Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Why Most of Today's MP Modes are Awful

I was playing some Battlefield 3, for the first time in awhile, the other day and realized why I don't play it as often as I do Halo: Reach.  Not only do I enjoy Halo: Reach more, but there is a skill difference that it has from those other "modern" multi player games.  For the purposes of my explanation, let's pit Call of Duty against Halo.

Call of Duty's ranking system and it's guns, kill streaks, and death streaks to buy makes for a pretty fun game if you're looking for something where your ranks allow you to develop your MP experience on a hierarchical level.  The higher your rank, the better stuff you can buy and the better you will end up being at the game. 

Halo's ranking systems are just to group comparable players together in matches.  Rather than allowing you to buy better and better equipment, this game has you rely on only your skill and wit when playing against others.  The ranking system may have higher numbers than others, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you have a greater chance at beating a lower number than that lower number has of beating you.

Since both of those are pretty terrible explanations I'll solidify my point here:  Call of Duty's ranking system allows the best to get better.  When you have large amounts of credits, you can buy the best equipment and start with the best load outs, most of the time.  So when you start a game on whatever map, those players with the best stuff have a greater chance of winning than those players just starting out.  Skill can be beaten out by better equipment or a chance kill streak from a care package.  When you look at a game like Halo, without the option to buy better stuff or get a random, awesome kill streak reward you can see a huge difference.  Since everyone starts off with the same weapon and the better stuff is lying on the ground, where all players have an equal chance to get at it, the game is much more balanced.  The only division between players in Halo is skill, and that's what it should be across the board.

Balance is the key word here: Halo is balanced and CoD isn't.  Halo stays balanced all of the time while CoD can only have brief moments of it when all of the players have the same load out, and that mostly happens never.  If we take the load outs out completely and eliminate that factor, we still see that CoD allows the best to get better.  How is that?  Because of the damn kill streaks!  It's ridiculous that the best player on the map is allowed to call in an air strike and just increase his/her lead.  Shouldn't the least effective players be getting death streaks that are huge air strikes and the best player get kill streaks that aren't as effective to balance the game out?

So as you can tell, I'm horrifyingly biased against CoD, but for good reason.  I don't want to play a game where there's no balance.  That makes for a flawed game experience.  To tell you the truth, I'm not even half-bad at CoD, I just can't stand the game based mostly on principle.  It just makes me sick...Makes me fucking sick!

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