Top 10: Things that will make Halo 4 great

Back in September 2007, just days before Halo 3’s phenomenal worldwide launch, we spoke to cinematic designer Lee Wilson, who said that Halo 4 was not in development. Here’s the full quote: “There’s a lot of people who have been working on Halo much longer than us two have and they’re really interested in exploring new games, new stories, and whatever comes out of those conversations is what we’re going to pursue. We’re still going to make games for us.” Well that was then, and now is now. With upwards of eight million sales of Halo 3 under its belt and massively positive review scores, Microsoft would be foolish to kill the franchise off completely in its FPS form. Rest assured a new Halo FPS is coming. So, with that in mind, we’ve knocked our heads together and come up with our own wish list – Top 10: Things that will make Halo 4 great. The fight has only just begun.

10. Sprint function

Halo is traditionally a fairly slow-paced first-person shooter. We like that about it, but at times we want to get to places quicker. We expect Halo 4 to be even more explosive and action packed, so If we’re caught in the middle of a fire-fight and don’t have a warthog close by, an ability to sprint for a few seconds would do wonders. We’re not entirely sure how it would be mapped to an already well-used Xbox 360 controller, but hopefully some people cleverer than us can work that out.

9. Clan Support

Halo 3’s online community is great if you can avoid the loud mouthed screaming kids intent on using every swear word under the sun. The big problem is the lack of clan support built into the game. We don’t want to have to use internet forums, email and instant messenger programs to organise games and remind each other that matches are about to start. Why can’t the game handle all of this? If you’re part of an eight-man clan and you’ve arranged a match with another clan, you’ll get in-game and email reminders, plus all matches will be recorded and stats tracked. Regional and worldwide clan leaderboards would make the competition all the fiercer.

8. Blind firing

We’ve all legged it from a scrap, but how about being able to run away and still put up something that resembles a fight. We propose a blind firing system that allows you to fire behind you while you’re running. You shouldn’t have any control over your aim, but you could spray some bullets in the rough direction of your pursuers in the hope that they’d be off-put enough by the sound of whizzing bullets to fire wide of the mark, allowing you to get to cover and recharge your shield. This would be an option in the campaign and multiplayer game modes, but it could be toggled on or off for online games.

7. Multiplayer

Essentially we want Halo 4’s multiplayer component to remain like Halo 3’s. Other first-person shooters can try to offer different experiences, but Halo is Halo – it doesn’t need to try and copy Call of Duty or Unreal Tournament. Things could be introduced that don’t have an effect on gameplay though. We’d love to see something similar to the Challenges in Call of Duty 4’s multiplayer mode. We’re more than happy with the number of players currently supported in online games, but a new game type that supported larger battles would be a welcome addition.

6. Improve team-mate AI

The enemy AI in the Halo series has always been on the cutting edge. Enemies react realistically and work as a team to try and take you out. We’re confident that Halo 4 will feature brilliant enemy AI, so it’s the team-mate AI that we want sorting out. Halo 3’s human squads were excellent in almost every way, apart from being incredibly dumb. We don’t want the AI to take over and play the game for us, but we want to see them actually helping us out. We want to be able to hop into the driver’s seat of a warthog and have one of the AI controlled team actually take out some of the Covenant.

5. Release it on Xbox 360 and not Microsoft’s next console

Right. We were torn about this a little, but in the end we felt it would be best for everyone if the next Halo was released on the Xbox 360, and not Microsoft’s next console. One Halo game on the Xbox 360 just isn’t enough (the non-Bungie games don’t count) and we think waiting another three to four years for a true follow-up to Halo 3 is too long. It makes financial sense too. Halo 3 has sold in excess of 8 million units worldwide, so imagine how many copies Halo 4 could sell when the Xbox 360 user base has had another few years to increase. Halo 4 would make an incredible launch title for the next Xbox, but it wouldn’t sell nearly as many copies as it would on the Xbox 360.

4. Stick with Bungie as developer

We know Bungie has split from Microsoft now and that Microsoft could farm out the Halo brand to any developer, but Bungie is Halo. The guys there know the story, the characters and, let’s be honest, they know how to make a good game. And, it might just be a little weird to have another dev handling the next proper Halo. Imagine Gearbox, Free Radical, Rare or Epic appearing on the splash screen while Halo 4 is loading. Wouldn’t you feel slightly odd, like walking into your living room to find an uninvited guest.

3. Improve the graphics

Halo 3 looked great, but it didn’t wow us like Gears of War and BioShock. The thing is, Halo 3 was Bungie’s first and only next-gen game to date. We all saw the leap in visuals from Halo 1 to Halo 2, so we’re hopeful we’ll see the same with Halo 4. Halo 3 was a good start, with huge environments and some highly detailed enemy models, but we want far more. We want more detail in the environments, more polygons in the vehicles, better special effects and a faster frame rate. Halo 3 certainly wasn’t a slouch in the frame rate department but, compared to Call of Duty 4’s silky smooth 60fps, Halo 3’s 30fps seems a little sluggish. More than anything else, we just want to be wowed.

2. Improve the single-player campaign

Flesh out other characters, make a special difficulty for co-op, Beyond Legendary, make it longer and improve the storytelling – Halo 3 was last game in the current story arc, so 4 could be a prequel. We’ve read the Halo book which charts John 117 from a young boy soldier to one of a hundred Spartans. Halo 4 could follow this or it could pick up where Halo 3 left off – with Master Chief drifting in space, heading towards a Forerunner ship and humanity thinking he is dead. Bungie knows more about the Halo story than us, so we’ll leave the finer details to them, but we want the story to be conveyed more successfully – at times it was hard to figure out what was going on in Halo 3.

1. Massive battles

Something we’ve wanted since the beginning is truly massive scale battles. You know the Halo 3 commercial with all the models on the battlefield? We want that, in video game form. Some of the battles in Halo 3 were impressive, but we’re talking about battles with more than a hundred soldiers fighting side by side, Covenant warriors coming at you, vehicles soaring in the sky waging their own aerial war and destruction all around you. We know it’s a lot to ask for, but this is Halo. Halo is more than a video game.

What would you like to see in Halo 4? Let us know in the comments section below.