Competitively, Halo and League of Legends are basically the same game.
"Okay Audley, you've gone off the
fucking deep end. How can a first person shooter with equal starts
and a top-down MOBA with 100+ champions be the same game?"
I'm going to start off with extremely
generic descriptions, but transition into more complex facets of play
that exist in both titles that players may be completely unaware are
parallel.
The team is more important than the
individual. In both games,
it's extremely unlikely one player will single-handedly carry the
game. Furthermore, a team of 4/5 players that work together well are
more likely to win than a team of 4/5 players that have superior
skills, so long as the individual skill gap isn't enough to outweigh
the teamwork team's ability to execute at all.
At the start of the game, both games
have a generic win condition. Whether it be "Destroy the
Nexus" in LoL or whatever the game type in Halo it is you're
playing, there is a condition for victory.
On your way to the ultimate victory,
there are smaller conditions that must be executed to accrue an
advantage to set you up for that victory. In Halo, this is
generally related to map control and power weapons. In LoL, it can
range from taking towers and Dragons to item powerspikes, to certain
level breakpoints that give you a certain skill powerspike.
Depending on your current
circumstance, your actual "win condition" may vary wildly.
In LoL, some team compositions simply reach a point that they can no
longer be fought. Others rely on pressuring advantages early to get a
large enough lead to overcome later troughs. Some rely on team
fighting, while others rely on avoiding team fighting at all costs.
In Halo, your win condition is not always "reach the max score"
-- but simply to have a high score than your opponent. Near the end
of Oddball games, you may simply try to keep the Oddball in a neutral
location to keep the opponents from racking up score while you sit on
a lead, rather than try to hold the ball yourself.
Information wins games. Both
are imperfect information games, where you know for certain where you
are at any given time. LoL gives you a minimap with other areas of
revealed vision (allied towers, allied champions, allied wards). Halo
gives you icons that show whether your teammate is in combat or not.
But neither of these are enough.
You still need to
know where your enemies are, whether through warding, pinging or
calling out their location. You need to know what weapons or major
cooldowns players have available to use, both on your own team and on
the enemy team. These bits of information get fed into you through
communication in games and empower you to make better decisions on
where to go or what sort of plays you can potentially get away with
attempting. Aggressive plays while the enemy outnumbers you in an
area get punished, but knowing the enemy are concentrated on one side
may let you know you can jump out and out-BR the fellow in the rocks
(or all-in the enemy top laner and take his tower.)
Each game has lanes, and a blown
lane assignment must be compensated elsewhere. Halo's
lanes aren't as pronounced as League of Legends, but if you examine
the successful competitive maps carefully, there is a general trend
of aisles of play with segmented sightlines that force map areas to
operate in a nearly linear fashion. On certain maps (Sanc, Pit) if a
team takes map control from one “lane”, the best way to offset
that is to press your advantage in another lane and “flip” the
map to neutralize the bleed caused in one lane. In LoL, you'll often
find successful solo queue junglers abandon losing lanes and attempt
to snowball lanes that are doing well. Or in competitive LoL, you'll
see teams that lose an objective on one side of the map often attempt
to mirror the objective on the other side whenever possible.
When you're leading, you want to get
further ahead. In LoL, this
can mean continuously beating down on your lane opponent, taking
objectives, or simply getting wards in the enemy jungle to track his
movements so you can continue to execute. It could mean forcing a
team fight, or overloading another lane while your opponent tries to
catch up in your lane. Snowballs are common and easy to spot in LoL.
In
Halo, snowballs come from two things: power weapon control and spawn
killing. If you've got a numerical advantage, you push, you take
over map control (or grab a power weapon). If you've reached the
enemy base, you take their flag (and run it wherever their numbers
are going to be weakest once they spawn.) Whenever possible, you
kill the people as they respawn to avoid letting them influence
whatever play is currently happening. You never drop an empty enemy
Sniper in H2A, to keep them from ever seeing their rifle again. You
always try to position in a way that will influence enemy spawns in a
way that make killing them like fish in a barrel.
Sitting
on a lead leads to comeback opportunities. Pressing an advantage
leads to frantic decisions, forced mistakes, and steeper advantages.
When you're trailing, it's better to
stall out than to try to force plays against the team with the
advantage. In LoL, attempting
to team fight at Dragon while down a few thousand gold in the mid
game can turn into a dire situation of being aced and hemorrhaging
towers. You can often offset leads by getting small areas of vision
control and making a pick-off to slowly ease the gold lead into your
favor, while champions with waveclear keep your towers safe. The
longer the game goes on in LoL when you are trailing but avoiding
giving up larger advantages, the less that flat gold advantage means
as the percent advantage decreases.
In Halo, if your
opponents have map control or power weapon control lorded over you,
it's often best to play passively until your opponents overextend,
and retake map control while you've gotten a numerical advantage. Map
and weapon control are fluid, and avoiding hemorrhaging kills will
allow your team to either take over new focal points on the map as
weapons respawn / hills move or to take over the strong areas of the
map to set up to slay your opponents and close the gap.
Team compositions are important.
In LoL, it's pretty obvious that
you don't want to run a team with 5 Marksmen. Such a composition
relies on nearly perfect play to be able to execute a win, and the
susceptibility to enemy burst or crowd control can leave you in big
trouble. You generally want someone to tank, someone to support, a
mage/assassin with damage from spells, and an ADC to deal damage with
clicking (and probably double down on the tankiness).
In Halo, it's less
obvious, and although many pros deny the existence of roles, time has
shown again and again, rosters with a player dedicated to Sniping
(ADC!), one generally dedicated to “selfless” plays (support)
(flanking, objective-running), one player balls-out aggressive with a
dominant BR (tank/bruiser), and another dedicated to controlling
certain areas of the map (control mage) tend to have the most
consistent high placings. Teams made of players of similar styles
often struggle, and teams made of lesser skilled players with a
decent composition often out-perform expectations.
Speaking of controlling certain
areas of the map, Zoning is an important aspect in both games. In
LoL, zoning usually refers to a player with high burst potential or
CC / Engage potential standing in a position and using their presence
as threat enough to keep a damage dealer from moving forward (or in
some cases, like Alistar W, using the ability to keep them from
coming near Baron while you finish off your smite.) Zoning can also
accrue you advantages in minion kills or experience during the laning
phase by keeping the enemy away from the minion wave.
In Halo, zoning is
what makes Ogre 2 great. Whether he's controlling an actual power
position or a portal on Warlord and watching cross-map sightlines,
he's often in a position to keep other players from threatening his
team, while staying relatively safe himself. Players also often use
grenades to cut off a route or impede an enemy's advance moreso than
to actually attempt damage. In H2A's King of the Hill on Warlord,
controlling the base counter-clockwise from the hill often meant the
best sightlines to assault the hill, while also great amounts of
safety from the players spawning directly opposite of the hill's base
– able to force those players into a less optimal path in order to
advance for the objective.
Both games also emphasize Spacing
quite heavily. Again, Spacing
is something more prominent / known in LoL than in Halo. It generally
refers to the distance between you/your teammates compared to the
distance between you/your enemies. This mostly comes into play during
laning phase and team fights. In bot lane, you usually don't want to
attempt to trade when you are in range of both enemy laners – you
want to trade while you+your ally are in range of the enemy ADC, but
not in range of the support. This ensures you have more damage
potential on a single target than you would with improper spacing.
Qiao Gu demonstrate the power of teamfight spacing with the synergy
between their mid laner and ADC, who are almost always in position to
focus the same target in a teamfight.
In Halo, you'll
find the more successful teams often talk to each other on
positioning, and communicate whether they have another's help or not.
Less successful teams focus on enemy positioning entirely, and don't
focus on whether or not they have the ability to cover each other's
sightlines. This also ties back into the aforementioned “lanes”
of Halo – you can see OpTic Maniac often shift to the opposite side
of Shrine off spawn to cover an uncovered lane while also
guaranteeing he has additional angles on players his teammates may be
fighting. Coach Towey of Evil Geniuses does a great job coordinating
EG's ability to cover one another and ensure they are spaced well.
In both titles, if
you were to make a sort of imaginary venn diagram of your potential
damage / engage ranges over the course of an entire game, you'd
likely find the most successful teams have the highest concentrated /
most occurrences of overlap whenever they're in combat.
Mobility is survivability.
This
aspect of both games is both accepted and entirely overlooked
simultaneously. Sure, people acknowledge Flash is almost 100%
must-take on most champions in LoL. They acknowledge that the amount
of champions with dashes or hastes in their kits has been gradually
increasing over time. Halo players acknowledge Sprint gets used
defensively more often than offensively. And that often, attempting
to chase is more dangerous than attempting to flee. But what
they don't seem to acknowledge is the amount of damage you can avoid
simply by being mobile.
Dodging engages in LoL with a blink,
staying just-out-of-range of those melees through the Captain's aura
from your Janna as you flee toward her with 18% increased
movespeed...every missed skillshot or second you stay out of range
simply by moving, you've given yourself additional survivability that
can't be directly quantified. Is 20 movespeed worth more than 200
health? If it gets you out of the way of that Morgana binding, it
absolutely is. If it helps keep you 50 extra range out of the way of
Annie's ultimate as she activates Talisman and starts booking it
straight for you, it is.
In the upcoming Halo 5, the Thruster
Pack and Sprint combine to add so much additional survivability (even
with the cost of delaying your shield respawn, it gives more than it
takes). Grenades lose relevance as player mobility increases
(limiting them almost solely to zoning potential or spot-checking).
Close range combat becomes a battle of who can out-maneuver the
other, with several areas of low ledges offering potential to parkour
your way out of there with a combination of clamber and thrusters.
Hell, even being able to get from one location to another more
quickly can mean you snagging the power weapon before your opponent,
or getting clear of a line of sight before an opponent has a chance
to set up a shot with their sniping pick-off tool. Projectile
weapons like the Plasma Caster are not much different than a LoL
skillshot, and with the leaps granted by the Thruster, this means
your best tool to survive isn't whether or not you have shields, but
whether or not you can dance.
I truly believe that, at their core,
almost all of these aspects of gameplay can be applied to any
competitive title (and actually, to any team sport in existence) –
LoL and Halo are just the two I have the most experience with and can
generate the most examples of overlap from.
While I don't feel I am THAT
mechanically skilled at either game (I honestly can't aim for shit in
Halo), I take an analytical, measured approach to playing both and
focus on playing smart over playing well. I am currently Diamond 4
in League of Legends and have coached a few pro and amateur Halo
teams. I also never lose a matchmaking game of Warlord King, by
applying the LoL concept of Zoning to every game I play.
Thinking about games in terms of
overlapping concepts can help you improve your individual and
team-based play and help you see a marked improvement in your
ranking.
