Somebody named Croal is whining about how hard Halo 3 is to play. I'm on the lookout for his gamertag just so I can frag him my damned self.
Halo 3, I have to say, is an overkill of a game. It has so much of everything that it can be downright intimidating. But that's what we want. People who can't handle the complexity should hide themselves way back in a corner of the map and try to throw grenades at the big boys battling it out on High Ground. Well, I guess that's what blogging at Newsweek is, by definition.
But you know what, I think he's man enough to say that he just doesn't like these kinds of online shooters. The online interactive Halo world is brutal and unforgiving. Noobs get schooled hard in Halo, and there's really no two ways about it. Even the best players are accustomed to getting fragged at least 10 times per game. My average lifespan in the beta has been around 30 seconds, but I've seen it down to around 24. I don't even want to talk about my K/D ration. (I sacrifice for the team). But I have to tell you, everybody gets their ass handed to them in Halo sooner or later. It's one of the great things about the game, you never get so good that it gets boring. Never.
Learning curves are one thing, competency and perfection are everything. What makes Halo so annoyingly great is that as you learn and master new techniques.. well, it's like playing a musical instrument, it's simply that involved. I've said this before and it's why I think the Wii is a joke. The kind of manual dexterity mastery of Halo forces you to acquire is daunting and the subtlety of finding new attacks is sublime.
Here's a couple of examples. I've been playing the beta for about 200 games now, and I've just picked up a couple new techniques, one of them dumb and the other fairly clever enough so that I almost hesitate to mention it it public. The first is that in dual-weilding, which was new to Halo 2, you could still throw grenades. It would automatically unweild your left weapon and you could grenade opponents. Now you have to perform a dummy melee attack to unweild your left weapon and toss the grenade. That extra step is tough to remember when your instinct is just to throw.
The second attack is with a new series of weapons never had before. One of them is called an energy drainer. To deploy it, you hit your X button and it basically rolls out a few feet in front of you, but unless you're moving forward you're going to get yourself in it's target radius. So I came up with a way to jump forward, deploy the weapon, move back and then start strafing the area of deployment for quick kills. Now my enemies are seeing the energy drainer in places they don't expect to find it.
These are tricks that noobs are simply not going to figure out even when they are done to them. The gameplay in 3 is a great deal more nuanced and sophisticated with the new weapons and maps, and they enable combinations of tactics that go far beyond just picking weapons and button mashing. But like Virtua Fighter fans before the days of consoles, a lot of us Halo player have always resented the school of twitch button mashing. Halo gives us all the strategies and tactics and speed we crave. But it does make it damned hard to master the game.
Did I mention vehicles?
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