343 have done an outstanding job, from the weapons to the artstyle and the holy halo music returning but as expected from the pc dedicated inside Infinite blogpost, giving pc players a 1st class experience meant pushing Xbox players to 2nd class or below that.
Halo Infinite has the most options in a console game I’ve ever seen but the most important ones like disable crossplay and input based matchmaking aren’t there nor has 343 ever mentioned such options. The closest thing to that is forced input based matchmaking in ranked. This is a trend in Xbox games. Gears 5 also removed the option to disable crossplay. Controller players will have to settle for sweating in ranked or being swatted by k&m in socials.
I’ve enjoyed the game for basically everything except the heavily reduced aim assist leaving experienced controller players severely disadvantaged against even the weakest k&m player and bots which are obviously based on k&m precision/movement. The fact that there’s no option to disable aim assist is quite telling. It’s almost like it doesn’t exist. There’s certainly bullet magnetism that’s enabled for all players but there’s no actual assistance to aiming on controller. For the franchise that perfected the console shooter it’s disappointing they’ve gone in this direction.
Halo Infinite won’t retain casual console players this way since they’ll go to a game that gives them a fair chance but truthfully that doesn’t matter anymore. With Apex, Respawn is forced to care about console players because playstation players add to make up the majority of the player base but an exclusive like Halo will heavily skew towards pc. I get that Xbox hasn’t been doing hot lately but abandoning the community is pretty harsh.
Don’t assume this only affects the multiplayer either. If you’ve had a horrible time aiming here expect to have a horrible time in Heroic or above campaign with Halo 5 levels of annoying ai bullet magnetism. I’m more of a Heroic/Legendary campaign person but I’ve been playing Halo since CE so I can hold my own at least averagely on any multiplayer from H3 onwards. Just to be sure I played a match of H3 mcc and won easily. While I could easily beat ODSTs/Spartan bots and get 1st/2nd place it wasn’t fun aiming for a single second while doing so and once they turned on pvp I was basically target practice.
Now there’s obviously going to be the git gud community replying but this isn’t the standard aiming for the Halo franchise so it doesn’t make sense to use that argument. It’s like telling Banjo Kazooie players to git gud at Nuts & Bolts. This has a history of not working for Halo when you look at Halo 5 anyway. Moreover, Microsoft has been heavily promoting accessibility so it’s even stranger to see them push in this direction.