Now that Mac Halo is out and this is giving a lot more people an opportunity to participate in multiplayer games, I thought I'd just chime in with my $.02 on one particular game type which I would like to make one of my favorites... but just can't right now. That game type is assault. (Click "link" below to read the rest.)

I'm not sure which FPS game was the first to add a mode like this. When ThreeWave made the first version of Capture the Flag for Quake, it opened up a lot of possibilities for gameplay beyond free for fall fragfests and.. team-oriented fragfests.

I first played a mode called Assault in Unreal Tournament. The idea was that instead of having to invade an enemy base and bring a flag back, all you had to do was invade the base. Some levels were divided into stages, so that as you advanced into enemy territory, if you got killed you didn't respawn back in your own base, but at the last checkpoint along your progress. Some levels had an objective like a switch at the end to throw. You had a time limit to reach the objective. If you failed to reach it, the teams swap sides: now you had to defend the base against the invaders. If you succeeded, the game recorded the time it took you to do so, and that's how much time the other team now had to complete the same task. Whichever team was faster won.

Halo, of course, among its many options, has an Assault variation. However, most players don't seem to know how it works. Partially this is just because it's less commonly played than Slayer or CTF. But also it's because how it works is less obvious in-game.

First of all, when the game starts, it doesn't report itself as an Assault game; it says "Capture The Flag". Most players already assume it's a traditional CTF game, and if they play that way, they're sure to lose, as they won't understand that offense and defense are supposed to rotate. You have to bring up the score screen to see that the game is really Assault.

Second, when the teams switch sides, sometimes there is an audio instruction and sometime not, and even when there is, it is confusing. When the Blue team is on offense, they get an instruction, "Blue Team CTF". To me, of course, that sounds like a score announcement, not an order. And those who still haven't caught on that the game is assault are going to rush out towards the Red base without the flag and therefore have no chance of scoring.

When the teams switch sides, the screen flashes "You are on defense". There's no audio warning. There's no mention of which team is being referred to. Switching to the score screen doesn't do any good, since it does not display which team is on offense and which is on defense.

Sure, if you already know about all these wrinkles in the game, and all the other players do, too-- then everything is OK. But I've already seen too many Assault games in which a few players spend a lot of time in chat trying to explain it to those who don't know, and the lack of proper cues from the game doesn't make it any easier. Certainly it would not be too hard, I'd hope, in a future patch to change it so the game displays and announces itself as Assault rather than CTF, and so that changes on offense and defense are both announced verbally, displayed in chat, and on the status screen.

Ideally, a flagless Assault mode based on territorial occupation, rather than flag-carrying, would be nice, but if everyone understood how the game worked I don't think it would matter as much.