It’s faster than the conventional Halo jump, yet the way it opens up emergent tactical possibilities is typical of classic Halo design. Meanwhile the grapple hook, inspired perhaps by Titanfall, is a whole new way to get around, allowing you to latch on to walls, vehicles and other players and then zoom over to them. Importantly, most of the new features added to Halo infinite fit in perfectly with the classic play style – such as dynamo grenades, which create a damaging electric field and shut down passing vehicles. Thousands of incredible maps came out of those tools because Halo is at its best when the maps are clean, simple and balanced.” “It was a very simple map editor, which for the most part gave players access to only very basic objects and geometry. “I cut my game design teeth back on Halo 3’s Forge mode back in the day,” says Pearce. These are the spaces I remember, not just from Halo, but from the earliest days of competitive first-person shooters: the likes of Unreal Tournament and Quake Arena. Excellent new maps such as Recharge, Streets and Bazaar are like shopping malls in the way they use levels, sightlines and differing ceiling heights to generate intrigue and keep people moving. The environments are totally artificial – they are not designed to resemble genuine locations, they are self-reflexive play spaces constructed to provide exciting, varied encounters. Halo Infinite also recalls the classic competitive multiplayer map design from the early 2000s.
Encounters tend to be more involved and more multifaceted than the bulletfests of Warzone and Apex Legends, where face-offs are over before you can blink. It reignites the muscle memory of those first Halo games, the way their pacing wouldn’t let you rely purely on instinct and lightning-fast reaction speeds. This, I think, is why older players are doing so well with Halo Infinite. There is a slow deliberateness to the way players had to move in those earlier games that modern shooters don’t really demand.” Spartans in Halos 1 through 3 are a lot floatier than I think a lot of people remember.
#NEW HALO GAME SERIES#
As Pearce explains, “Halo 5 radically expanded and sped up the movement options for the player … It was extremely dense with options in a way that I feel distracted from the core combat loop that Halo as a series is known for. In classic Halo multiplayer, the pacing comes down to where objectives are rather than how fast characters actually run and jump – something the series lost sight of in recent years. This careful revisionism extends to the way players move through the world. Both you and the enemy had equal claim to that weapon, you were the one who decided to grab it first, and now that choice will inform rest of the match.” Obliterating someone who’s stolen your flag with a rocket launcher not only feels fair, but smart. “So no matter how a match is going, there is always some new way you can think on your feet and maybe turn the tide. There are no surprises, you don’t have to think about whether or not you’d have landed that kill if you’d had the same weapon attachments as your opponent.”Įmergent tactical possibilities … Halo Infinite. “Whatever tools you have access to, the other team has access to as well. “Every player starts with the same loadout and there are no abilities on cooldown,” says game designer and Halo veteran Dan Pearce, my favourite person to speak to about shooter games. All the complexity is systemic rather than inventorial. This is something Halo Infinite’s combat perfectly recalls.
The holy trinity of gun, grenade and melee actually provided a vast arsenal of attack options, just like the basic kick/punch moves did in many a quality old 2D fighting game. Instead, all the complexity came from the ways the weapons worked perfectly together with the game’s physics and environments to offer an array of emergent possibilities. You were given a limited number of perfectly balanced weapons and abilities, so you didn’t have to worry about perks, stats, builds or loadouts. Old-school Halo’s design aim wasn’t realism or even variety: it was fun and feel. In early interviews around the game, developer 343 Industries talked about how they thought of Infinite as a spiritual reboot of and love letter to the first three Halo titles, which were released between 20. With Halo Infinite’s multiplayer mode, it’s the other way around. In modern shooter games such as Call of Duty: Warzone, Fortnite and Apex Legends, older players like me tend to get absolutely destroyed by teenagers.
0 kommentar(er)
