On unlimited defense and limited offense
I finally finished Halo last month. It was extremely OK.
There’s been some backlash against two of Halo’s main changes to the FPS formula: health that recharges if you don’t take damage for a while (technically it’s a shield and you also have health that doesn’t recover, but whatever) and a limit of two weapons carried at one time. Both of these seem like they were meant to address the problem of hoarding.
Maybe this isn’t a problem for everyone, but I know it was a problem I had in Half-Life: if I got through a fight but used more ammo or lost more health than I felt was ideal, I’d quickload and try again. Having a ton of weapons, aside from being kind of implausible, makes me feel preoccupied with making sure I don’t use too much ammo from each of them, or if I get a type of ammo I’m full up on I try to use it more and then run back for the pickup I couldn’t use before, and so forth. I’d end up feeling more like a bean counter than a badass.
The knock against recharging health, one I hear from Yahtzee a lot, is that it means every battle is punctuated with moments where you’re hiding behind a wall waiting for your wounds to magically heal. That does happen, and it’s not great, although I think it’s better than the problem of having to repeatedly load a previous save during a difficult fight, especially if you had 17% health when you last saved.
I can’t remember if I’ve heard complaining about the two-weapon limit. That too has some emergent problems: whenever I picked up a rocket launcher in Halo, I’d feel a lot of pressure to make good use of it, which was often hard. Too many times I found myself reluctantly dropping the rockets in favor of a more practical weapon, leaving so many Convenant tragically un-exploded. But the upside is that it sort of weans you off being too attached to your guns. In a big firefight it’s fun to run around, shooting everywhere in a panic like you would if you were actually there, run out of ammo, quickly grab an enemy weapon to keep shooting, that kind of thing.
All of this is undercut somewhat by the lameness of the Covenant weapons. They’re easy to find and better at taking down enemy shields, so I used them, but I don’t know how an alien culture would become so good at war if their weapons made stupid “pew pew pew” sounds. I’m glad Mass Effect gave all the guns a nice satisfying ballistic sound, even if it meant some dubious handwaving about using “thermal clips” as ammo.
