Prepare - This is a long rant but does contain my deepest thoughts on Halo 5 and whether it’s really the greatest Halo we’ve seen in the past decade.
Now in my mine Halo 5 is not the greatest Halo of the past Decade. That title still belongs to Halo 3 in my opinion since it had a lot going for it at the time. And while yes we’ve all moved on to newer more advanced systems and games, there are still areas that Halo 3 Succeeds in more than it’s progeny Halo 5.
In terms of Combat evolution I agree for the most part, just adjust a few of the settings like spawning in killzones right next to enemy players and it would be fine. However the game isn’t the greatest as there has been too much focus on multi-player but next to non in terms of the story and other player features.
In other words the game feels unbalanced when you compare it to say Halo 3 and 4 in terms of what features were available on release. The Campaign story could have been miles better in my opinion and wasn’t worth the build up it got in all honesty. We could have done without the story missions in all honesty and had another 3 missions as chief so it felt like less of a disconnect from the franchise in the eyes of myself and others.
The Req system and the customisation options for Spartan models is my biggest gripe here. There is no real reward for say collecting all of the skulls and intel…I’d have expected to unlock something for it…like a req pack containing a specific armour or helmet etc. Doesn’t have to be anything too special but at least reward players for the fact they spent time finding the damn things. Plus Not being able to work towards an armour that catches your eye or you’d really like. it turns the whole req system into some form of trading card fiasco; buying packs with the hopes of obtaining that one card that you desperately want and either grinding for hours or spending money on a sheer random chance.
If they also linked it to Spartan rank as well like reach level 25 and obtain the warrior armour and helmet or something like that like we had in Halo 3. Also they could have done away all of the multi-variants of the same armour suits / helmets. Lets be it’s nice to change your colour pallet but do we really need to have 3 of the same helmet taking up slots in the Req Random drops. I get why it needs to be there for Warzone, but we are being forced to use this method to obtain armours when most that we end up getting from drops are ugly in their appearances (my least favourite being Athlon armour being my absolute least favourite yet I’ve got it 3 times in the past 7 packs I’ve bought).
Personally I’d have set it so you obtained the normal versions of armour and helmets via the packs but then you could spend req points to obtain the other paint schemes if you wished to do so…similar to reach in that you could obtain all the helmets and then further customise them if you wished to do so.
Now Forge is where the game makes a great impression form the looks alone. I’m an enthusiastic forger and love to build maps for my friends and share on the community. Having this introduced in Halo 3 with the Foundry and Sandbox maps was a dream come true for all of us and gave us the opportunity to be map designers just like the games creators and sharing them with other players online. This only evolved further with Halo Reach’s Forge World and later in Halo 4 showing a great step for those of us wanting to build fun and interesting maps for the community. However with the Master Chief Collection, we did get an evolution in a small way, with large canvases and scripting switches but the community aspect was sort of hurt with it’s not so great file-share set up. Hopefully with the update we get a file-share similar to that of halo 3 simply because it was simple, effective and very user friendly. I am also hoping that gametypes such as infection, King of the Hill, Race, Assault and Oddball / Griff-ball do comeback and that the new social playlist make the matches more fun rather than focusing on this whole E-SPORTS craze that is going around.
To sum up Halo 5 is good but it’s not the greatest halo ever made. It does well in some areas but falls tremendously short in others, the campaign and customisations being the 2 biggest in my opinion and I base a games greatness on it’s ability to deliver to everyone, not just a specific group of players. it feels too focused on the E-sports side and while forge is right around the corner; when the game was released it was evident that the game was really forced towards getting newer players interested in the series rather than trying to keep the older fans shown buy their lack of consideration towards the chief’s storyline and thrusting this new character onto us and expecting us to connect with him as we did with chief.
On the customisations side, having multiple armours that are the same model but just a different colour scheme seems lazy to me and could have been done a lot better in terms of how they are distributed to the community rather than bundling them in with req-packs all the time. There was plenty of opportunities to do so so why not is all I’m asking and it would add a sense of value to each armour piece rather than it feeling cheap.
This is why Halo 3 is still the greatest in my mind as it had a good balance towards multiplayer, story and forge when it was first released and offered something for everybody. Also it spawned the massive community sharing of maps, screenshot art, and various other fun aspects that we came to enjoy. It wasn’t perfect by all means but it offered a more social and fun side that halo 5 is unfortunately lacking at the moment. Hopefully Forge can rectify this in some way however for my voting.
Halo 3 on release got a 7/10 from me. Halo 5 on release fell just on a 5/10 simply because all it offered was the Campaign, Warzone and Arena competitive play. What hurts it most is how the Campaign’s story was handled and the Req system or rather the point of obtaining Spartan armour through the req system, if these were to be rectified the the game would be bumped up to a 6 with the added prospect of going higher when forge is released.
These are just my thought though and I hope that they don’t offend people but I do like to speak my mind on these matters when I can 