- WhackyGordon
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- Noble Heroic Member
Welcome to the internet. Joy dies here.
Posting my reply to that thread here, in preparation for my inevitable ban lol
Posted by: L4xm4n
I think what the competitive plays wanted was for Bungie to build up from their previous games. Instead they removed/changed things.
For example, the plasma rifle in Halo CE had a stun effect. This gave the weapon a purpose. In the later halos, the stun effect was removed and the weapon is now useless.
Strafing has become worse throughout the halo series. Halo Reach has the worst strafe, halo 1 and 2 had the best. What's the point of decreasing the effectiveness of the strafe? So it's easier more new players to hit their target.
Hitboxes are larger now too. Your reticule can be beside your enemy and you will still hit them.
The utility weapon is less effective than before. After every halo game, the kill time of the utility weapon increased.
These are a few of the many unnecessary things that Bungie did to the game. They could've added on top of these things, but instead they changed it.
I think in those areas Bungie was trying to make the game a little easier to learn while still maintaining it's competitive nature. Broadening the audience. I think Reach was just a step too far. Halo 3 was something of a sweet spot as far as that goes, with enough simple mechanics for players to be able to jump from campaign to MM without having to relearn the way they play completely.
I'm all for appealing to a larger audience, but the purpose should be clear - welcoming that larger audience into a competitive environment.
I think something has been overlooked in this competitive vs. social debate. Social is still competitive. That's the nature of the game. You're competing with your opponent to win the match. Even firefight is competitive to a degree, because you're competing for the highest score. Halo is necessarily a game of competition. In fact, all games are competitions. In Scrabble the aim is to achieve a higher score than your opponent. Even jumping jacks has a competitive focus. Competition is what makes games interesting. Competition is what makes it a game.
So 'competitive' is the wrong word to use. The debate here is about the difficulty of the game. Reach is easier than Halo 3. Easier to perform well and easier to survive. In even matches that's not as much of a problem. The problem is the uneven matches.
That's when the disparity of learning curves between the various mechanics really gets drawn to the forefront. Skilled players get frustrated when they lose an engagement to a lesser skilled player because the lesser skilled player was using a simpler mechanic. Lesser skilled players get frustrated when they lose almost every engagement to more skilled players using mechanics that are beyond the abilities of the lesser skilled player. What does that mean?
Difficulty settings. There's a reason just about every game ever has had Easy/Medium/Hard/Expert, or some subset thereof. Trying to put all of your audience on an even playing field means you'll have a very small audience. Letting your audience have some level of control over the difficulty of their experience means a much larger audience and far fewer frustrated players. The lesser skilled can enjoy playing Easy/Medium, while the more skilled players that are looking for more of a challenge can enjoy the Hard/Expert difficulties. The lesser skilled players will get frustrated on the higher difficulties, just as the more skilled players will get bored on the lower difficulties. So you offer some degree of selection.
That's what Reach is lacking. Difficulty selection. The majority of MM is being treated like the Easy/Medium setting, with MLG being Expert. There's no middle ground for players to cross the gap from Medium to Expert, and Expert is essentially one 'level' compared to the rest of MM. Would it make sense if 90% of the Reach campaign was only available on Easy/Medium, and there was one level at the end of the game with the option of Expert? Perhaps in the bigoted mind of a very selfish individual who only plays one difficulty and only cares about his current personal experience. It would be foolish for a company to make a game for just one person. They would have to develop it for less than $60.
Ranking in Halo 3 had it's drawbacks, but the net effect was a much more balanced environment, with options for all sorts of players. I hope 343 moves back in that direction somehow. The combined audiences mean we have the potential to collectively finance a much better end product if only we could tolerate each other's presence.