RedStarRocket91

didn't read lol

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For me, a good boss battle is one which forces you to prove that you've mastered the game's mechanics up to that point - bonus points if you have to try using them in new ways which show you understand their concepts, have to execute them without crutches, or are forced to use multiple mechanics rather than just being able to get complacent and repeat the same tactics over and over. So for me, the 'perfect' boss would be something like Mr. Freeze from Batman: Arkham City. It's brilliant because in order to pass it, you have to demonstrate that you've mastered almost every single takedown ability in the game, because every time you use one, he adapts to it, and you can't use it again. There's no surprises about it - you aren't introduced to any wholly new mechanics, enemies, or concepts - and while he has a lot of health, it's not just a case of repeating the same action over and over again and slowly whittling it down. Instead, you have to keep thinking of what takedown abilities you can still use to reduce his health, all while staying hidden from him, and under the pressure of knowing that if you go too long without hurting him, he might find you or use one of his heat-seeking attacks to wound you anyway. If you've spent the whole game not bothering to learn anything but the same basic two or three takedowns, you're going to have a lot of problems as you struggle to think of ways to injure him, but if you've taken the opportunity to practice with all the tools at your disposal, the whole fight becomes a really tense but satisfying battle in which you prove you've mastered all of the game's core 'predator' mechanics. In terms of bosses I hate? Things which throw completely new mechanics at you, where you haven't had a chance to practice them, things where what you're supposed to do is poorly explained and isn't a sensible course of action based on what you known of the game and its mechanics so far, or where the enemy is basically a giant sponge, where you're only really doing the same thing over and over with the real 'test' being one of endurance, to see how many times you can repeat it without making a mistake and needing to start over. In terms of 'bad' bosses, for me the most obvious things would be something like Tartarus form Halo 2. It introduces a brand-new mechanic in that you can't hurt Tartarus until Johnson shoots him with his Beam Rifle (bonus points because the rifle is so quiet and so far away that it's hard to see this is what's provoking your window of opportunity; bonus points again because it's completely beyond the player's control; bonus points again because it's a mechanic which has not only never been seen before in Halo 2 and thus gives you no opportunity to prepare for it, but is in fact seen literally nowhere else in the entire series), doesn't challenge the player to try any new tactics (you're still just shooting him), and he has a ridiculous amount of health, so all you can do is slowly chip away at him until he dies.

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I think it's less that he should have been writing comic books and more that he should have been thrown into the sun.

But how much would it cost?

Three years on, still this. Sony absolutely crushed Microsoft at E3 2013: I've never seen anything like it, where one participant attacked another so blatantly - and where, more importantly, that attack paid off so well.

At the moment I trend fairly negative toward 343i as a developer, views which has worsened over time. I know I'm in a minority here, but I love Halo 4, and consider it to be the absolute narrative high point of the franchise: almost all the problems I have with it as a story were introduced retroactively through Halo 5 and other Halo media, which isn't really its fault, and although there were several frustrating elements (Prometheans) for the most part I actually really liked the gameplay as well. Even the multiplayer is something that I really enjoyed, and while I can understand a lot of the frustrations with it, for the most part I think they're overblown and exaggerated, especially when compared to the shambles that was Reach. Everyone forgets this now, but Reach was really unpopular when it came out, with the most common view among the fanbase being that Bungie had killed Halo and that it wasn't a proper Halo game, and yet now people compare it to Halo 4 and say how fantastic it was. As for the MCC... well, what needs to be said? It was an unmitigated disaster which cost me personally, and many other Halo fans, a huge amount of money for almost nothing in return. Halo 5, in contrast to Halo 4, was a huge disappointment to me. Perhaps the multiplayer's good - don't know, don't play it anymore. But a combination of blatantly and deliberately misleading advertising, terrible characters, shockingly poor writing, utterly moronic plot twists, invalidation of Halo 4's story, dull gameplay, lazy and uninspired and repetitive level design and that one boss just completely ruined the campaign for me, to the point where I just don't have any interest in replaying it: the fact that there's no splitscreen or LAN and you can't even use things like the Forge without XBL Gold is just insulting, and of course the REQ system of pay-to-win gameplay using a system of real-money gambling is as unethical and greedy a system as I've ever seen and utterly killed my desire to play it's main new game mode even before I let my Gold expire. For me, Halo 5 isn't just a disaster as a game, but a composite example of anti-consumer behaviour, and frankly I have no interest in supporting a developer who does that. So for Halo Wars 2? No, I don't really trust 343i with it. I can accept the MCC was a disaster as a one-off, but what they did with Halo 5 and the fact that they openly lied about it and put so little effort into it, as well as the incredibly poor quality of the campaign, really hurts my opinion even before we consider how much I disliked the first game. Now, if the reviews come in and they're good, and they suggest that the story isn't completely awful and the gameplay is actually fun, and there's no ethical problems like the ability to buy power or attempts to fleece gamers with real-money gambling, then I might consider it, but the absolute make-or-break for me is going to be whether it supports mouse&keyboard, because RTS games simply don't work on a gamepad. I'm fine if it's a Win10 exclusive, because after it inevitably flops there they'll port is back onto older OSes as they did with Spartan Assault and Spartan Strike, but if there's no support for a proper control interface, I won't play it regardless of how well it's reviewed.

Above all else, what I really want to see is actual gameplay, which is reflective of the quality of the final product. E3 is far too often used to either show gameplay which has been pre-rendered and is well above the graphical fidelity and physical complexity of the final product, or doesn't actually have any gameplay at all, and while I don't expect it to happen getting to see a realistic representation of what I could actually expect to be playing would be very welcome. In terms of actual games? I'm not sure. I can't really think of any game series where I can honestly say 'yep, I want a sequel to this sometime in the next year', so what I'd really like to see is some brand new stuff. perhaps the only exception would be the new Gears of War, but obviously since that's already been announced it's more a case of that I'd like to learn more about it. What I'd hate to see would be yet more safe, unimaginative sequels to existing franchises, especially if they're basically just rehashing old ideas rather than trying anything new. I'm also fairly sure I'm going to hate Battlefield 1, which is an unusual state for me as while I've never really been a fan of the series, this is the first one that I've outright disliked the premise of.

Trial-and-error gameplay. I'm aware it's more design than mechanics, but it's one of my pet peeves in videogames, and I can't stand when games use it (which forms a very big part of my disdain for Halo 2). For me, a game is well-designed if a player who has sufficient understanding and execution of a game's core controls and mechanics (shooting, parkour, spotting things on radar, etc.) and who is making sensible decisions based on what they've previously encountered in the game in terms of challenges encounters a new area and is able to complete it on the first try, barring sheer bad luck. In essence, it's a good game if you've learned how to play the game, rather than needing to learn how to complete the specific challenge, by the time you finish one. Mechanically, I really dislike randomness and needing to rely purely on RNG in order to advance: this is part of why I hate things like the REQ system, where your only options for progression are to participate in what is literally gambling (possibly using real-money if you don't know any better) with no control or input of your own. There's a place for things RNG in games (XCom, for example, does it really well), but when it's poorly implemented and your only option is essentially to roll the dice and hope for the best, it's incredibly frustrating.

I've been hugely impressed by the output of Halo 5's Forgers thus far, and I'm sure they'll manage to continue to do so throughout this contest: can't wait to see what you guys come up with! And of, course, just as a reminder, anyone who participates in this contest will also receive an Award on their profile. Best of luck to all of our Forgers!

Well, I mean... Help me

Why?

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I'd contest a lot of this. Insofar as the Arena multiplayer side of things is concerned, I think it's perfectly fair to say Halo 5 is a success: weapons are generally very well-balanced, the map pool is generally of unremarkable but serviceable quality, the new Spartan Abilities add a lot to combat in what feels like a very natural and fluid evolution of traditional Halo gameplay, and it all comes together to give what is arguably the most well-balanced and diverse Halo multiplayer to date - and that's only going to improve as more features are added. I'm also told Warzone is very good, but given that I have no intention of playing it so long as it remains a pay-to-win gamemode funding by what I am obligated to remind everyone is a system of real-money gambling, I don't have an opinion on it. In terms of no Halo shipping more incomplete - I'd argue Reach was far worse, given that the entirety of its multiplayer maps were ripped from the campaign, and the absolutely appaling quality of forge maps that were initially shipped with it (I'll never forgive Bungie for allowing the travesty that was The Cage to be shipped). And that's before we even begin to consider things like the complete lack of balance, incredibly questionable mechanical decisions like bloom and damage bleedthrough, or, to come onto how 'broken' it was, the near-total collapse of the matchmaking system in the immediate aftermath of launch. As for Halo 2 being balanced - can't agree with that at all. It was a game completely dominated by the Battle Rifle, which made almost every other weapon completely redundant, as well as leading to the rise of cheap tactics like the noob combo, and that's before we even get to how completely and utterly broken it was in terms of button glitches like the BXR combo, which was never patched out and so created an artificial balance in which players were literally required to abuse exploits in order to win games. Plus, the Sniper Rifle was pathetically easy to use thanks to the way it detected hits, and the whole game stank of being a rushed and poorly organised affair despite having substantially more in the way of time and budget than its predecessor. Add to that a spattering of incredibly low-quality or recycled maps, one of the worst designed singleplayer campaign I've ever seen in a videogame, and a lack of netwrok policing making it incredibly easily exploitable, and you have a complete and utter disaster of a game which was so poor in every regard that literally its only saving grace was that there was nothing competing with it at the time, because if it had come out on PC and needed to compete with things like Quake III, it would have been laughed out of the market and dead in a month. So while I respect what Bungie did, and still think Halo 3 is the crowning achievement of console gaming, I think it's unfair to say that their record with Halo was an uninterrupted series of triumphs. Let's not forget that Reach completely split the community so badly that many people were actively glad to see Bungie go. And given the direction they've since taken with Destiny, it's increasingly clear that they're no longer a studio that I'd want to be associated with Halo. That said - yeah, I'm disappointed with 343i as well. For all Halo 5's multiplayer is very solid, I still dislike how much faster it's become than the older games, and I'm really disappointed by the fact that Firefight is still yet to return (PvE Warzone is a step in the right direction, but it's a fundamentally different gametype). And that's to say nothing of what a catastrophe Halo 5's campaign was, or the blatantly false advertising which led up to its release - which is all a particular shame as Halo 4 had a fantastic campaign, the kind of strong character drama which the series really needed after how flat Reach's campaign was. And of course, I'll make a criticism here not just of how low on content the game was on launch (not as bad as Reach, but still poor) and the incredibly monotonous art style, but of the business model, given that the REQ system is absolutely disgusting and a very big part of why I don't play anymore. So overall? I don't know how I feel about 343i. On the one hand, between Halos 4 and 5 they've shown they have the capability to make a really good game, with a really good story and a well-balanced multiplayer, but they've also shown that they're quite capable of utterly screwing it up as well, and making shady business decisions while they're at it. I think on balance I'd say I still believe them to be the right people to be making Halo, but they aren't really far off losing my trust, and while I do intend on getting Halo 6 whenever it comes out, there's no way I'm going to be buying it on day one.