My renewed love for Halo Infinite sadly died the day they decided to remove Last Spartan Standing after nearly 4 months straight, amid a season called “Lone Wolves”
I don’t see why they didn’t make the Social game fun classic Halo, then nerf Ranked to make it less wacky and more streamlined, with only certain maps and modes able to be played. They DIDN’T have to base the whole entire game around competitive, because Halo shouldn’t be competitive at its core. It should be a fun and wacky social party game first, competitive balance second, like Smash Bros. Smash still gets balance patches over time, but the fun aspect hasn’t changed.
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Ya, this is a good point. I was ruminating and actually came to this conclusion, too. It occurred to me that 343 overemphasized tuning, making each weapon fit a specific role, which forces you to think about picking up a certain weapon and use it a specific way. And this speaks to the rest of the game design, too.
Everything is designed for a specific style of play, ignoring the fact that the fun of Halo used to be how flexible every scenario was. Though different weapons and vehicles provided different flavors, you could pick up a weapon and use it in most situations to get a kill.
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My guess would be the focus on Halo being competitive instead of a fun party arena shooter. Halo Infinite lacks pretty much all the features that make legendary titles such as Halo 2, 3 and Reach fun.
It feels antisocial and sweaty instead of wacky and fun, pretty much no one uses voice and there’s no post game lobby to hang out in while you veto maps & party up.
It’s basically load into dev chosen game modes, complete challenges that don’t promote social play or team contribution, rinse and repeat. The devs haven’t added interesting things like Vidmaster Challenges or anything to promote community engagement. Not even simple things such as a screenshot or Machinima competition (not that that particular one is possible because of the lack of polished features to support it…).
There just isn’t really anything there to bring people together, Infinite comes off like a generic shooter instead of a Halo game full of community features, wacky weapons, fun physics, playable elites, dual wielding, creative tools and file share. Not to mention the fact they removed the old vehicle health system that was tied to the occupants and replaced it with a system that makes all vehicles feel like you can sneeze on them which in turn makes them turn red and dismantle themselves with poor visual effects…
But even then the vehicle maps are claustrophobic and not fun anyway, where’s something crazy like Sandtrap with mobile bases and large open areas for vehicles to zoom around?
What about a mode that turns the massive campaign map into something similar to Planetside 2 but with AI? Imagine zooming around with players and capturing territories and bases that have AI patrolling, that’s basically a multiplayer mode that can take full advantage of Halo’s sandbox!
There is seriously so much potential in Halo that is just blatantly untapped, Infinite unfortunately has this ability to make that so much more obvious with its focus on small map spartan only deathmatch.
I personally stopped playing Infinite shortly after the campaign released because it genuinely made me upset with the lack of vision and content.
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Only 3? Mine were split 50/50. It has been fun this week… until the times I got 4 land grab challenges queued up…
Multiplayer:
- Challenge system and store turned MP into an obsession with doing chores for cosmetics.
- Numerous layers of FOMO mechanics means you have to keep checking the game every day/week or you might miss something you want forever, tieing back to the first bullet
- All social elements have been stripped from the game
- Maps are all very similar, making the game feel very samey
- Sandbox has a number of annoying weapons that sacrifice effectiveness for ‘utility’. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea with longer kill times, but kill times so short that utility means nothing.
MP feels like you slog through games to ‘look good’ just so you can quite the game cause by then you’re sick of it.
Campaign:
- Sterile open world with little ‘going on’
- Same biome, interior segments are only come in 2 varieties
- Only one enemy faction. Sentinels and Endless buddied up with the Banished. Making every fight you v them.
- Sentinel and Endless factions underdeveloped
- Little immersion in actual game world. There’s like 3 activities recycled across the map. HVT’s just camp instead of doing anything useful. Marines are just mindless drones. Banished never try to retake bases.
- Low vehicle variety, and vehicles control terribly in the environment.
- Solution to just about everything in campaign is grappleshot.
- Lack of epic moments, making the campaign not terribly replayable, even once they add mission replay (i still can’t believe i have to say this)
- Same enemies + same equipment + same weapons available + same environments pretty much all the time makes the entire campaign feel well, the same.
- Co-op still not officially in the game.
- Story more interested in telling us cool things happened in the past, rather than have us do anything cool NOW.
Honestly h4 and h5’s campaigns sucked, but this game’s campaign just feels drab and dull. Yay chief’s back and he doesn’t talk too much, but its all talking to holograms in dark rooms.
The XP system is a huge reason I felt obligated to play a certain way every time I booted up. I HAVE to use a Sidekick, back hits, or whatever suboptimal method they suggest. I can’t win, that isn’t rewarded at all, I have to complete challenges. I have to do this because despite all their talk of accessible battle passes they use limited events to hide the few free cosmetics behind FOMO, even non-event cosmetics get “vaulted”. I will never get CQC and Hazop shoulders because even though I bought the Reach Battle Pass they kept these Reach armour pieces from me in favour of “challenge swaps” to mend the broken, stupid challenge system. I hate thinking about the game and all the positive reviews I gave because they spit in our mouths every update with less content and more fees.
Well:
No replayable campaign missions
No classic maps
No Firefight, Warzone, Infection, Forge, or any of the general gametypes that 343i has known for years that the community likes and wants
No interesting new gametypes (I don’t mean a BR mode, I never had high hopes for that)
No objectives-only playlist besides dedicated one-offs like Land Grab
They significantly expanded the potential depth of customization and then made basically all of it unattainable outside of the week they’re released
I still stick around just because the books make me nostalgic, but Halo Infinite’s launch was worse than Halo 5’s and they haven’t fixed as much in the year following the former’s release as they did with the latter. Hecc, with Halo 5, they actually did a decent job of listening and started adding stuff people wanted after a while.
Of course, those people still whinged, because more than half the Halo community just demands H2 remakes until the end of time, so eventually, 343i stopped listening to fans and started listening to sponsors and eSports teams. So here we are.
Until you play on Behemoth or Launch Site for the 3rd time in a row.