Chicken Soup for the Spartan Soul
Dual-wielding and vehicle jacking are great fun, but those were pretty much the only new gameplay features in Halo 2. I fancy myself an overachiever, so here are a few ideas that I think would improve the next game.
Infinite Grenades: Some of the most fun I ever had with Halo 1 were grenade-only matches on Prisoner and Hang 'Em High. What happened to the option for infinite grenades? Maybe this is something they can fix with a patch.
Multiplayer Bots: Yeah, man, all the cool kids are doing it! But seriously, sometimes I get fed up with the cheaters, griefers, loudmouths, and pubeless brats that infest XBL. Halo has awesome enemy AI, so why not let us randomly place some baddies on the multiplayer maps for offline carnage? How cool would it be to splatter a horde of Hunters on Coag?
Live Campaign Co-op: The ultimate no-brainer, this was originally going to be in Halo 2. I don't know about you, but I could have waited an extra couple months for Bungie to finish debugging cooperative campaign play over XBL.
Ignore List: Speaking of Live trolls. Sometimes you come across somebody that you abhor with an unholy passion. When you put someone on the Ignore list, they will not be able to send you Friend, Clan, or Party Invites. Their voice will automatically be muted should you end up in the same Matchmade game. And to top it off, players on your Ignore list can’t join a party that you’re the leader of. That means if someone in your party happens to be Friends with another person who is on your Ignore list, they can receive an invite, but will be blocked from entering the party. (Admittedly, this is an issue for the XBL crew rather than Bungie.)
Ambient Life: The infamous Halo 1 beta movie showed scenes of the Chief driving through open fields with ugly beasts that resembled Shriekers (see Tremors II: Aftershocks). There were quad-winged birds and schools of fish on Delta Halo. More open areas would allow you to drive around wandering herds and scatter a feeding flock. Halo 3 will definitely be on Xbox 360, meaning they should have more than enough processing power for dozens of characters models on screen at once. Just imagine a fun diversion of mowing down alien cows with the Warthog’s LAAG!
New Flood: There are three types of Flood forms: Infection, Carrier, and Combat. They all do the exact same thing by running straight at you, with varying degrees of speed and strength. We need a bit more variety. Human/Combat forms should rely heavily on weapons while Elite/Combat forms are more likely to run in and swing away (sometimes having Overshields or Active Camo makes them doubly dangerous). Grunts and Jackals should mutate into some kind of dog-like thing, which is faster but weaker than a standard Combat form. We’re told that Hunters can’t be mutated, because they’re actually a hive creature made of many wormy things. But Brutes are big and badass. They should balloon into grotesque behemoths that are slow to move, but immensely powerful. And check this out!
Destructible Environments: This is something that’s limited by processing power, because the more particle effects and geometry you throw in, the harder the CPU has to work, and having too much is what causes a drop in framerate. But since Halo 3 is going to be on Xbox 360, it should be more than powerful enough to handle breakable crates and crumbling walls. Rather than making every structure completely destructible, I could be satisfied with visual fracturing, knocking down some crumbling walls (like the ruined buildings of Outskirts), and twisting the distressed metal on a damaged battleship.
Weather Conditions: Halo 1 did this very well, with both snow and nighttime levels. Halo 2 threw in some fog. How about some rain? Imagine if all those droplets messed with your motion sensors! That would make for a tense campaign level. Granted, it would be too annoying for multiplayer, though an weather option for custom games would be appreciated.
Built-In Night Vision & Infrared: First of all, the novels already tells us that Spartans have built-in low-light enhancers and infrared sensors. A flashlight is really impractical, because it gives away your position. The Covenant AI should be smart enough to notice a beam of light moving around their ship where it’s not supposed to. And we’ve already done the “suddenly attacked by Flood in the dark” thing twice. Also, infrared would have both benefits and drawbacks. You’d be able to spot Elites in Active Camo, while Grunts (who wear temperature regulated suits) and Drones (cold-blooded insectoids) would be almost invisible to infrared.
Issuing Commands: No matter how good the enemy AI is, it always seems like your support crew is behind the curve. Either they fail to give you cover fire or blow your cover when you’re trying to sneak around. One of the things that still gives me trouble is in the tunnels of Metropolis, trying to get the Marines to follow me in their Warthogs while I drive a Ghost. They just don’t want to jump that damn ramp! I don’t expect Rainbow Six level complexity, but the D-Pad is just sitting there doing nothing. All I ask for is the four cardinal commands: Move Out, Hold Position, Cover Me, and Retreat. Look at a specific Marine to command one at a time (necessary range for commands to be received indicated by a Friend-Or-Foe tag on the HUD), or don’t look at anyone to send commands to the entire party. Not only would it fix a lot of gameplay issues, it would add an extra layer of strategy and give us an excuse to hear Master Chief’s badass voice barking orders. And better, you don’t have to use it at all if you don’t want to, because the AI will go about its normal business anyway.
Weapon Stealing: You know how you can trade weapons with your AI support in the H2 campaign? How cool would it be if you dodged someone’s Sword lunge, pressed X to rip it out of their hands, and killed them with it? Being able to steal the other guy’s weapon would help discourage people who like to run right in your face and melee. It could work like hijacking a vehicle too: If a shotgun-wielder gets TOO close, stealing it would include a quick animation of you flipping it around and firing it at point-blank range, like friggin’ Jet Li. I’ve seen a lot of complaints about how a weak player that hordes the power weapons can slaughter a better player. Head-to-Head Matchmaking has been ruined by this. Weapon stealing would let the better guy show his ability by snatching away a sword-whore’s favorite toy.
Grenade Cooking: A simple concept that’s not exactly new to action games. Instead of just pressing the trigger to throw a grenade, holding it down primes the frag and you have to release to throw. Hold it down just long enough and you can let the grenade explode over an enemy’s head, rather than have it bounce around and give him time to jump away. Not only would this be extremely useful in the campaign, but it would add a whole new dynamic to multiplayer.
Spartans: Note the plural. According to Bungie, the novels can be considered canonical. And according to the novels, there are eight living Spartans: John (Master Chief), Fred, Linda, Will, Kelly (listed MIA but definitely alive), and--as mentioned in The Fall of Reach--three unnamed Spartans who were too far away to be called back for the Pillar of Autumn’s mission (and thus were spared the massacre of Reach). It’s possible to explain away the absence of the other Spartans from Halo 2: only Master Chief needed to attend the medal ceremony on Cairo Station, so the others were probably still on Earth or elsewhere, fighting the Covenant. MC’s mission to New Mombasa and then Delta Halo was so sudden that they didn’t have time to call the other Spartans in. With a little back-story, it would be very easy to incorporate them into Halo 3.
Objective-Based Missions: Campaign missions tend to be little more than "go from Point A to Point B and kill everything in your path." That’s all good and well, but the programming already exists for something more interesting. Why not give us a variety of such objectives during the campaign? Examples:
King of the Hill: Both H1 and H2 already have missions like this; the first time you teamed up with Marines on Alpha
Halo and again when you had to hold the courtyard in the Outskirts. Here’s a better one: A mission where you have to
defend a Marine outpost against waves of attackers. The twist is that the outpost has several zones with different
ammo supplies, gun emplacements, and architectural layouts, and you have to run between them as necessary.
Capture the Flag: It wouldn’t make sense within the context of a war with the Covenant, but one of the ideas I’ve had
for a level in Halo 3 is a prologue, establishing the existence of other Spartans. It would take the form of a flashback
with the pre-MJOLNIR Spartans training on Reach. They have to infiltrate a base held by their instructors, with the
objective of capturing their flag and bringing it back to extraction point. You could carry the flag yourself, or tell a
teammate to grab it while you play escort. A similar mission is shown in Chapter 17 of First Strike.
Assault: For those that don’t know, the Assault gametype is about carrying a bomb into the enemy base and holding
the position against defenders long enough to arm it. In the context of the campaign mode, you’d have to carry or
escort the bomb carrier into a Covenant stronghold, hold the position while it’s being set up, then escape before the
timer runs out. This could even be just one part of a mission and whether you succeed alters the rest of the stage.
Oddball: You have to snatch a piece of Forerunner technology and keep the Covenant from taking it back to their base,
but you have to drop it to defend yourself. You can either stop to kill each patrol or try to sneak through.
And speaking of sneaking, I really liked the segments of "Assault On The Control Room" that encouraged you to take it slow, meleeing the Covenant patrols rather than just running-and-gunning. H2 didn’t have anything like that and I miss it sorely. Gimme a mission that promotes stealthy tactics over brute force.
