...rolls a grenade into the room... (Gaming)

by EffortlessFury , Thursday, January 27, 2022, 19:59 (819 days ago) @ cheapLEY

I find myself wishing it had been paced differently somehow.

After doing almost everything I could on the first island, I mainlined the campaign missions and did basically nothing else in the open world. I think I would have resented being forced to have campaign progress gated behind clearing out FOBs or something, but not doing the open world stuff definitely left the campaign missions all feeling pretty much the same. I really found myself missing the variety of environments and art present in most of the other Halo games. Integrating the overworld a bit more may have helped that. But it’s probably not an easy challenge to make it feel integrated without also making it feel tedious. Like I said, it would have felt really bad to have to do random open world objectives between missions or something.

And see I really enjoyed going off the beaten path to do everything on a whim. It's definitely pulling from BotW there (and at least it's not "korok seed" type stuff) and IIRC I heard that was an intentional part of the design.

I can see the potential here, and I hope they find good ways to capitalize and expand on it. But I think I will always just prefer the galaxy spanning adventures of the previous Halo games. Not having to have the world be a big cohesive space allows for so much more potential in the spaces we can visit and play in (given the same amount of dev time and resources—they could have had more variety in a world like we got, but it would have probably been a massive amount of more work). I just find myself thinking about Halo 2 or 3, or even Halo 5 and all their varied design and wishing we had something more like that.

While I totally understand the loss felt by reducing the variety of locations in each game, there's another side to that where having so many locations in one game means each location can feel a bit more artificial, as you're being funneled through very specific areas semi-linearly. I like how a larger, persistent space makes the ring feel more like a real place. Yes, that does mean variety goes down if they only ever introduce one biome at a time, but theoretically in the long run there'll be a variety of larger sized biomes to explore, and I'd prefer that to only getting to explore unique spaces for 15-20 minutes and then they're gone.