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  • Subject: Halo Reach - Custom Game Wants & Ideas
Subject: Halo Reach - Custom Game Wants & Ideas

We're the Flintstones kids, ten million strong and growing...

Glass Galaxies - a theme for bungie.net

Per audacia ad astra. Halo Reach | Destiny

Custom Games are great, right? Well, what If they were even better?

Lately I've become a both frustrated and fairly bored with Halo 3. It's still a great game, but it's kinda lost its magic for me due to the amount I play it. To be specific, I'm fed up with matchmaking more than anything. Custom games are usually still a lot of fun - on the rare occasion that I actually get to play a great map and gametype. I'm hoping that Halo Reach will feature more Custom Game related content to make the whole process of acquiring and playing custom games much more efficient.

I'm not expecting you to read this entire post, but if you decide to comment on any specific part of it, please read the whole sub-section to which you are referring.


Mapmaker

note: it might be worth mentioning that, when I refer to "mapmaker", I am referring to an in-game tool used to create maps, not the people that create maps.

Forge gives us a mapmaker option, but you could call it 'watered-down' to an extent. One thing I love about forge that most mapmaker tools generally don't include is the ability to have multiple users editing and playing in a sandbox [I'm not referring to the map 'Sandbox' here] environment in real-time. This is something I'd want to hold onto in Halo Reach, whether as part of an expanded mapmaker, or as a completely separate mode.

It's impossible to say what could be accomplished in terms of mapmaking in Halo Reach due to having no idea of what the Halo Reach engine is capable of. However, it would be cool to have features such as snap-to-grid and precise rotation, as well as some more eye-candy effects (the post-processing effects found in the newer Halo 3 maps are awesome - more of these would be sweet, possibly with tweak-able settings to pin-point that exact effect for the masterpiece you're delicately constructing).


More Gametype Options

You 'erd. One of the great things about the Halo trilogy is that each game has brought more new, fresh, advanced options for custom games. Here's hoping that Halo Reach will follow in these footsteps and provide even more options for more refined gameplay, more replay value, and more generally interesting multiplayer scenarios. Of course, you can't (or probably shouldn't) go too over-board with features because you don't want to intimidate newer, less-experienced users. Chances are, a lot of people just want to set up a simple game and start playing. You also don't want to make too much stuff tweak-able as it'll cause confusion. Imagine this: you're duking it out in an epic battle when all of a sudden, a grenade goes off near-by. You had no idea that the frag grenade damage radius had been increased by 1.43 metres, and has been strengthened by 62%, so that seemingly harmless grenade ends up obliterating you, ultimately filling you with rage, and leaving the grenade-thrower stumped. But yeah, more options is (usually) a good thing, and allows more and more creativity when developing gametypes. You want your players to be able to accurately re-create Sonic 2 just with a few custom maps and a gametype. Bad example, okay..


Custom Game 'Sets'

This is the main reason I created this post in the first place. I've been thinking, today, about handling custom gametypes and maps, as well as the whole process of playing custom games. As you may know, it can be very tedious trying to find matching maps and gametypes, as they often aren't linked together on Bungie.net, or tagged with similar keywords. The result: you're left with an awesome map, but no gametypes to play it properly. A wasted map in a sense. Now, imagine if you could download a map with a default gametype built-in: a 'set', if you will. Loading the map from the custom games lobby will automatically load the associated gametype, with the option to change to a different gametype if you wish. This basically allows all the freedom of playing any map/gametype combinations, with the efficiency of being able to share and load custom games in simple 'packages'.


Map Sharing

Another area that I feel is fairly advanced, but has a lot of potential to be improved. File shares are great, but using them to download files from within the game is.. Not so good. Bungie.net has a lot of search options available to find custom content, but even this isn't always efficient enough (for my liking at least). When I'm trying to find custom content to download, most of the time I'm on Halo 3 already, playing custom games with friends. I have access to a computer, so that isn't a problem for me, but I know it would likely be a problem for quite a large number of Halo players. The problem I have is that, when I click to download a file on Bungie.net, I have to exit out of Halo 3 and start it up again for the download to start. An idea would be to allow users to check for queued downloads from the lobby, automatically prompting the file transfer to begin. Another option, which would also benefit those without constant access to a computer, would be to have a custom content search engine within the game's UI. Allow the user to search for keywords to find screenshots, films, gametypes and maps, all from within the Halo Reach menus. There may be technical limitations on this, but it'd sure be an awesome feature to have if it is possible.

The other area of 'map sharing' I'd like to cover is sharing maps between players within a pre-game lobby. I'm sure most of you have experienced, at some time or another, something along the lines of "I have a cool map; give me party leader!". How about allowing the user with the map/gametype to send it to the party leader on-the-fly, or even allow the party leader to give permission to this other player to load the map/gametype for the rest of the party without having to give away their 'party leader' status. Either way, a direct player-to-player file transfer would be much easier than having to temporarily upload the content to a file share.


Custom Playlists

This one is an idea I've been throwing around in my head for a couple of years. There could be a couple of different ways to handle playlists in custom games: the first method would be similar to matchmaking; the party leader creates a playlist, or selects an already existing playlist containing multiple custom 'sets' (see above). A gametype/map combination is selected at random, and the players are given the chance to veto for a different gametype/map. The other option for custom playlists is a linear or random (optional - set by the party leader) playlist of 'sets' which will be played one-after-another, without the option to veto. An idea would be to have full, pre-assembled playlists (including all associated gametypes and maps) to be downloaded in one package, ready to play.


Custom Game Finder

Keeping my hopes high for this one. You may or may not know this, but a Custom Game Finder was once planned (or at least rumoured) to be included in Halo 3. Wouldn't it be cool if you could just search for a game and join it? Select a gametype, a game tone (hardcore/casual/social/whatever), and allow the system to find open games to join. Prioritizing games by ping (faster connection to the host) would also be a great feature; no more uber-laggy, other-side-of-the-globe, "but-I-just-headshot-that-guy-WTF-bunjee-fix-halo" type games! Well, a reduced number of them at least.

disclaimer: by posting "tl;dr", "cool story, bro", or any variant of the aforementioned memes, you hereby agree to being smelly, and allowing me (Zoidberg25) to refer to you as such.

So that's pretty much it. Sorry for keeping it so brief. ;) Obviously these are all merely ideas, not even speculation, as I have no evidence to back them up. Everything mentioned in this post has come straight from my mind.

Any suggestions, ideas, criticism, etc. is welcomed and appreciated.

Thanks :)

  • 10.09.2009 3:31 PM PDT

We're the Flintstones kids, ten million strong and growing...

Glass Galaxies - a theme for bungie.net

Per audacia ad astra. Halo Reach | Destiny

That's what I'm hoping. :)

  • 10.09.2009 3:54 PM PDT

Plekpedia - The most epic site in the history of ever.

All I need is more options and gametypes and I'm set.

  • 10.09.2009 3:56 PM PDT

We're the Flintstones kids, ten million strong and growing...

Glass Galaxies - a theme for bungie.net

Per audacia ad astra. Halo Reach | Destiny

Yeah, more options would be amazing. Preferably to the extent that you can sort of create your own new gametypes, not just variants of existing ones.

  • 10.09.2009 3:59 PM PDT

This is what Id want the most. Firefight/Infection.

Noone has to be the infected, The Flood spawn and attack, and 1 by 1, everyone gets infected. Plus, The Flood have different types like ones with shotguns, swords, hammers, spikers, brute shots, plasma rifles, assault rifles, magnums, needlers, fuel rod guns, rocket launchers and SMGs. Not to mention the pure forms that can transform.

EDIT:
You should also be able to choose which weapons the flood can use.

[Edited on 10.09.2009 4:07 PM PDT]

  • 10.09.2009 4:05 PM PDT

We're the Flintstones kids, ten million strong and growing...

Glass Galaxies - a theme for bungie.net

Per audacia ad astra. Halo Reach | Destiny

Hah, that would be fun. Adding bots as part of the custom game sandbox - as you have awesomely exampled - would add so much replay value to the game. Get sick of being the zombie in infection? We got AI. Bored of being fragged by pros? Get some AI Grunts in. The options would be near-limitless. Though I'm not getting my hopes up for stuff like that just yet..

  • 10.09.2009 4:15 PM PDT