Halo FPS/RTS Hybrid

[Joseph Angelo]

I think 343 should include a RTS/FPS hybrid game mode. When I play Halo wars I always look at my three Spartans in the field and think "Wow, I really wish I could choose to play that character in first person." Imagine playing Halo wars and having a team of six spartans on the field which are all human players and when you select them and give them a command, it appears as a waypoint or an objective marker on their screen, giving them the distance to their objective and the details of the objective JUST LIKE IN A CAMPAIGN MISSION! If done properly, this game mode would seem like an entire unique campaign each match.

I think the best way to do this would be to treat the firebase as a vehicle that the commander can operate from within or exit and fight as a spartan in first-person view; this allows even the person commanding armies to still have their personalized character in the match.

If you want to get carried away allow players to be the captains of ships and make the map the size of whole galaxy with landmarks such as planets Earth, Harvest, Reach as well as High charity and all of the locations visited in all of the Halo Games prior.

[Is not JL]

 make the map the size of whole galaxy 

please......noo

 

Other than that, this sounds a lot like a Moba, just with a different visual perspective. We know that MOBA's can work in Third Person and in Top-Down. I'm sure that it'd work in first person - BUT - the key factor of a Moba has always been vision, and information flow.

 

As fun as it is to basically have an all new style of Arena Shooters, which is what Halo is famous for, I don't see how the current trends of Halo (Golden Triangle, HUD, Radar, etc.) can be adapted to provide the information that Mobas need.

 

I also don't think the best way to do it is to have 1 guy be the 'commander' of everybody else, partly because people aren't forced to follow what the commander says, and partly because, who picked that 1 guy? In a way, that's why the first thing that pops into my head is MOBA; I an RTS basically has a commander who organizes his AI units, except in this situation the supposed units aren't AI but other players. In the end this feels a lot like Battlefield 4 and it's commander mode, and that didn't really have a standout to me; I couldn't have cared less if there was a commander ordering me around, since, having played both commander and soldier, as a soldier I just do what I want to the objective and as a commander I just keep on rerouting all my soldiers and dropping random uav's and crates to get points for myself, because that's basically what you do in commander mode.

 

The main issue here is:

 

In RTS Form -

1. Nobody is forced to follow the orders of the commander

2. Commander is basically an un-elected god

3. As strategic as you get, your battles are still determined by other players and how good they are; thus there really isn't any point in a commander anyway

 

In MOBA Form -

1. Can't adapt Halo stuff into moba

 

The only other possibly I could think of is something similar to the special ops mission in CoD black ops 2 where you were basically commanding squads in a map but you could hop in to a squad members POV and control them. This had big issues when I played it: 1. The squads were usually dumb when I controlled all of them so I HAD to hop in and control from from first person, but 2. The moment I hopped into first person I could no longer efficiently tell the units to go here, here and here - thus, the dumb got dumber.

 

A cool idea? Yes, but Halo was designed as an arena shooter and this would stray far, far from those roots to basically become what I envision as something like super-gigantic-team-battle. I'd rather play my FPS as one game, and my RTS as another game. Could it work? Perhaps, but before we start thinking of a Halo FPS/RTS hybrid, I think we might have to think of how exactly an FPS/RTS hybrid would work in the first place.