So far I’m loving the game. The campaign had me WAY more interested than Halo 4’s, even if Warden did get a bit repetitive. The cliffhanger is even more annoying than Halo 2’s, though. It feels like the story just got cut in half, like with all the movie series doing “The Last Movie: PART 1!” and “The last Movie: PART 2!”.
Multiplayer has been very fun for me. I like the default armor abilities, the sprint, the boosters, ledge climbing, all of it. It makes the game much more mobile, and makes more sense. Spartans were never meant to be giant walking tanks with no mobility. The worst problems have been a few server hiccups resulting in me having to wait a few minutes for things to resolve.
A couple things I actually take issue with:
1) The placement system for arena ranks. You do your 10 placement matches before you get ranked, which is fine, but after 10 matches of Swat, in which I lost probably 2 or 3, it put me at Onyx. So, without doing ANYTHING other than my placement matches, I am effectively at the highest rank, barring the lucky few who get “Champion” by having the an MMR in the top 200 for the entire playlist.
The highest rank should be something you HAVE to work for. I don’t think the placement system should put you that high. I think it should put the best performers at Gold or Platinum at best. Let even the best players work their way through Diamond and into Onyx. Heck, I’d almost rather have them not do placement matches and just start everyone at Bronze, it would work itself out in the coming weeks anyway.
Like I said, I’m having fun still, but I don’t have much to work toward in terms of the arena system because the placement system put me at the top after an hour of matchmaking.
2) Missing Content. I understand the reasoning for delaying Forge at the very least. They want to ensure they do it right and give us a quality Forge rather than a rushed mess to meet the release date of the game. On one hand I’m glad they’re making sure to put the time they need into Forge, and presumably other features like the missing gametypes [Oddball, KotH, Infection, etc] and game variant options, but on the other hand, with so many gametypes missing, and Forge, which is a HUGE deal to me, I feel that they should have delayed the release of the game so it was all present at launch.
Forge and many of the missing game variants are the types of content that more casual players enjoy. Oftentimes these are the kinds of games that require an active community to find players for, as this is the nature of custom games and maps. Since this stuff is all delayed ~2 months if its not delayed further, I am very worried that the game’s population and hype will die down before we get that patch. If I have trouble finding people to play custom maps and game variants with because 343 delayed the release of those features and people already moved on to other games, I’m going to be very disappointed.