Background
I’d like to preface my feedback with a brief background as I feel it helps knowing where the feedback is coming from. I got into video games off Halo 2, I played it constantly when I was younger, and then also played some Halo 3 and eventually even less Halo Reach. I have not played 4 or 5 as I no longer own any consoles. I solely play PC games these days ranging from WoW and Destiny 2 to Rocket League, Valorant, CSGO, etc. I would love to get back into a Halo title as I love the arena-ish style shooter it is.
First impression
First impression of the game is good, had to mess with control settings a bit off the bat, but overall I had more fun than I expected to this weekend playing 10+ hours of multiplayer. The game looks good, feels okay (more on that below) but definitely see the potential here for a lot of fun and potentially some competitive following.
PC Performance
The first glaring issue for me is the performance on at least PC, possibly Xbox as the networking side of things feels off at times too. I have a decent setup with a 2070 S, but am only getting up to around 120 fps and dipping into the 90s very frequently in games, along with fairly common hitching this was super frustrating to deal with. If you guys are after a competitive following on PC this will definitely need to get a lot better. FPS aside, I also saw the post regarding someone using Afterburner to see frame times that were very bad. Overall a lot of room for improvement performance wise. I don’t see myself grinding/competitively playing this game a whole lot without some major progress made on this.
Aim
This has been the most common feedback I have seen and heard during the flight. From both MKB and controller players, seemingly all over. Some saying aim assist is too much, others saying it isn’t enough, etc. and I won’t even get into people claiming aim assist is somehow cheating. Whatever the root cause, I also feel whatever wonkyness there is with aiming. It may solely come down to low FPS/hitching/high frame times, but either way aiming currently feels inconsistent which is frustrating. I will say there are also times where I have been melted by an AR or Commando and felt the only explanation was a controller player. I am all for crossplay in social playlists, I think it is a great feature a lot of people will enjoy being able to play with whoever. And while the tuning could be way worse, I feel it could use some more tuning to prevent those moments where I get shredded even with strafing.
Also please at least turn off the mouse aim assist option by default. It makes tracking a target super awkward and honestly doesn’t need to exist in the first place.
Menus UI/UX
While overall the game and menus look good, there are some menus and UI that are not intuitive and awkward.
- Starting with the animation when opening the game menu, the options in the menu seem to ‘slide’ in, and more than anything it is just annoying. Speeding the animation up may help, but I don’t feel like it adds much. - Next up is the post-game screen. It is honestly bad. The default page gives nearly none of the information you would want to see after a match. Opening up the scoreboard has the info there, but that should be open by default and the post-game screen should be build around that. Then if I want additional details on a player and how my average matches up to their performance, I should click their name/row in the scoreboard. - The customization menus aren’t super clear, for example in the weapons area, it should be communicated how many total weapons there are instead of just sifting through one by one. - My last point is the battle pass menu. it is cumbersome to navigate and breaks from expectation of how battle passes look in other games. Each entry in the slider should be per level, not per reward. As in there are a few entries in it for each reward of level x. while each entry should be a level and if there are multiple rewards, it should list them or something. Also the xp boost only showing on the battle pass page and having to go into a sub menu there to get to boosts is really awkward and easy to miss.Also, you should be able to exit game to desktop from anywhere in the game. I can see in a PvP match having to exit match before exiting to desktop, but in things like training etc. you should be able to exit straight to desktop.
Training
The training tools are great, having the ability to hop in a match with bots and custom settings on the fly is awesome and can only see this getting better as features are added. Same with the weapon drills, fun idea, my only gripe is having to do the training, complete and either load again to retry or go out to a menu to load back in. Would be great to have that menu in the map maybe and you can just switch around weapons as desired.
Maps
The maps overall are really good. I think Bazaar seemed to cause my FPS/stuttering issue to worsen, but they feel like Halo maps, they feel fun and balanced overall. I do not like vehicles on Behemoth at all though, they feel cheesy at best and very frustrating at worst. I’m fine with vehicles in stuff like BTB, but don’t feel they belong in 4v4.
Sandbox
Super fun and probably the highlight of the game currently. Grapple and repulsor are great additions to the game and create fun moments. BXB being back is awesome, as a big Halo 2 player I love that it is back; I hope the complaints don’t get it removed. With that said, melee feels inconsistent at times which can be incredibly frustrating. Sometimes you go to melee someone and dash a bit but don’t hit them then they are somehow now behind you and you get assassinated? These were by far the most frustrating moments I encountered. The distance and everything on melee feels fine I think maybe it just needs some tuning or polishing to feel more consistent? May also be related to client/server performance issues.
Weapons
Weapons all feel unique and have their place. Power weapons feel powerful enough for the most part. The only gripe I have on this topic takes us back to controller/MKB lobbies where sometimes you get melted through strafing and have no idea how, which seems most common with AR and Commando and sometimes BR, maybe just need some AA tuning.
Battle Pass
The battle pass feels not great. The notion of only getting XP from challenges could be fine, but with the current implementation it feels bad and very prone to RNG. The challenges are too specific to be the only source of XP, especially with how the boosts come into play. The swapping can help, but still in itself is more RNG.
As an example, lets say I have limited time to play and hop on and decide to pop a 30 min XP boost, I queue up and get into a few slayer matches, but my challenges are all flag related objectives. I have now gotten 0 benefit from my boost and 0 XP during my session. Swaps may help, but with them also being random, I could use a swap to get another overly specific objective. This is very frustrating, moreso if I have paid for the battle pass. The objectives need to be achievable in all modes, or add passive XP from matches and have the challenges just be additional XP?
The capstone challenge is a neat idea, though.