For most of the past few years the bulk of my attention has been on Halo's campaign play: story, characters, and settings. Partly it's my choice, since it is where my interest in Halo lies, but partly due to circumstances. For most of the past seven years, the Internet connections I had access to were unsuitable for online play.
Recent events, however, have conspired to bring my attention back to online play. The first is the upcoming Halo 3 multiplayer public beta. True to form, it appears that Bungie will have multiplayer ready to show the world before the campaign is finished; so between now and when the beta test ends, most Halo 3 discussion will probably focus on multiplayer aspects.
The second thing is that I finally have a reasonably priced Internet connection that makes it possible to participate in Halo 2 matches. While I still have more latency and less skill than a below-average Halo 2 player, for me, participation is the thing. I've already missed out on far too much.
The last thing was that during a discussion of an entirely different subject, my attention was drawn to Halo2sucks.com.
This is not normally a site I would pay much attention to. There's something incongruous about reading a site that labels Bungie "sellouts" and proudly (if largely incoherently) claims that Halo 1 is better than Halo 2 and this inevitably leads to the conclusion that Halo 2 sucks.
However, then I began to feel that simply dismissing all the points the site tries to make simply because of the presentation was prejudicial; and despite the fear of directing attention somewhere it's not warranted, I felt a need to address some of the points the site raised. Then I discovered what really bothered contributors to that site. More on that near the end.
Pistol Whore With A Heart Of Gold
Halo 1's pistol figures heavily into many of they "key points" that bolster the site's assertion that Halo 2 sucks. In fact, it's treated as a foregone conclusion that the absence of the pistol, or an equivalent weapon, is proof that the game sucks.
They do spend some time defusing counter-arguments defending Bungie's removal of the pistol. Chief among these are that the pistol overpowered for a sidearm. This is countered nicely by the fact that the pistol's appearance and nature as a pistol is entirely arbitrary; Bungie could have called it a bananagun for all anybody cared. All that is important are the technical specifications of the gun: accuracy, firepower, rate of fire, ammunition capacity. They argue that Bungie could have solved this issue just by reskinning the pistol as a rifle. Instead, they gave us the Battle Rifle, a very different gun than Halo 1's pistol; less accurate, less powerful.
An SMG For You And Me
Part of the objections of Halo2sucks.com isn't just that the pistol is gone. The Battle Rifle may be the pistol's closest equivalent, but for many gametypes, it's not the standard spawn weapon, as it was in Halo 1. That has changed over the years, as the matchmaking game types on XBL evolved over time. What was the default spawn weapon was the SMG: a weakened, but dual-wieldable, version of Halo 1's assault rifle. This weapon is what has led to criticisms of Halo 2 being a game for "noobs"; a weapon that sprays in a wide arc at short range and requires little or no skill to operate, and that encourages players to simply rush at each other immediately upon spawning and engage in close quarters combat. The one who firest first usually wins.
The SMG's role in various combinations does not impress the authors of Halo2sucks.com. The use of the plasma pistol (which drains the shields) and the SMG or magnum pistol to issue the coup de grace is discounted and reviled as the "noob combo" because it also allegedly requires no skill to execute. The plasma burst homes in on enemies, and the SMG's spread is so wide at close range that all you have to do is be there and pull the trigger to have a good chance of getting a kill. The same goes for the many variations on that technique. Using a grenade instead of the pistol seems to garner somewhat more respect given that the player must at least throw the grenade accurately; and the absolutely deterministic physics that Halo uses for grenade tosses seems to please them. Spartans always toss grenades at the same speed, so if you aim accurately at a given spot, the grenade will always go there. Above all, this predictability seems to be what is valued in Halo 1's weaponry as compared to Halo 2's.
It Was Self Defense
The powerful pistol as a spawn weapon was justified, say the authors, for newly spawned players to defend themselves against the power weapons: the sniper rifle and the rocket launcher. While they have respect for the sniper, since like the pistol, it requires precision aiming, the rocket launcher is another "noob weapon" that requires little skill to use. That it has tradeoffs: low ammunition capacity and long reloading time, seems not to matter.
What is ignored in this argument is that by providing the pistol as a default weapon-- a weapon that requires precision aiming (which also, incidentally, requires low latency to use effectively) any level of success in Halo 1 multiplayer all but required a minimum level of proficiency with it. You might have your other favorite weapons: sniper, rocket launcher, shotgun. But you don't spawn with it. You're going to have to go get it, and to defend yourself while you go get it all you have is your pistol. Everyone else has one, too, which for the authors of Halo2sucks.com, means it is fair. Fair the way showroom stock car races are supposed to be fair: a contest of driver against driver where the machinery is irrelevant because everybody has the same. That's one definition of fair and it's one way to play the game. I think if Bungie wanted that, though, there would have been only one weapon in Halo 1, and it would have been the pistol. It's not, and I don't think they did.
If you can't get a three-headshot kill on your opponents while you're on the way to pick up your shotgun, your sniper, or your rocket launcher, then chances are, you may hardly ever get those weapons. In the hands of a pistol expert, it is indeed an equalizer against those wielding power weapons, only one of which, the sniper, the pistol expert has any respect for whatsoever. Because the pistol is the pistol expert's favorite weapon, it would be unfair to make him traverse the map to get one while holding another, weaker weapon. If the pistol is your weaker weapon: suck it up, say the authors of Halo2sucks.
Jealousy
Halo 2 turned the tables on those pistol experts. They don't have a strong weapon to spawn with, and if someone else has gotten the power weapons already, they may possibly die before they get one back.
One argument against the pro-pistol, anti-Halo 2 crowd has been that they aren't good at the sequel and are therefore jealous. Not so, they say. We're also good at Halo 2. I'm inclined to believe them. I'm also inclined to wonder what the problem is, then. Part of it really is, I think, that for these players, the pistol was not just a solid spawn weapon and a decent counter against the power weapons. It was their favorite weapon. Since it gave you a decent chance against the power weapons, going for any other weapon was essentially optional: you could go it alone with the pistol and some grenades, and many players did. If you picked up a power weapon, you might choose not even to use it: at least it was out of your opponents' hands. If you're a pistol virtuoso and you've got the rocket launcher, anybody less skilled than you with the pistol is probably out of luck. If they can't aim a pistol, it's likely they can't use a sniper well, either, and in any case, a good player would also stay under cover. You'll never get close enough with a shotgun unless the pistolier gets careless.
Experiences like that are what I remember most from 2003, when after a long hiatus, I had a chance to play some Halo 1 multiplayer. I remember a lot of deaths. I remember 2 player games that went 50-1 against me because I couldn't get the three-headshot pistol kill with any reliability whatsoever. That was the game, says Halo2Sucks. Deal with it, and it's a shame Halo 2 isn't the same way.
Dressed To Skill
The word that comes up over and over again is "skill". Weapons that require skill, and a scoring system that rewards skill, are good. That is why Halo 1 is good and Halo 2... well, sucks.
Skill, in this case, almost exclusively means the ability to aim; specifically, the ability to aim a weapon that requires pinpoint accuracy, one that has a small reticle and very little spread over a long distance. A gun that does the same thing each and every time you pull the trigger. A gun that gives you deterministic control over the events in a game. A gun that gives the host most skilled player in the game his just reward.
That's when it hit me what Halo2Sucks is really about. I wondered why I hadn't seen it before. The site even has a graphic that they say explains exactly what is wrong with Halo 2, when what it really explains is why they're upset. This "skill comparison meter" illustrates the idea that the gap between the worst possible player and the best possible player in Halo 2 has been dramatically foreshortened. Since Halo 1 can't play on Xbox Live and there is no persistent, reliable store for Halo 1 multiplayer statistics, it is likely there will never be an objective way to test this assertion. Still, it seems reasonable to me and to many others, and I have never seen anyone object to it.
Staring at that picture, I thought about the implications, and where I fit into that-- squarely somewhere slightly above "noob" and probably far short of "intermediate". According to that graphic, in a Halo 1 game against "professionals", as they put it, I don't stand a chance. They're right about that. Even against fairly decent players, I never stood a chance. One on one, with pistols, on any map, I was dead to rights every time. Perhaps with practice that would have changed, but likely never enough to alter the end result, and probably not enough to change the score much.
Enter Halo 2. Everybody starts with a weak weapon in many matches. The BR is now, arguably, a "power weapon" but it takes one more headshot to kill, at best, and is less accurate at long distances than Halo 1's pistol was. That's enough to give players dual-wielding, or even with weapons like Halo 2's weakened shotgun a fair chance.
And chance is what is at the heart of Halo2sucks. Chance as the opposite of skill: introduction of elements other than the bare ability to focus a tiny reticle on a distant target consistently and repeatedly. A lucky grenade bounce. Getting in an early few shots with a pair of SMGs and doing the dance of death until somebody drops. Two shotguns going toe to toe, point blank range, and the seemingly random nature of the gun's spread, rather than precise aim, deciding the outcome.
Of course, these small differences wash out over the course of a game, or indeed over many games. These guys don't hate Halo 2 because they are bad at it. The best a player like me is going to get, even over the long haul, is a few kills. Instead of losing 50-1, I'll lose 25 to 10; and I often do.
After rereading the site, and staring at that graphic, and recollecting my own experiences online, I realized that is the problem. Although they never come out and say it, here is the essential complaint of Halo2Sucks.com:
Halo 2 insufficiently rewards, in terms of kills and kills to death ratio, confirmed superior skill.
By allowing inferior players to exploit random elements to gain a few kills and narrow the superior player's margin of victory, Halo 2 has destroyed the meritocracy of Halo 1 and become, in the minds of these players, unfair. Unfair because the final score is not indicative, proportionally, of how much better they are than you. If their score is 30 and yours is 10, then they win, but they don't win by enough, because they are more than three times better than you. They know this, because Halo 1 told them.
All's Fair In Love And Halo
What Bungie did was narrow the gap between the best and worst online players. The authors of Halo2Sucks.com bemoan this as ruining the game. It didn't ruin it. It made the game what it is. If Halo 2 online played like Halo 1, nobody on the "skill comparison meter" below the halfway point between "Professional" and "Intermediate" would even bother to play. There would be no point. The margin of victory within each individual encounter would be measured in terms of thousandths of a second, according to who lands that third crucial pistol headshot first. The timing required would be so precise that only the host would have any chance at all, all other things being equal. Even as it stands, I'm convinced that hosts win the cast majority of Halo 2 online matches. If Bungie, or anyone else, has data that refutes that, I'd love to see it.
Halo 2 creates conditions under which a lagged player, an inferior player, or both-- can get enough kills that they feel like they might be able to win. They probably won't ever win consistently enough to gain a high rank, or to threaten the superiority of the truly skilled; but enough to keep playing the game. I think Bungie recognized this. This is why Halo 2's weapons are the way they are. It's not perfect. I think Bungie itself knows that there are still some adjustments that could be made. I think they recognize that the bullet-hose as a spawn weapon is not the best answer; but they also know that a three-shot kill weapon as a default spawn is also not the answer. Halo 3's default weapon, the new Assault Rifle, will apparently not do headshots. Which means it will not appease Halo2Sucks.com and other Halo 1 pistol fans. I think that's a recognition, though, that whatever flaws there may have been in the execution of Halo 2's weapon balance, the philosophy was sound. Weapons should all have their uses, and allow for different playstyles and player choice. They should also give a fighting chance to inferior players-- a chance to at least feel as if they are participating.
Halo2Sucks calls that selling out: dumbing down the game for the masses to make more money.
I say: thank you, Bungie. Thank you for recognizing that most people have more fun playing games like Halo than they have any right to, given their level of skill; and there's nothing wrong with that at all.