Why Halo 3 maps suck

So I’ve been thinking for a while that these maps aren’t as much fun as Halo 2’s, but I’ve wanted to give them a chance to grow on me. Part of the problem is clearly the craposity of the available playlists. But I don’t think these maps are up to par, either, and I think I’ve figured out why.

Isolation is not just a Halo 3 map, it’s a Halo 3 map design philosophy. These maps really seem to have abandoned one of the core design philosophies of pretty much every Halo 2 map. The two most obvious and extreme examples of this new approach are Isolation and Snowbound. I don’t think we’ve ever seen a map like this before with all the isolated subterranean tunnels. It’s almost like two separate maps in one. This approach is, um, interesting, and I’m not saying these maps are horrible as an alternative to the norm, but it seems like this philosophy of separating players from each other has kind of crept into all the new H3 maps. On the two maps mentioned, you can have another player directly below you, showing up on your radar, and yet the two of you are really nowhere near each other. You would both have to walk a significant distance to actually get a shot at each other. The fighting from one “story” or “level” of a map to the next is totally separated. This has the ultimate effect of discouraging the large scale, group combat of Halo 2 and encouraging more isolated, one-on-one or small-scale encounters. It also means more wandering around looking for a fight. Some players may prefer this style, but I think it gets boring fast and feels very “un-Halo”.

If you think back to the Halo 2 maps, there were plenty that separated players by room, or by multiple story structures, but there were always more ways to quickly get to the fight, wherever it was happening. If someone showed up below you on your radar in one of the Midship bases, you could literally drop down on them in about a second, maybe two, and you had at least 4 choices as to which side of them you wanted to drop down to.

Also, there were very few locations on a Halo 2 map where you were totally shielded from the rest of the map. The Halo 2 maps were all so cleverly designed in terms of angles. You could find a spot where you were protected from shots from one side of the map, but you were almost always exposed from another angle. The ultimate example is Lockout, which really deserves its status as an all-time classic map. I’m sorry, but Guardian is no Lockout. Besides all the clever jumps and unusual ways to get around the map, Lockout was sheer genius in terms of all the crazy angles you could get shots from. From the library alone, you could attack people at BR1, BR2, BR3, Under Glass, top of the lift, on the glass, and you even had a narrow sniper shot at the Blue Room and the walkway leading to it. All the maps in Halo 2 seemed much more carefully designed in terms of these crazy angles to get shots from. On Guardian it seems much harder to attack someone who is above or below you without actually going to their level of the map.

Also, in H2 you always had to expose yourself to enemy fire at some point in order to cross a map. Even though there were plenty of enclosed spaces in H2 maps, they all seemed more focused around a central open area, and the maps were more clever at forcing you into those open areas, either to get better weapons, or simply to cross the map. If you knew where major combat was taking place, you usually didn’t have to walk too far before you could at least see what was going on, even on the larger maps.

In almost all the Halo 3 maps, there is a way to cross the map without ever really exposing yourself to a wide-open area, or exposing yourself to potential long-range-fire. As I stated, Isolation and Snowbound are the two most obvious examples because you can cross the whole map by tunnel. But all the new maps are kind of this way, if not to the same extent as those two. Construct might be the worst Halo map I have ever played. The layout of the upper ring is cool, but, like Snowbound and Isolation, what happens on the lower floors of Construct feels totally isolated and separate from the upper ring. You can drop down and participate in fighting on the lower floors if you wish, but it takes too long to get down there and there is little incentive to do so. And there isn’t a single shot at the lower story from the upper story, anywhere on the map (that I’m aware of). Compare that to Lockout or Midship, or really any H2 map you can think of, where you can get shots at most of the map from any number of elevated positions, and vice-versa. Construct, like Isolation and Snowbound, feels more like two separate maps than one big one. And from what I’ve seen, combat on this map pretty much always centers around the top of the three main grav-lifts. This is fun for a game or two, but the gimmick gets old for me REALLY fast. The focus around the grav lifts makes this the most one-dimensional, one-trick-pony Halo map I’ve ever seen.

Narrows has turned out to be pretty boring for me for the same reason. You don’t ever really have to expose yourself to the open part of the map to cross it. You can just take the mancannon or take one of the lower levels of the main bridge. If you know someone is below you on the bridge, sure, you can quickly drop down to fight them, but you can’t really kill them from above, you have to go down there to do it. That’s ok for something different, but again, it seems like all the new maps are designed this way. You can fight on the lower part of the bridge or the upper part, but the two are separate.

The Pit also allows you to cross from one base to the other on the Rocket side of the map without ever really exposing yourself to the open part of the map. You might encounter resistance over there but it’s going to be more isolated, small-scale combat. High Ground seems like a fun CTF map, but I wouldn’t know because I have yet to play a single fricking game of CTF on it. For Slayer gametypes it’s just ok. I like this map, but it’s so long and stretched out, without any quick way across (besides vehicles) that it tends to encourage more isolated combat as well. Valhalla is a good map, and I haven’t really played Epitaph enough to have a strong opinion on it, though the screen doors seem to be part of the new philosophy I’m talking about, since they serve to isolate the combat even more. Having a Gravity Hammer on the same map as all those screen doors seems pretty dumb to me, though.

Bungie has made a number of mistakes with H2 and H3, but I used to think they couldn’t make a bad map. They are trying pretty hard to prove me wrong with this initial batch. None of these maps is outright horrible (except maybe Construct), but as a whole, they are quite weak compared to H2’s. They all seem to abandon the central design philosophy of H2, which was to encourage large group combat in large, open spaces. None of these new maps seem as clever in their layout, or as carefully designed to encourage utilization of the whole map. I could get into more specific, map-by-map comparisons, but hopefully someone will give me a good argument here and we can get into the specifics of each map later. Discuss on the comments…

Humourous Halo 3 Video

Whilst blogging around the Blogosphere recently, I found this fantastic video which I just had to share with you all! Enjoy!

Weird Search Terms

As a normal webmaster does, I was looking through my stats taking some screenshots so I can sell the advertising space, as the Google Ads is only averaging me around $10 a month. And I feel an independent advertiser would pay slightly better.

So I was looking through, and decided to write some more articles, making the topic some of the search terms you got here via.

It was then I noticed some very strange patterns, otherwise known as anomalies.

Who was it exactly that came here via the term “angerjump” or maybe “steamdrink”. Two terms I’ve just never heard of, even worse the list goes on.

• Doorspeed
• Interestbottom
• Treeplayingcard
• Tutoringdoors (Whao!)
• FatherWhether

I’m sure we’ve never marketed to these keywords. So just what is up?

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