Bungie, and you too 343, always opted for the Radar Option with the except of the Ranked MLG/HCS and SWAT playlists. But normal Ranked and Social always had Radar…until H5. When things went super downhill and you made the change to only tracking Sprinting/Spartan Abilities (and gunfire) and suddenly it was ambush and backslap city.
Why?
Because Halo has never ever EVER had the level of sound design needed to facilitate non-radar gametypes . The game simply does not provide enough accurate audio information to the player for that kind of gameplay. You’ll notice literally EVERY OTHER FPS that forgoes a radar system spends a ton of time getting the footsteps and audio cues right because that is literally the only thing players have to inform them of the enemy 99% of the time . Halo instead spends it’s audio “budget” (for lack of a better term) and the atmosphere and theatrics of a match rather than the info of a match, because the core gameplay was originally designed and built around that Motion Tracker - why waste audio resources on something that another game system will give them anyways?
Previous Halos were bad about the audio, too. But Infinite takes the cake - you legitimately cannot hear people directly behind you stomping around or even sprinting. This was true in the Flights too. With the shoddy Radar in Social, you have about .3 of a second of warning before a fight starts, and the ability to keep track of Friend/Foe in CQC is really bad (especially with no Collision to keep sides separated).
In Ranked? It’s ambush, backslap and confusion city.
I doubt you’re going to do some massive audio overhaul for Infinite. So instead;
- Social Modes need to have the 25m regular Motion Tracker back, or at least one that detects everything above walking pace.
- Ranked SoloQ/DuoQ needs to at least the 18m Tracker available. You can leave it out of the Open/Team Queue since that is supposed to be the coordinated/“hardcore” mode. But in SoloQ we at the very least need to be able to tell where our teammates are without directly looking at them.