I love a lot of the things this game does, there is clearly a lot of love put into balancing the game and refining the gameplay. That being said, there’s a lot that needs addressed. I’m going to try and be as constructive as possible.
The Progression
As stated many times, the progression is not good. Not only is it slow (due to the challenge based XP), but also unsatisfying. A large amount of the unlocks are challenge swaps, which truth be told aren’t very valuable. While sometimes there’s challenges I just want to skip, I don’t use them frequently enough for it to be the majority of my unlocks. It just feels too restrictive for being the only progression system. During the flight I ended up finishing a match as MVP. I popped off really good, but it was only 1/2 matches for the challenge, and then my XP boost expired. A really sour moment to ruin an otherwise good time. This also means there’s no reason to even try. You don’t get anything special for winning, or for having high performance. Why even bother if I get as much XP for not participating. It would also be nice to get notifications for challenge progress/completion like in MCC, so I’m not left guessing whether or not the challenge actually completed. Maybe add more goal oriented challenges that aren’t weeklies. Like getting certain scores in weapon drills, or getting a certain performance against Spartan bots, etc. There needs ot be long term goals to work towards, beyond just completing weeklies to progress a battle pass. It just doesn’t feel like the game wants me to play it, it wants me to do chores.
There’s also the issue of free players getting almost nothing, and don’t even get an armour piece until 20 ranks in, and then another 20 ranks. This is supposed to be the most advanced customization system, but if you don’t throw money at it, you have almost no way to express yourself. Not a great first impression for such an advanced system. I also take massive issue with left/right shoulders being completely separate unlocks that are spaced out. These should not be separate unlocks, which you guys knew in MCC. It feels malicious to people who didn’t sped money on the battle pass, and it feels intentionally slow to nudge people into dropping money on more ranks. I know it’s free to play, but this is something that many more free to play games do better. I get so much more out of other games without spending money, like Apex.
Playlists
This is the biggest thing for me. Not only is there a lack of modes, but having no choice in what I play almost ruins the game for me. I don’t really have anyone to play the game with, so I like things like slayer and oddball. Those modes are fine to solo queue, but solo queueing things like CTF can be a nightmare. It feels like every game I get is CTF, and I get teams that don’t really want to play the objective (presumably they want to play slayer like me). I understand that you don’t want any gamemode to be hard to find matches for, but not only is the game sitting real pretty right now, but the solution isn’t forcing those modes on players who don’t want them.
The lack of modes is also concerning. Variety is the spice of life, and with no chill out modes like action sack, snipers, infection, SWAT, griffball, etc; there is very little to do. There isn’t even FFA options. These are all iconic modes for Halo, and they’re all missing. If this is representative of launch, it doesn’t exactly scream “ready when it’s ready”. It’s really disappointing for things like forge and co-op to be delayed, only for the game to be released early with less content than what’s expected. If there aren’t new modes added for the “official launch”, as you call it, this game will drop players fast. This is looking to be a repeat of Halo 5 in that regard.
I’ll leave this section off with something really positive. Oddball is really good. I think you should be able to either one hit melee or sprint, not be stripped of both. Other than that, really good take on it.
Optimization
The performance is very inconsistent. Even with most settings at low, and lowered resolution scale, the game still stutters more often than it should. With my 2070, i5 9600k, and 32 gigs of ram, I do expect low to not be so hard to run. It’s not a beast, but surely lowest settings at 1080p should be seamless. In a time where GPU scarcity makes it almost impossible to get the latest graphics cards, it’s more important than ever for games to make it easy to get high FPS on midrange systems, especially for such a competitively focused game. I think there should also be a focus on making BTB maps perform equally to arena. I understand they’re bigger maps with more detail, but in a competitive game having consistent performance between all maps is important.
Misc
Random weapon spawns makes it hard to benefit as much from map knowledge, and miserable trying to complete weapon specific challenges.