Some of you are probably wondering when the hell Halo 3 had any problems with the melee aspect to begin with, and the rest of you are probably thinking it’s about damn time this auto update came along. Bungie have revised the melee system which decided who gets a kill when two players enter a ‘melee contest’. Originally, the first to attack won. Sounds about fair, doesn’t it? Not exactly. As many Zetzio members already know, this heavily depends on internet connection. God knows how many times we have moaned about this, only to have our American opponents assume we simply can’t accept defeat.
Let’s see how Bungie has fixed this issue.
So now we have the contests, but how are they resolved? Having determined that we cannot trust timing in an environment with latency, we instead use the remaining health (including shields) of the contestants as the tie-breaker. This is about as fair as you can get, within the conventions of Halo—the guy who did more damage comes out on top. Specifically, the winner of the contest still takes melee damage from the loser, but is protected from death and lives to fight another day.
However, Bungie admits that there is a big flaw.
Halo 3’s system is inscrutable. This is most famously illustrated by a splitscreen film (eliminating latency as a factor) of two players running at each other, firing, and throwing melee attacks on the same frame. One drops dead, and it isn’t clear why, so the result is declared to be random. The real reason is, of course, that one player landed one or two more bullets than the other, but that isn’t anywhere near obvious.
Any time you have a game system which players cannot understand, it might as well be random. No matter how fair the tiebreaker may be, if a single Assault Rifle bullet can slip by and decide the outcome, it might as well be random. And randomness is a poor substitute for tactics and skillful execution.
You know, we haven’t been playing Halo 3 lately. Perhaps this update is a good excuse for Zetzio to give the multiplayer another shot, and for us to see for ourselves how much of an impact this update will make on our experience. It’s good to see that Bungie are addressing a problem which most developers would probably ignore. The update also fixes that glitch where your body goes flying when someone melees you. I admit it was amusing to watch yourself rocket into the air while waiting to respawn, but not something that suits the Halo multiplayer which is serious business. Check out Bungie’s full explanation on the update, along with how it all works in detail.
