Why I will not buy another halo made by 343

[Mega_Voltz]

Fair point. But there is always an OP gun.

[BaconShelf]

 

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That's a fair point but its still really pathetic it took more than a year and they are still balancing weapons out! THAT WERE IN THE BASE GAME!

 

They had all the years prior too release too to balance weapons out. And an alpha and a beta!

 

This is pretty common, to be honest. There's a lot of things you can't take into account in play testing. Especially in a game with dozens of weapons all filling the same role. My absolute favourite multiplayer (BF4), took about a year to get to the point of glory it is now. You can do as much internal play testing as you want, but people will find a game-breaking glitch or exploit on day 1.

 

Same for Halo Wars. I imagine that internal playtests generally involved people making combined-arms armies because that was what the game was balanced around. When people found the game-breaking strategies (Chopper+48 engineers ftw), they had to compensate for that after launch.

 

Plus, Halo versus games like Battlefield or Destiny (Even Halo 4, to an extent) all have multiple weapons in the same role. In battlefield 4, There are about 12-15 weapons in every class of gun (Assault rifle, carbine, sidearm, sniper, shotgun, DMR, pdw, LMG). With so many weapons in the same role, how are you going to differentiate the M16A1 from the AK-12, or the AN-94 from the SCAR-H? Damage value, accuracy, muzzle climb, reload time and rate of fire. Only, you then discover that the AEK-971 is significantly more powerful than any other weapon on the playing field, so you have to go and tweak that weapon's values and see if it works. Then the BULLDOG is added in the next expansion, and now you have to rework the entire assault rifle balancing to compensate. It's a lot more complicated than it would seem.

 

In Halo 4, we see this with the marksman weapons category; the battle rifle, DMR, carbine and light rifle all fill the same role, and so all are having to be balanced against each other. The Assault and Storm rifles + suppressor all have to perform equally against each other. And so forth.

 

Weapon balancing isn't easy, especially when people are actively looking for ways to exploit something, my battlefield loadout consists of smoke grenades, a shotgun firing explosive rounds and with a thermal scope, then a 40x ballistic scope on my sidearm (It's a repeater carbine). I can dominate half the map with this gear, and camouflage myself so I cannot be hit accurately. This is after over a year of constant tweaking, and you can still find ways of breaking the system.

 

Halo has a luxury in that it's weapons are district from each other, especially in halo 5, where the DMR truly acts as a marksman rifle, so can have a much more effective user at medium-long range, but will become outmatched in short range. Something the games have drastically needed for a long time.

[Silent Orbis]

When I say new mechanics I was talking about implementation. Sure, Bungie thought about it at the beginning but that doesn't make it old by any means. At least not to the player, which is what matters. The question is whether or not these mechanics have been in Halo 2/3. No. And had Bungie implemented them, they wouldn't have been balanced as good as they are in Halo 5. That's what I'm saying. Maybe it's wrong to say this as a fact, but IMO 343 is doing a good job with IMPLEMENTATION. That's what I was saying by "new".

[Unease Peanut]

Plus, Halo versus games like Battlefield or Destiny (Even Halo 4, to an extent) all have multiple weapons in the same role. In battlefield 4, There are about 12-15 weapons in every class of gun (Assault rifle, carbine, sidearm, sniper, shotgun, DMR, pdw, LMG). With so many weapons in the same role, how are you going to differentiate the M16A1 from the AK-12, or the AN-94 from the SCAR-H? Damage value, accuracy, muzzle climb, reload time and rate of fire. Only, you then discover that the AEK-971 is significantly more powerful than any other weapon on the playing field, so you have to go and tweak that weapon's values and see if it works. Then the BULLDOG is added in the next expansion, and now you have to rework the entire assault rifle balancing to compensate. It's a lot more complicated than it would seem.

 

 

My god I know this feeling. DICE can never and will never get balancing right. It seems to be pretty OK right now but there are a lot of guns that are just useless right now.

 

Though in Halo 5 everything seems to be pretty balanced. Every gun has it's own style and plays its part correctly.