Gravemind put all his ideas about what would be the ultimate Halo game. I thought I’d take a look at some of those elements and see which I liked, which I didn’t, and why:

My preferred compromise would be a Resistance-style “sectional bar” health system, with the player using health packs to fully restore their health; the player’s health would have limited regenerative capacity, and could sustain damage that won’t come back on its own. The health bar would be divided into three to five sections, depending on which number works better for gameplay or for each particular character. The health bar would be a solid bar with no visible lines to demarcate the sections. Instead, it would change color as it diminishes depending on which section the player’s current health level occupies, similar to Halo 1’s health bar but without the less accurate individual squares that composed that one — the colors would be blue, yellow, & red if there are three sections, blue, green, yellow, & red if there are four, and blue, green, yellow, orange, & red if there are five. Each subsequent section could be made to regenerate slower than the preceding one. For example, the blue section might regenerate at one-quarter the rate of the shields, while the yellow section might regenerate only one-eighth as quickly and the red section might not regenerate at all.

This really would be an Ultimate Halo, at least in terms of difficulty, unless the damage model were altered. In this case, players are punished doubly for allowing their health to drop precipitously. Not only are they close to death, with further damage threatening to kill them, but they are forced to wait in safety for health to regenerate longer than if they had taken less damage– and at that time it would be less important.

Of course, if there are health packs available this difference in regenerative rate is moot, since they restore health fully.

I think the above scheme is unnecessarily complicated and not particularly transparent. Unless the indicator takes up a significant portion of screen real estate the difference in regenerative rate may not be immediately apparent.

Frankly I think the design decision required is bold: to either have regenerating health or health packs but not both. H2/H3 compromised by having your shield, as your primary line of defense, regenerate, while retaining a “hidden” amount of health. (Also not particularly transparent.)

If, for various reasons, the design should include a health pack then I think the change that needs to be made is to allow for at least some absolutely minimal amount of inventory management. Merely touching a health pack should not use it, just as merely walking over a gun does not equip it (unless one only has one weapon). Either it should require a button press, or touching it should pick one health pack up, like equipment, to be utilized later. Perhaps like equipment, one and only one could be used. Of course, this does not leave for much distinction between the health pack and the Regenerator equipment; perhaps they should be combined and made more plentiful.

This game would restore the melee system back to the non-lunging melees of the first game. Halo 1’s melee system is basically as good as melee attacks can get, and any future Halo game should have melees functionally identical to those of the original. The only change I would consider is maybe trimming the range by about 0.5 to 1 meters down from the original 3.5 m, though if that causes any complications that did not exist with H1’s melees, then I would leave the range the same.

The melee lunge is a favorite target for criticism, but I think this applies more so to the multiplayer than the single player game, which is more my focus. What does concern me is what campaign films would look like if you can melee a character from a range of 2-3 meters and there is no lunge motion to explain this.

Fall damage is a feature from the first game but absent from the sequels that I would restore. I have always stressed its importance in gameplay. It provides tremendous incentive to watch your footing in areas with high drop-offs. Inattentive players can plummet to their death or at the very least suffer damage. Likewise, players who attempt to jump off a high ledge put themselves at risk of injury or death as a tradeoff to getting to lower elevations more quickly, thus providing a certain balance to methods of traversing a stage on foot in addition to encouraging players to be more careful. As Rampancy.net’s Narcogen said “A map that has fall damage can offer options and be balanced. One approach, for instance, might require a long drop that would weaken the player, but be the shortest and fastest possible. A longer route would cause no damage, but take longer.”

I’m flattered by Gravemind’s recollection of my own words, and I’ll have the good sense here not to disagree with myself.

Personally, I prefer that faster running speed from the first game. Therefore, I’d increase the base player speed about 10-20% from Halo 3. One reason why is that I would substantially increase the accuracy of practically every weapon (unless of course it couldn’t be made any more accurate, as is the case with the sniper rifle), which would make it too easy to hit an opponent in multiplayer if they moved as slow as they do in Halo 3. Likewise, it requires better aim to hit a faster, more agile enemy. Another reason is that it makes traversing large outdoors areas on foot more practical by cutting travel time by a substantial percentage.

Psychopant already replied in the forum that from what he sees, player speed is pretty close to identical in Halo 1 and Halo 3, so perhaps what we’re dealing with here is the perception of speed rather than speed itself.

I prefer the opposite for pretty much the same reasons. Slowing perceived player movement makes sense for the kind of character the Master Chief is, and is a cheap way of making the world seem larger.

As for jump height, it’s negotiable. While I feel that the lower jump height in Halo 1 cut down on bunny-hopping — which might be exacerbated if you combined Halo 1’s speed with Halo 3’s jump height — jumping in the first game felt a bit unresponsive (I’ve heard this is mostly due to H1’s physics, though Halo 1’s controls did feel overall somewhat looser).

I think the height of the character’s jump is not as critical as the ability to double-jump or to jump immediately after landing a jump. In single player this has little impact. In multiplayer it leads to bunny hopping, which is a ridiculous scourge on online gaming. Last week I talked about how realism isn’t as important as verisimilitude; the problem is that bunny hopping breaks both so thoroughly that I hardly think any debate on the subject can be brooked. Normal soldiers don’t bunny hop, and those wearing several tons of armor certainly don’t. So make the jump height whatever you like, just make it impossible to hang in the air by mashing the jump button, and make it so that once you do come down, you can’t jump again immediately, and that if you do manage to minmax the interval between possible jumps, the more successful minimum-interval jumps you manage to string together, the longer the interval becomes. That’ll show them!

Regardless of their HUD type or whether they’re playing Campaign or multiplayer, I’d give the player the ability to adjust certain aspects of the HUD, such as the opacity of its main features (shield & health bars, ammo & grenade counters, etc.). I’d also give the player the option to place the crosshair in the center of the screen; the crosshair’s placement in Halo 2 & 3 (about a third to two-fifths up from the bottom) is a common complaint I’ve heard, so I think it’d be nice if the player could choose whether to center the crosshair. Finally, I would give players the option to have the HUD use Covenant text when playing as an Elite.

Not sure how that would work. The crosshair is supposed to represent the point on which your projectiles will converge. Of course there are already some graphical problems regarding first and third person perspectives, in that this means that projectiles do not emerge, in the third person view, from the barrel of the gun, but rather from a location appropriate to present to the first person view the idea that projectiles are headed towards the crosshair. There appears to be no sync between the apparent position of weapon barrels in third vs first person.

Making the crosshair movable just would seem to exacerbate this.

Finally, there’s the issue of field of view. In Halo 3, while a player on a widescreen TV has a good FOV, a player on a standard TV gets shafted by being stuck with a much narrower FOV much like that of Halo 2. A future Halo game (or any other FPS, for that matter) should better balance how many degrees of field there are on the two types of TVs. While players on regular TVs should have a better horizontal FOV than they had in Halo 2 & 3 (preferably, it should be as much as in Halo 1, which IIRC gave the players about 10-15* more FOV than the sequels, which were around 55-60*), it shouldn’t be quite as much as they’d have on a widescreen TV, or else they’d have too much vertical FOV as compared to the latter. My initial suggestion would be 70-80* of horizontal FOV for 4:3 screens and 90* for 16:9 TVs. Alternately, the game could simply be letterboxed on standard TVs to make the viewable area the same as on a widescreen TV (this would be optional, and the player could have a full-screen view at the cost of less FOV than a widescreen TV).

The last, I think, is really the only workable solution for going forward, unfortunately. There are issues of integrity of artistic presentation as well. The bottom line is that I don’t think that any of the above compromises would equally satisfy a significant enough portion of the population that are, admittedly, playing the game on hardware that it was not designed for (4:3 displays). The compromise still gives an FOV advantage to widescreen players, and changes the aesthetic experience of playing the game for 4:3 players. Letterboxing solves both at the expense of less efficient usage of screen real estate. I fear this is the price to be paid for running a next-gen console game on a last-gen display. That probably sounds harsh, and it is, but I think there’s nothing better that can fairly be done.

The bubble shield should be far less influential. Instead of lasting for a rather long stretch of time, it should only last long enough for a player to let his shield regenerate and/or reload his weapon (8 seconds is more than enough). It should also be more personal, so it would be a bit smaller. Finally, to compensate for these changes, the bubble shield would activate instantly rather than taking a second to deploy when the player presses the button. Alternately, the bubble shield could be very rare, with the “deployable cover” item becoming the primary form of stationary shield. Deployable cover would function just as the stationary shields of Halo 1 & 2 did, and would take damage like a Jackal’s shield.

If you hadn’t mentioned that you’d really just prefer to eliminate equipment altogether I could have guessed it from your revisions to the bubble shield. Only eight seconds? Smaller radius? Rare? Why have it in the game at all? Already, as you mention, plenty of players make limited use of equipment. How is that situation improved by making equipment less, rather than more, useful? The bubble shield you describe above isn’t useful enough to a player to justify the man-hours needed to create its artistic and programming assets, nor is it an efficient enough use of a player’s time to stop, pick it up, and judiciously deploy it, as opposed to just using a standard weapon or taking cover.

The regenerator could be reworked as well, though I could do without it. I don’t really care for how it functions in Halo 3. It feels wildly inconsistent; it either works really well or it’s useless, and a fight could go either way when two opposing players are inside it in multiplayer, even if there was a wide initial gap in shields. If it instantly restored any damage done to shields, then I’d consider keeping it. In other words, nothing short of a one-hit-kill attack (e.g., sniper headshot, rocket, or assassination) should kill a person inside of it.

I can’t speak as the the effectiveness of the regenerator specifically, as I don’t play enough multiplayer to get a good sample on its rare use, and in single player it is used far more by my opponents than by me. I merely wait it out if I can. However, the suggestion to restore shields with it just seems to leave too little distinction between it and the bubble shield, as the end result is the same– a temporary barrier to taking any damage. As such there’d be little reason to leave both in the game.

The trip mine would remain a simple proximity explosive deployed just as it was in Halo 3. However, it would be smaller (about half the H3 model’s size), make no noise, and emit no light. In order to be more effective against enemies and less of a threat to careless allies, instead of the glowing and incessant beeping, it would have a bright red waypoint over it that is only visible to the allies of whoever deployed it. Finally, it would be more effective than it was in the final version of Halo 3. To make it as effective as it was in the beta, it would have the same damage and blast radius as the rocket launcher.

I wholly endorse this. While I understand that it was not Bungie’s intent to make Halo as deep or as complex as a tactical shooter, the game does make plenty good use of waypoints, but not in this way. I do still think there needs to be some audiovisual cue; the mine shouldn’t be completely invisible. There needs to be some chance of an enemy detecting it, even if it is slight and easily missed.

The power drainer would emit a single, instantaneous burst instead of a persistent field. In other words, it’d become more or less an EMP grenade. Indeed, it’d be a small grenade-sized device thrown like a grenade that detonates a couple of seconds after coming to rest. It would have a similar effect as before — it would knock out any shielding and temporarily disable any vehicle in its area of effect (8-10 meters radius). However, it would no longer cause damage to health or to vehicles, so there would no longer be any instances where a power drainer kills someone or blows up a vehicle.

I have difficulty seeing the necessity for arbitrarily increasing the strength of an already powerful piece of equipment, like the trip mine, by making it both less noticeable and more powerful, while at the same time taking an item of dubious usefulness and making it even less useful. Again, it seems that what you really want to do is remove all equipment without drawing the objections that suggestion would cause. Instead, you want to compromise the effectiveness of most equipment (except the ones you like) to the point that most players would agree with your assertion that these things are useless and the game is better off with them removed.

The flare, as it functioned in Halo 3, was more of an annoyance or minor distraction than something useful. Instead of the Halo 3 version, which was basically a bright, blinding mini-sun that activated the instant it was deployed and persisted for a few seconds, I would have it function more like a flash grenade. Like the power drainer, it would be a smaller device thrown like a grenade. Once it detonates, it would emit an instantaneous flash of extremely bright light. Anything looking at the flash will be completely blinded should they be within a certain distance of it. Even if they are outside that range or are close but not looking directly at it, they would still suffer from “washed-out” vision, kind of like the HDR lighting effect when a player goes from a dark environment to a bright environment (a “dark theatre to bright outdoors” effect). The effects of the flare would of course be temporary, and any affected player’s vision would return to normal after a few seconds. Also, this time the flare would be useful in Campaign, as most enemies would actually be blinded as well. They could stagger around, fire in random directions, or run aimlessly around trying to flee.

I agree that more could be done to make it apparent to the player that the flare equipment is useful in campaign mode. So far I can’t tell, and that means it isn’t transparent, whether it works or not.

Why a player should suffer washed-out vision if nearby the flare, but not looking at it, is not apparent to me. I think that breaks verisimilitude and unnecessarily punishes the player arbitrarily. If what you want is a persistent, area-effect weapon that reduces the player’s field of vision then I think the flare should be replaced with a smoke grenade, or perhaps some sort of EMP-like device that would only affect augmented characters like Spartans by somehow scrambling their displays. Perhaps such a device could be combined with the radar jammer and be more useful than either; that’s another item that I am not convinced has any utility by the player in campaign mode.

All equipment would, due to how influential it is in gameplay, would take much longer to respawn in multiplayer to place more emphasis on the traditional “Golden Tripod.”

I have a fundamental problem with this as I think as a conclusion it works directly against your assumptions.

First, I think there’s plenty of emphasis, both in campaign and multiplayer, on the golden tripod. You can’t get through any campaign levels or multiplayer matches only using equipment, and the rest of the time, the golden tripod is what you have to use.

If you make occurrences of equipment that much more rare, it means that the use of it, and any resulting advantage gained by the team or player that uses it, will seem more random and more arbitrary. Use of equipment would become not the norm, but an exception to the rule. The rarer its use becomes, the more it would be seen as an exception to, rather than a part of, normal gameplay, and eventually its use would be seen as dishonorable.

As for the power-ups, there would be a few changes as well. First and foremost, the overshield would once again provide two extra layers of shielding, just as in Halo 1 & 2, instead of just one like in Halo 3. Furthermore, that attention-grabbing glow effect it gives the player would be removed.

I’m not sure what the justification is for this. Isn’t it configurable in customs anyway? Or are you merely referring to the cosmetic presentation of the shield bar? Why should the shield provide extra protection without any downside?

Personally, I think the camo being a device you can carry around and activate on command later is not only more plausible than some odd blue crystal or floating orb of energy you touch that takes effect immediately, it’s also more convenient for the player from a gameplay perspective, as sometimes the placement of the camo could make it to where it would run out by time the player got to where it would be of some use. Since the camo was in the form of equipment, then I think the overshield could be such a device as well.

No argument there. Only promotes equality and symmetry for gameplay-changing effects.

Environments in the Halo series have been largely static and non-interactive. I would try to make them at least somewhat more dynamic. One way would be to give them some degree of destructibility. While this game would not have destructible or deformable environments anywhere near the degree seen in games like Bad Company or Fracture, there would be a sense of persistent damage. This could be achieved by the implementation of superficial environmental destruction like that seen in Gears of War 2.

There I have to disagree violently. If there’s an example to be taken on how to handle environmental objects, it’s from Half-Life 2, especially Episode 2, and not from Gears of War. Gears of War’s ordinary environments are actually far more static than any environment in any Halo game with the possible exception of Halo 1. The entire world is basically a backdrop, and the only items that are in any way interactive are weapons and enemy units. Sometimes some random portion of the environment, as pointed out by the game, is interactive and may be destroyed or otherwise influenced to achieve a particular effect. In many cases this is specific to one instance of an item, regardless of how many other, similar, but noninteractive items may be nearby. In some cases the interactivity is one-time and one-way, and in others it is initiated only by the game engine or by enemy NPCs, and cannot be affected by the player. It is often used to prevent players from backtracking by collapsing things behind the player.

In short, Halo would be a good model of environment interactivity for Gears to adopt, and not the other way around, and Half-Life 2 would be a superior example for either; a model in which any object that appears movable or would otherwise be interactive in some way can be interacted with (picked up, dropped, thrown, pushed) and all objects that share similar outward characteristics are interactive in similar ways and in ways that are consistent with those outward characteristics. Part of the reason for this in HL2 is the gravity gun, but if you ask me, this kind of interactivity should be in every first person game that can possibly justify it.

Moving stage geometry could play a role as well. For example, in Halo 2 there were the moving parts of Cairo Station’s MAC gun that interfered with the player’s movement, various pieces of machinery operating in Forerunner installations (e.g. the elevator sequence in the stage The Arbiter), the piston on Waterworks, the fan on Zanzibar, and the radar dish on Ascension. I would like to see more stuff like that in a future Halo game.

I agree, and it’s interesting to see that nearly all of those elements were removed between Halo 2 and Halo 3; I think they were so problematic that they eventually were just eliminated. I was a big critic of the rail-shooter gameplay induced by H2’s gondolas, but there was lots of moving BSPs in Halo 2 and it made those environments seem more alive.

Environmental hazards could also be an element. In snowy stages, there could be ice patches that cause wheeled vehicles to lose traction. There could also be rockslides, avalanches, and other falling stuff throughout the game (e.g., stalactites, which like the ones on Waterworks could be shot off to crush enemies), which could happen as part of a scripted event or as something triggered by the actions of the player or an NPC.

Finally, bad weather would come into play. Weather in the Halo series has largely been mild and usually quite fair. There was light snowfall on Assault on the Control Room, Two Betrayals, and Lockout, light, almost unnoticeable rain on The Great Journey and The Storm, and fog on 343 Guilty Spark and Backwash. Fog was the only example of adverse, gameplay-affecting conditions as it limited visibility to a few dozen meters. None of the other weather effects did anything other than add ambiance. Heavy rain, wind, thunder & lightning (with appropriate light sourcing), heavy snow or whiteouts, thick fog, and so forth would play a larger role in this game, and could affect gameplay by affecting visibility, interfering with vehicle maneuverability, and so forth. Weather effects could even be dynamic rather than static, changing as a stage progresses and even differing in the same place and time on separate playthroughs.

I could only see such variability within a stage being subject to campaign mode, and even then I think it’s questionable. I sort of like the idea, and I’m intrigued by it. I think the rain levels in Gears are fantastically atmospheric, and in a way it’s too bad that Halo’s weather is so unnoticeable. The levels where it is most prominent– 343 Guilty Spark’s fog and Assault on the Control Room’s snow– are the most memorable and fun levels, although not entirely because of the weather. It is a factor, though.

However, such variability within a multiplayer game I think would invariably cause no end of complaints and criticisms when it affects the outcome of battles, either due to lack of visiblity, lack of traction, or other such elements. Of course over a long enough timeline these things would tend to average out for most players, but that is no consolation for those who complain about any event in multiplayer that is random or arbitrary.

Even in campaign, variability within a stage could be problematic if it affects the outcome negatively; you’d just end up with people dying in a way they considered unfair.

I put this on the list of ideas I personally like; but I think any developer shooting for a mass market would tend to shy away from it.

Ultimately I think the above really is less of a discussion about what consitutes an “ultimate Halo game” but rather what defines an ultimate Halo engine, or even an ultimate shooter engine, in that it should have the capabilities to handle items and processes such as the above.

The next portion of Gravemind’s article focuses on specific elements in a Halo campaign and I’ll get to those next time.

A detail-oriented critic of the Halo series, Gravemind has now collected his ideas into a kind of roadmap for his ultimate Halo game to combine all the elements he finds the best from all three games, as well as eliminating the faults. Interesting read. If y ou don’t like the light text on dark background version at the shadow of the void, you can try the dark text on light background version at HBO.

Rebuttal forthcoming!