The Halo Headshot
...is an Iconic, Elegant, and Excellent Feature
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by Ifafudafi (2015)
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Many things have changed but across all the games, but one stays the same: people love headshots. People love guns that cause headshots. Whether the consistent superiority of apparently-eternal power trio Pistol, BR, and fresh-faced DMR is symptom or cause, those three were the biggest lightning-rods for a "WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY GUN" shitstorm if their dominance wasn't translated over 1:1, or especially if (gasp!) they didn't appear.
It's such a good mechanic. It embodies a microcosm of several small but important Halo trademarks:
It's so good. I hate it. I hate it so much.
It's such a good mechanic. It embodies a microcosm of several small but important Halo trademarks:
- It's clean, intuitive, and easily readable. If you shoot the exposed head, the unit dies. No questions asked.
- It's intrinsically satisfying to pull off; an emphatic crystallization of the basic "'aim and pull the trigger' heart" of the core shooting mechanics.
- It rewards additional player skill with additional weapon performance. Aim better, kill faster.
- It adds another variation into the encounter possibility space. A mini-story of "he was barreling down at me but at the last second I got him in the face!" carries weight and meaning when it could easily have gone another way.
It's so good. I hate it. I hate it so much.
For all the flak it gets from snooty PC elitists (and this is coming from one), Halo is probably one of the most deep and systems-oriented shooters around — as in, good player performance, exciting moments, and in general most of the things player gets out of the game emerge from cool and unique intersections of systems, rather than scripted, authored set pieces.
Consider this mini-story I played in Halo 3:
Player gets in a Mongoose. A nearby friendly Marine with a Rocket Launcher hops in the back seat. Player drives off into the encounter area and weaves around attacking Ghosts, but gets the attention of a Brute in a Chopper. Player tries to ramp off a small hill while trying to avoid being rammed into, but fails and flips over. Player and the Marine buddy are ejected from the Mongoose, with the Chopper barreling towards them. Player grabs the Marine's Rocket Launcher out of his hands. The Chopper hits the same hill and flies over Player -- who aims upward and blows it up mid-air with a rocket.
This is a really cool moment that emerged completely out of the unscripted systems. I didn't get a waypoint saying GET IN MONGOOSE. The Marine just happened to be the one standing closest, and automatically got in. The Chopper dude was driving around doing his own thing before he saw me. The hill was just one of many around the area.
If I wasn't able to get in and out of vehicles at will, it couldn't have happened. If Marines couldn't automatically detect an open seat in a player-driven vehicle and get in, it couldn't have happened. If the AI wasn't flexible enough to dynamically acquire and chase targets, it couldn't have happened. If I couldn't exchange weapons with Marines, it couldn't have happened.
But it did happen, because Halo provides a huge amount of game elements that can all "touch" each other in a variety of ways. The means to facilitate this go all the way down to how the engine is structured around modular, persistent objects, and up through the open environments, distinct weapons, and capable AI. Most of the new features across the series (vehicle boarding, exchanging guns with friendly AI, equipment/AAs, etc.) are designed to expand the range and depth of elements, and ways for the elements to "touch." These emergent moments hold more value since player knows they weren't authored; the game is more replayable when levels are systemic cauldrons instead of sequenced set pieces that play the same every time. Ideally, Halo gameplay is primed to generate long strings of exciting moments like that bit from Halo 3!
Ideally.
Then comes the headshot to tear it all down. Consider this mini-story:
Player hides behind a crate and shoots aliens with a BR. Player takes cover when their shields are down and pops back out for more shots when they're recharged. Repeat.
Consider this mini-story I played in Halo 3:
Player gets in a Mongoose. A nearby friendly Marine with a Rocket Launcher hops in the back seat. Player drives off into the encounter area and weaves around attacking Ghosts, but gets the attention of a Brute in a Chopper. Player tries to ramp off a small hill while trying to avoid being rammed into, but fails and flips over. Player and the Marine buddy are ejected from the Mongoose, with the Chopper barreling towards them. Player grabs the Marine's Rocket Launcher out of his hands. The Chopper hits the same hill and flies over Player -- who aims upward and blows it up mid-air with a rocket.
This is a really cool moment that emerged completely out of the unscripted systems. I didn't get a waypoint saying GET IN MONGOOSE. The Marine just happened to be the one standing closest, and automatically got in. The Chopper dude was driving around doing his own thing before he saw me. The hill was just one of many around the area.
If I wasn't able to get in and out of vehicles at will, it couldn't have happened. If Marines couldn't automatically detect an open seat in a player-driven vehicle and get in, it couldn't have happened. If the AI wasn't flexible enough to dynamically acquire and chase targets, it couldn't have happened. If I couldn't exchange weapons with Marines, it couldn't have happened.
But it did happen, because Halo provides a huge amount of game elements that can all "touch" each other in a variety of ways. The means to facilitate this go all the way down to how the engine is structured around modular, persistent objects, and up through the open environments, distinct weapons, and capable AI. Most of the new features across the series (vehicle boarding, exchanging guns with friendly AI, equipment/AAs, etc.) are designed to expand the range and depth of elements, and ways for the elements to "touch." These emergent moments hold more value since player knows they weren't authored; the game is more replayable when levels are systemic cauldrons instead of sequenced set pieces that play the same every time. Ideally, Halo gameplay is primed to generate long strings of exciting moments like that bit from Halo 3!
Ideally.
Then comes the headshot to tear it all down. Consider this mini-story:
Player hides behind a crate and shoots aliens with a BR. Player takes cover when their shields are down and pops back out for more shots when they're recharged. Repeat.
Maybe I'm being presumptuous, but I don't think I'd be reaching to guess that your Halo experiences are built more out of the latter than the former.
Headshot guns couldn't be more tailor-made to completely waste all the depth and variety in Halo's possibility space, and instead orient encounters toward endless, identical slogs of carnival-booth target-shooting. Why? How?
The result is that the player gets less and less incentive to explore all the other elements of the game, drastically reducing the potential for fun emergent intersections. Why bother putting yourself at risk when you could sit back and lazily pick off heads? As difficulty increases, the incentives to do so only get stronger; player's shields are weaker, headshots are even more disproportionately effective — driving player further into hiding behind a rock, and turning Halo into a game of:
Player shoots Grunt with BR.
Player shoots Grunt with BR.
Player shoots Jackal with BR.
Player shoots Grunt with BR.
Player shoots Elite with BR.
Player shoots Jackal with BR.
It feels real good, but the headshot comes at the cost of neutering the rest of the game.
While it was a long process, we eventually got to a point where the general goal for TSC:E's combat was pretty clearly defined: maximize generation of fun and unique emergent moments. Doing that means maximizing the number of game systems the player is interacting with during a given playthrough; i.e., ensuring that the player is constantly changing weapons and tactics, rather than clearing every counter by sitting in a corner with a BR. (Ensuring that the player still has multiple options per encounter is another huge aspect to this that took a lot of time and effort, and would take up way too much space to go into here.) Unfortunately, this meant fighting against 14 years' worth of preconceptions and "BUT IT'S NOT LIKE HALO X," most of which centered around these idiot headshots.
The headshot is too iconic to remove. It's one of the few game elements whose presence has stayed constant (and as of Reach/4, significantly grown) throughout the series. Plus, it feels real good. Keeping it as-is, though, meant unacceptable risk of combat (uh) devolving into an autopilot zero-thought no-variety pop-up gallery. I could go into a long thing on how TSC:E's systems took shape, but for brevity's sake, I'll just note the countermeasures present in the final map:
Headshot guns couldn't be more tailor-made to completely waste all the depth and variety in Halo's possibility space, and instead orient encounters toward endless, identical slogs of carnival-booth target-shooting. Why? How?
- Headshots do not scale with difficulty. A Grunt minor on normal is killed as quickly as a Grunt major on Legendary — where other guns take 3x as long or more, the headshot weapon always only needs one shot.
- Headshots require the same kind of weapon. The precision necessary to consistently hit heads requires headshot-capable weapons to be high-accuracy, and consequently long-range oriented. (With a low-accuracy gun, whether or not a headshot happens becomes effectively random, which is not at all desirable in something like Halo.)
- Headshot guns' situational limitations are almost all "soft" limits. A low-accuracy gun simply won't work beyond a certain range, but there's nothing stopping a high-accuracy gun from working at shotgun-like ranges if the player can aim well enough.
The result is that the player gets less and less incentive to explore all the other elements of the game, drastically reducing the potential for fun emergent intersections. Why bother putting yourself at risk when you could sit back and lazily pick off heads? As difficulty increases, the incentives to do so only get stronger; player's shields are weaker, headshots are even more disproportionately effective — driving player further into hiding behind a rock, and turning Halo into a game of:
Player shoots Grunt with BR.
Player shoots Grunt with BR.
Player shoots Jackal with BR.
Player shoots Grunt with BR.
Player shoots Elite with BR.
Player shoots Jackal with BR.
It feels real good, but the headshot comes at the cost of neutering the rest of the game.
While it was a long process, we eventually got to a point where the general goal for TSC:E's combat was pretty clearly defined: maximize generation of fun and unique emergent moments. Doing that means maximizing the number of game systems the player is interacting with during a given playthrough; i.e., ensuring that the player is constantly changing weapons and tactics, rather than clearing every counter by sitting in a corner with a BR. (Ensuring that the player still has multiple options per encounter is another huge aspect to this that took a lot of time and effort, and would take up way too much space to go into here.) Unfortunately, this meant fighting against 14 years' worth of preconceptions and "BUT IT'S NOT LIKE HALO X," most of which centered around these idiot headshots.
The headshot is too iconic to remove. It's one of the few game elements whose presence has stayed constant (and as of Reach/4, significantly grown) throughout the series. Plus, it feels real good. Keeping it as-is, though, meant unacceptable risk of combat (uh) devolving into an autopilot zero-thought no-variety pop-up gallery. I could go into a long thing on how TSC:E's systems took shape, but for brevity's sake, I'll just note the countermeasures present in the final map:
Grunt Helmets
Making exposed heads take more than one shot was out of the question — it removes the clear, readable component of the headshot that makes it as satisfying and elegant as it is. However, without any protection, there's the illustrated issue of Grunts with 3x the HP or more being killed just as quickly as their weaker counterparts.
The answer was straightforward: a helmet, which takes an extra shot to expose the head, given to Grunt majors. This fits neatly in line with their health increase — majors have twice as much HP as minors; requiring two headshots instead of one is a matching 2x increase to the killtime, preserving the headshot's relative time advantage but ensuring it still scales with the stronger unit. Higher difficulties increase the amount of Grunts that become majors, ensuring that headshot weapons are now affected by difficulty scaling too.
Obviously this causes some friction for people who simply want to autopilot their way through a Grunt pack with pop-pop-pop kill-kill-kill. The tactile satisfaction lost by inability to do this was deemed an acceptable sacrifice when held against how one-note and dull the game risks becoming without proper headshot countermeasures — and, the Battle Rifle now has a unique advantage in being able to kill a Grunt in one "shot" (burst) if player can aim correctly, giving it an additional little quirk for skilled players to take advantage of.
The answer was straightforward: a helmet, which takes an extra shot to expose the head, given to Grunt majors. This fits neatly in line with their health increase — majors have twice as much HP as minors; requiring two headshots instead of one is a matching 2x increase to the killtime, preserving the headshot's relative time advantage but ensuring it still scales with the stronger unit. Higher difficulties increase the amount of Grunts that become majors, ensuring that headshot weapons are now affected by difficulty scaling too.
Obviously this causes some friction for people who simply want to autopilot their way through a Grunt pack with pop-pop-pop kill-kill-kill. The tactile satisfaction lost by inability to do this was deemed an acceptable sacrifice when held against how one-note and dull the game risks becoming without proper headshot countermeasures — and, the Battle Rifle now has a unique advantage in being able to kill a Grunt in one "shot" (burst) if player can aim correctly, giving it an additional little quirk for skilled players to take advantage of.
Autoaim
(For clarity: Halo's engine defines "autoaim" as the system that causes bullets to land on the target even if the reticle is a little offset, and "magnetism" as the system that causes the reticle to "stick" to a target.)
To reiterate: a weapon like TSC:E's Assault Rifle simply won't work after a certain range, as the player has no real control over where the bullets will land inside the small end of the accuracy cone. The Battle Rifle, on the other hand, can hit at 20WU or 2WU — it's just a little harder to do the latter. Harder, but still possible — which becomes an issue, as players will almost always assume they can pull those kinds of things off, even if they can't. (Think about when you've been TK'd for your Sniper Rifle, and have then observed the TKer miss every shot.)
To counteract this, autoaim for the long-range guns has been reduced significantly, to try and drive home the fact that the weapon simply is not meant to be used in the territory of e.g. a Plasma Rifle. At best, players will realize this and pick a more appropriate gun; at worst, they'll waste all their ammo and then pick a more appropriate gun.
To reiterate: a weapon like TSC:E's Assault Rifle simply won't work after a certain range, as the player has no real control over where the bullets will land inside the small end of the accuracy cone. The Battle Rifle, on the other hand, can hit at 20WU or 2WU — it's just a little harder to do the latter. Harder, but still possible — which becomes an issue, as players will almost always assume they can pull those kinds of things off, even if they can't. (Think about when you've been TK'd for your Sniper Rifle, and have then observed the TKer miss every shot.)
To counteract this, autoaim for the long-range guns has been reduced significantly, to try and drive home the fact that the weapon simply is not meant to be used in the territory of e.g. a Plasma Rifle. At best, players will realize this and pick a more appropriate gun; at worst, they'll waste all their ammo and then pick a more appropriate gun.
Less Vitality
Really, the main flaw with the headshot is that it "bypasses" all of a unit's health — 2HP or 200HP, doesn't matter; one headshot is all it takes. The Grunt helmets help counteract this to an extent, but keeping the headshot from becoming too dominant required proactively accounting for it in all units' vitality stats.
Consider: On Legendary, Halo 4's Grunt ultra can eat 18 shots from the Assault Rifle (over half the magazine!). That its helmet requires merely one extra shot from a headshot gun doesn't really mean anything when the disparity is still so unbelievably high. So:
Consider: On Legendary, Halo 4's Grunt ultra can eat 18 shots from the Assault Rifle (over half the magazine!). That its helmet requires merely one extra shot from a headshot gun doesn't really mean anything when the disparity is still so unbelievably high. So:
- Comparatively speaking, our Grunts are weak, by virtue of drawing from Halo 1 — Halo 2 & 3 Grunts received a significant vitality boost, which then went even farther in Reach/4.
- TSC:E relies much less on rank upgrades; outside of a couple of unique units in "boss" encounters, units only have minor and major ranks.
- Higher Elite ranks only receive vitality buffs to shields; health is constant. (This also mirrors Halo 1.)
Combined, this prevents killtimes for non-headshot weapons from being completely outclassed by headshot guns, and in some cases allowing them to be superior — for example, the TSC:E Spiker can mow down a huge group of Grunts far more quickly, and a Needler or Shredder and take down an Elite or Brute faster than a BR could break through to the head. Greater proportion of major ranks (and a greater reliance on increasing unit count instead of unit vitality) as difficulty goes up still means that the vitality per encounter scales properly, without relying on saturation of additional ranks.
Testing confirmed that the adjustments did their job of driving players to consider and apply new and interesting tactics to encounters once their "default" BR/Carbine options failed (with some even discarding the idea of a "default" option), leading to increased generation of unique and exciting moments as they are then required to more closely engage with all the other systems in the game.
"But shouldn't you reward player for aiming better" there are like 6 billion different skillsets in a shooter; particularly one like Halo, whose slower pace and variety of systems pushes it less toward twitch accuracy and more toward intelligent and creative play. There's:
...and plenty more. TSC:E was balanced under the hopefully noncontroversial assumption that a creative solution to a problem (e.g. charging the Warthog into the entrance to the canyon bowl) is more fun to pull off than headshot spam (sitting at the top of the ramp and tediously cover-shooting), and consequently prioritizes all these other skillsets just as much (if not more) than player's ability to put the reticle on the alien and pull the trigger.
If the game was really just about shooting accurately, there'd be no need for the Assault Rifle or Plasma Rifle or Needler or Warthog or Ghost or anything other than some equivalent to Quake 3's Railgun. The headshot may be really satisfying and iconic, but it comes with just enough flaws to put all these other skillsets and systems to waste, keeping players stuck at the most reductive and tedious nadir of the game's possibility space.
It does feel real good, though.
Testing confirmed that the adjustments did their job of driving players to consider and apply new and interesting tactics to encounters once their "default" BR/Carbine options failed (with some even discarding the idea of a "default" option), leading to increased generation of unique and exciting moments as they are then required to more closely engage with all the other systems in the game.
"But shouldn't you reward player for aiming better" there are like 6 billion different skillsets in a shooter; particularly one like Halo, whose slower pace and variety of systems pushes it less toward twitch accuracy and more toward intelligent and creative play. There's:
- Keeping track of enemy movement
- Managing "inventory" (held weapons) based on situational need
- Locating resupply points
- Prioritizing targets
- Navigating wide and often vertical environments
- Using ammo efficiently
- Applying unique weapon strengths like Needler supercombine, Auto-Carbine rate of fire accel, etc.
...and plenty more. TSC:E was balanced under the hopefully noncontroversial assumption that a creative solution to a problem (e.g. charging the Warthog into the entrance to the canyon bowl) is more fun to pull off than headshot spam (sitting at the top of the ramp and tediously cover-shooting), and consequently prioritizes all these other skillsets just as much (if not more) than player's ability to put the reticle on the alien and pull the trigger.
If the game was really just about shooting accurately, there'd be no need for the Assault Rifle or Plasma Rifle or Needler or Warthog or Ghost or anything other than some equivalent to Quake 3's Railgun. The headshot may be really satisfying and iconic, but it comes with just enough flaws to put all these other skillsets and systems to waste, keeping players stuck at the most reductive and tedious nadir of the game's possibility space.
It does feel real good, though.