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Posted by: S0ULJA PHARAOH
Why H2? They need to go back to H3 elements if anything.
Lol.....
Halo: CE is incontestably the most competitive Halo title to date. It is by far the most fun and long-lasting title of the series as can be evidenced by the number of people who still LAN or play on XB Connect as well as the 20 000 strong who continually enjoy the PC version. It was a game that not only rewarded aiming skill, but intelligence and multi-tasking, and thus the skilled individual. I speak for myself here - but I'm sure many will certainly agree - I am still learning something about the game despite having played it for the last 7 years. Whether we are talking about the intrinsics of the game such as more effective positioning and movement or helpful tricks like nade points. The game was the most dynamic of the Halo series, the most punishing, and the one with the fastest gameplay. I often hear people saying that Halo 3 and Reach were more team-oriented than Halo:CE. I can assure them that that is most definately wrong. At the highest level, teamwork is the most important. Thus, one must be able to separate teamwork from teamshot, the latter only being a component of the former. As far as teamwork is concerned, teamshooting is only the most basic form. In Halo:CE a teammate had to be able to manipulate and control the spawn system, nade camo or a weapon to his teammate, win the individual battle to secure the power position or weapon, flank, distract, you name it. Teamwork was natural, not forced upon like in later Halo games. This ultimately brings us to the major determining factor - the primary weapon. You spawned in Halo CE with a Weapon that was effective at all ranges and was able to punish careless players at long range. If you see an enemy, you can kill him, simple as that. There was no artificial pressure on the teamshooting aspect, the 3sk was guaranteed on an opponent travelling in a straight line. Unlike Halo 3, you couldn't have an opponent simply run across the open to secure the camo on Prisoner or Hang em High then rabbit hop and StrongSide back to safety. He would simply get gunned down. At the moment, I am not trying to detail the various ways a utility Weapon would advantage the competition, but simply how it affected the style of play. In Halo CE, the game relied on the players quick thinking and strategy. It promoted flanking and earning powerups. Powerups and Power-weapons had to be earned by killing the opponent, not running there first like on the Pit. This was simply because the pistol could kill effectively at all ranges very quickly. It was an organic, logical style of play that relied on intelligence principally and in-game knowledge. Not pushing forward on a thumbsick according to your teammates' callouts.
Halo 2 represents the first step in the wrong direction. With the creation of their second game, Bungie decided that having an effective long-range utility Weapon off of spawn was unacceptable.Apparently, there was this new notion that all weapons should be used equally. They restricted the range of the BR by making it a 3-shot burst Weapon with a lot of spread. Everybody detested that and Bungie fixed the spread after the patch. The starting Weapon is now accurate at long range, but doesn't kill quickly enough. Players can now escape away from you unless you have support. What happened in Halo 2 was the emergence of the setup and the support player. In Halo CE, there was no such thing as a support player. Teams didn t need one since everybody could take down opponents at long range. Instead, in Halo 2 you needed a player on Midship who would remain in the base and weaken people cross-map. The teamshot became primary rather than secondary, but an individual still played a rather important role. You could still 4-shot somebody across Lockout if he popped out too far. Medium-range 1v1 encounters still retained some form of aiming skill since the movement speed was fast and the spread restrained.Furthermore, it still took time and strategy and a deep understanding of the game to develop setups and counter-setups and how to break setups and when to push and when not to push and so on. You still needed your head to play and be successful.
And then came Halo 3. In the next instalment of the Halo series, Bungie said enough was enough. The concept of the utility Weapon had to be abolished once and for all. According to their vision, players should start with a weak starting Weapon (Mind you, this was also the philosophy in Halo 2 with the awful SMG starts.) and try to pick other weapons from there according to their preference. It's a vision that caters towards the casual players and has no competitive merit. The Halo 3 BR was made worse than that of Halo 2 pre-patch. It had significant spread and very slow kill times. It had been turned into a mid-range Weapon that had the ability to pin snipers. Now not only is it slow, but it is also inaccurate. It had by now become impossible to kill a shielded opponent cross-map. Your opponent could secure that OS in front of your eyes, without having to earn it by killing you. If a guy is too far for you to hit him, what is the solution? The aggressive push. That, my friends, is the single worst thing that has happened to Halo. The intelligent, dynamic, power-seeking style of play of Halo CE and the set-up of Halo 2 had been discarded since they no longer worked. You absolutely need teamshooting to kill a person at long-range - it's no longer natural, it's necessary. It is pathetic that I see PRO TEAMS securing the closed/open street hill on Construct by brute-forcing 3 guys up the purple lift. It is a mindless style of play that allows teams made up of less skilled individuals (Whether in the aiming or thinking department) to win games because they were able to have all four players pushing their left analog forward and shoot in unison. That's what Halo 3 really was near the end, and the linear agressiveness-playstyle was only encouraged with maps like Onslaught and Narrows. All there is to it is communication and a response in the way of moving your thumbstick in said direction.
As far as Halo:Reach is concerned, the philosophy was carried over. Slower movement speed, slow strafe speed, and this goes without telling: an ineffective utility gun. Many have the impression that the ulterior motive behind the bloom was to make it more skilful. But I ask you, since when has Bungie done something to the weapon sandbox to make it more skillfull? No, that can't be as they are geared toward the casuals. If you analyze the function of the bloom, we immediately tell that the gun decreases in effectiveness as distance increases. Killtimes in fact increase in linear fashion as distance increases. Can you see a parallel between this and the H3 BR bullet spread? You probably, do and that's because there is. The DMR addresses the limitations of the spread, but completes the same function. It is restrained to its mid-range niche and cannot kill at long-range (a full shielded opponent without help - of course it can kill a one-shot but that's besides the point and was also possible in H3). We, therefore, due to the kill times and the inherent design of the primary weapon, end up with a game with the exact same style of play as its predecessor. Lunchbox in a recent interview summe dit up well, "We just wait for us to have more numbers (as in more players alive) and then we push." Not very bright gameplay and this is coming from the top team. Then later on from Ryanoob "We don't have strategies we just push forward". It's once again down to teamshooting while pushing aggressively. This is not a type of gameplay that MLG should be encouraging. If you need more proof that this is the case, look at the top players. The grand majority of them are the same ones that were excelling in Halo 3. There was no change in gameplay as the H2-H3 jump. MLG should have been taking steps to counter this type of mindless gameplay in my opinion. Instead, the official gametype settings include sprint which only aggravates the problem. Now players are further encouraged to push forward like never before and this dilemma is accentuated when opponents sprint to safety since the other team now has to sprint further to finish the one-shots. Ridiculous.
That's why Halo 3 was bad, it infected the Halo series with a plague called the mindless aggressive push.
[Edited on 11.27.2011 6:19 AM PST]