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I was thinking how I should approach this post and how I should get this point across... I considered going with ‘Spartans need more face armour’ or simply ‘Arrgggh!’ but then I realised that no matter what I do or how levelly I look at this it is going to get flamed to hell by a large chunk of the community once I insult their precious Battle Rifle... I’ve just had a game, one of many, in which the entire enemy team took to using Battle Rifles and backing away from every single encounter firing. Now some of you are surely going to say this is not an issue and just how the game is played... or rather, given the mindset of these people I’m expecting a lot of variously illiterate comments along the lines of: ‘LOL AM NOOB YOU?!’ The problem is, besides from being annoying, this tactic doesn’t really seem to really make any sense in this game. Most players who operate like this rarely seem to bother with a sidearm or their abilities... features which in their eyes may as well just be removed. So it has to raise a question as to the balance of the game when one weapon is utilised so heavily that not only other weapons but also key game features simply go unused. The other issue I have with this is that the primary way of beating a team doing this is to do exactly the same thing... which means the game soon becomes very solely focused and all semblance of tactics go out the window. On the face of it Halo 4 seems to offer quite a good degree of customisation which allows individuals to explore and develop their own play style. Armour specialisations, abilities, upgrades and weapon loadouts should create a great deal of variety in the opponents you face. However when one style of play defeats all others with ease it leaves people little option but to do the same. In short individual preferences go flying out the window faster than a grunt targeted by a fuel rod cannon... Now I am not going to suggest the Battle Rifle be nerfed, surely such a thing would be tantamount to heresy. I mean clearly the developers have decided that it should be able to beat automatic weapons at close range and that its ability to complete destroy armoured vehicles from across the map with its small calibre rounds is working as intended... but I feel as if one simple change could massively improve game play and balance issues. Reduce the speed at which you walk backwards. It’s that simple. The Battle Rifle can still be a flak cannon, shotgun and sniper rifle all rolled into one confusing bundle but just reducing the rate at which you can back peddle ever so slightly, I think, will make the game not only more balanced but more enjoyable. It would mean that when you have someone charging you down with the oddball they are actually a threat. It would make automatic weapons rightly more powerful in one on one close range fights. Most importantly it would just make sense. I mean as much as I’d love to see it there’s no 100m backwards sprint in the Olympics... Now perhaps everyone loves Battle-Rifle-back-peddling but when both teams are standing at opposite sides of the maps doing this it quickly resembles a game of duck hunt... The best games I’ve had were when both our team and the enemy used a variety of tactics and equipment. It meant you had to constantly adapt and weren’t sure what to expect next... that, ultimately, seems like the sort of game play Halo should revolve around. I’d dig out the box and quote it directly but if you recall, one of Combat Evolved’s main selling points was that you were the master of every weapon and that all vehicles were tools of destruction just waiting for a driver... it was not advertised as the ultimate ‘shoot each other in the face with a rifle until someone falls over’... game.

Firstly, before you get the wrong idea this is not a complaint - I am enjoying the game. However there are quite a startling number of issues which frankly could and should be implemented better. Simple things which it just baffles me were not considered... hence I feel the need to rant about these for a bit. The forge map ‘Ravine’ for starters. Very nice map, looked full of potential and pretty damn big... then I discover the ceiling is set half way up the geometry. I had plans for a towering sky base with... I don’t know, dragons and the like. Now however my aerial domain resembles a hobbit hut... I wasn’t expecting to be able to reach the very top of that massive tower but to not even be able to scale half those rocks is just bizarre. If you get up close to them, shortly before dying a horrible Guardians based death you’ll find they have decent textures and collision... so why make them out of bounds? It’s a forge map for us to do with as we please. Don’t be like Apple and enforce pointless rules on usage. In Halo 2 you could climb on top of some ridiculously high cranes for basically no reason at all... now with an amazing editing tool at our disposal we can barely make it 20ft off the ground... Then I notice that the, admittedly limited, selection of rocky scenery is cut even shorter on this map with the regular crowd being completely absent. So on a map primary made, covered with, populated and staffed by rocks you didn’t think it might be important to give us some... rocks? Curious. I then turned my attention to Erosion with the intention of building a nice flood map down in that disturbingly radium coloured water. Again I’m limited by the kill box but I make the best of the situation. Now this is a map that has so many lights on it by default it has to do a bit of calculation whenever you switch to player mode and yet we still have the four light limit from the original forge. Clearly the engine can handle more. I had planned for a dark setting that relied on ambient light and limited promethean vision to kill the flood yet again basic filters have not been implemented. I notice you still have the one that makes everything painfully bright, unplayably... inverse and just generally weird... all I’m asking for is a very basic brightness, contrast, hue and saturation control. To be honest it could even just use presets like day, evening, night and it would be fine. Currently of the half dozen filters we have maybe two are usable at best. Frankly they remind me of all those pointless visualisations that come bundled with any media player nowadays... you know the one that has exploding cubes that seem to bear no resemblance to the music or the one that flashes the word ‘BADGER’ every time a bass drum is struck... the sort of thing that makes you question what kind of medication the developer was on at the time. Now the snaps and quick duplication are brilliant additions, would be made even better if the ‘magnets’ had actually been put in logical places on more than half the items but oh well, it suffices. The coordinate system however is painful. The issue from the original forge is back with a vengeance I see... the lack of a local rotation axis. When you rotate using snaps on one axis you move the other so it spins off axis. Seriously... a local and/or world coordinate system is just fundamental. All round the position system needs a major accuracy boost... that one decimal place often seems to make the difference of a foot or so when all you want is a minor nudge. Anyway, once I had a vaguely functional map I turned my attention to the gametype. To my dismay I am entirely unable to customise the flood loadouts, the Spartans seem to get additional loadout options I didn’t enable on some gametypes and try as I might there is no option to spawn as an acid spewing dragon... sorry thought I might be losing people. I seem to recall a zombies gametype a while back aptly named ‘Ghostbusters’ in which the zombies could fly and the Spartans had to shoot them down with lasers. Unless I have missed something very obvious in the menu however the flood seem to always get the same boring old abilities. Then I notice that, unless I am very much mistake, it doesn’t seem possible to have weapons spawn on a flood gametype. Perhaps I need to specify this somewhere - I hope that is the case but I have tried enabling weapons in the options and giving the items a ‘FLOOD’ tag under the settings in forge and yet no joy. Ability packs can be picked up and mounted gun turrets appear but a basic pistol does not... very limiting. Next I decided to have a play with one of my favourite maps from matchmaking... Exile. Now I really didn’t think I could improve it any but thought it might make for a fun vehicle map for an upcoming LAN party. A few jumps here, some basic walls to block off buildings and a decent scattering of vehicles could be interesting. Then I find that you can’t place any structure items at all on maps other than the forge specific ones. I appreciate they are high budget maps with a lot of flashy stuff going on but all I wanted was a couple walls. It seems almost obtuse to even let us edit these maps in forge if we can’t actually... edit these maps in forge. What’s next? Ah yes... King of the Hill. I had some major problems setting up a custom map for this as it seems that a vehicle set as a ‘stationary’ hill just doesn’t work. I just wanted a single warthog as the hill but instead I have to set it to cycle and get pointless messages about the hill moving every minute. Not the end of the world but clearly not working as intended. Then I thought I’d try making a golf ball the hill (because invariably after a few drinks and a dozen serious games at a LAN chasing a giant golf ball is the only course of action left)... it works, sort of. Since there is no spherical shape for the hill, the options are a rounded box or a cylinder... and both of them rotate with the hill rather than staying oriented to the level as makes sense. The result is a rather ugly spinning blue box. This is not the primary issue however... that lies in the fact that the ball just... vanishes after a bit. So I am left with no option but to have it respawn rather than stay in play indefinitely. Kind of defeats the point in having a ball in the game but oh well... I was expecting some major improvements to the editing system but it seems as if the whole thing has just been cut and pasted from Reach with a handful of new assets and some minor interface and tool changes. It seems there are dozens of things which either have not been thought of (unlikely) or just not bothered with (more likely). What baffles me most however are the prescriptive rules and zealous doctrine regarding how you think we should have fun. If I want to fly up to the rocks on Ravine and build a little fort why should I be stopped just because a developer decided it should be out of bounds? If I want flying zombies why stop me? If I want to turn into a triple headed acid spitting dragon...