I’m gonna second this sentiment It makes a lot of the open-world engagements rather bland, AI suffers from Darksouls syndrome where they can’t leave the area they spawn in. This hurts the Skirmishers especially bad as most the time that they are present they can’t use their mobility effectively because you’re outside their zone. Turns them into fast grunts instead of the speedy flankers they’re supposed to be.
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Campaign needed Flood. Randomly blowing a chunk of the ring off, and random excavations occuring all over that consist of blowing holes into facilities, yet nothing…
CE may have repeated content but it definitely remixed it in new and enjoyable ways.
AOTCR is not the same as TB. Beyond the level flow feeling very different, it mixes up vehicle sections and adds flood/sentinel enemies that drastically change up the experience. It also set during night, sutbly changing the environment, and makes use of areas you couldn’t reach before by making use of the banshee.
Keyes and Maw also notably change things up, the latter changing the environment a fair bit and adding significant new portions too.
Its also important that the forerunner tileset is effectively different in every level of CE. The Library looks nothing like TB/AOTCR, which looks nothing like 343 guilty spark, which doesnt resemble the 2nd level either.
I dont think it necessarily needed the flood, but it needed a third faction to deal with.
The talk of the banished only allying with the harbinger while they were useful had my hopes up, but nothing changed.
The Harbingers are just flying grunts. It didn’t feel like there was much of a threat to contend against. Banished won the initial conflict and despite you being the single greatest threat to them they mostly leave you alone. They’re not actively hunting you, and despite being apparently severely outnumbered and their only remaining target they don’t pursue you very hard. With the situation Chief finds himself in he should be in a situation similar to what Noble Six found himself in.
Id actually say they’re worse than grunts. Their AI just kind of sits there doing nothing most the time. The first encounter I just hopped around punching them.
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I was more or less OK with running the same levels backwards but there were often the same rooms reused multiple times within the same level making it hard to distinguish where you have to go next. Arrows on the walls in anniversary were placed not because of levels being very distinct, you know)
The librarian is the worst level in the entire franchise since it’s was built from the same two corridors reused over and over.
Still the game offered more visual variety than Infinite
CE is lower on my rankings mainly because the copy pasted rooms don’t hold up by today’s standard and the gameplay while still really good only went up for the rest of the franchise.
Not because it was more open which isn’t really true. Apart from “halo” level there aren’t any levels there that are more open than any other game in a franchise. Halo 5 had plenty of very open areas, for instance.
As for the story I treat CE higher than some of the recent games.
Again, I’m not completely against open-world games I just find the Infinites open world shallow. And it clearly pulled developer resources from the main missions so they aren’t as good as in previous halo games as well.
After 6 years of development time I sort of expected them to nail both aspects.
Apart from the underwhelming story I actually really liked the gameplay and the level design in Halo 5.
So I hoped that they could make something better (b- is similar to what I’d give it) than what they ended up with given the 6 years the game was supposedly in development. 
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I definitely didn’t like a lot of the Spartan Abilities and really, really disliked the team revive mechanic when playing solo in H5, but the visual variety was pretty good in terms of locations and the basic gunplay wasn’t bad either. But that story was so bad to me that I could only stand to play the campaign over about 3 1/2 times in the entire six years that game’s been out, sadly 
I think (can’t say for sure) I’ll get more replayability and enjoyment from Infinite, as I really do enjoy the story and tone of this game a lot more. But some of that is really hindered at this point by the lack of a Replay Missions feature. I agree with you that the traversal between objectives can definitely feel like a tedious chore if you’re trying to play the “golden path”.
On my first playthrough, though, I quite liked the gameplay and encounter designs despite the super repetitive visuals and lack of awesome vehicle setpieces. Still figuring out how I feel about the boss fights, though. That mission replay feature and PvE challenges really can’t come soon enough for me.
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I really, really wanted to like this campaign, but i couldn’t there’s to many story arcs. bullet sponge boss fights. cutscenes most of which are just “holograms” that only tell us what happened instead of showing us. a bland open world that’s bigger than skyrim but feels as empty as a desert. the linear sections are filled with too many empty corridors that should have been filled with enemies. speaking of enemies they are also very bland and the only good thing is their dialogue, seriously who at 343 decided that sentinels could melee (which is them just giving chief a chest bump) and that a melee from a grunt can take you down to half shields on heroic with a fully modded shield core.
without the open world this is by far the shortest campaign halo has ever had, my first speed run was finished in 3 hours and 58 minutes, it would have been even shorter but the game locked me in several rooms for like 5+mins while it loaded the next sections, also my audio broke because i kept skipping cutscenes.
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It was Far Cry 4 with Halo overlaid…I dislike “clearing” an area only to find that I apparently didn’t clear the area…
After 6 years I guess I was hoping for more to be going on outside of the specific story missions.
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It has become painfully apparent the games as an industry is following the potato chip bag business model. The packaging is the same size but with each successive year there are less chips in the bag and more air is pumped into the bag to make it seem there is still the same amount but when there is really less than before…If that makes sense.
Halo, IMHO, fits this analogy. Halo 2 and Halo 3 perhaps has the best story and content to date. Halo 2 with its anniversary version has the most impressive CONTENT cut scenes I have ever seen in a game. Halo 4, guardians, and infinite don’t even come close.
The only cool cut scene we get in Infinite is the opening scene and that’s it…And through out the game we get holographic monologues which adds nothing but padding to the game.
But why is that? Seems to me 343 decided to cheap out on story telling by having the player search for audio logs to fill in the gaps in they story that 343 didn’t bother producing into gameplay or cut scenes, I think it’s almost criminal we couldn’t play point and escort cpt laskey out of the infinity or at the very least see it happen in a cut scene.
This game feels cheap to me. I am perhaps in the minority where I care more for a good story. It’s not well fleshed out in infinite
Overall game play is great 7.5/10. Story 6/10.
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I mean, 6 years is a long time. They couldn’t begin with the stakes set as high as they were at the end of Halo 5. So you had to get a much more low key and smaller scale storyline. Refocus back on the core cast and then slowly build up from there.
On the whole I thought the campaign was engaging and gripping. I was curious about what’s up with the Endless and speculating on what they were about. I am glad we got answers on the Banished and do feel like they are fully fledged faction now.
I was impressed by how well the Open World came across. Wandering Zeta Halo, being able to get a bunch of marines and pile them into a Warthog. I didn’t feel like you lost that much on the combat environments you had in 4 and 5. Yes there are more varied environments, yes , you can feel the design on say the Sanghelios maps. But the cost is in the scope, scale and ultimately game length. I did Halo 5 in a single sitting day of release. But it took a good while to chew through the campaign and I never felt like I was just being fed junk content. It was fun and it came across very well.
The music and the ambience does such a good job of selling the world and the tone.
I put my negative thoughts in another post regarding the soft retcon of Halo 5 and killing Cortana offscreen. But for all that, the drama with the Chief, the Weapon and the Pilot. That failure does help add to the Chief and the Weapons character. So it does pass the test I set the game which was “do these events still drive the narrative” which is does do. It’s not the story I wanted, but it’s still a good one.
With the flashback cutscenes, I am glad we got to see some of Goddess Cortana on a galactic rampage. Halo 5 is all talk but yeah, she really has the galaxy at her mercy for a year. Especially because you do feel the Weapons horror at the idea that she is that person and it’s just fun OTT sci fi. Also, they don’t say she has the Logic Plague, but there a lot of Halo 3 quotes and Flood mentions. So as far as I am concerned that’s what’s going on there.
I really don’t like that the campaign is just a setup for further content. It just leaves you with more questions than answers. I really hope campaign expansions won’t cost extra, because what we got currently is not worth $60, especially on top of the obscene F2P monetization.
I do think the humanization of Chief was really good, though.
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dude he said he wasn’t a fan, not that he doesn’t like them… and why did you lump Witcher 3 in there? I love witcher 3 but hate BotW. They’re entirely different games lmao.
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I would thoroughly enjoy watching someone beat the boss fights on legendary while ignoring the grapple hook - and no cheesing too (I’m looking at you Fusion Coils).
Campaign should just rename Master Chief to Master Hook or Grapple Chief because the whole campaign is entirely dependent on it.
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Grapple Chief sounds cool) you should patent the trademark)
Yeah, the industry trend is goind towards more hours per dollar spent. But the thing is that the amount of quality content content developers can produce stays more or less the same. And the reourses can either go towards a 10 hour blockbuster or towards 30 hour open world with a ton of filler stuff with at best 10 hours of good content. But even then that content doesn’t quite match what they could do in a linear game.
If you even compare something like God of War (2018) to God of War 3 - 3 had a lot more cool set pieces, a lot more epic boss fights and more cool characters in general.
From the overall level of production Guardians were true to the original formula. But they certainly dropped the ball with infinite.