I’ve been around Halo since CE and the OG Xbox were released back in 2001 I’ve played Halo casually and I’ve played competitively. I’ve poured thousands of hours into all of these titles. And that’s no exaggeration, on this account for JUST Halo 5 I have close to 3000 hours(mostly Team Arena). If you include my secondary accounts that I used when playing with friends, I’m in the ballpark of around 4500 - 5000 hours, in just Halo 5 alone. I’m not just a multiplayer junkie either, I’ve played through all of the campaigns multiple times, I own most of the novels and the ones I don’t own I’ve borrowed from my close friend’s collection and I have way to many collectables. I’m a Halo fan. Die hard. (Minus Halo Wars if I’m being 100% transparent with all of you, not a big RTS guy tbh)
My point with the brief intro is to help you understand the experience that I have with this franchise. My hope is that my experience listed above, can properly convey my thoughts and feelings on Halo Infinite below.
In a nutshell, aiming on a controller in Halo Infinite is awful. Like, the worst I’ve ever experienced in any FPS title I’ve ever played awful. Worse than Halo 5’s. And H5’s was bad. So bad that 343 had pushed multiple updates out to attempt to fix it but the issue kept coming back. As most of you might have heard, the big issue was “Heavy Aim”. Now while that is the primary issue, it wasn’t the only one with aiming in H5. Other issues were the inconsistency with aim acceleration, specifically with diagonals, inconsistency with dead zones on sticks, and inconsistency with aim assist due to aim being somehow tied to the server. Now the issues with acceleration and dead zones is a pretty straight forward explanation, but the aim assist being tied to the server was a different kind of animal. Some examples would be:
-Not being able to actually put your cross hair on an enemy. Think of trying to push 2 magnets together with opposite sides.
-Reticule randomly doing a windmill when engaged with an enemy. Most common after enemies shields are popped. This isn’t your typical bad aim windmill, this is much tighter and faster than that.
-Aim Assist failing altogether. Rare, but occasionally happens.
These same issues are what I’m seeing in Infinite. They’re much more pronounced in this title though, compared to H5. 343i, the community has given you feedback on the aiming issues pretty consistently over the almost 6 years that H5 has been out. How are these issues in a brand new game, with a brand new engine, despite all of this feedback? I’m all for toning down aim assist and magnetism, balancing the field vs mnk, widening the skill gap etc. But this isn’t just toning down the AA , these are game breaking issues/bugs we’ve been seeing and communicating about since 2015. Why is it that no other AAA titles have these difficulties at this kind of level, over this period of time, with easily the most fundamental mechanic in any and all FPS titles?
I want to see this game succeed as much as any of you. I want to see a thriving player base, insane forge creations by the community, wild HCS tournaments that rival CSGO or League. I’m ecstatic about all that the game has to offer and even more excited to share it with my friends. Open world campaign, free to play multiplayer, seasons passes, custom AI, I could go on and on. But unless these aiming issues in Infinite get resolved before launch, my guess is that we’re all going to be in the same exact situation as H5 and we’ll all just be waiting for Halo Infinite 2’s first flight 6 years from now.