoot down rockets if they were fired at you from a distance. Really freaking difficult, but possible. Just whip out the AR and empty the magazine at the rocket streaking toward you and hope you hit it and detonate it. I don't know if it's possible in the other games, I've never pulled it off in them. Never pulled it off in Halo's campaign either, because the only enemies with rockets are Flood near the end of the game, and they don't usually fire a rocket from far enough off that you can react by spraying bullets at it, they wait until they're practically in your face to fire.

In Halo 3 you could shoot rockets down with the spartan laser, and deflect them away with the grav hammer, if your aim/timing was good enough. I don't know if you could shoot rockets down with any other weapon, since I never tried.

In Reach at least, it is possible to shoot down rockets with a sniper rifle. No idea about other weapons, though.

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

I'm not seeing how carrying a sidearm is 'awkward', and the game is nothing like a simulator anyway so who cares. Halo1 got the balance of constantly changing weapons and blasting like a maniac right, but in the others it's just tiresome. It doesn't help that ammo loads (and accuracy) are so poor most guns don't have a long lifetime.

I wasn't talking about a sidearm, what I meant was more of a comparison to earlier shooters like, say, Quake or Unreal, where you can carry as many weapons and you pick up. Two rifle sized weapons and a sidearm is fine, but its about the limit. I mean, sling two rifles to your back, carry another one in your hands, and holster a pistol to your hip, with ammo for all of them, then try to run. Its not going to work so well because you're carrying too much crap. See what I mean?

[aieeegrunt]

The ammo starvation in Reach is annoying; you pick up a DMR from a dead marine and it's rare it has more than one clip. The only weapon that you had decent amounts of ammo for was the AR. Fortunately I found the AR pretty usefull.

[Sarevok]

^^

It is hilarious that you can only salvage a measely amounts of bullets but the marines can shoot same gun all day and never run out.

[Stark]

The game (like all FPS games) would be pretty broken otherwise. Or did you think bad guys with limited ammo or guns that drop 100% of carried ammo had never been tried in the past? The problem is caps, not how much you get per pickup. The total lethality (adjusted for accuracy) in most loadouts is piss poor, and things like the AR are only viable because in Reach they constantly dropped gun racks on you to top it up.

[FaxModem1]

have 117, no scratch that, John, has a personality. The guy might as well have been voiceless in the trilogy for the personality he had.

Open the game a bit like Pitch Black opened, with John narrating as he's in Cryo sleep., and combine that with flashbacks to his kidnapping and training on Reach during cut-scenes. Let us get to know this guy and have a reason to root for him. If you want, do the same with Cortana or the Captain, with them remembering the Fall of Reach and the screaming civvies being bought time with the deaths of the entire fleet. make this seem like a war for survival, and that there are stakes involved, not that you couldn't give a shit if they lived or died.

Game wise, make the controls customizable. Dealing with the presets got aggravating for me from game to game.

[Sarevok]

Yeah. An AI smart enough to manage finite ammo is too much to expect from a game with invincible team mates.

[Stark]

It's too much to expect from basically any shooter that isn't a tacticool game focused on short-term engagements. Do you have any understanding of playability beyond 'make moar realistix'? Do you realise in a game like Halo the enemies could just bum rush the player and kill them whenever they wanted, and the dancing around pretending to be intelligent is what makes the game fun?

Faxmodem, the control presets in Halo are just retarded. If you could move them around however you wanted, you could just set them up like a normal console shooter... but they want to make you play 'halo style'.

[FaxModem1]

'Halo style' is having the grenade distance change from game to game, the location of melee change, etc. That's incredibly stupid.

Also, Introduce the Arbiter in Halo 1, he's a cool character, and gives us the image of what the Covenant side of life is.

[Stark]

Bungie is all about the 'golden triangle', where they want melee, nades and guns to be used equally. That's why they give nades a whole trigger instead of just a bumper (which means no irons) and why the Y button is for weapon inventory instead of the d-pad.

[adam_grif]

Bungie is all about the 'golden triangle', where they want melee, nades and guns to be used equally. That's why they give nades a whole trigger instead of just a bumper (which means no irons) and why the Y button is for weapon inventory instead of the d-pad.

Is there some reason why you couldn't keep grenades as LT and have aim as LB? I don't see how grenades on LT bars them from having ironsights, it's just a design decision that they don't want ironsights.

I haven't played a halo game in ages, wtf does the D-pad even get used for in those games?

[Stark]

In Reach r-pad is used for night vision. That's it.

Irons on LT and nades on LB would just be standard, Halo doesn't even use irons cause they're so married to the Golden Triangle.

[adam_grif]

In Reach r-pad is used for night vision. That's it.

Haha it's like I've time warped back to 2003. I hear lots of oldschool gamers crying foul at modern games for making use of iron sights and cover systems but the shooter has come so far. It's kind of tragic that Halo was the first game that really popularized now standard shooter mechanics like recharging health and melee/grenade buttons, but it's so in love with itself that it refuses to crib off other games that took the genre even further. Now the halo games just seem generic because everybody copied their best parts so there's nothing to separate it from the pack. Oh, except the amazing story

I suppose it is unique in the sense that it's now, in 2010, a complete dinosaur of a franchise, stubborn refusing to modernize.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I would set up a longer introdution, showing the escape from Reach, with someone, possibly Keyes or Cortana, explaining exactly WHY it's so devastating.

Customiseable controls and ironsights are a must I think. Possibly a GoW cover system, or a FEAR 2 style system where you can slide objects around for cover. Possibly being able to lean around corners, although I dunno how you would do that on a xbox controller

A FEAR style bullet time would be nice, the "Spartan time" described by Fred in one of the novels. Even rationalise it by saying one of the implants he got was a super-adrenal gland or something

Add to this super-strength and larger jump heights, etc, as outlined in the novels. Faster sprinting too (In Fall of Reach CPO Mendex explains to Dr Halsey they can run in bursts of 55 kph)

Larger environments, less corridors fighting, plasma weapons fire moves faster, no dumb Wraith as a covvie MBT. Change the Scorpion to the equivalent of a modern Bradley or somesuch

And specific, fancy weapons for the SPARTANS. Heck, all the human guns they have ame from the Pillar of Autumn, and the good old Pillar was supposed to be embarking on a fancy mission for the spartans. Surely they would have brought better weapons?

[aieeegrunt]

In Reach r-pad is used for night vision. That's it.

Irons on LT and nades on LB would just be standard, Halo doesn't even use irons cause they're so married to the Golden Triangle.

Halo doesn't use Irons because it's a strafe shooter. Adding the traditional irons mechanic where you aim and your movement speed dramatically slows down means no more strafing, and it's now a completely different type of game. Having an irons mechanic that doesn't affect movement speed is basically the exact same things as the zoom mechanic that already exists in the game, and you've now re-invented the wheel for no reason other than incorporating a trendy mechanic from other games. If it makes you feel better, we could have a 1.5 zoom on certain weapons like the AR, the PR, the pistol etc. that causes the weapon model to pull back and centre so it looks like you are aiming for reals. This would also shut up the "OMG scope on a pistol GAME RUINED" nitpickers. I agree with the point that Halo really should have fully customizable controls, but that, like being able to save at will, is a bizarre omission common to many, many xbox games besides Halo. If you absolutely can't stand using left trigger for grenades there are already a few controller presets in Reach that change that for you; you can melee or jump instead, can't remember if there is a left trigger zoom preset.

A lot of the suggestions I'm seeing that more or less amount to "Gears of Halo" would be far better served if you made a new series of games set in the Halo universe where you play as a marine. Then you could have iron sights, cover systems etc. The ability to accurately use a scope on a weapon while running full tilt on uneven ground is basically your Spartan Wank Time Super Powers already.

[Stark]

That's what everyone wanted in Reach, remember?

And Halo isn't a good twitch shooter anymore, because they constantly moved away from it in the name of 'realism', starting with the battle rifles that encourage irons to the heavy weapons that make you slow. If Halo was more like UT3 we'd have actual super powers and giant enemies and maybe even deformable terrain, instead of what is kind of UT98 with a crapply tactical mod.

People would be happy with a super rocket jumping tank-punching missile-swatting Halo, or a more modern game with industry-standard features. Instead it's just Halo with a texture pack and a gun mod.

[aieeegrunt]

Who, a couple random guys on some internet forum? The single most common positive thing said about Reach is that it plays like an improved version of the first one. Bungie kept repeating that was their goal for this game throughout the development process, and it was generally well recieved. I can only imagine the backlash and Epic Sales Fail that would happen if it had been Gears of Modern Halo of Honor, given that the vast majority of people would be expecting and wanting a strafe shooter with melee, grenades and shooting. Halo with a texture pack and a gun mod? Sounds just fine to me, and the sales numbers bear me out.

Halo was never a "twitch shooter" the way Quake and Unreal were, the pace is simply too slow. I dont know where you are getting this moving towards realism from. Halo 2 introduced akimbo duel wielding sub machine guns and leaping tall buildings in a single bound and also surviving falling off cliffs, Halo 3 introduced magical gimmick power ups and surviving an orbital re-entry, Halo Reach gave those power ups colour coded glow spot lights that even my 7 year old daughter laughs at ("Halo Mario, where is the one that shoots oil blobs?"). Literally turning turtle while glowing white is realism?

We already HAVE a super jumping tank punching (board a Wraith with no grenades, you just punch it to death) missile swatting (grav hammer) Halo. A more "modern" game with "industry standard features" would amount to just Call of Duty with a Halo themed texture pack and gun mod.

Stark, one of the games you seem to want is already done. Somebody extracted the models, textures etc. from the PC versions of Halo and imported into UT2K4, as well as the vehicles. Tooling around Torlan in a Banshee was a lot of fun, and I was finally able to realize my dream of playing a round of death match as a Grunt while shooting Mrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr Crow full of plasma. I imagine the same thing could easily be done for Gears of War, especially since that game was designed with modding in mind. You could replace the Gears with Spartans and Marines, replace the Locusts with Covvies, and even build your own single player levels if you want. I've thought about it myself, but I simply don't have the time now that I did when I did the UT stuff.

Anyways this is getting way off topic for a thread asking about a remake of the first game. If you want to have a "building a different shooter game set in the Halo universe" discussion I'd be be all for it; I suspect we'd have similar ideas on that one.

[Stark]

What are you talking about? I've never met anyone who wasn't looking for a more modern experience from ODST and Reach. They even ape modern shooters by redesigning all the guns to have rails for no reason!

You are confusing 'realism' in play to 'realism' as a slower pace of play. You already said the game is too slow to be a twitch shooter (thus agreeing with me, but whatever) but they have worked to slow the game down since Halo1, ith Reach being even slower than Halo3. When even the developers realise the BR is the only gun worth carrying, you realise that the player is primarily shooting scoped, which means they're not rocketjumping anymore. Game has been slowed. Hell, reduced accuracy on the move means it's slow. Having powerups is totally irrelevant, and you seem to think Gears is 'realistic', when it's the game where grabbing someone's ass heals them.

Its amusing that you identify things in Reach that are minor elements that should be major ones but just can't step outside the Halo box. Didn't you notice that meleeing a tank without attaching does basically nothing? Why do you need a hammer to swat missiles, this is not CANONZ. When 'industry standard features' means 'a decent inventory system' and 'guns that have a role', you can't get butthurt when people want these things.

Hilariously just playing UT3 with Spartans is way more fun than playing Reach. That's saying something, don't you think? Sitting in a middle ground with a superhero character with no super powers in a twitch world where you're often slow or ironed up where agility is important and you can't even dive is not a good place.

[Vendetta]

When even the developers realise the BR is the only gun worth carrying, you realise that the player is primarily shooting scoped, which means they're not rocketjumping anymore. Game has been slowed. Hell, reduced accuracy on the move means it's slow. Having powerups is totally irrelevant, and you seem to think Gears is 'realistic', when it's the game where grabbing someone's ass heals them.

Having played Reach plenty online, you're really not using the scope a lot. Hell, the autoaim is so generous that if you do fuck about trying to use the scope you'll just slow yourself down to the point that you get killed without being able to fire back by someone who put their crosshair vaguely near your head and started firing. Especially since Halo still has that thing where you drop out of scope if you're hit.

[Stark]

I'm talking single player. I played Reach online enough to get bored of the constant rocketrounds and went back to BC2. It's funny how a series with such powerful autoaim also has such crazy conefire.

[Pulp Hero]

Make these changes to the weapons list:

Remove the zoom on the pistol.

Include a x2.0 zoom on the assault rifle and make it slightly more powerful, but make it spread a lot when fired rapidly. Good for killing grunts and jackals at long range, but not overpowered enough to compete with a sniper rifle.

Ditch the DMR, Battle Rifle, and all alien equivalents.

Have variants of the pistol and assault rifle that are silenced; build in scenarios in the campaign where the stealth is actually used.

Remove the fuel rod cannon as a usable weapon for the player. (Covenant might still need it in campaign to fight), but make that weird lock-on, delayed plasma explosion weapon the Covenant heavy weapon of choice.

Ripping a mini-gun out the mounting puts you back into first person view.

Maybe give the player access to a jackal type shield in one of their weapon slots.

Ditch a lot of the redundant weapons or make them unusable for the player.

Other changes:

Make VISR from ODST the standard; it had an interesting take on night vision technology.

Some more voiceovers by the MC to give him more character.

More first person cutscenes ala Halo: Reach. I especially enjoyed the bit in Reach where your HUD went out and you were reminded that your character was wearing a helmet and glass mask. I want more of that.

Maybe give the MC a hanger-on squad of ODSTs or Marines with actual personality.

A button to bring up objective locations; I hate having to wander around lost until the icon appears on its own.

Possibly make sprint a permanent ability for the player.

Include abilities like jet-pack, active camouflage, hologram, overshield generation (Similar to what engineers do to Covenant forces.)

Completely remove auto-aim and weapon magnetism.

Remove health regeneration completely.

Remove buggers as an enemy type (constantly annoying.)

[Stark]

Not only does your list make the game not Halo, you haven't even played Reach. The armour abilities do pretty much everything you want already. I love the 'remove all middle-ground weapons and health regen because I don't like them' part!

I can only imagine the joy of playing a console shooter with no auto aim. How refreshing!

[Pulp Hero]

One of Halo's strengths is its clearly defined weapons. In Halo every weapon had a distinct purpose. That is one of the things that sets it apart from other high profile shooters; I am suggesting a return to the more clearly defined weapon roles that have been lost as the series has gone on.

My suggestion to give the assault rifle a zoom is not to make it more "tacticool", but to remove the need for a DMR/ Battle Rifle or relying on the pistol's zoom feature for some middle distance weaponry.

Same thing with recharging health- it was a strength of the first Halo game to balance out the multiplayer and put some dents in the domination by better players.

Yeah, I fucking know about the armor abilities in Reach, but this thread is about incorporating improvements from subsequent games into a remake of Halo, if you haven't heard. Some of the armor abilities are useful and should be brought forward.


How do these or other suggestions make this game "not Halo"?