Features · driving
Vehicles, and two guns
Vehicles are on twenty of the maps, and only the ones that had them in Halo. Driving is walking with momentum and uses the keys you already have, because there is nothing about “forward” that should mean a different key in a Warthog.
The engine is the speedometer
A vehicle's note rises continuously with its speed and it is the loudest thing anywhere near it. A sighted player glances at a needle; this is what that becomes — and unlike the needle, it works for everybody else on the map as well. It is how you know what your own vehicle is doing and how everybody else knows you are coming.
Acceleration is what a vehicle is
So it is the only thing in this game that is not on a grid. A vehicle's position is a pair of doubles integrated twenty times a second.
A Warthog that reached its top speed the instant you pressed forward would not be a Warthog, it would be a fast player. The whole reason to take one is the thirty metres of run-up before it is worth anything — and the fact that you cannot stop it in time either. Everybody you drive past hears all of that.
The controls you already have
| Key | In a vehicle |
|---|---|
| E | Get in. The driver's seat if it is free, the gun if it is not — you cannot throw somebody out of their own Warthog. |
| shift+E | Tear a turret off its mount and carry it. That is how you get a chaingun. |
| W / S | The throttle, forward and back. |
| Turn keys | The wheel. |
| left shift | The boost. |
| backspace | Get out. |
Two kinds of aircraft, and they are genuinely different
Halo has both and reproducing the difference costs about thirty lines. It is the difference between two aircraft and one.
The Banshee
Always moving. It climbs by pointing its nose up and trading airspeed for height, so one that has been slowed down cannot climb — which is why a Banshee caught low ends up in the ground.
The Hornet
Hovers. It holds its altitude with nothing pressed and goes up and down directly.
The driver's seat is the whole seat system
You cannot take one that is taken, so running at a Warthog somebody is driving puts you in the gun. That is Halo's rule and it is also the only answer that does not let two people fight over a steering wheel.
A turret is a vehicle with one seat and no engine, which is what lets manning one, firing it, getting out of it and dying in it be the same code as everything else — and it is how you get a portable turret, which the weapon table had described since the arsenal was written and which nothing could actually do.
A turret makes no sound sitting there, and that is the point rather than an omission: the thing that gives every other vehicle away is the thing a turret has not got.
Two guns is a decision, not an upgrade
Dual wielding is not a loadout and there is no menu for it. You are holding a magnum, you walk over an SMG, and now you have both — which is Halo's rule, and is what made it interesting: a thing that happens to you mid-fight, and a decision you then have to live with.
What it costs is the whole of what makes it interesting.
- No grenades, because you have not got a spare hand.
- No armour ability.
- No scope.
- A wider spread on both.
- A reload that does one gun at a time, which is twice as long stood still.
Giving any of that back would make holding two strictly better than holding one, which is a different and much worse game.
The off hand fires on the scope key, and that is not a shortage of keys: a dual wielded weapon cannot be scoped, so while both hands are in use that key has nothing else to mean. It is the same arrangement the turn and snap keys use — one key, two meanings, decided by something you already know about yourself.
Which maps have them
Twenty of the forty, and only the ones that had them in Halo. Where a map has vehicle spawns, the map page says how many.
Asking the server which maps have vehicles…