An exhaustive look at Infinite from a Halo veteran

Games Halo Infinite
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To whom it may concern,

Halo is, and forever will be my lifeblood, it it my favorite series, nothing compares, I would always say to people that doubted me that I could give a 40 minute lecture on the in-universe development of the Assault Rifle without notes. I am so deeply engrossed into the lore, the gameplay, the idea of Halo speaks to me on a level that only a few other games can possibly manage, but nothing beats it. I want- we all want this game to be the best possible game imaginable. In order to do that- I’m now going to spend the next 1000 words absolutely railing this game, please forgive me. My plan is to go in order of importance, starting from the top.

TL:DR is in bold so just skim for that.

Controller aiming/Auto-aim

Yea so I stopped playing the first week over this. To put it as harshly as I can and then allow me to explain, I have never had such a difficult time in any FPS attempting to do the most basic function of shooting the enemy. Halo 5 high diamond player, Halo 3 lone wolves rank 50, low diamond Apex Legends, I love Destiny, battlefield, specifically Black Op 3 and nothing else in the series, Overwatch. FPS is by far my favorite genre.

I can’t aim. I’ve spent hours, fiddling with my million-and-a-half settings (not a bad thing) and to be fair, got to a level in which I thought to myself, I guess I can get used to this.
Halo is the First-Person Shooter. No disrespect, how did console aiming get this scuffed (imo). To me, its in the name. I don’t touch pc FPS, those people scare me, but seriously, it feels as if the entire internal playtesting base was on KB&M and they got some intern to slap a console auto aim system on for the tech preview (imo).

I can’t. Stay on. Their head. Or their body, or anything, from any range, with nearly any gun. It feels at times like I’m aiming at a teammate. The aiming itself feels great, I love it, but there is just not enough stickiness, and yes I get the whole, “Each gun has a range, and actually there isn’t any assist after a certain range.” I get that, I’m talking prime Sidekick range, 1v1, I get the jump on them, and I give them 6 piercings in each ear and have to reload. My decades old muscle memory is moving my stick a certain distance expecting aim assist to catch, and it doesn’t, that is my issue.

Reticles

I love myself a good reticle. Halo does reticles, we all know this, its a core gameplay feature of Halo however minor and insignificant it may seem. That being said, well, second verse same as the first. I don’t know if the art design was way too focused on a matching “style” to all of the reticles or something but-

  • Why are they so small? - Why is bloom so hard to read on them? (Commando) - ThreeNow this isn’t the end of the world for me, just because its second on the list doesn’t mean I’m gonna walk away if this is ignored. But it really does seem like the general art style of, white-borders, minimal menu noise, a “holographic cleanliness” kind of feel if you will, seeped a little too far into reticles. Halo has always kept the philosophy (imo) that if they’re filling your reticle, you’re gonna hit them. But weapons like the Commando just seem to miss, a lot. What it seems is that the reticle is not truly displaying the full bloom of the weapon, because its so damn small.

Medals

Now listen, by now everyone has left so I’d like to just… Chat a little about my love of art. I make Magic card alters and miniature clay sculptures of Pokemon and do pixel art at work far too often. I took college courses on art while doing programming work, I always wanted to be a kind of in-between in game development of art and programming.

What the **** are these medals.

No I’m kidding. You guys did well, my issue stems from the same problem with the reticle design, you have implemented a system of medal categorization-
Wait a minute, oh wait a minute… Alright listen forget I said any of this I’m looking at the wiki now, I no longer have issues with medals as a whole.

MultiKill & Spree Medals

What the **** are these medals.

Why is there no green multikill? Why does red start at overkill? Why do the more abstract art in place of stars on the medals effectively account for 6 of the stars, who decided 6 was the appropriate number and not 5 like the rest of humanity? Why do I care this much? Why did you guys ever make Killtacular not an upside-down pentagon good lord that has infuriated me since 2013 and I just need to get it off my chest… Ahem. When does conforming to style hinder creative vision?

You have the ability to enhance an already beautiful system you created, Halo 3 multikill design was cool, Reach improved the vision. Halo 4 redesigned it to a much cleaner and honestly better system, Halo 5 perfected that system with the change to the Killionaire and Legendary medals as a whole. Then all of that was thrown away for the sake of conforming to a style. But anyway…

Why is there once again no green spree? Why did it look like two separate people were given two separate design philosophies when designing the spree medals? Continuing off that, why do running riot and rampage seem to take your new art style and adapt it to the already established style at play (and they look good doing so)? Why am I reusing the same “why” joke? Seriously, why does it feel like two different art styles are at play for sprees?

You even changed the names, which while I have issue with on principle, only exasperates my already confused feelings on what the bloody **** happened in the art department during the creation of what is supposed to be the other half two medal categories that are supposed to flow into one another smoothly, and just don’t. Some people may feel I am getting a little heated at this point, just remember my preface, I come to Halo from a place of reverence. I loved your multikill redesign for Halo 4, 343, I really did. Your Halo 4 sprees were so clean, and then you made them even better in Halo 5. To say that this is a departure is an understatement.

In my opinion, conforming to this strict style for these two categories should be reevaluated. They are of a different caliber than the other medals and should be treated as such. Also revert those spree names.

Vehicle Damage

Put fire on dead vehicles. I just can’t tell they’re dead. I’ve seen a dozen people walk up to ghosts that they think are functional only for them to punch it and walk away.

Tech Preview Stuff

Some things I have are most certainly to do with the fact that this is a splinter build for testing purposes and I will file tickets accordingly for those issues and won’t bring them up here.

Conclusion

Halo Infinite is an absolutely beautiful game, your sound design is perfect, the map design is wondrous, the changes you have made to the sandbox and how things function are top notch. Thank you 343 for putting this much work into something that millions of people are going to love, and destroy, and enjoy, and complain about, and revere, and hate. I will always remain on the positive side but I really do just have concern for these few things. I hope one of you reads this.

Remember I addressed this as a letter,
Brandon

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As a fellow Halo veteran, I completely agree. Very well written, Spartan

3

Another Halo veteran. Thank you for writing this. The game definitely feels like it was made for pc and the aiming was such a fight. Hopefully they can fix it.

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I very much disliked the first beta but the one BTB that just got released I felt like halo is back and I was excited again. Radar is a love hate as it is smaller than previous versions. Small slayer game maps I thought were too big and forgettable

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I was having a bunch of difficulty aiming at first but by the end of the flight I was fraggin’ like a pro.

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I know I’m in the minority, but aiming simply was not an issue for me during the flight. I plugged a Series X controller into my roommate’s PC just to see what the fuss was about, and I still managed to perform relatively well during each match I played. Is there something here that I’m not seeing?

7

This is a nice write up, from one Halo vet to another. I agree with with everything you’ve typed. I want to like the game, I just found it to be too frustrating. It was the same thing with Halo 5’s aiming, took me awhile, but I got used to it. For comparison I went back and played a game online in 5. Though I did terrible, the aiming felt way better than Infinite and that’s saying something. I’m sure it’ll get sorted out for launch as they’ve said they’re working on it.

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Wow finally someone who has acknowledged how terrible controller aim is and how it even released so bad. I swear these forums are full of robots from i robot, “Get gid aim assist is aimbot”. Actually makes no sense how Halo has had the best fps controller aim on every title and then we get this broken mess in Infinite.

Some of the devs said they were aware that aim wasn’t very good in a tweet a couple of days ago, hopefully next flight we get to see if they actually make it consistent.

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> 2533274795400839;4:
> I very much disliked the first beta but the one BTB that just got released I felt like halo is back and I was excited again. Radar is a love hate as it is smaller than previous versions. Small slayer game maps I thought were too big and forgettable

I agree that BTB felt much better, and aiming at range seems to be mostly on point, for me. But I agree with OP that close quarters aiming, especially with the sidekick, isn’t sticky enough and it’s too easy to draw a circle around their head with missed bullets.

10

I definitely feel pretty similarly. The Medals seem off, the Crosshair can be hard to see sometimes, Destroyed vehicles need to be a bit more obviously destroyed. I recall in Halo 2 and 3, a destroyed ghost would always blast itself in half. Not just because “ooh, neat engine overload” but also it helped make it clear that the vehicle was no longer functional

I think its neat they seem to have added an engine Overload mechanic to basically every Vehicle now. Gives you that small window to hop out and potentially save yourself before it explodes.

On the subject of Vehicular Destruction; They added details like being able to pop the tires of a warthog or Mongoose. unfortunately, this seems to be a cosmetic only change. I feel like this should affect steering, at least. Just adding that little extra detail would be really need.

Ithink They really nailed the main gameplay loop here. It’s back to something similar to Halo 3, where I also felt the Gameplay was really great. Limited Use Equipment was definitely a much healthier game design choice over Armor Abilities.

I will say that the best lesson they learned from Halo 5 was that the weapon sandbox is way more fun if the Battle Rifle isn’t the only viable weapon, and I’m glad they continued that in Infinite.

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> 2533274826424961;8:
> Wow finally someone who has acknowledged how terrible controller aim is and how it even released so bad. I swear these forums are full of robots from i robot, “Get gid aim assist is aimbot”. Actually makes no sense how Halo has had the best fps controller aim on every title and then we get this broken mess in Infinite.
>
> Some of the devs said they were aware that aim wasn’t very good in a tweet a couple of days ago, hopefully next flight we get to see if they actually make it consistent.

What do you mean? There has been a lot of users saying that the controller aim is terrible. There’s just some of us that don’t want the M&K community killed like it was in MCC.

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Well said, thank you for putting it into words in such a clear and consice manner.

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> 2533274796540656;11:
> > 2533274826424961;8:
> > Wow finally someone who has acknowledged how terrible controller aim is and how it even released so bad. I swear these forums are full of robots from i robot, “Get gid aim assist is aimbot”. Actually makes no sense how Halo has had the best fps controller aim on every title and then we get this broken mess in Infinite.
> >
> > Some of the devs said they were aware that aim wasn’t very good in a tweet a couple of days ago, hopefully next flight we get to see if they actually make it consistent.
>
> What do you mean? There has been a lot of users saying that the controller aim is terrible. There’s just some of us that don’t want the M&K community killed like it was in MCC.

Well half of these forums have been spammed by Stew and his sped takes on aim assist, so that’s why I said that. I’m also convinced that anyone who thinks that this aim on Infninite is fine hasn’t played a Halo game in over a decade, maybe even longer since Halo 4 feels pretty smooth compared to this.

MCC was also a port to PC so it wasn’t going to be good, hence why the banshee can create a black hole when it spins. It seems like they didn’t even try to balance Infinite for mnk and controller. OP is right does nobody at 343 play on controller?

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> 2533274826424961;13:
> > 2533274796540656;11:
> > > 2533274826424961;8:
> > > Wow finally someone who has acknowledged how terrible controller aim is and how it even released so bad. I swear these forums are full of robots from i robot, “Get gid aim assist is aimbot”. Actually makes no sense how Halo has had the best fps controller aim on every title and then we get this broken mess in Infinite.
> > >
> > > Some of the devs said they were aware that aim wasn’t very good in a tweet a couple of days ago, hopefully next flight we get to see if they actually make it consistent.
> >
> > What do you mean? There has been a lot of users saying that the controller aim is terrible. There’s just some of us that don’t want the M&K community killed like it was in MCC.
>
> Well half of these forums have been spammed by Stew360 and his sped takes on aim assist, so that’s why I said that. I’m also convinced that anyone who thinks that this aim on Infninite is fine hasn’t played a Halo game in over a decade, maybe even longer since Halo 4 feels pretty smooth compared to this.
>
> MCC was also a port to PC so it wasn’t going to be good, hence why the banshee can create a black hole when it spins. It seems like they didn’t even try to balance Infinite for mnk and controller. OP is right does nobody at 343 play on controller?

Preach. I just got very playfully heated in a party chat with my friend reading comments together about how it seemed like whenever a playtest was scheduled everyone in the office said, “Hold on let me grab my cubicle keyboard.”