For Halo 5, how about an environment that Interacts with players and the map itself?

[Romario Barnes]

Maybe for a map say...in the sand dunes in the middle of a dessert...there's earthquakes and strong wind that cause dust storms and maybe a warning signal telling the characters to find shelter or something...because it takes down their shields and stuff.

 

Maybe for a jungle map or something you can shoot down a tree to fall on an enemy...or maybe have actually animals in maps that will fight against players.

 

It'd be a really neat idea don't you think? It'll really meld with the whole "going for a futuristic/realistic feel" for next-gen gaming. Having the environment dictate some of your movements.

 

Just a thought, let me know what you guys think.

[RedStarRocket91]

This sort of idea has actually been surprisingly popular lately. There was a similar sort of idea in the 'Hazard' variants of Mass Effect 3's multiplayer, which added various challenges such as reduced visibility and damage over time in certain areas, and of course the Gears of War series has been playing around with map-specific modifiers, first with the Forces of Nature DLC and then the declassified challenges in Gears of War: Judgement. Even Call of Duty: Black Ops II experimented with dynamic maps elements like moving crates.

 

I don't think putting AI-controlled units into multiplayer is a terribly good idea though, because it's an extra layer of calculations to perform and then send, and AI-intensive data is why you can get so much lag with three Grunts and a Jackal on-screen when playing co-op Campaign over the internet, but 8v8 Big Team games can play just fine.

 

But other than that, I can definitely see the potential in this! If a blizzard arrives every two or three minutes, reducing visibility for anyone outside and perhaps affecting aim assist, or there was some sort of electromagnetic reaction which harmed shields and scrambled the motion tracker of anyone in range of a damaged reactor, or in a damaged spaceship with very narrow corridors the gravity generators might occasionally fail, so for a few second everyone might be weightless and when the generators came back on the gravity might be in a different direction, so you'd have a completely new map layout, or there might be a bomb goes off halfway through so that a big chunk of the map changes and ends up being laid out completely differently. I don't know that these would be good for regular competitive play, as they might be a bit too unpredictable, but they could be great fun for Custom Games or Social playlists, where the more chaos, the better!

[BaconShelf]

It would work for customs, Firge and machinima, but I can't see a point for it in online play.

[Elite]

This sort of idea has actually been surprisingly popular lately. There was a similar sort of idea in the 'Hazard' variants of Mass Effect 3's multiplayer, which added various challenges such as reduced visibility and damage over time in certain areas, and of course the Gears of War series has been playing around with map-specific modifiers, first with the Forces of Nature DLC and then the declassified challenges in Gears of War: Judgement. Even Call of Duty: Black Ops II experimented with dynamic maps elements like moving crates.

 

I don't think putting AI-controlled units into multiplayer is a terribly good idea though, because it's an extra layer of calculations to perform and then send, and AI-intensive data is why you can get so much lag with three Grunts and a Jackal on-screen when playing co-op Campaign over the internet, but 8v8 Big Team games can play just fine.

 

But other than that, I can definitely see the potential in this! If a blizzard arrives every two or three minutes, reducing visibility for anyone outside and perhaps affecting aim assist, or there was some sort of electromagnetic reaction which harmed shields and scrambled the motion tracker of anyone in range of a damaged reactor, or in a damaged spaceship with very narrow corridors the gravity generators might occasionally fail, so for a few second everyone might be weightless and when the generators came back on the gravity might be in a different direction, so you'd have a completely new map layout, or there might be a bomb goes off halfway through so that a big chunk of the map changes and ends up being laid out completely differently. I don't know that these would be good for regular competitive play, as they might be a bit too unpredictable, but they could be great fun for Custom Games or Social playlists, where the more chaos, the better!

You cite Call of Duty to do this despite many games doing this many times in the past?

Plus, 8v8 Big Team on Xbox One would be kind of pointless. It wouldn't be "Big Team" anymore, it would be "Average-sized Team" which sounds horrible. With better servers plus new-ish hardware it is pretty reasonable to go straight to 16x16 for Big Team. Maps will be big enough to support 16x16, too.

 

Wouldn't it be nice to bring bigger lobbies to consoles? At least 32 people in the biggest-sized lobby? Feels almost empty when I come from PC back to Halo and I've gone from 200+ people on average to 8+ people on average. :

[RedStarRocket91]

You cite Call of Duty to do this despite many games doing this many times in the past?

Plus, 8v8 Big Team on Xbox One would be kind of pointless. It wouldn't be "Big Team" anymore, it would be "Average-sized Team" which sounds horrible. With better servers plus new-ish hardware it is pretty reasonable to go straight to 16x16 for Big Team. Maps will be big enough to support 16x16, too.

 

Wouldn't it be nice to bring bigger lobbies to consoles? At least 32 people in the biggest-sized lobby? Feels almost empty when I come from PC back to Halo and I've gone from 200+ people on average to 8+ people on average. :

 

I stand by citing Call of Duty in this circumstance, though I'm not going to dispute that dynamic maps have been around for a very long time. I chose the newest Call of Duty as an example for two main reasons: the first, because it's representative of the current trend toward dynamic maps, which is what I was focusing on rather than the history of maps as a whole: the second, because it was one of the game's big selling points, and was probably the first game featuring this kind of thing for many people. It's an accurate citation and one that most modern gamers will be familiar with it, so I don't really see the problem.

 

I should also clear up the second paragraph, because it wasn't very well written I actually don't really have any problems with very big lobbies, provided the game is coded well enough to cope with them. If a game is built well enough that one match can have a hundred people while keeping lag at acceptable levels on the average home connection, then I'd be perfectly happy to see that many people playing together. The issue with Halo in particular however is that, to my understanding, there hasn't been a major overhaul to the netcode since the days of Halo 2, which is why compared to more recent franchises the newer instalments of the Halo series have such horrible levels of lag: essentially, we're trying to run a modern game on a system built for the world as it existed a decade ago, and that system just isn't adequate anymore. I know for a fact that netcode can be written to accomodate AI without destroying everyone's connections - look at Horde mode in the Gears of War series, which is the prime example - and yet we're still in the situation with Halo that even people with decent connections can suffer lag bad enough to make games unplayable once more than two or three AI units show up. Even with 8v8 games, the game can sometimes struggle.

 

So yeah, while I'd be very happy to see bigger lobbies and I know that it's entirely possible to make their lag acceptable, I'd far rather that Halo were to stick with fairly small lobbies than create really big matches where everyone goes back to the kind of lag we had in the late 90s.

[Eisenhower]

Has anyone thought of flood maps? Like a huge gravemind tentacle crushing players in a certain area. Or the infestation slowly grows on top of the map over the course of the match.

 

Now that would be cool.

[spartan123]

You cite Call of Duty to do this despite many games doing this many times in the past?

Plus, 8v8 Big Team on Xbox One would be kind of pointless. It wouldn't be "Big Team" anymore, it would be "Average-sized Team" which sounds horrible. With better servers plus new-ish hardware it is pretty reasonable to go straight to 16x16 for Big Team. Maps will be big enough to support 16x16, too.

 

Wouldn't it be nice to bring bigger lobbies to consoles? At least 32 people in the biggest-sized lobby? Feels almost empty when I come from PC back to Halo and I've gone from 200+ people on average to 8+ people on average. :

I agree with this. Next-gen consoles will be able to handle larger numbers of people, especially since Halo 5 is going to have dedicated servers and therefore minimal lag. I would honestly love to have larger lobbies; like in BTB if they made it 30 v 30 or something crazy like that, make it seem like an actual ground war. 

[Victory Element]

Has anyone thought of flood maps? Like a huge gravemind tentacle crushing players in a certain area. Or the infestation slowly grows on top of the map over the course of the match.

 

Now that would be cool.

 

 

it would be a great effect or map alternative for flood mode

[Corporal Hicks]

Maybe a map where the player can activate certain Forerunner structures? Where they press a button and sentinels come out to fight for you. Or you can activate hidden entrances or rooms. Any one else thought of this?

[Noneed4sleep64]

This would be cool but not NPCs