Day 1 Initial Thoughts

Games Halo Infinite
1

I’ve got about 4.5 hours under my belt now and a pretty solid feel for the major mechanics of the game at this point so I figured I share my first impressions. For context I’ve been playing Halo avidly since 2009, Halo 3 being my first game and Halo Reach being my favorite, and I play Infinite on PC, now lets get started…

The Good:

  1. The game runs very smoothly and looks amazing, 343 really did a good job here and it’s worth mentioning especially this being their first PC game.
  2. The gunplay and fighting mechanics are good, they maintain a lot of what Halo always has been while adding a fresh feel. I have nothing to complain about here other than my skills with a mouse and keyboard not being up to par with my old controller days (for now…)
  3. The weapon balance seems to be ok for now, this one of those things that takes time to properly critique though. I can’t say the same for vehicles which I go over later.

The OK:

1)Matchmaking speeds aren’t slow, they aren’t necessarily lightning quick either but I think that this could improve over time, for now this will sit in the Ok area.I was definitely expecting it to be a weak point at least at launch.

The Bad:
1)Collision needs to be added, and friendly fire as well at least for some gamemodes (ranked especially). Both of these aspects are core to Halo gameplay and missing, I can play COD if I want to shoot through my teammates and chuck grenades in a room with them and enemies.
2) The ranking system. Oh boy. This is by far the game’s weakest point currently, and I made an entire separate forum post with my critiques and a potential solution which I can’t link but you can find if you view my other posts (I think)
3) Some of the vehicles are extremely weak, I played a 4v4 slayer game that surprisingly had a banshee, after using it 3 times I determined that the reason they could incorporate a banshee on a 4v4 slayer is because of how terrible it is in this game. I had similar experiences with other vehicles, the ghost seems much weaker as well, very difficult to splatter players in this game. I’d rather have those vehicles that are SUPPOSED to be strong reserved for the larger maps/gamemodes. Making them weaker to fit into the smaller gamemodes is not fun for me.

These are my initial thoughts after day 1, opinions will change over time but I’m curious as to what all of you think. Thanks for reading

2

I would have to disagree about multiple things.

The game’s graphics look alright, but it definitely does not run smooth. I have a pretty decent set up (5700XT, Ryzen 7 3700x, 16GB RAM) and only hitting 70-80 fps no matter how I switch up the graphics settings.

I do like the gun play so far, but some guns are unusable and need to be buffed, or completely overhauled to fit a different niche. Notably the Pulse Carbine. I also here a lot of people complaining about weapon bloom, but it’s to keep certain weapons from being too good (like trying to snipe people across the map with the starting pistol)

I also am not experiencing slow matchmaking speeds at all. Every game I play I literally don’t have time to cancel after hitting play, that’s how fast I get in to games and that’s how many people are playing right now. I do not doubt they were slow day 1 though, as I had no clue the multiplayer even dropped.

I do want the ranking system to be improved, something like a Spartan rank as there currently is none.

Some of the vehicles are weak I agree. Warthogs are more fragile than glass. They blow up way too easily, they are basically only usable if no one is shooting at you. Wasps I feel are a little too strong. If vehicles are going to be strong, then weapons that counter them need to spawn consistently in a certain spot every game. Changing the power weapons that spawn on the weapons pads every BTB game changes the dynamic entirely, for the better and the worse. It also is very hard to splatter, and half the time I don’t even try because more often than not I feel I will just be hijacked if I try. It just doesn’t have the same Halo feel as the last engine when it comes to that, maybe that’s actually better lol.

3

Sorry about the late reply but yeah since the release matchmaking speed have been much much faster, thanks for your imput.