Regarding ‘Random’ Power Weapon drops in Halo 4…
2012/04/07 in 4, commentary, halo
Knowledge is power.
But knowledge is not a skill. You cannot get better at knowledge. You simply acquire more of it.
What is the skill, is the rapid acquisition and application of this knowledge for success.
Lack of knowledge, about maps, about weapon placements, is a huge barrier for entry to new players. You only have to compare the amount of players that buy the game, to the amount of players that enter multiplayer at all, to the amount of players that play more than 20 games to see a huge drop off of players. Thats a problem when you want to keep as many games off the 2nd hand market as possible, when you want people to stick around to buy DLC, to use other tertiary and premium services like the rendering or Atlas. You want players in your game, playing matches, because the more people you have the better the overall experience for everyone in terms of skill and connection matches.
It’s not hard to understand that part of the reason for the massive drop of rate is because players are getting killed by powerful on-map weapons they had no idea even existed – that doesn’t seem fun or fair to them. They have difficulty learning where these weapons spawn because they always seem to be in the hands of other players who have simply played more - who have got over that initial frustration and lack of knowledge, not that they’re actually better at the game.
The only consistent, in-game, way to learn where the weapons are is to go into Forge, select each weapon in turn and inspect the properties. Even then, the version you have provided for you on the disc inevitably diverges from the one in matchmaking (but you can fix that of course). Maps are set up for a plethora of gametypes where some weapons or vehicles may not appear in the gametype you’re interested in, and they contain a huge amount of extra information that is difficult to interpret into it’s in-game relevance (tags, spawn zones etc).
It is completely unreasonable to expect new players to learn the ins and outs of Forge mode, to painstakingly go through each map in turn learning where weapons are and how long they take to respawn, just so they can begin to be on an even footing with more experienced players. I’ll try to be clear here: I’m talking about a game between two players where their ability to manipulate weapons, their aim, their strafe, their ability to navigate spaces quickly and cleanly is the same, they learn at the same pace etc. One player however knows a given map, where the weapons are, how long they take to respawn and because of that, that player is almost guaranteed to win. Weapon locations are an essential part of map knowledge, crucial to success in almost every gametype, yet that information is very obscured.
Tell me: how often have you done gone into Forge to do this? I have only done it a few times on a handful of maps, to check very specific weapons that were confusing me. For the most part I’ve muddled through learning mid-game because I want to play against people and not spend my time in Forge reciting weapon locations and respawn times. My knowledge is incomplete, vague and yet my skill still means I’m counted amoung the top few percentiles of players.
For example, there is a Plasma Pistol in each of the bases on Hemmorhage; can you tell me off the top of your head, what the respawn time for the weapon is? Now this is an essential anti-vehicle weapon on the map, and I don’t know what the respawn time is myself.
So how do you fix this? How do you make maps easier to learn, and make sure the players that win are the ones that are more skilled, rather than simply more knowledgable?
Well to start with you could bring the information about weapon spawns and timings much closer to the surface: Gears of War (last I checked) has a little overhead map that you can view before the start of a game which showed you key weapon locations. Halo could certainly use that verbatim – the Atlas facility in the Halo Waypoint app is certainly the start of that (although it is behind an awful pay-barrier).
But that’s still just rote-learning and is out-of-game. Ideally you want players to be learning as they play, inside the game world because that is more fun and what players would rather be doing anway. For that you’d rather need to change the mechanic.
That’s exactly what 343 Industries seems to be doing with Halo 4: where power weapons aren’t always in set locations at set repetious times. The would ‘random’ was used as part of the brief description of a system that is clearly more complex than vague rumours and 3rd hand information can effectively convey. The company was quoted as saying they wanted to take away the aforementioned advantage that experienced players have.
For Mr. Traditional-Halo-Uber-Pro-Headshot-Skill-Gap, both of those are huge red flags: “They’re casualising the game”, “They’re noobing it up”, “They’re catering to casuals, they don’t care about skilled halo” and other such dramatic assertions.
When this type of player thinks of “random”, they think of Crazy King, of Fiesta, of weapon firing spreads – mechanics that can (both potentially and in actuality) dish out advantages to one side or another ‘unfairly.’ But things can contain elements of randomness and still be entirely fair, fun and even competitive. Respawn locations for example.
It will never be completely random of course, and there will necessarily be a limit to the number of locations. We still know next to nothing about the specifics. 343i aren’t immune to the cries of the hardcore competitive types (see the recent removal of Jetpack from Arena). It’s entirely possible, for example, that while the exact location is random each time it spawns, that this location will be called out to all players on the map 10 seconds before it actually spawns – so that players have a chance to adapt their location and tactics on the fly to acquire it or defend from it’s possession by the opposite team.
Does that sound a little like Invasion Slayer? Why yes it does. But unlike that gametype, there need not be just one location for power weapons, they don’t need to be as overwhelming and numerous in each drop, and the locations can be more finely and fairly controlled.
It isn’t a question between pure hidden randomness (which is unfair) and pure hidden determinism (which can get boring and has the problem of knowledge rather than skill ruling the day). You can bring the knowledge to the surface, and you can make it so players need to react on their feet a little more rather than act in pre-determined cycles.
Have you ever heard the phrase: “a minute to learn, a lifetime to master”? It’s a good rule of thumb for creating games: that anyone should be able to get up and running very quickly, but that there is still immense depth to the gameplay. From the sounds of it, 343i want the basics to be quicker and easier to learn, so players can concentrate on the mastering part more – this is a fine goal and nothing people should be objecting too. Halo, even just from the perspective of using the Xbox controller, is difficult to get into and if you can make the rest of it easier to learn you’ll have generally made a better overall game. These things don’t have to make the game easier to master either.
Let’s think about it: why wouldn’t you instead go the opposite direction and make the maps arbitrarily difficult to learn and navigate? With hidden passages and invisible routes, hidden caches of weapons (Carney Holes) with arbitarily obtuse weapon respawn timers and triggers? Well, because once everyone has that knowledge, you haven’t necessarily added anything to the complexity, fun, skill gap and competitiveness of the game. It’s fake skill-gap dependant purely on the difference in knowledge – not how well you can acquire, process or apply that knowledge.
Knowledge is power. But knowledge isn’t a skill.
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been among the harshest of 343i’s critics – so much so that in some circles I am known for such. They haven’t earned my trust and for all we know Halo 4 could still be an unmittigated disaster. But please, if you’re going to complain about or criticse them for something, do so about something that actually needs it and not about something that, at least on it’s motivations, is a good idea. Once we have a fully-realised example we can then discuss whether the implementation really works, but until then let’s not freak out.
Besides, everyone knows 2v2 Halo CE will always be the pinnacle of competitiveness 
by Dr RC Tautology
Halo 4 Gametypes – Regicide
2012/04/18 in 4, commentary, halo
What Have they Said About it?
Almost hidden amoungst the Game Informer-exclusive story on Halo 4 in their most recent print magazine (cover) was mention of a new Free For All gametype known as ‘Regicide’. Details were light but from the description in the magazine it sounded like a variant on Slayer that included bonus points for ending the killing sprees of the current leading scorer. Not sure I can safely quote the section without GI getting mad at me!
Fortunately, Brad Welch (lead multiplayer designer on Halo 4) briefly mentioned it during an extra, and more importantly free, video on competitive multiplayer that Game Informer’s post on their website. At 2:25 to 3:05 in video he described it thusly:
Check out the rest of what he said in the video on Game Informer’s site.
What Exactly is it Going to Play Like?
So the description we’ve got isn’t exactly a technical specification: does the King’s bounty grow with each kill without dying he gets? Or does his bounty keep growing for every kill as King even if he is killed between kills? What happens when a King has a large bounty, but someone overtakes the King’s score, and becomes the new King? Does the bounty get transfered? (Very dangerous for the new King) Or is the bounty permanantly lost? (seemingly ‘wasteful’).
We’re going to have to make a couple of educated guesses to discuss this gametype: lets say that for every kill the leader makes, in a row without dying, their bounty increases until they are killed. So if a player becomes the king, and then makes 2 kills in a row without dying, their bounty would be ’2.’
Of course, once they die and respawn, this would imply that their bounty would be reset to ‘zero’ and killing the King would be no more lucrative than killing any other player, and marking them for everyone would be pointless. From this I would assume that killing the King at any time carries with it an extra bounty.
More formally, killing the King rewards points equal to: normalKillPoints + standardKingBounty + spreeAsKing*kingSpreeBounty
Would it be fun to play?
From the magazine description I had already surmised that this gametype is probably intended as a way to allow people to catch up more easily and add another focus (the score leader) into the chaotic game of FFA Slayer. Brad Welch’s descriptions bears this theory out as well.
Even with so many potential targets in FFA Slayer, when losing it is difficult to make the necessary volume of kills quickly enough to catch up to leaders who are often walking around with power weapons and in superior map positions. Unlike in a team game where it is often obvious roughly where to go to find the ‘front-line’ of action and engage the opposite team, in FFA intense fights can break out on nearly any part of the map. Especially for new players it is often unclear where the most beneficial places to be are, and sometimes players can lose because they are wandering around the empty parts of the map and not getting kills rather than because they are unskilled at fighting.
From that perspective, you can see how marking one player as a universal target for all players will make it clearer on where to go. The King of the Hill gametype directs players in this way already, interestingly enough. However it’s likely 343i wanted to keep score flowing for all players and avoid suffering rather than suffer the non-capture griefing problem of existing Koth – at the same time, they keep the gametype firmly based upon Slayer.
Unfortunately, I have the sneaking suspicion that the King bounties will actually make the game of Slayer more chaotic – from the scoring if not map-movement perspective. Brad Welch’s comment about swings late in the game is quite telling of this.
While the King getting a bounty on his head is incentive for everyone else in the game to kill him, it becomes a punishment for the leader themselves: they lose all stealth, and while they get a constant stream of targets, the greater their success, the more likely it is that whoever kills them will suddenly overtake or rapidly catch up with them.
Players will end up not wanting to be in the leading position because of the liability and risk. Instead, they’ll want to stay close in the second or third place and, as Brad Welch indicated, make their move towards the end of the game. A common move would probably be to kill the current King and collect the large bounty to propell them over the point limit.
This of course would make it unsuitable for serious, for-the-win competitive games and would relegate it to more of a ‘party’ game in the same level as Fiesta or Reach’s Headhunter. Brad Welch’s comments on it being a “fun, frenzied” gametype are perhaps indicative of this, and that’s a bit of a shame.
Could You Make it Better?
If a kill was worth one point, killing the current King was worth another point, and for each kill in a spree the current King had was another point, it’s easy to see how massive swings could happen:
If the current King has 49 points in a game to 50, and has just got his 5th kill in a spree as King, then someone with as little 43 points (losing by 6 points) could kill the King, collect the bounty, and instantly take the lead and win!
However we do know from the trailer (at 3:13 in this video) that 343i seem to be revamping scoring wholesale in Slayer so that 1 kill no longer equals 1 point. Each kill seems to be worth perhaps 5 or 10 points. If this were the case, the degree to which large swings can happen by killing a good King could be lessened. For example:
This could go hand-in-hand with other bonus points in the theme of Halo: Reach’s BTB heavies or my own ‘Stylish Slayer.’
If the scoring was more like this, then the scoring wouldn’t be as chaotic, with massive swings, it would be a bit more predictable and it would be slightly more competitve. Killing the King would still be a good idea if you got the chance, but it wouldn’t become so lucractive that you’d sacrifice all other concerns in order to do it.
But Who Wants to be King?
There is still the problem of the disincentive of being in the leading position: you becoming directly more lucrative to kill and everyone knows where you are. Either one of these would serve to compress the difference between the leading players, and the field as a whole. When you do something like that generally the winner depends more on luck than skill.
A King has the benefit of extra players coming towards them, but few want that pressure of being priority target number one, especially when their death could catapult someone else into the lead.
I certainly feel that players in this gametype could use some extra incentive to want to become the King and, perhaps more importantly, try to stay as the King for as much as the game as possible - all the way to the end if they can. Being the lead scorer is naturally a position of power since you have a buffer of points over other players – players should want to be the King, not be afraid to be so.
To try and redress that incentive imbalance, the King himself could get extra points for every kill he makes as the King. So if most players get 5 points for killing another non-King, then the King might get 6 points. If this is set at the right level, the King actually gets a bit of Reward for all his Risk in the form of being able to accumlate further points slightly more quickly.
If Regicide was made like I describe above, it would retain the benefits of having a more centralised, focused Slayer as is its intention but, there would be less chaos in the scoring and more of an incentive to be the King.
Could you Summarise that for me?
Regicide is a new Free-For-All gametype that 343 Industries are adding to Halo 4. It is Slayer-based, with bonus points for ending the spree of the ‘King’ – the current score leader – who’s location is marked on the map at all times. Its intention is to give a more centralised focus to the FFA Slayer environment and give players someone on the map to go to and reason to go there. It can be described thusly:
I worry that if ending the Spree of a King is rewarded to highly, it will simply make the scoring chaotic and down to luck rather than skill. 343i’s statements about the gametype seem to indicate this may be the case. There would seem little reason to want to be the King yourself for much of the game since you get a huge target painted on you and you can earn more points by killing someone else who is the King instead.
However, if the bonus points for killing the King were only a fraction of the worth of a normal kill, the chaos would be reduced while still providing incentive to kill the King and a place on the map to go.
Furthermore, people should want a reason to be King for more of the game since right now it seems like a pretty raw deal. To help with this, I propose that any kills a player makes as the King should be worth slightly more. My construction would be summarised with an additional point:
Would this gametype be perfect for the highest levels of competitive play? Maybe not. There is little way to be sure without playtesting it and fine-tuning the trade-offs between being a King or a normal player. Nevertheless, I believe this would have a slightly wider appeal across the fanbase.
Couldn’t you make this in Reach?
You can make some of the features of this gametype already in Reach’s custom gametype editor – in fact you have been able to do for several Halo games now. In the ‘Slayer’ options, you can assign bonus points for the killing of the leading scorer (invidiual or team, known as ‘Leader Kill Bonus’). The Slayer gametype also features a ‘Leader Traits’ option, where you can make it so the leading scorer (aka ‘King’) has a waypoint over their head(s) at all times.
But what about the King Spree bonuses, and my idea of extra points for killing as King? Not with the in-game gametype editor, but I would wager you could with a custom-scripted Megalo gametype. That’s perhaps the biggest gripe I have about this gametype: why not bring it to Reach, test it, and release it fully polished on launch day in Halo 4?
At the same time as testing a gametype for Halo 4, you give Reach players something new and interesting to try out, that would freshen up the game’s rarely updated FFA playlists. If successful, it could whet their appetite for more Halo 4 gametypes. If unsuccessful, then it would be a strong indicator to redesign or scrap the gametype before Halo 4′s release in November – it would strengthen Halo 4′s line-up in either case. It would also provide the same benefits as giving a focus to a Slayer-based FFA gametype in Reach as it would in Halo 4.
Megalo has the power to tag specific players with extra properties and trigger extra events upon their deaths (see: Headhunter). So the only downside is finding someone with the relevant expertise in Megalo with the time to build and test it. Hell, give me access to Megalo and I’ll do it myself! No, I’m not going to stop asking.
-RC
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