Assault Rifle:
AR needs to be less lethal, but still usable. Suggestion: Reduce max range by five metres, remove headshot multiplier or make it almost insignificant, to make the weapon feel more consistent. Maybe also reduce magazine size back to 32.
Battle Rifle:
Currently, it feels underpowered, if a target is shooting at me with anything, I feel like I will lose no matter what. It feels like the gun is balanced for a slower paced game, mainly due to it’s slow rate of fire, whereas everything else has a much higher rate of fire. I would increase the rate of fire by 25-33%, otherwise the gun feels pretty decent.
Commando:
Originally, I thought it was pretty bad in multiplayer, and I do think it’s underpowered still. It gets beat by the Sidekick in close quarters too easily, despite it seemingly being the, ‘close range’ type of precision rifle. I would maybe look into toning down the recoil. Like the BR though, this could just be a symptom of the AR being too dominant.
Sidekick:
I can’t tell if it needs a buff or a nerf. Some players destroy me with it, especially when I’m using the Battle Rifle due to the slow rate of fire. But when I use it, it swaps between a really good headshot spammer, a cool clean-up tool, and a gun that can’t hit anything. I’m not sure what the issue is with it, or if this is a sign that it’s balanced well as long as you hit your shots. Either way, possibly something to look into, I have no real idea of what to do with the weapon, maybe reduce the rate of fire to make it less spammable.
SKMM:
If this is going to exist in the game, fine. But it should not be in Social playlists, social is for kicking back and relaxing after a long day’s work, a rough day, or just simply to have fun, going up against similarly skilled opponents every match, or higher skilled, is just going to cause frustration, leaving, (already had at least 6 games where people left, enemy team and my team.) It sucks to throw away hard work, especially coding, but it just doesn’t belong in Social playlists, if it’s just a thing for the Flight, then fair enough.
TTK (Time to Kill):
A lot of people have said it, but that is because it is true. Considering how spammy the game balancing currently is. Meaning, AR spam, Sidekick trigger-mashing, Commando rate of fire, and even grenade spam. You simply die too quickly. I think a 25% buff to shielding would help alleviate the issue some, but this could be an issue on the weapon balancing side, rather than player weakness. At the moment, it is almost impossible to win a gunfight if you didn’t shoot first, which was definitely possible in Halo 3. I don’t know if it’s because the projectile speed in Infinite is too fast, (borderline hitscan) or if it’s because of other things, like said above.If you’re shot at from the side or behind, you almost always will lose the fight if you turn to fight, and you definitely die if you just keep running, as it’s impossible to escape when enemies can climb vertically as much as they want.
Grenades and Friendly Fire:
Simply put, this is possibly one of the spammiest Halo games ever in terms of grenades, and explosives in general. Grenades, rockets, Ravager’s alt fire. Because of the removal of friendly fire, there is no need to think about tossing a grenade into a mosh pit of enemy and friendly players and just wreaking havoc. Rockets can be fired at will towards teammates engaged in Close Quarters Combat. However, I do understand it for the Ravager’s alt fire as it is a really large radius. Either friendly fire needs to come back, or explosive radius/damage needs to be adjusted to account for how much things are being spammed, especially frag grenades.
The Radar and Target Identification:
Personally, I feel the motion tracker needs a buff, just in radius. 18m is too short, I have consistently found myself in the same room as an enemy that the motion tracker didn’t detect, despite them moving. I’m not sure if this is just an issue because rooms and areas on maps are bigger than previous games, like Halo 3, in conjunction with the lowered motion tracker detection radius. At the least, I would increase it to 25 metres, at least to see if it makes it more usable. Continuing with the issue of identifying threats, this time with your own eyes, I have had several experiences of staring at a supposed enemy and not realising, this is a request for an option to turn on Red vs Blue team colourings. Many other games with monetised skins, World of Tanks, Smite, MCC even though it’s not monetised, has the option to turn off egregious skins and armours that look silly or hurt game balance, there is no reason Infinite should lack this feature, especially with all the catering towards accessibility that’s been added.
Maps:
I will not judge too harshly yet as the map pool is very limited, but Recharge is currently the most fun map to play. Bazaar is too campy, especially due to the AR having such good range and accuracy. A team can simply camp their balcony and the rocket spawn and lock down the entire map without having to fight for it. Live Fire has many issues, especially spawning. Multiple times, I have spawned in line of sight of an enemy player, in one case, they were looking at me and I had no escape. I have also witnessed enemies spawn in front of me. As for Recharge, it is a decent map, however I feel like the power weapons on the map are completely negated due to their close range nature, and the dominance of long sight lines on the map, especially with where the Commando/BR spawns are.
Progression System:
While it is not as bad as I thought it would be, though the challenges do feel like chores, even as easy as they are… I do not see why a regular XP/rank system cannot coexist with the Battlepass XP system. It’s not because I personally need it to play the game long term, I do enjoy the game enough at its core to continue playing. However, being a free to play game, without more incentive, I fear a lot of new players will drop the game quickly, I want Halo to thrive and sink its claws into the masses once again, not to be tossed away after a couple of matches.
Crossplay and Aim Assist:
Simply, give us a way to opt out of playing against PC players, and/or keyboard and mouse players in general. The PC players don’t want to go against, ‘aimbot’ (Aim Assist) And controller players don’t want to play against mice. So, just give us the option to opt-in or out. Additionally, at first, the aim assist felt pretty strong, too sticky and stiff, especially when enemies overlapped each other, it seemed the reticule would stop moving when I was trying to track. However, as I’ve played more of the game, it’s either less noticeable somehow, or it’s already been tweaked. Either way, I think it needs looking into, maybe give us an option to turn off aim assist, as I do that in most games, or at least a slider to determine how strong/weak we want it.
Edit: I have remembered one other thing that I wanted to mention. Melee feels very inconsistent. Unlike other Halo games, it feels like there’s no, ‘lunge’ to it. This is very jarring to a veteran Halo player, especially one coming from Halo 3/Reach as their main focal point of experience. And doubly especially when it seems that, my enemies are able to lunge at them, several times, I have gone to finish with a melee to an enemy’s face, and it just whiffs into the air from as little as a metre away. I don’t know if I’m just not doing it right, or if something’s up with it.
