How is killing Cortana offscreen and replacing her with Offensive Bias as the evil AI overlord an improvement? That just means I have no qualms killing it, it’s just another light bulb to smash, just like Atriox is just another Brute who needs to go. That’s making the story more generic: not less.
If people, genuinely, hated Halo 5 because “OMG AI go mad been done to death. AI have never been part of Halo.”. Why are you all suddenly “OMG Offensive Bias the AI who betrayed his Creators and has mastery over Forerunner Technology has returned?”. It’s utter hypocrisy and if you’re looking for originality the Banished/Endless shouldn’t be doing it for you.
Plus, I am just throwing it out there. But did you all really think Chief was going to kill Cortana after Halo 5? You didn’t think, “well this is Frozen” there’s obviously going to be a heel turn here so Chief saves her like he promised in Halo 4 and Logic Plague, Gravemind, Anti Flood robots etc etc.
Instead it’s like, yeah you failed. But don’t feel too bad we’ve got this new model with all the glitches sorted. The Weapon isn’t Cortana and it will be absurd if they continue trying to have their cake and eat it with that.
Campaign should have stayed linear but that is to tough and expensive now a days… Coming up with at least 10 distinctive missions and levels along with cutscenes…when you can make a open map with recycled environments … You know back in the day it was like hey we made these three multiplayer maps they are only $10 dlc… Now it is like hey check out these cat ears and emblens $10… And sadly it works and they rake it in.
I honestly think Halo Infinite has one of the best campaigns. Halo CE and Reach have always had a special place in my heart, Halo 2 has really cool world building and some awesome locals but it’s not a polished game by comparison and it lost a lot of what made Halo CE play so well.
Halo Reach has my favorite story, Halo Infinite has my favorite gameplay and I think the open world of Halo Infinite was just awesome. I still think they can improve upon Halo infinites core but damn I loved the whole package overall.
Personally, campaign wise my ranking on the titles are:
Masterpieces: Halo 2 / Halo 3 ODST
Great: Halo CE
Good: Halo 3 / Halo Reach
Bad: Halo 4
Terrible: Halo 5 / Halo Infinite
I did not enjoy Infinite story at all. We were introduced previously to an all consuming and very smart organism that had the possibility to shapeshift and learn to use very advance technologies in a short period of time and are now told that the endless are much more dangerous than the flood despite not explaining why they are (surviving an halo array firing does not make it necessary dangerous)
The story poorly introduce the villains and did not bring much development to them, as a result you don’t feel anything from killing them. The Prophet regret from H2 is a decent example of how to introduce a temporary villain to the story in an interesting way:
The character accidently discover the human Home World and kick over the anthill before running away. The character then request support from one of the main antagonist (truth and mercy) which decline in order to increase their own power over the covenant. Meanwhile you are tasking to kill the character in order to cripple the covenant forces. The character overall existence and death (even as secondary as he was) bring a lot to the story
Gameplay wise, the game is about shooting aliens. Doing it for several hours in the same environment can be very repetitive and tiring, one of the trick bungie used back then to prevent a negative experience was to fight in different biomes (when re-using the same maps, they would reskin them and fight a different faction(e.g. H3 The Storm / Floodgate)). Another problem the gameplay have is the boss battles: they force you to only rely on the grapeshot and some weapons (e.g. plasma grenade / needler / sentinel beam) and are very unfair to fight in higher difficulty (they can break distance in half a second and 1 shot you). One way to make it much more fair and interesting would be to introduce the repulsor in the campaign and reduce the chieftains thruster speed (instead of taking half a second for the chieftain to break distance change it to 2 or 3 seconds)
To summarize, the reason i personally disliked the game and probably why others did as well, was the way the story introduced its content and characters, as well as the repetitive biomes and the unforgiving bosses. I believe if the game went for smaller biomes (maybe 2 or 3 island size) instead of 1 large and empty map the game would have been better despite its flaws
Halo Infinites Campaign was pretty solid, but I do find Ensharum was disappointing, the Blademaster was the only enemy that had my interest, but overall, the campaign was fun, enjoyed the open world and parts of some missions got me shocked & a bit teary eyed at parts
Whenever I see a discussion such as this, I feel like 343 needs to put more marketing towards the fact that Halo Infinite’s story so far is just PART 1 OF 3 we are going to have in the main narrative.
I see a lot of hate for the Halo 5 campaign, I throughly enjoyed it. Can’t say I’ve disliked any Halo campaign to date. Infinite wasn’t bad, but it just felt kind of “eh” to me. Repetitive environments and a lack of any stages feeling epic like so many other Halo titles were great at is what brought it down for me.
Gameplay is about the only thing solid about it, and the grapple shot kinda gimps the level exploration that we had in previous games. No skill jumps, no need for ground vehicles; just if you want to go somewhere it’s a casual spam of the bumper.
The only good characters in this are Atriox and John really. Cor2na and Brohammer are just annoying and need to learn when to shut up. On top of that we get some Marvel Movie tier dialogue from the former and the latter consists of grunts, cringes, and despair monologues.
The world is all one giant space-Washington with no biodiversity like what we had before, and the inhabitants aren’t doing much outside just standing around waiting for the player to show up.
Why not just properly introduce us to Atriox? Or make Escharum actually a good villain to properly develop the banished? You’re intro to a faction shouldn’t be a cartoony villain.
Who seem boring and contrived. “For fearsome than the flood” “immune to halos”, and all they are is some skimmers who die to any gun ever and a monologuing lady who we kill with a sentine beam.
They aren’t built up enough to make us care.
A legendary ending only thing, and perhaps the only interesting thing infinite does.
Halo Wars 2 was the introduction to The Banished.
They had already been fleshed out in three separate stories that were available in that game.
And you want Escharum to be a more simple villain. Otherwise he could potentially outshine the actual main villain of the game and make the acts that followed be weaker than the one that came before.
Skimmers aren’t Xanalyn.
They are a separate species known as the Gasgira.
Legendary Endings always did something in Halo games… except for Halo 2 and Reach. Usually they were easter-eggs or extra reward scenes. Halo 3, ODST, and Halo 5 did bonus scenes that helped reach the narrative around to the next chapter.
From the basis that I have replayed the campaign in multiple occasions and I have already dedicated multiple days of active playtime on the campaign. There doesn’t exist any other option that I do enjoy campaign. Even if the open world does feature a single biome, the biome to still offer a sufficient degree of complexity and variation to keep the world interesting. The diversity is instead seen in the smal details like the topography, landscape and possible scars in it.
I am not sure how they could be worse than the Flood. It’s odd that they repeat this line on multiple occasions.
If they are Precursors then they’re just the Flood by another name. We already know the Gravemind has the knowledge and access to the Star Roads. Why would the Precursors in this form be more dangerous?
If Joe really has made them like the Guardians from Destiny where they have magic powers and can’t be killed because they respawn. There’s still a limited number of them and we can physically kill them in a conventional fight. Whereas any flood can destroy a civilisation and become its own army. They’d still have to physically beat whatever they’re fighting.
If they have a time machine, or just superior technology to the Forerunners, well that’s their technology. Not them. Give the Flood a time machine and they would be dangerous.
Like the Flood aren’t dangerous because individual combat forms or even Pure Forms are overwhelmingly powerful. They don’t need to be. It’s the nature of the threat that makes it overwhelming. What we see of the Harbinger is a very conventional alien species which should be very easy to beat.
For example if the Flood escaped during the campaign they would have killed all the Banished and UNSC on the ring within a few days. The Harbinger hasn’t done that. So they aren’t as dangerous.
That or this is some elaborate misdirect that we think the Endless are being released when actually it’s the Flood.
The pop in is absolutely egregious. I hated using the banshee or wasp due to the hundreds of the exact same tree popping in constantly. The graphics are just not good in this game.
