Original Post
So the recent release of Call of Duty: Black Ops has gotten me thinking. Anyone with some time logged with FPSes on the Xbox 360 is aware of the eternal holy war over which FPS franchise is best: Call of Duty, or Halo. Players rarely seem to like both games, and instead strongly prefer one series or the other. With Black Ops now facing off against Reach as the latest contenders from each line, the debate only intensifies. I have friends who swear by the Black Ops multiplayer, and others (who are more like myself in their tastes) who loathe all things Call of Duty and yet will play Halo for hours on end.
I'm curious as to where this comes from.
My speculation is that it comes down to a fundamental difference in design philosophy. Halo has always placed a very careful emphasis on balanced gameplay. (I'm speaking strictly of the competitive multiplayer experiences here; not co-op or single player type modes.) Sure, Halo has power weapons and some "sweet spots" on certain maps, but for the most part, if you're good with a weaker weapon, you can overtake a team that holds a set of stronger weapons.
By contrast, Call of Duty seems to favor... something else. I personally can't stand the CoD franchise's multiplayer, and I think it comes down to the fact that CoD represents the very antithesis of game balance. Modern Warfare 2's loadouts and special reward abilities are a classic example of this. Certain players, by virtue of simply playing the game a lot, are handed more powerful weapons and abilities; this serves to increase the gap between weak and strong players rather than narrow it.
As a result, my experience with both franchises has been one of stark contrast. Even as a Halo newbie back in the 2003-2004 era, I could hold my own in a firefight and occasionally do fairly well for myself. Sure, I wasn't a top-ranked player by any means, and the regular players could slaughter me handily - but I had enough of a chance in any given fight that I felt like skill was attainable. I could survive long enough - and enjoy myself long enough - to learn to be good.
This started with Halo: CE on the Xbox, with a handful of us hauling our ancient tube TVs over to each other's houses and futzing around with a mass of ethernet equipment for an hour before we could actually play. One reason I kept coming back to Halo LAN parties was the simple fact that the game felt immediately accessible.
Halo 2's introduction of play over Xbox Live only deepened my appreciation; here I found the opportunity to compete against literally thousands of other random people from around the world. I started out with fairly mediocre skills, but as with Halo: CE, I continually felt like improving my game was within my grasp - like the sole thing keeping me from winning more games was my own skill level.
Once again I found a welcoming experience in Halo 3. By that point it was familiar enough that I could hold my own outright, but new enough that there was plenty to learn. And again, through the entire experience, I never felt like the game itself was to blame for my losses (lag issues aside). If I wasn't winning enough, it was because I wasn't playing as well as I could have - and there was always a fighting chance to learn how to play better, even against highly superior opponents.
Finally, this has all culminated with Reach. Enough things changed from the Halo 3 gameplay that it's really a new experience, and despite the token familiarity of a handful of maps and weapons, it's honestly a very different game. Armed with my past Halo experience and a little bit of determination, I was able to learn and master the game fairly quickly, and now play regularly and enjoy the whole thing.
So what about Call of Duty? I started in the CoD2 days on the PC, coming from a background of Return to Castle Wolfenstein and more heavily RTCW: Enemy Territory. The first thing I found difficult was the adjustment to instant-kill combat versus the more slowly paced pump-him-full-of-lead design of RTCW and ET; but that was easy enough to overcome with time.
Where things got messy was in aspects of the map design; certain fields were just horribly asymmetrical (in a power sense, not a geometric sense) and unbalanced. It's been too long to remember any names or specifics, but I can recall dreading certain maps on certain server rotations because they always devolved into sniper campfests or grenade-lobbing contests. It was also sadly uncommon to see certain weapons used; there were one or two that were clearly superior to all others, and they were utilized virtually exclusively.
I found that with CoD2 I dearly missed the flow of play that occurred routinely on maps in ET, and I found the lack of weapon and tactical variation to be boring. After a few months, I quit CoD and didn't play again until Modern Warfare.
MW and MW2 caught my eye largely because of their excellent reception among the gaming community; I figured it was worth a shot to play them because so many other people I knew were enjoying them.
I wasn't able to play either for more than a few minutes before giving up in disgust.
There was no tactical planning, no coordination, no teamwork. Even in random matches with total strangers in Halo I had better luck getting cooperative teammates - and most of the time in Halo I play with complete goofups. Again only a tiny subset of the available weapons and loadouts seemed to be favored. Worse yet, most players knew the maps so well that they just sat in a handful of sweet spots and camped like hell. Trying to play MW2 in particular was an exercise in self-torture; spawn, get hit by a grenade launcher, die, respawn. I didn't get to even try half the loadouts because I spent too much time getting sniped or grenaded to death by someone who knew exactly where I'd pop up next time the spawn timer ticked over. Attempts to get help from my teammates - so I could at least attempt to join the fight - fell on deaf (or, worse, puerilely rude) ears.
I tried to like MW2. I really did. I like the concept, the world is interesting, and I like the idea of realistic combat (although I personally happen to feel that CoD fails miserably to deliver anything vaguely resembling realism).
I won't be trying Black Ops.
So what's the point of this? Just another fanboy shilling for Halo? Just another whiny guy who doesn't like getting killed in one shot? Just another skill-less noob who has to have an energy shield to live long enough to figure out how to use a gun?
Hardly. My favorite play mode in Halo 3 (and continuing forward in Reach) is Team SWAT, where you play with no radar, no shields, no special abilities, and a headshot is an instant kill. Sure it takes place in space with cyborg supersoldiers, but at that point it's all decorative; it could just as easily be a bunch of Marines in Iraq clearing houses.
I like my Halo fast and furious - and many people I know have commented that SWAT seems suspiciously like CoD in space. And yet, even ignoring the community as a potential source of the difference in experiences, I consistently find Halo a better game than the CoD franchise.
Incidentally, I tend to avoid game types that involve a lot of vehicles for similar reasons - they overpower the game and make it too difficult for the underdogs to come back. Reach does a decent job of allowing a losing team to regain control even if they don't have a large selection of vehicles (mainly in the Invasion modes) but it's still shaky.
It seems clear to me that I find something in Halo's meticulous balancing to be appealing, and that that quality is lacking in CoD for whatever reason. What I'd like to see is some exploration of what exactly that stems from, why CoD is missing it, and why so many people still seem to love the game and dislike Halo.
I'm curious as to where this comes from.
My speculation is that it comes down to a fundamental difference in design philosophy. Halo has always placed a very careful emphasis on balanced gameplay. (I'm speaking strictly of the competitive multiplayer experiences here; not co-op or single player type modes.) Sure, Halo has power weapons and some "sweet spots" on certain maps, but for the most part, if you're good with a weaker weapon, you can overtake a team that holds a set of stronger weapons.
By contrast, Call of Duty seems to favor... something else. I personally can't stand the CoD franchise's multiplayer, and I think it comes down to the fact that CoD represents the very antithesis of game balance. Modern Warfare 2's loadouts and special reward abilities are a classic example of this. Certain players, by virtue of simply playing the game a lot, are handed more powerful weapons and abilities; this serves to increase the gap between weak and strong players rather than narrow it.
As a result, my experience with both franchises has been one of stark contrast. Even as a Halo newbie back in the 2003-2004 era, I could hold my own in a firefight and occasionally do fairly well for myself. Sure, I wasn't a top-ranked player by any means, and the regular players could slaughter me handily - but I had enough of a chance in any given fight that I felt like skill was attainable. I could survive long enough - and enjoy myself long enough - to learn to be good.
This started with Halo: CE on the Xbox, with a handful of us hauling our ancient tube TVs over to each other's houses and futzing around with a mass of ethernet equipment for an hour before we could actually play. One reason I kept coming back to Halo LAN parties was the simple fact that the game felt immediately accessible.
Halo 2's introduction of play over Xbox Live only deepened my appreciation; here I found the opportunity to compete against literally thousands of other random people from around the world. I started out with fairly mediocre skills, but as with Halo: CE, I continually felt like improving my game was within my grasp - like the sole thing keeping me from winning more games was my own skill level.
Once again I found a welcoming experience in Halo 3. By that point it was familiar enough that I could hold my own outright, but new enough that there was plenty to learn. And again, through the entire experience, I never felt like the game itself was to blame for my losses (lag issues aside). If I wasn't winning enough, it was because I wasn't playing as well as I could have - and there was always a fighting chance to learn how to play better, even against highly superior opponents.
Finally, this has all culminated with Reach. Enough things changed from the Halo 3 gameplay that it's really a new experience, and despite the token familiarity of a handful of maps and weapons, it's honestly a very different game. Armed with my past Halo experience and a little bit of determination, I was able to learn and master the game fairly quickly, and now play regularly and enjoy the whole thing.
So what about Call of Duty? I started in the CoD2 days on the PC, coming from a background of Return to Castle Wolfenstein and more heavily RTCW: Enemy Territory. The first thing I found difficult was the adjustment to instant-kill combat versus the more slowly paced pump-him-full-of-lead design of RTCW and ET; but that was easy enough to overcome with time.
Where things got messy was in aspects of the map design; certain fields were just horribly asymmetrical (in a power sense, not a geometric sense) and unbalanced. It's been too long to remember any names or specifics, but I can recall dreading certain maps on certain server rotations because they always devolved into sniper campfests or grenade-lobbing contests. It was also sadly uncommon to see certain weapons used; there were one or two that were clearly superior to all others, and they were utilized virtually exclusively.
I found that with CoD2 I dearly missed the flow of play that occurred routinely on maps in ET, and I found the lack of weapon and tactical variation to be boring. After a few months, I quit CoD and didn't play again until Modern Warfare.
MW and MW2 caught my eye largely because of their excellent reception among the gaming community; I figured it was worth a shot to play them because so many other people I knew were enjoying them.
I wasn't able to play either for more than a few minutes before giving up in disgust.
There was no tactical planning, no coordination, no teamwork. Even in random matches with total strangers in Halo I had better luck getting cooperative teammates - and most of the time in Halo I play with complete goofups. Again only a tiny subset of the available weapons and loadouts seemed to be favored. Worse yet, most players knew the maps so well that they just sat in a handful of sweet spots and camped like hell. Trying to play MW2 in particular was an exercise in self-torture; spawn, get hit by a grenade launcher, die, respawn. I didn't get to even try half the loadouts because I spent too much time getting sniped or grenaded to death by someone who knew exactly where I'd pop up next time the spawn timer ticked over. Attempts to get help from my teammates - so I could at least attempt to join the fight - fell on deaf (or, worse, puerilely rude) ears.
I tried to like MW2. I really did. I like the concept, the world is interesting, and I like the idea of realistic combat (although I personally happen to feel that CoD fails miserably to deliver anything vaguely resembling realism).
I won't be trying Black Ops.
So what's the point of this? Just another fanboy shilling for Halo? Just another whiny guy who doesn't like getting killed in one shot? Just another skill-less noob who has to have an energy shield to live long enough to figure out how to use a gun?
Hardly. My favorite play mode in Halo 3 (and continuing forward in Reach) is Team SWAT, where you play with no radar, no shields, no special abilities, and a headshot is an instant kill. Sure it takes place in space with cyborg supersoldiers, but at that point it's all decorative; it could just as easily be a bunch of Marines in Iraq clearing houses.
I like my Halo fast and furious - and many people I know have commented that SWAT seems suspiciously like CoD in space. And yet, even ignoring the community as a potential source of the difference in experiences, I consistently find Halo a better game than the CoD franchise.
Incidentally, I tend to avoid game types that involve a lot of vehicles for similar reasons - they overpower the game and make it too difficult for the underdogs to come back. Reach does a decent job of allowing a losing team to regain control even if they don't have a large selection of vehicles (mainly in the Invasion modes) but it's still shaky.
It seems clear to me that I find something in Halo's meticulous balancing to be appealing, and that that quality is lacking in CoD for whatever reason. What I'd like to see is some exploration of what exactly that stems from, why CoD is missing it, and why so many people still seem to love the game and dislike Halo.
