Bungie’s Double XP Weekend playlist of choice this last weekend was Grifball. I adore Grifball. Created by Burnie Burns of Rooster Teeth, thanks to the wonder of Halo 3’s Forge map creation tool and the fully customisable game-types, then combined with being able to spread these around via your own personal File Share, Grifball is undoubtedly the most successful user-created Halo 3 experience*. So much so, that Bungie have taken it and added it into the mainstream Halo 3 experience in the form of Double XP weekend playlists. Now, Grifball as a Halo 3 game-type seems quite counter-intuitive: only using mellee weapons in a shooting based First-person-shooter and having such a short fuse on the bomb is nothing like the traditional Assault game-type… But it gels as a “sport”: melee weapons representing blocks or tackles and getting the bomb to a scoring zone results in an instant detonation and thus an instant point in the same way getting a ball over a line or into the scoring zone in real-life sports scores an instant point.
Then there’s the tactics. There’s a kind of triangular Rock-Paper-Scissors dynamic with the Sword/Hammer/Bomb and Overshield weapon set, knowing which to use and when is a key part of winning. Defending can be tricky sometimes, as the bomb carrier is slightly faster than regular players, you really need to spread out and make sure there are no gaps in your line. Of course, when you have the bomb and are attacking, you can sometimes be sneaky and rush through one of these gaps. A favourite tactic of mine is to jump with the bomb just as enemies are rushing in with their Hammers primed – the resulting chaos is usually just enough to take off my Overshield, but the boom from the Hammers makes me fly so high – but only sometimes actually towards the goal.
And looking towards the future, we can probably expect Halo Reach to add even more options to the beautifully brutal game of Grifball. The Sprint Armour ability is the most obvious one – attacking players sprint to support their man with the bomb, while defenders rush back to plug a gap in their line. Removing the restriction on being able to use equipment at the same time as holding an objective, then giving all players jetpacks would literally add another dimension to the game. I’m not just talking about Grifball now, but novel gametypes in general: Could you somehow tweak a version of Invasion to something novel and unexpected? Or possibly play a game of CTF with the added threat of enemies in Firefight 2.0, or even try a game of CTF vs the AI somehow? Or even take Firefight and change it up into something else totally? The potential for interesting gametypes that go beyond what is expected is incredibly high for Reach – I’m expecting Forge to be improved and expanded upon as well, because Bungie’s desire is to make things even more customisable so that more unique experiences can be devised by the infinitely creative players who seek to go beyond the traditional FPS.
*Before you mention Zombie gametypes – this was a Halo 2 invention, added to Halo 3!