Audley's Workshop: Carvin' Niches for Killin' Bitches

Back to Audley's Workshop we go! In today's blog, I'm going to be talking about some various Halo weapons as well as PlanetSide 2's incarnation of the Vanu Rocket Launcher, the Lancer, and finally, my favorite FPS weapon design of all time. The general focus will be weapons with very distinct niches, whether they underperformed or overperformed in those niches.

First, the gun labeled the Type-25 Carbine...but more commonly known as the Spiker. This gun looks badass. Like other Brute weapons, blades are a big part of its visual design.

I was one of the top 10 players in Spiker kills in Halo 3 according to HaloCharts back when the website was active and tracking stats through Bungie's API. So, if you're reading this and wondering, “Why does this MLG kid think he can talk about a social weapon?”...first off: I'm a BTB kid, not an MLG one. I only got into competitive 4s because there was a more established scene. I will always feel BTB is the more “pure” Halo experience and the better representation of the game's beautiful sandbox. Hell, I even took down Disco (top Social pilot) in his Banshee with Spikers once. Hitting a Banshee with short-range projectiles is not an easy task. I knew my way around the Brute equivalent to the SMG.

But wait, equivalent to an SMG? ...the Spiker is supposed to be a Carbine. Or a Spike Rifle. Why is Master Chief able to dual-wield a rifle from a species of creature more than double his size? Why is it treated like a submachine gun instead of a RIFLE OR CARBINE as the weapon name says?

Some quick notes about the Spiker:

• Higher damage output than the SMG, and more damage to shields
• Projectile, harder to aim
• Spikes affected by gravity (and inertia, they move more slowly as they go)
• Larger spread than any other weapon in UNSC/Covenant sandbox
• Deals 2 more points of damage (TWO. REALLY?!) than default melee.

So the Spiker suffers not only from an identity problem (SMG RIFLE WHAT ARE YOU DAMN IT), but also suffers from its gameplay not matching its visual.

There are two routes we can take to make the gun feel better to the player. We can embrace the Covenant/Brute SMG identity, or we can turn the gun into a true Spike Rifle. Given the Covenant already have the Plasma Rifle to rival the SMG, but don't have an equivalent to the Assault Rifle in the context of Halo 3... let's take the Spike Rifle along the latter route. No more dual wielding.

Since the Spiker is meant to be a Brute weapon, this definitely means we need it to be fearsome up close. Brute combat was very much about rushing. Besides, the weapon has GIANT FUCKING DOUBLE BLADES attached to it. Halo 2 took the right approach to the Brute Shot's melee identity during the big patch that reworked damage, allowing a momentum Brute Shot melee to kill a target in one hit. This made the Brute Shot a fearsome close range weapon (even though the weapon itself was intended to be wielded at range.)

So step 1: Greatly increase the Spiker's melee damage. None of this 2 damage shit. Make it a one hit kill. Because you should never be in range of a Brute.

Step 2: Since we're making it live up to the Rifle moniker, rather than working as a dual-wielded SMG, we need to increase the effective range. To do this, we need to reduce the effects of gravity (projectile drop) on the spikes and reduce the enormous bullet spread of the gun. Just to make it fire a bit straighter in general, so medium range becomes a reasonable distance to try to deal some damage.

Okay, so now it's a rifle. And it's a scary rifle in melee range. But what about that old “Audley gives everything unique identity or a niche to fill” bit? Don't worry, I'm getting to that.

The Spiker fires super-heated spikes. It's not unreasonable to think they would cool off as they traveled. Plus, we've already mentioned the bullet velocity decreases as they go.

So because of this, we can take the route PlanetSide 2 takes with nearly all of its weapons – have the damage fall off at longer ranges. Up close, the Spikers spikes will deal enormous amounts of damage per bolt. Further away, the damage falls off slightly, decaying a small amount below the AR's damage output. In short, the weapon becomes stronger than the AR in closer quarters, but weaker as the range increases.

And now we've made the Spiker live up to its name as the Type-25 Carbine / Spike Rifle. And made it live up to its visual of the blades.

(Of course, if you wanted to turn it into a Tier 2 Power Weapon rather than just “the Brute AR”...you could go a step further and have the super heated visual of the glowing weapon also transfer to the weapons to where its damage increases at higher RoF / the damage carries longer range before the falloff occurs, but this would probably be a bit much / borderline superfluous.)

Since we're on the subject of Pseudo Assault Rifles...next on the anvil...

The Halo 4 Suppressor.

Even down to the bolts, this gun was basically a re-skinned Spiker. But we've already adjusted the Spiker. Let's not give the Suppressor the same treatment. In the context of Halo 4, we have the Assault Rifle... humanity's relatively low shield damage, high health damage automatic weapon...and the Storm Rifle, the Covenant projectile high shield, low health damage automatic weapon. It's fairly boring and doesn't create any interesting decisions or improved niche to make the Suppressor a “neutral” version of this where the damage is in the middle. I believe (might be mistaken) the Suppressor had the highest RoF and the highest bullet spread of Halo 4 Automatic weapons.

So...let's change that. Let's give the Suppressor its own unique niche among Automatics that no other Halo automatic has attempted. After all, the thing is called the Suppressor. Let's go all out on its capabilities for suppressing fire (extinguisher).

Call it plagiarism, but there's actually a weapon from another game I think would fit perfectly for the Suppressor's intended niche.

If you know this weapon, congratulations, you've played one of the most fun arena game series of all time, Armored Core. This is the “Finger” – it had various different prefixes over the franchise's different games.

But this gun was AMAZING at close ranges.

Why?

Because it was a MACHINE GUN SHOTGUN. It had an absurd rate of fire but also fired multiple bullets at once.

Now put that in Halo.

Turn the Suppressor into a gun that fires a METRIC FUCKTON of bullets, all at the same time. A barrage of bullets, blazing across the sky. It becomes a complete melter at close quarters. Give it a large enough magazine and it can become a weapon that, although inefficient for killing at range, could at least sustain enough swarm of bullets to scare off those who fear bees.

(Shotgunified Automatic weapons in Tower of Guns are also pretty fucking badass. Or automatic version of the Shrapnel Trumpet. You know, whatever.)

Speaking of shotguns in Halo 4...

The Boltshot!

Because who doesn't want to SPAWN WITH A SHOTGUN, right?

Someone at 343, in the creation of the Halo 4 sandbox, thought to themselves, “Creating a gun that can deal instant kill damage, and being able to use that gun off spawn is definitely a healthy thing for this game.”

Granted, functionally its instant kill was similar to the Plasma Pistol – gated by a charge-up that was required before the gun fired. In theory it wasn't too oppressive. Unfortunately, when you arm potentially everyone in a game with a weapon that can instant kill, the problem is that everyone in the game will take the weapon that can instant kill. When that weapon is range gated, it leads to gameplay issues.

The Boltshot was a unique pistol. And a cool design. But it was unquestionably too powerful.

So, what can you do to the Boltshot to keep its identity of “Shotgun Pistol” without turning it into the Halo 3 Mauler but also keeping it from being a one-hit kill weapon?

• Nerf the damage. Make its charged up damage deal full shield damage, but make the body damage fairly weak, such as taking 3 charged shots to kill a foe. With this change, you can make it so the effective range of the charged shot isn't forced to be immediate vicinity.
  • This will encourage using the pistol form's headshots to finish off a foe, turning the gun into a self-sustained noob combo.
• Increase the charge-up time slightly. Since it's not killing foes with the Charge now, it doesn't need a slow charge.
• Decrease the amount of ammo consumed by a charge-up to 3. This will further encourage charge shots + follow-up pistol bullets.

With these changes, you turn the gun from an outright shotgun pistol into a gun that's balanced for skill. It's got the pseudo-shotgun identity of having a ton of burst damage at close range, but you still need to be able to land the pistol headshots in order to reliably finish a kill. Unlike a true Noob Combo though (the Plasma Pistol + Battle Rifle combo from Halo 2, if you're for some reason unfamiliar), this one-weapon version is limited in range. So there's still room for swapping out your weapon for a better version.

I've done a good job with my segues so far this blog... but now I'm all out of good segues. A good one for this next weapon is a bit out of Reach.

The Plasma Launcher. Also known in the BTB community as Blueberries. This gun was actually pretty useless in the vehicle killing niche. Where it should have theoretically been strong.

It could take down a Warthog, but what couldn't? The Warthog's armor was paper thin and shredded easily by a team's worth of DMRs. Which, coincidentally, had a stronger scope than the Plasma Launcher.

The true terror vehicles of BTB were tanks, the pseudo-tank Revenant, and the Banshee. Tanks could nearly shrug off the damage. The Revenant was agile enough to escape the extremely slow engagement time. And the Banshee only needed to do a single roll to break any lock-on that was attained.

So basically, you have a useless power weapon on your hands. Because again, the DMR out-ranges the Plasma Launcher, so even against foot soldiers, the weapon with the potential to one-hit kill is outclassed.

The draw of the Plasma Launcher was supposed to be it's ability to fire multiple sticky grenades at once, in addition to its lock-on functionality.

I will give credit where credit is due, the slow projectile speed means there's plenty of room for counterplay to the power weapon. Unfortunately, combining a necessity to lock on to truly be effective with a slow projectile speed means you're really hurting for effectiveness. So what can we do to make the Plasma Launcher more useful without making it overpowered?

For dealing with infantry, giving it the ability to lock onto multiple targets with a single charge could help a lot, turning the weapon into a “crowd control” weapon, rather than a “Okay I pick you.” “Now you.” one by one weapon. Allowing each of the four grenades to seek out a different target with up to four potential locks puts more power in the hands of the wielder in situations where he is outnumbered, with opportunity to take everyone down with him, if he's fast enough on the draw.

With the amount of armor abilities in Reach that catered to mobility or defense (read: basically all of them), there were plenty of ways to escape a Plasma Launcher bolt if it was coming your way. Because of this, speeding up either the grenades' travel time or the target acquisition speed is important for empowering the weapon. Players who complain about power weapons being powerful when given so many tools for counterplay BEYOND JUST DODGING, WHICH IS ALSO POSSIBLE will learn the power of the blueberries.

But how do we make it better against the Banshee?

If you improve the travel time, keeping the lock-on time the same, you can edit the Banshee to only be able to shed ATTEMPTED locks, rather than already-secured ones. The Banshee when piloted by ace pilots probably won't spend enough time without flipping to get a lock on in the first place, so this would generally solve that problem.

As for making the weapon more effective against tanks, that's simply a matter of the player wielding it getting in a position where they won't be killed attempting to get a lock on.

That's all for Halo on this blog, but it's time to talk about another “rocket launcher” that featured a charge-up time. The PlanetSide 2 Vanu Sovereignty Lancer.

In the original PlanetSide, the Vanu Lancer was essentially a 6-shot rifle that dealt significant damage to vehicles/armor. PlanetSide 2 mostly tried to keep that in tact, but turned the Lancer into a bitchified version of the Halo Spartan Laser, with three levels of charge up damage.

As with many of the weapons in PlanetSide 2's arsenal, the weapon had to be balanced for “What happens if a fuckton of people use it?”

As a result, the weapon felt almost useless for a single person to use. It didn't fill a niche of a “rocket launcher” at all for an individual. If you were by yourself, it was almost always more efficient to carry a dumbfire or a lock-on rocket launcher as a Vanu soldier, because it meant you could either kill infantry that approached or scare off vehicles with the threat of a lock on.

So how do you balance an anti-vehicle weapon for scale? How do you make a weapon that is potentially oppressive for squads of people to use feel satisfying for an individual to use? This is an important design question for every piece of the PlanetSide sandbox, as well as being important to ask in games like Battlefield or Halo in the case of BTB and upcoming Warzone. (Hell, in League of Legends we saw three instances where a summoner spell taken by an entire team ended up problematic because of how stacking them worked. Heal, Promote, and Fortify all had design problems regarding scalability.)

So now, what do you do to make a weapon such as an anti-vehicle laser interesting/useful for an

individual, but not overpowered for a squad?

The Lancer's identity was supposed to be a sort of “Anti-Vehicle Sniper” – it even required some degree of leading your shot despite being a laser beam.

Unfortunately an easy answer like “give vehicles weak points to aim for” was not an explorable option for PlanetSide 2 since that would mean additional sprites were necessary which would have destroyed game performance.

I do believe the Lancer was the longest range “Rocket Launcher” in the game. So wielding it, even as an individual, meant one could at least harass vehicles from far out of their engagement range. However, because of Engineers' potential to repair a vehicle more quickly than a Lancer could damage it, it wasn't really possible to do relevant chip damage to a vehicle.

Instead of buffing impact damage, giving the Lancer a damage-over-time effect which does not stack (but similar in power to the amount a single Engineer could repair, with a duration roughly equal to a charge time for another Lancer shot) would allow a single Lancer to feel impactful against a target – ensuring that each shot would be impactful, while the damager-over-time would offset the potential for the vehicle's driver to simply hop out and repair until the Lancer-wielder ran out of ammo. Additionally, since the damage-over-time effect does not stack (simply reapplies), having multiple Lancers firing would not make the weapons any more fearsome than usual in a group.

It would empower an individual, but keep the groups in check.

And so the PlanetSide 2 Lancer is more satisfying for an individual and still relevant in its niche as the Anti-Vehicle Sniper.

So finally, we come to my favorite weapon from any shooter ever.

It comes from Unreal Tournament (big surprise)

This is the Shock Rifle. A glorious projectile weapon with a hit-scan alternate fire method.

I'm not here to redesign the weapon or suggest any methods on how to improve it. I'm just here to share the gospel of a fantastic weapon.

The gun could fire either straight laser beams or “shock cores” which traveled significantly slower than the laser beams. The shock cores could then be hit by the laser beams and detonated from a range, dealing a massive amount of AoE damage that usually killed a target it one hit.

It's a brilliant skillful design with tons of nuance and mastery. Good counterplay due to the slower projectile speed of the instant kill. Tons of clarity of what's going on. Every gun should strive to be as awesome and satisfying as the Unreal Tournament Shock Rifle.

And if the Shock Rifle weren't cool enough, they took that gun concept and put it into a vehicle as well, known as the Hellraiser, which could rapid fire Shock Cores, and then detonate them in a chain of explosions. Just in case you needed to feel truly epic.

With that, this blog is donezo. Hope you enjoyed the read!

Audley's Workshop: Another Visit to the Halo Sandbox

Time for another visit to Audley's Workshop! Back on the subject of the Halo sandbox this time rather than maps. And this time, I'm going to be talking about something very near and dear to my and the majority of Halo players' everywhere's hearts. A piece of the Halo sandbox that was welcomed with open arms and loved by everyone who ever used it.

And in case you haven't caught onto the sarcasm just yet...

I'm talking about Armor Abilities (and some Halo 3 equipment).

Now, you probably already want to stop reading because I mentioned those two awful words that made many a Halo player stop playing. But I encourage you to stay, even after I make this shocking next statement: I liked the idea of armor abilities. I just despised the implementation, both from the perspective of a player and from the perspective of a designer.

Today, I'm specifically going to be speaking about the abilities that were designed to increase your survivability. And although I stress mobility is survivability, I'm not going to be speaking on mobility today – we'll save that for another time. For this subject, we're talking:

• Reach Armor Lock
• H4 Hardlight Shield
• H3 Bubble Shield
• H3 Regenerator
• Reach Drop Shield

Before I delve into any individual bit, I want to point out why these are generally all bad for Halo's gameplay. The general consensus among players that complained about them revolved around two arguments. The first, “It lets an idiot get away with making dumb plays and survive.” The second, “It slows down gameplay.”

To anyone arguing the former: No, shut up, you're wrong. It increases the amount of play options available to a player by giving them more opportunities to survive an encounter or wait for help. Them taking a survivability ability alone does not guarantee the “dumb play” will work. It enables them to make larger perceived risks with the knowledge they have more safety than is immediately apparent. This is actually a positive in my eyes.

But then you take the latter. Slowing down gameplay. Making it more time consuming to punish players for overextension is frustrating in the best case scenario. In the worst case, it gives the aggressive idiot time to be saved by his teammate. (Audley, weren't you just saying they can take more perceived risks? Wouldn't this be one of those?)

Let's talk Armor Lock.

Armor Lock was by far my favorite (and probably my most used) Armor Ability in Halo Reach. I adored its two primary functions: Parrying explosives and EMPing vehicles.

Unfortunately, Armor Lock was overtuned. Although it was meant as a method to survive fatal damage and to disable vehicles, it ended up being far stronger. Vehicles had to be terrified of attempting to splatter players running across an open field, as Armor Lock wouldn't just EMP their vehicle. It would outright destroy it. The attempted splatter would deal more damage to the vehicle than running full speed into a brick wall or colliding with another vehicle.

Rather than being used to survive fatal damage, players would hold Armor Lock for its insanely long duration and wait for teammates to come clean up. In some cases, such as Slayer variants on Countdown in default settings, full teams of Armor Lock played their own version of leap frog alternating armor locks to take down opponents. It was a grave oversight that led to extremely poor emergent gameplay.

The nerfs given to the ability when 343 took over were too conservative. Armor Lock had two distinct niches in which it could exist, as outlined above.

Gutting the duration of Armor Lock to only let it last a fraction of a second (you know, to make it specifically avoid bursts of damage) would've gone a long way toward making the ability require skill to use rather than “Let me go make a dumb play and bait people while I'm invincible.”

Further, removing the self-inflicted vehicular suicide functionality (and replacing it with further stressing of the Armor Lock's original intent of EMPing the vehicle) would also have made the ability less daunting in the context of Big Team Battle or open maps.

Even with these two extreme nerfs (duration and reflected damage), Armor Lock still is the dominant choice in its niche (surviving fatal explosions and avoiding being splattered by vehicles) – but “edge case” (read: THE WAY IT ACTUALLY GOT USED ALL THE FUCKING TIME) uses of overextending and sitting in your impenetrable glowy fortress of autofellatio for 5 seconds while praying your teammates saved you would be completely eradicated.

It also wouldn't effect the little known aspect of the Armor Lock EMP that I abused – where the shields of a player would be drained when used at melee range, allowing you to instantly kill a player with a melee if they stood over your armor locking body. This added a nuance to CQB encounters, and if the Armor Lock duration were more along the lines of a quarter of a second rather than several seconds, it could lead to players attempting to block an enemy melee and immediately countering with EMP+Melee of their own if CQB devolved into a fist fight.

Armor Lock is fixed. But let's stay on the same track for our next subject.

The good ol' Hardlight Shield.

This was another instance of an armor ability that had really cool moments, but ultimately degraded into a “Oh, fuck, I'm going to die so let me just hold onto this button as long as I possibly can and pray for deus ex machina or for them to run out of ammo!” ability.

Hardlight Shield was really cool when you deflected a rocket right back at the rocketeer and killed him with it. It was a rare occurrence since the deflection angles were really awkward and hard to figure out (too much curve to the shield, made it really hard to actually aim.)

Like Armor Lock, HLS was a really cool parry option introduced to Halo. And also like Armor Lock, rather than embracing the Parry identity, it was given a lengthy duration which turned its identity into a hulking Riot Shield-esque ability which slowed your movements while blocking any incoming damage from that direction.

343 definitely learned lessons from Armor Lock in Hardlight Shield's design: shields didn't recharge during use, and the immunity to damage was only directional. They seem to have also decided Armor Lock's immunity to being splattered was too strong and allowed HLS users to become pavement paint.

Hardlight Shield was essentially a nerfed Armor Lock – you are still exposed to damage from most directions (and even some areas on the front, like your feet) and still susceptible to grenades, so long as they're thrown a little extra distance. Because of these additional vulnerabilities, I managed to convince Gh057Ayame to include Hardlight Shield for testing as one of the potential Armor Abilities to call down with Personal Ordnance in Team Throwdown settings.

However, despite being a “nerfed version of Armor Lock” its dragging duration allowed players to use it while trying to hobble back into cover during a losing fight, or to simply wait for a teammate to be able to help. I recall seeing Pistola use the ability in one AGL tournament to great effect, as the Wizard of staying alive would certainly do. He abused its power well and made sure to annoy enemy players by appearing to be overextended, but knowing he could get back to cover if he truly wanted to.

I think one of the biggest mistakes in the Hardlight Shield's design was the continued focus on reduced mobility in exchange for its damage mitigation. So Audley, what would you have changed about Hardlight Shield if you had been its designer?

• Reduce the duration. Maybe not a quarter second like Armor Lock (since this is much more vulnerable) – something closer to 1-1.5s. A full 1v1 kill time worth of timing, but no more.
• Leave the player's mobility completely in tact. That's right, even allow them to sprint with the Hardlight Shield up. This encourages a player in a hallway battle to activate their shield and rush at the unsuspecting foe. It encourages making aggressive plays with the ability.
• Normalize the deflection of the shield / Flatten the shield. Make it so things hitting you head on are deflected directly back (in most cases, it seemed things went off to the right.). The ability to deflect rockets back at the rocketeer (or Scorpion tank shells) was one of the most interesting interactions of the ability. HIGHLIGHT THIS INTERACTION.

With these three changes, the Hardlight Shield encourages more aggressive usage, while also giving it a more highlighted niche as a strong ability to use in choke points. With the improved deflection and the maintained mobility, it also increases the potency of selfish use of the ability, rather than having to rely on teammates to help you, or encouraging use defensively to stall for time.

Hardlight Shield and Armor Lock are now more fun to play with and against. Let's move on.

Halo 3 gave us the Bubble Shield and the Regenerator, and Reach bastardized them with its Drop Shield. All three were extremely important in the context of BTB, but were absolutely banned from competitive 4v4 settings. Drop Shield made Oddball games extremely one-dimensional.

Halo 3's Bubble Shield saw four primary use cases.

1. Place on an Armed Bomb to buy time to disarm.
2. Place at a doorway in order to give space to escape and/or safety to board a vehicle
3. Place in an open area with large space between points of cover to stop and recharge your shields before pushing up further.
4. Place to bait players with larger effective range to come fight you inside the bubble (whether this meant you had a shotgun and were trying to get an easy CQB kill, or if you were hiding from a vehicle to try to bait them into splattering you but turning the tides with a Plasma Grenade or highjack.)

In most cases, these were pretty healthy for the game. But on smaller maps, numbers three and four become problematic. In a long ranged battle and afraid you'll lose? BUBBLE! Have a Shotgun and can't get close? BUBBLE! Down a shot? BUBBLE!

Although the Bubble Shield had many avenues for proactive use, it's also a strong stall tactic, with very limited options for counterplay unless you were already in close quarters. The Bubble could be destroyed from the inside (or knocked away with a grav lift or some of the ball equipment like Power Drains or Radar Jammers).

If you were outside the Bubble, you were shit out of luck. You had no way to burst the Bubble. No way to damage the Bubble. Nothing to do but wait. There's nothing fun about that.

If you were inside the Bubble, and no one came in, you were shit out of luck. You were stared at by watchful eyes. No way to damage them from inside your zone of safety. Nothing to do but wait for your eventual demise. There's nothing fun about that either.

Bubble Shields in these cases were the definition of anti-fun. Neither side gains any fun from using the Bubble Shield in this manner. For the side whose kill was denied by the cowardly option, their fun was taken away.

On the other hand, Regenerators in Halo 3 ended up being used quite a bit differently. The most common use case for a Regenerator was simply to tank long range shots while you won the gun battle. Because a Sniper or a grenade+well-timed shot could kill you within the Regen, the “bait safely with Shotgun” use cases were not available.

In the case of CQB combat, use of the equipment was not favored toward “whoever had the better CQB weapon” (as was the case for a Bubble Shield) but rather, “Who used the Regenerator?” – the person outside the regenerator continues taking damage until they get into range of the field (at which point they may also reap its benefits.) Whereas with the Bubble Shield, neither player may exchange damage until both are on the same side of the Bubble, much like dreaded shield doors.

Comparing the two directly,

• The Bubble Shield was stronger at countering power weapons (as it made the person inside immune to external damage.)
• The Bubble Shield had less options for counterplay, limiting such options only to players able to infiltrate the shield. The Regenerator player could be killed through teamwork, power weapons, or very good grenade+weapon usage.
• In the context of impending CQB, the Regenerator gave more power to the player who used it as opposed to the player with a CQB weapon. A rushing player with a BR and a Shotgun was susceptible to a player inside Regenerator with a BR, but would likely win against someone who threw a Bubble Shield.

Overall, however, the two generally fulfill similar niches. I mentioned in my Rat's Nest post the Regenerator was better for aggressive plays while the Bubble Shield was better saved for protecting spawners or disarming a Bomb – this is still true (after all, can't mass-slay the people disarming the bomb with your rockets if they throw a Bubble Shield on the Bomb plant.)

Removing the Bubble Shield option all together, however, would be a superior option, as it prevents the earning of a power weapon from being countered by a much more commonly spawning piece of equipment, and increases the amount of effort a defending team must execute to disarm the bomb.

If the “I want to avoid this one Rocket” function a Bubble Shield brings is deemed necessary, the Regenerator could deploy an outward force field when first activated that immediately dissipates. You know... like a parry. (I seem to like those, yeah?)

For all other intents and purposes, such as temporary cover or time to regain shields...the Bubble Shield's functionality could've been covered by a piece of equipment we never saw used on a single Halo 3 map: Deployable Cover. In addition to having the counterplay options of “just go around it” Deployable Cover's design also caused the shield to disappear after a certain amount of damage had been taken, meaning regardless of duration, players wanting the shield to go away could make it go away.

In short, GET RID OF THE FUCKING BUBBLE SHIELD. (And maybe slightly nerf the Regen to improve the potential for a player inside one to lose a ranged 1v1 battle if the enemy fires perfect shots.)

But then we have this fucker...

The Halo Reach Drop Shield.

Because someone looked at the Halo 3 Bubble Shield and Halo 3 Regenerator and thought, “Hey, these two kinda overlap in their intended roles. Why don't we COMBINE them?!”

It didn't take more than a week of post-launch matchmaking to find instances of players spawning with Bubbles breaking a gametype. Nothing like trying to play 4v4 Oddball where the entire game is centered around a nigh-impenetrable dome of safety. Oh, your Drop Shield expired? I gotchu fam.

I mentioned Bubble Shields could only be destroyed from inside. Drop Shield at least realized this mistake and allowed it to expire based off damage (more like the Deployable Cover).

In BTB, we saw Drop Shield used on Boardwalk one-sided objective to troll chain bubbles of immunity while running a flag home or running a bomb in.

We rarely saw the Drop Shield used to create a “field of safety” from vehicles out in the field (partially due to how overpowered Armor Lock was) – it was occasionally used for attempted flag steals on Hemorrhage for getting into a vehicle. But even then, it was too big of a trade off to give up on other armor abilities to maybe get a flag into a vehicle if you managed to make it to the base without being destroyed.

Before it was realized Warthogs were essentially useless, it was common for drivers to take Drop Shield in order to recover safely if the vehicle flipped. But that didn't last long.

In Drop Shield's case, it exhibited the problem of trying to take an on-map piece of equipment and translating it into a repeatable use ability for players, regardless of cooldown. It's also a problem I'll address in a later Audley's Workshop when I talk about Empire-Specific Rocket Launchers in PlanetSide 2 (scalability – balancing a tool available to one person versus the tool being used by GROUPS of people).

Before Drop Shield was ever given the green light by Halo Reach's design team, two questions should've been asked:

• For what reason should a player take this ability over the others?
• What will happen if this ability is in the hands of every player?

After both of those were asked, chances are its problems would've been a bit clearer prior to its release to the general public.

And, as with the case of the Bubble Shield, it probably would've been realized that the Drop Shield had no true purpose belonging in Big Team Battle. In cases where the shield is being deployed to survive in the open field, are players ever actually advancing, or just delaying? In cases where the shield is being deployed to protect an objective, is there actual counter-play available with other abilities or who haven't gone out of their way to pick up a Plasma Pistol.

But rather than outright remove the Drop Shield... let's make it into something that can work in Halo.

The main issue, in my eyes, is the area of survivability is limited to where you cast the ability. So before we move further, let's change the name. Drop Shield is now Safeguard.

When Safeguard is cast, a somewhat small (half/a third of the size of normal Drop Shield Bubble) semi-transparent sphere is created around the player. The player who cast Safeguard may still use their weapons freely. However, any foreign bullets, projectiles, etc. that come into contact with the sphere have their damage reduced substantially (by ~80%) and transferred to the player whose sphere they have come into contact with. This sphere moves with the player as the player moves.

The sphere could also be given stages of damage like Reach vehicles, causing the bubble to shrink in size (with both damage and duration rapidly causing stage transitions) and decreasing the amount of damage mitigation from the sphere.

Now you've taken an immobile shield without much purpose outside of protecting an objective and turned it into a selfish defensive mechanism for turning a player temporarily into a pseudotank (still able to be killed), at the expense of being an easier target to hit.

This new form would encourage pushing across open terrain, aggressive flanks or engagements, and prevent players from stacking their shields as a sort of Road to Glory for flag or Permanent Thunderdome for Oddball. Players wishing to use Safeguard to protect teammates would be forced to actively use their bodies to shield their teammates.

Suddenly you've turned Drop Shield into a more active ability with more incentive for aggressive use and less room for abuse cases.

And my work here is done. Until next time, folks!

Audley's Workshop: Balancing an FPS Vehicle Sandbox

I'm bored and feeling creative, so it's time for another visit to Audley's Workshop.

This time, instead of talking about a variety of guns from the Halo series, I'm going to focus on the vehicles we've encountered in the past. Just in case my previous rants about Halo vehicles weren't enough (Part 1, Part 2). And unlike the situation with guns, where I was mostly speaking of how to buff underpowered weapons into being used competitively...this time I'll be talking about how to make certain vehicles more fair to play against.

I'm gonna cover a few Halo vehicles as well as a few vehicles from other shooters that we've seen. Vehicular sandboxes are one of my favorite parts of most FPS games. Fuck running around on foot, there's driving to be done!

To start, let's talk about Halo 3's most overpowered vehicle (that was witnessed in matchmaking, I'm not counting the default Hornet).

No, it's not a tank.

It was this motherfucker right here. The Brute Chopper.

I referred to it once as “If Firefly Reapers got a hold of a Covenant Ghost” and I don't think that's far off. On enormous open maps like Sandtrap, the Chopper actually had meaningful trade-offs. The Chopper was forced to move, exposing its weakness of having three sides completely open to small arms fire.

Unfortunately, because the Halo 3 BR was not really a long ranged weapon (unlike the CE pistol, H2 BR, Reach DMR, etc.)...most of the maps in Halo 3 ended up not being very large. And as a result, we ended up with this map called Sandbox.

On Sandbox, the Chopper became a monster. The best Chopper pilots simply moved out to the dunes and fired from afar, feathering their trigger to rapidfire long range, high damage shots at anyone found out of cover. Only the Missile Pod or Rocket Launchers could threaten to dislodge a Chopper from its post on the edge of the map, as well. With those threats heavily telegraphed, it was rather easy to keep the Chopper in its oppressive suppressive mode.

Granted, there is one easy solution to balancing the vehicle in TODAY'S context...Reach introduced Vehicle Health, which means any vehicle can simply die from small arms fire. Just BR the bastard til it blows up... But how do you balance the emergent gameplay of the Chopper within the context of Halo 3?

There are two “easy routes” to take in regards to the vehicle.

The first is to simply reduce its standard fire range, missile speed, or gun damage in order to further encourage the use of the grinding front tires to splatter Spartans across whatever improvised road you choose. The issue with this easy route is that the Chopper had notoriously bad handling when making any sort of sharp turn (which would be necessary whenever playing on Sandbox map variants, as the maps featured some tight corridors).

The second easy route would be to gut the Chopper's impenetrable front armor identity and separate the wheels ever-so-slightly in order to expose the driver's head. This route leads to a “feels bad man” situation for drivers where there is no correct decision to make in terms of positioning, as you have no safety.

If the latter option WERE explored, increased side or rear armor would also be necessary to compensate for the new heavy exposure to danger from the front. Requiring more precision to take down a pilot from the sides or rear also somewhat encourages more aggressive plays from the Chopper as a missed Splatter does not necessarily equate to death.

An alternate method is one that would fit the animation of the Chopper much better, improving its visceral feel and the level of mastery necessary to operate the Chopper on smaller maps, while also ensuring the “park and be a mortar cannon” style of play was no longer possible, without actually nerfing the Chopper's viability in other roles – Because the wheels are constantly grinding/rolling, even while the Chopper is stalled, the Chopper could have a consistent forward momentum – guaranteeing the vehicle moves forward, even if very slightly. This means parking on the dunes has a limited timer, or a sort of cooldown for how long you are able to maintain the position. While on larger maps, where the Chopper must be constantly on the hunt for new vehicles as its pilot hums the theme from Jaws, this forward momentum would not greatly impact its playstyle or use cases.

Next on the Chopping block (Ha, Chopper, Chopping block... Great Segue m8)...is hands down the most overpowered vehicle in Halo history when used optimally... a level of play less than a dozen players can honestly say they Reached during the vehicle's game's lifespan. (Ha, you'll see what I did there in a second.)

The Halo Reach Banshee.

This fucker right here. THIS fucker.

Okay, if you ever faced Gamesager in the Banshee (or a handful of ace pilots that existed in the game), you know how fucking absurdly broken this vehicle was. Outside of the hands of ace pilots, the Banshee could be taken down by a coordinated assault of DMRs or a lucky Laser.

The only thing an Ace Banshee pilot feared? No, not a tank. Not a Spartan Laser. Not Rockets (ha, flips break lock-ons, good luck hitting me sucka). They feared Sniper Rifles.

But the Banshee in the hands of an ace pilot was truly a weapon to be feared – the type of fear that could also be mistaken for respect. I've said in my most recent blog that MOBILITY IS SURVIVABILITY. Well, when you have the fastest vehicle in the game able to dodge and roll (which breaks any sort of lock on), you've multiplied that survivability to crazy levels. Coupled with properly timed boosts, the Banshee's flip animation could be faster and cover more ground. If you thought Neo was crazy for dodging bullets in The Matrix, then seeing an ace Banshee pilot zip across the sky might leave you with dampened pants.

But that wasn't all that made the Banshee strong. Like its Halo 3 counterpart, the Reach Banshee had the ability to fire fuel rods at its opponents. Giant green Banshee Bombs that could kill in a single hit. Normally, these were easy to dodge. But the most mobile vehicle in the game and greatest of aerial vehicles in Halo history came with a trick up its wing.

Those flips I mentioned? Yeah, if you had a target in your sights as you did one, and launched a banshee bomb at the same time... that target was 100% dead. Because a flip accelerated the Banshee Bomb and magnified the aim assist.

While this was probably a bug, it was an enormous part of Ace pilots ability to find an isolated target, flip toward them, bombflipdestroy them, and literally flip the fuck out. No one was safe from your reign of terror.

So, balance issues:

• wtf sniper damage destroys me
• OMG WTF LOCK ON BANSHEE BOMBS AND INFINITE FLIPPING FOREVER

How do you solve?

This is one where the obvious answer is probably the right choice – fix the interaction where flipping makes the Banshee bomb a guaranteed kill. Yes, you'll make many a Banshee pilot angry by nerfing their guaranteed damage and greatly exposing them to increased risk for much more difficult to acquire reward.

This is an instance where compensatory buffs are necessary. Because when the Banshee wasn't flipgodding their way to instakills and flipgodding back out... it really wasn't an effective combat vehicle.

The Banshee definitely needed improved front armor, to better encourage the use of its nose cannons (which were a death trap to actually use – using them instead of the Banshee Bomb meant you weren't flipping. Which meant you were dying to DMR fire from every angle on the map. And if the enemy had a Sniper Rifle, you were dead (5 shots from the Sniper meant a dead Banshee. Period.)

I would also personally increase the damage from the nose cannons as well as their targeting reliability – leave the Banshee bombs for cleaning up targets in cover. Tighten up the ability to utilize the nose cannons when entering or exiting a flip so target acquisition can come sooner as you roleplay AcroBatman across the sky over Gotham. Any tweak that can encourage the Banshee user to use the actual guns of the Banshee over the Banshee Bombs is a step closer to a balanced flipgod machine.

Now, you've finally nerfed Gamesager. Sort of. The survivability is still there (flipgod for days) but the damage is not. You've now made the hardest vehicle to master in Halo even harder to master...

OH WELL, on to the next subject!

The Gauss Warthog.

This one, I'm going to keep short and sweet. In fact, we'll balance it without actually touching the vehicle.

Halo 2 is the strongest incarnation of the Gauss Warthog we ever saw. It was an instant kill, somewhat rapid fire vehicle turret that ensured the demise of anyone on a level playing field with it. Halo 3 nerfed the rate of fire, but the vehicle dominated even harder than the previous iteration. Halo Reach...well, we never saw it because it was bugged and literally fired through Forge objects. In Halo 4, we saw the Gauss on Exile completely dominate games even when players could spawn with Plasma pistols and Plasma grenades to take it down. It saw longer sprees than the Mantis could ever dream of. Its rate of fire and aim assist were nerfed, but it continued to dominate.

In Halo 2 Anniversary, 343 took a heavy hand to the Gauss and turned its firing mechanism from an instant kill upon trigger pull into a charged up shot much like the Halo 4 Railgun, which made it a bit unwieldy for the user.

Ironically, the strongest iteration of the Gauss Warthog (Halo 2's) was the least dominant. (Unless you directly compare H2A Stonetown versus H2 Zanzibar, in which case Stonetown Gauss is weaker. Over the whole of H2, however, the Gauss was less dominant than a Gauss on Stonetown in H2A can be.)

With the new incarnations of Halo, the developers failed to properly assess what made the Gauss acceptable in Halo 2.

The vehicle existed on maps such as Zanzibar, Headlong, and Terminal in Halo 2. Each of these maps featured either extreme verticality, heavily segmented map design, or both in conjunction with one another. There were plenty of paths along the map that were free from the gun's reign of terror. Its turret's range of motion wasn't steep enough to pick off targets overhead.

The Gauss Warthog saw repeated nerfs in subsequent games because it wasn't viewed contextually, nor was it allowed to be placed on maps that let it take control of low impact areas of the map (low field on Headlong, the fields on Terminal) – it could easily control those areas, but could not reach the portions of the map which were necessary for scoring an objective. (I mean, the Gauss COULD drive there if you were determined, but... not really the best place to be.)

tldr: HEY BIG TEAM BATTLE MAPS WITH VERTICALITY AND SEGMENTATION RATHER THAN LARGE FLAT OPEN FIELDS ARE COOL AND IF YOU UTILIZE THEM THEN THE GAUSS BECOMES OKAY TO BE OVERPOWERED BECAUSE IT CAN DOMINATE UNIMPORTANT SECTIONS OF THE MAP RATHER THAN THE ENTIRE MAP ALL AT ONCE.

Okay, enough about Halo vehicles... lets talk about something from another game...

This is the Flail, from PlanetSide. If you've driven the Wraith in Halo, you have a mild idea of what the Flail is like. But now take that Wraith range (base to base on Blood Gulch maps)...and multiply it by about ten. The Flail could fire from base to base on the expansive PlanetSide continents.

But there's a problem... the Flail pilot can't see anything he's doing. In order to utilize the Flail, you need a second person in your Squad with a weapon called a Laze Pointer. The Flail was never self-sufficient. It wasn't uncommon to see a column of Flails all in the same squad with a single person painting targets to unleash a cataclysm of plasma mortars raining from the sky.

Unfortunately, this is at odds with the PlanetSide 2 design goals which insisted every non-transport vehicle was given some degree of self-sufficiency (all tanks gave control of the main cannon to the pilot, rather than locking the guns away to additional passengers.)

So my favorite PlanetSide vehicle was not allowed to play in the sandbox with its other friends when they made the switch to the new playground.

How can we fix it?

The first option is to include a camera in the shots – each time you fire you're given a fly-by-wire camera to spot where your shots are actually going. (This functionality definitely exists in the game, as it is the NC's Empire Specific Rocket Launcher, the Phoenix's method of operation.) The issue for this idea, of course, is that the travel time of the shot is often longer than the time it takes to recharge shots, so you'd be forcing a player to sacrifice potential damage output / suppression time in order to line up their shot. A second issue is that this doesn't help prevent the trial-and-error shots from ending up landing among your own army and betraying everyone.

An alternate route is to have the vehicle automatically place a personal waypoint where its shots will land – this helps you better understand what you're going to hit and where to aim to get your desired result. While this one doesn't carry the drawbacks of the previous option, it's perhaps a bit TOO user friendly and may make the vehicle too easy to use.

The third route combines the first two: have the vehicle include a deploy option before it may begin firing (which I'm fairly sure the original already had) – once deployed, the vehicle first releases a drone, piloted by the player. This drone may be flown wherever, and then the drone must also be deployed. Once the drone is deployed, a waypoint is placed in order to target the drone (which is immune to Flail fire, but susceptible to being killed by other weaponry.) If killed by other weaponry, the Flail must release another drone in order to continue firing. This keeps the vehicle user-friendly and capable as a fantastic mortar vehicle, but also grants counterplay to those who are under siege from the mortar (an option not present in the original PlanetSide, where all it took was a stealthed player with a laser pointer to declare your base Plasma Crater Number 722A.

And now the Flail is free to exist in the context of PlanetSide 2.

I wanted to cover a vehicle from Unreal Tournament as well, but I couldn't honestly think of one other than the Leviathan that felt like it wasn't well-balanced in the context of the game. And the Leviathan was meant to feel the way it did. (5 player vehicle, of COURSE it's going to be OP).

So instead I'm just going to say: Unreal Tournament's Manta and Scorpion are fucking fantastic examples of how to handle self-sufficient vehicles with trade-offs and noticeable weaknesses.

And with that, I'm wrapping up this trip to Audley's Workshop. Hope you enjoyed!

Audley's Workshop: Balancing an FPS Sandbox

A while back, I did a blog on having certain weapons appeal to multiple playstyles, referring to the horribly vague MtG archetypes Timmy/Johnny/Spike to label the players to whom those weapons would appeal.  It focused on having weapons in Halo be both fun and competitively viable.  I mentioned the Halo Reach Grenade Launcher as the pinnacle of success for designing weapons for all players, then pointed out three examples of weapons that appealed to two archetypes and failed to meet the standards for the third.

Today, I'm revisiting Audley's Workshop with a focus on tweaking some weapons from the Halo series to make them more viable competitively or more appealing to the broader player base.  There won't be any focus on Timmy/Johnny/Spike here, just strictly on some weapons that get overlooked in Halo for either being shoved too far into a niche, being too unreliable, or simply not having enough identity on their own to be embraced by the players.

The Needler.  Everyone knows the pink mist.  Or, in a strafe battle, the pink missed.

Halo 3 and Halo 4 had decent incarnations of the weapon, but even then its niche was very difficult to abuse and relied heavily on flanking and catching players by surprise in order to get kills with.  By the time a player had time to turn and react to the first needle connecting in H3, the others were already locked on and tracking to set up the super combine.

But as we move into Halo 5, where the Thruster is readily available, and players are going to be able to quickly break those lock-ons, how does one make the Needler more useful?  Hell, the weapon already had trouble keeping up with any side-to-side motion, whether strafing or simply running in a straight line perpendicular to the wielder... so where is the Needler missing power?

While you may think, "Hey, the Needler's tracking could just be improved to make it harder to dodge!" -- reducing counterplay isn't a wise decision for a weapon that is theoretically a very fast kill weapon between time-of-engagement to time-of-death.  While the actual travel time of the needles makes the kill time long, the actual time to react from being shot is substantially smaller.  Reducing post-reaction counterplay is not the way to go.

"Well then Audley, I guess you have an idea?"  I do, and I've mentioned it on forums in the past.  You know what weapon the Covenant never had a true successor to in Halo, despite having plenty of CQB weapons?  The shotgun.  What if, instead of a standard melee, using the melee with the Needler unleashed all of your needles in a uniform cone ahead of you?  If seven, or eight, or whatever the arbitrarily chosen supercombine number happens to be managed to lodge themselves in the target, you get the insta-kill as usual.  Suddenly the Needler is a much better weapon in CQB, which immediately improves its definition in the sandbox.

This also improves the Needler's options versus a player running perpendicular to you; instead of simply praying the tracking decides to work at your range, you lead your shot and unleash.  If they aren't terribly far away, and you angle your shot (melee) correctly, enough needles will land in their side to score a medium range kill with the Needler.  (Audio cues will be necessary for this "MULTIPLE NEEDLES INBOUND" situation though.)

Voila, the Needler is now the best weapon in Halo history.  You're welcome, Bung343.

Oh, nice, the Plasma Rifle.  A weapon that gets praised in Halo: CE for fitting well into the sandbox with its hitstun and quick camo uses.  Hardy LeBel did a wonderful job with this gun and making it useful in Hal-oh, wait, you're telling me outside of HCE no one uses the Plasma Rifle?  Because it's a shit generic automatic weapon with no niche or role at all?

Well, we need to fix that!  No weapon should be useless.  Let's talk about how to make it better, without treading down roads been walked before, such as the hitstun method which limits counterplay potential.

As a visible projectile-based automatic weapon, the Plasma Rifle is a weird beast.  Players can literally dodge the shots (unlike the hitscan incarnations of the Assault Rifle) and see where they need to move in order to stay ahead of their opponent's reticule.  This is good, it offers counterplay.  The slower projectile speed compared to most weapons in the game makes it difficult to use.  It leaves us with an unreliable weapon, especially at longer ranges.

In non-Combat Evolved Halo games where the Plasma Rifle is available to be used, its most common role is for a quick couple of shots followed by a melee.  A pretty shitty niche as other CQB/melee weapons outshine it in that role, and other automatics (SMG/AR) outshine it in gun roles.  As a gun, the Plasma Rifle is pretty shit.  Its other common use, in H2A's case, is to put a couple of shots in, back down into cover while you switch to your BR, and finish with a headshot.  A role where it is outshined by a Plasma Pistol (outside of Warlord, where there is no PP).  Uh oh, looks like we have a weapon that isn't very useful in its intended niche.

So how do we make the Plasma Rifle more reliable at range, or stronger as an automatic?  How about we do both at once -- by removing the limitation that each shot fired only has one particle, instead splitting it into two?  To make the weapon more effective at range, the plasma could feature a dissipation effect -- where the plasma spreads out, becoming able to hit a wider area at range.  This would still have significant damage versus shields, but be relatively useless versus player health.  The damage would still degrade at range based off how much of the spreading disc of plasma hit the player, but the focus here is to soften shields.  The second part of the damage would remain in the center of the disc, increasing focus on hitting your shots accurately as a player gets low on health (in line with Halo's core combat philosophy across the series where you body shot until a player is low/out of shields), then headshot.  The central portion of the Plasma Rifle's bolt could convey headshot bonuses, as well as pack a substantial punch to health any time it connects to an unshielded player.

Suddenly you've got a weapon with nuance for use (do I focus on aiming accurately or just try to drop shields as best as I can, do I have teammate help?) while it still has potential to stand on its own as an automatic, due to having a centralized point of increased damage for penetrating health and finishing off players that have had their shields dropped by the high energy plasma.

But let's not stop there; I've only been talking in 4v4 so far, there's another niche the Plasma Rifle was absolutely overshadowed by its UNSC counterparts...in BTB, versus vehicle health.

It makes zero sense to me that UNSC vehicles are so resistant to plasma damage.  That shit should shred the fuck out of vehicle health.  C'mon now.  Bump up the UNSC vehicle health damage from Plasma-based weaponry.  UNSC vehicles are built to withstand other UNSC vehicles' weaponry, not Covenant weaponry.  UNSC ARs/Magnums/Rifles should not be stronger against vehicles (outside of rifles versus weak points) than Plasma Rifles.

Okay, now we've buffed the Plasma Rifle to viability.  Who are we looking at now?

I'm afraid I don't recognize that weapon.  I don't think I've ever seen anyone use it.  What is it?

Oh, that's the Carbine?  I thought that thing was just a myth made up by those bastards that played playlists as Dinos and ran around shouting "wort wort wort" to be funny.

Here we have an example of a weapon that is perfectly capable in its own right (usually, I think in H3/H4 they intentionally made it weaker than the other options just so they'd never have to bother worrying about it.) but which rarely gets used apart from a pick-up to hold as a sidearm in case you run out of ammo in a power position you don't want to leave.

The Carbine has no role of its own, it's simply the "harder to use Covenant BR"; I say harder to use because it's single shot, versus the BR's burst.  Mistakes are punished more, and it's high shots-to-kill leave plenty of room for mistakes.

So how do we give this thing a role?  Sage Merrill had a pretty good idea once.

But if this blog is to jerk myself off--err, challenge my own design mind, I need to explore a different avenue.  One that doesn't involve "oh just aim for the body if you can't aim and you'll get a flashy kill; it'll be sweet I swear."

First let's examine the canonical design of the Type-51 Carbine.  By design, it is meant to be a riflesque version of the Type-33 Light Anti Armor Weapon...also known as the Fuel Rod Gun.  The Carbine literally fires supersonic radioactive projectiles at the target.  It's most often wielded in campaign by Jackals, the "snipers" of the Covenant military.

So using this knowledge, what can we do to the weapon to give it some identity?  Looking at its Big Sister counterpart, the Fuel Rod Gun, we know that the fuel rod "deploys" after being fired a certain range -- making it move much slower and explode upon the next target it hits.  Thinking about this, Carbines could do the same after a certain range.  Within their intended range (max red reticule range or whatever) they could still fire the standard method that ultimately operate like any other rifle in the game, but as you extend beyond that range, the fuel rod "decays" turning the bolt into an explosive projectile.  This could make it useful for pinging targets behind cover in long range skirmishes, damaging light vehicles as they attempt to flee, or packing an extra punch against smug DMR wielders who think their superior range gives them safety.

Ultimately, this change gives the Carbine a unique role as a dual-threat weapon; a rifle in standard ranges with some potential for splash damage or anti-armor potential in extreme ranges (hello BTB crowd!).  Suddenly the weapon has flavor that allows it to stand out from the other weapons of its niche, and you may actually remember it exists!  (And hey, making the Covenant Rifle explosive isn't that farfetched, we DID have a Supercombining Needle Rifle.)  And for those of you who can't visualize how I imagine the longer-ranged Carbine bolts to work...just imagine the Phoenix from Perfect Dark.

One last Halo weapon before I delve into my "bonus" topics...

"Audley, I didn't play Halo 4.  What the fuck is that?"

Don't worry, it's not a morning star.  It's the Pulse Grenade.

I encountered a poll on GameFAQs asking what the most useless weapon in Halo 4 was, and the #1 answer, with 40% of the vote (passing the Suppressor, Storm Rifle, and the Gravity Hammer) was the Pulse Grenade.

In my experience, this wasn't true.  Melee+Grenade throw was an instant kill with Pulse Grenades active...sharing this knowledge even convinced Eric "Gh057Ayame" Hewitt to include Pulse Grenades on-map in his Team Throwdown settings which were used for competitive tournaments during H4's lifespan.

So, if I'm so convinced Pulse Grenades were one of the strongest CQB weapons in all of Halo 4...why do I feel the need to talk about them?  It's all about player perception.

When you see the Pulse Grenade's animation, and its name, you expect it to be a sort of delayed-explosion that deals a ton of damage.  In reality, the Pulse Grenade's damage is front-loaded.  It takes place instantly in the giant circle of doom you create.  Add in Halo 3's Power Drain animation to a player's knowledge base, and you expect the Pulse Grenade's giant orange doomglobe do also deal significant damage over time.  Nope, not the case.

Literally the only good uses for the Pulse Grenade were to finish off players who were severely weakened -- the delayed effects were negligible at best and completely avoidable at worst.  But the instant burst of a well-thrown pulse grenade (or, in the primary usecase, a pulse grenade thrown at your feet immediately after a melee) was unavoidable, and made the pulse grenade a potent option as a finishing tool.

So, to reiterate clearly after all that jumbled rambling...

The Pulse Grenade needed nothing more than an animation fix to better clarify it's purpose to the users.  It was an instant burst tool, not a delayed-damage like most grenades, nor an AoE drain like the Halo series' past tool, the Power Drain, which carried a similar animation.  Clarity of design is just as important as unique flavor and potency, otherwise your users simply won't grasp how good it actually is.


That's all for my Halo weapons to rework...Now for two bonus guns.

Perfect Dark - Reaper.

OH DEAR GOD THIS THING WAS A MONSTER.  Viscerally, it was one of the most fun weapons to use in the history of FPS.  But in terms of viability...dear god, the weapon was ass.  It wasn't really intended to be a serious use weapon from what I can gather; hell, in game canon terms, humans aren't even supposed to be able to wield it, only the Skedar are.

If you didn't play Perfect Dark and are wondering what the fuck a Reaper is...  Imagine you took the bottom of a blender or food processor and made it the size of a chainsaw.  So you have a giant rotating fan-o-death that can shred people to death.  Got that in your mind?  Okay, that's just the SECONDARY fire mode of the Reaper.

Now imagine, for the primary mode...  That each of the tips of the "fan blades" can fire bullets, and as the fan spins faster, your rotating death fan of doom and despair fires faster as well, and is essentially the fastest firing machine gun in the history of anything ever.

Got it?  That's the Reaper.  Don't got it?  Here's a video.

With great fire rate comes great inaccuracy.  Dear lord the thing was inaccurate.  Unwieldy.  The melee secondary fire mode was fun, but mostly useless unless you had a really good corner to hide in for ambushes.

In terms of fun factor, the Reaper was fantastic.  It was a weapon you'd pick up just to watch it spin as you were hypnotized by murderous glee.  Unfortunately, there was just no way to reconcile its RoF with its accuracy to make it work for players...or was there?

The Reaper's kill time was surprisingly fast, when bullets actually hit.  Myself, I'm not a fan of randomly making bullets miss because you arbitrarily want to limit a gun's power.  Drastically reducing the damage per bullet and increasing the accuracy could've gone a long way to making the Reaper a bit less farfetched as a tool -- and as a cost for the increase in accuracy, tuning the recoil to actually RECOIL (rather than again, just being a random spread of bullet trajectories).  Alternately, taking the Halo "ripped-off-turret" approach of reducing the player's movement speed could also curb some of the power given back to the player by more consistency in the weapon itself.  A final route, though probably too ahead of the technology curve for Perfect Dark's day could've been to greatly increase the magazine size (from 200 to 1000) and add the potential for the gun to overheat as it approached its faster RPMs, leading a player to want to micromanage the heat and avoid spinning too fast.


And the final gun... Quite possibly the most hated gun in FPS history...

The Klobb.

How could this have been fixed?

Just delete the goddamn useless piece of shit.




That's all for my random blog on FPS sandbox design, hope you enjoyed.