Indestructible Vehicles

[Fredex]

Am I the only one that finds the options regarding vehicle destruction a tad... ridiculous?

 

Because vehicle health is separate to player health indestructible vehicles render the player invincible in any vehicle where they themselves cannot be shot out of the seat. These options have severely hampered my attempts at creating a couple gametypes.

 

The first was a go at creating a CTF game for a LAN similar to what we played on the first Halo. However indestructible vehicles mean that Warthogs aren't the bullet magnets they used to be and Scorpions may as well be replaced by Godzilla... this gametype was doomed to failure due to the lack of despawn settings anyway. Ideally I'd have liked the vehicles to simply remain where they were left indefinitely like the used to... instead of disappearing the moment you turn your back on them as if they're being spirited away by ninjas...

 

I am currently working on a sumo game with rocket hogs, which is where the ridiculousness is really highlighted. With indestructible vehicles disabled landing all 6 rockets from the volley on an enemy hog will destroy it. I primarily want the rockets to be more about pushing the enemy around than killing them so damage reduction or indestructible vehicles need to be used. The problem with the latter is that the rockets will do a hell of a lot of damage on direct hits to one of the players in the hog but if it hits the armour an inch to their left does nothing...

 

There really needs to be three setitngs for Indestructible Vehicles: Enabled, Disabled and Classic... ie Halo 1 style where the player still took damage and could be killed by shooting the vehicle, even though it could not be damaged itself. Frankly this is just what Enabled should do fullstop since there are plenty of options for making players tougher or even invincible without this.

 

 

 

...and whilst I am here I fail to see the reason for the arbitrary vehicle limits in Forge when you can place 16 of any vehicle on the map (on top of the original by using dominion vehicle pads. Then there is the aforementioned despawning timer which is just way too short. Warthogs have some really great destruction animation on them with bits flying off left right and centre but most of this stuff despawns before it even hits the floor.

 

The incredibly short despawn timer and vehicle limits suggests that the game is running right on the edge of the console's capabilities but that simply cannot be the case. As a test I just piled up some 24 vehicles on top of a map's worth of fusion coils and plasma grenades then fired a rocket into the middle... the framerate didn't drop by any noticeable amount and this is way more simultaneous destruction than you'll ever see in a real match. Of course with 16 players, 16 consoles and latency galore it would be a different story but it strikes me that the sensible thing to do would be to calculate the graphics budget appropriately based on how much is on the map and the number of players. Instead they seem to have created some really great destruction graphics and then decided not to bother displaying them for more than a second in case your console's GPU had accidently been replaced with mild brie... If there is only one vehicle being destroyed then why not keep the debris around a little longer... or you know, just stop spending all the graphics budget on lighting up every single level like an epilepsy testing clinic...

 

Destruction aside, vehicles and weapons that despawn if no one is looking at them is more than just annoying. It is game breaking.