Having played both technical flights, these are some of my thoughts:
- Time-to-kill overall still feels slightly too fast, with non-pinpoint primary weapons like the Sidekick and AR still feeling ‘melty’ (and even the Commando). Some of the spawns exaccerbate this, but without spawn protection (as it should be) the ability to be melted off your spawn with weapon archetypes not the BR, sets a precedent for very spammy gameplay and I was hoping this would be avoided in Infinite. Adding something like ‘bloom’ and less sticky-aim on the Sidekick doesn’t alleviate this spam if rushing and lucky spreads allow you more often-than-not, to be able to sidestep the intended rhythm and cadence of the weapon’s intent. I don’t think the solution to this is to change how many shots these weapons take to kill but instead changing the fire-rate if applicable and then tuning the bloom (or removal of it) accordingly. - I don’t believe sprint is necessary in this game, given the way it has been tuned to be largely innoffensive and hardly advantageous. This creates a negative association with it, in that it’s only use is to get away from engagements and cheat poor-positioning and decisions such that when you are on the recieving end of a player sprinting it is often only viewed as ‘annoying’ and ‘frusterating’. With the advent of so many people online such as content creators stepping into previous Halos for the first time and documenting their ‘blind’ experiences–I think it’s very telling that many of the experienced hobbyists do not find it jarring or miss that feature in the original games and don’t find it dated because the game was built around this inherent limitation and from any fan’s perspective was never seen as a limitation or detriment because you have the ability to traverse the map at a static rate and it allowed for fair fights and the ability to always be able to multi-task and always be able to engage in any gameplay regardless of what you were doing, input-wise, in a match. This needs to be embraced and not wasting development time trying to appease or ‘check a box’ for a demographic that, if shown a Halo game working as intended without it, would just as likely embrace it and not complain about it not being there. These are people that have false expectations going into a Halo game and then foist them on as if every game is an amalgam of another and must be this arbitrary ubiquotous ‘soup’ of similar gameplay. Halo should embrace the way it was, lest you loose the uniqueness of it to begin with. - With that said, I feel this is equally true for clamber. It only muddies combat and traversal engagements and I’d like to see it only be reserved for something like the Grappleshot as an inactive toggle that comes into effect only when you pick up that equipment. Embrace crouch/precision jumping, which is at the core of Halo, and create a training mode in the Academy to put players through traversal paces in order for them to understand the importance and the versatility of crouch jumping and being able to always, with no delay interact with their sandbox environment. - To conlude with movement, I feel these things are why the radar feels so bad–even with the changes having been made two it in the interim. Because of the inconsistent rate of movement speed because of sprint, and I would imagine a combination of the rate at which the radar updates tied to the tick-rate as well as it’s range being so small for whatever reason–players just ‘appear’ extremely close to you and you can simply never react based on the radar–it’s largely irrelevant. Players are just up on you immediately before it registers in the radar in any sort of reactive way. Throughout the flight, I ended up ignoring it entirely (as it was getting me killed or second guess deaths/positioning) and relied largely on audio cues and forced me to play much more cautiously. I don’t believe this was the intent of radar and I’d like to see it tuned more like Halo 2-Reach.I may have more thoughts I will add over the week but these are my initial critiques I’ve marinated on since the initial flight and gauging the communities reactions as well. I do have quite a few positive take-aways and I do believe the core of Infinite is a fun ‘Halo’ game but too many perplexing decisions or cut-corners on design philosophy are making this experience less than stellar as to be expected.
(Added as a comment due to word limit)
- I don’t know if these are definitely bugs (I’ve seen mention of grenade/shot desync as well as bullet registration issues) but I encountered a lot of what I’d call ‘fluke’ grenade kills, whiffed melees and rubberbanded deaths from shots behind the wall. This worries me that the damage modeling in place is the kind that will allow for those with the worst connection in any given lobby to have an inherent advantage in their kill window syncing back to the host in a way that enables them to ‘shoot through walls’. I definitely experienced these much more commonly than I would have imagined from a steady connection perspective and I’m worried the damage modeling and tick-rate may have something to do with why actions can feel inconsistent during MP. - I don’t think ‘bloom’ is the solution to culling power and keeping weapon archetypes in check. It played out poorly in Halo: Reach and every Halo since then and I don’t understand why not tuning the weapons with the appropriate fire-rate and lowest time-to-kill in mind isn’t the go-to methodology for weapons like the Sidekick and Sniper. - I don’t think maps like Behemoth should have Shock Rifles and Ravagers in such out of the way spawn racks. It makes it a chore and often is disorientating enough to get your bearings to find a weapon station that you will often quickly put yourself out of position and get killed trying to go for them at any point in the match. I felt Fragmentation avoided this by having multiple of these racks, in close proximity, in each of the bases and then in opportune locations leaving said bases such that this didn’t become any issue gearing up for ranged encounters. I also just think it hurts the flow of a map like Behemoth where it’s largely ‘No Man’s Land’ out in the open and you cannot afford to leave a large structure without something such as a Commando (1 spawn location) or one of the medium-long range precision/splash weapons. - Aiming with controller still feels quite a bit off with certain weapons and in general, this is the first Halo I find I really need to jack up the sensitivity (and varying sensititivies based on axis) and mess with certain analog deadzones and accelerations to find a sweet spot. - Aesthetically I don’t believe the Commando both fits or looks ‘cool’ in a Halo game. The same can be said for some of the sounds of the Covenant weapons (mainly the Plasma Pistol and Needler not quite sounding archetypically like they should and more like generic future energy-based weapons or silenced advanced weapons from a Call of Duty and are often grating to hear (Commando). Don’t fix what isn’t broken, and I feel design language and audio work is still not consistent enough–the identity of Halo is something 343 has been marketing and harkening back to a return to ‘form’ not just old classic sounds/visuals for the sake of it–there is a reason people enjoyed these stylings in the past and I think it should be fully embraced instead of trying to shoehorn in modern reimaginations that often don’t land with the community. - I don’t think the outlines are helping as much as 343 likes to say they are. Passing this off as an ‘accessibility feature’ when it clearly isn’t and in some cases can do the opposite of providing accessibility for visually impaired players is really quite baffling. I feel like 343 consistently is trying to see what buttons they can push, and get away with in regards to respecting the player and constantly stating this intent, and then making nonsensical decisions (such as the radar from the previous flight) that actively do not provide accessibility and in-turn, get in the way of helping the player. You are now compromising the aesthetic and feel of Halo multiplayer and I find this quite ironic given that they said they want player agency in their cosmetics to be able to be seen better in Infinite, but all I see are overly outlined, poorly-aliased Spartan silouettes in goofy brash neon colors that change the visual styling of Halo to be much more cartoony and aping other trendy competitive shooters of the time. Again, bastardizing and robbing Halo of it’s identity of something that has worked and wasn’t ever an issue to begin with. - I don’t like how late and often difficult it is to procure/be-aware of heavier ‘end-game’ vehicles coming into a BTB match. It sucks a lot of the excitment and expectations out of the match and shifts the reliance on vehicle play less and less over time.
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> 2533274799664485;1:
> Having played both technical flights, these are some of my thoughts:
>
>
> - Time-to-kill overall still feels slightly too fast, with non-pinpoint primary weapons like the Sidekick and AR still feeling ‘melty’ (and even the Commando). Some of the spawns exaccerbate this, but without spawn protection (as it should be) the ability to be melted off your spawn with weapon archetypes not the BR, sets a precedent for very spammy gameplay and I was hoping this would be avoided in Infinite. Adding something like ‘bloom’ and less sticky-aim on the Sidekick doesn’t alleviate this spam if rushing and lucky spreads allow you more often-than-not, to be able to sidestep the intended rhythm and cadence of the weapon’s intent. I don’t think the solution to this is to change how many shots these weapons take to kill but instead changing the fire-rate if applicable and then tuning the bloom (or removal of it) accordingly. - I don’t believe sprint is necessary in this game, given the way it has been tuned to be largely innoffensive and hardly advantageous. This creates a negative association with it, in that it’s only use is to get away from engagements and cheat poor-positioning and decisions such that when you are on the recieving end of a player sprinting it is often only viewed as ‘annoying’ and ‘frusterating’. With the advent of so many people online such as content creators stepping into previous Halos for the first time and documenting their ‘blind’ experiences–I think it’s very telling that many of the experienced hobbyists do not find it jarring or miss that feature in the original games and don’t find it dated because the game was built around this inherent limitation and from any fan’s perspective was never seen as a limitation or detriment because you have the ability to traverse the map at a static rate and it allowed for fair fights and the ability to always be able to multi-task and always be able to engage in any gameplay regardless of what you were doing, input-wise, in a match. This needs to be embraced and not wasting development time trying to appease or ‘check a box’ for a demographic that, if shown a Halo game working as intended without it, would just as likely embrace it and not complain about it not being there. These are people that have false expectations going into a Halo game and then foist them on as if every game is an amalgam of another and must be this arbitrary ubiquotous ‘soup’ of similar gameplay. Halo should embrace the way it was, lest you loose the uniqueness of it to begin with. - With that said, I feel this is equally true for clamber. It only muddies combat and traversal engagements and I’d like to see it only be reserved for something like the Grappleshot as an inactive toggle that comes into effect only when you pick up that equipment. Embrace crouch/precision jumping, which is at the core of Halo, and create a training mode in the Academy to put players through traversal paces in order for them to understand the importance and the versatility of crouch jumping and being able to always, with no delay interact with their sandbox environment. - To conlude with movement, I feel these things are why the radar feels so bad–even with the changes having been made two it in the interim. Because of the inconsistent rate of movement speed because of sprint, and I would imagine a combination of the rate at which the radar updates tied to the tick-rate as well as it’s range being so small for whatever reason–players just ‘appear’ extremely close to you and you can simply never react based on the radar–it’s largely irrelevant. Players are just up on you immediately before it registers in the radar in any sort of reactive way. Throughout the flight, I ended up ignoring it entirely (as it was getting me killed or second guess deaths/positioning) and relied largely on audio cues and forced me to play much more cautiously. I don’t believe this was the intent of radar and I’d like to see it tuned more like Halo 2-Reach.I may have more thoughts I will add over the week but these are my initial critiques I’ve marinated on since the initial flight and gauging the communities reactions as well. I do have quite a few positive take-aways and I do believe the core of Infinite is a fun ‘Halo’ game but too many perplexing decisions or cut-corners on design philosophy are making this experience less than stellar as to be expected.
The amount of noobs/average players that claim sprint and slide are “useless” is just insane lmao… it’s so crazy.
One final thing to add, I think the UI is basically atrocious in the menus. There is a lot of wasted neutral space, perplexing scroll dialogs, poor-framing and non-sensical drilling into certain stats/menus for the sake of preserving said framing.
> 2533274799664485;4:
> One final thing to add, I think the UI is basically atrocious in the menus. There is a lot of wasted neutral space, perplexing scroll dialogs, poor-framing and non-sensical drilling into certain stats/menus for the sake of preserving said framing.
oh yeah, it has some really bad menus, I think most everyone agrees on that. Maybe it was just a functional presentation menu and not what they’re launching with. But if it’s what they planned to launch with, I hope they realize hardly anyone is even neutral on it