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> > My biggest thought on H5 multiplayer is that everything about it is designed to reward people with super fast reflexes and inhuman accuracy. Older Halos usually worked the same way, although the actual speed/accuracy ceilings were never as high as they are now. I’m sure the wider skill-gap is useful to the people who are HCS-bound, but to me it just makes the game feel like it’s too hard to be good at. I’m not saying that Halo shouldn’t reward speed and accuracy, but there was at least one earlier version of this game which managed to reward those things without over-rewarding them to the point where things like strategy and caution no longer even matter. To me that balance (H4) was the one that 343 should strive for.
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> > Clearly I’m in a minority on this point, but I’ll add this: Everyone who ever thought Halo 4 wasn’t competitive enough claimed that their argument was supported by the low multiplayer population. Well, I’m not claiming that H5’s multiplayer population is as low as H4’s, but it isn’t very big, and so I’ll ask: Is it any less likely that players leave a game that’s too hard to play as it is that they leave a game that’s too easy to play?
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> If you don’t mind me asking, what is so difficult about H5’s gameplay? I’m genuinely curious…
On the subject of H5 motion mechanics I would say that they offer a level of challenge somewhat beyond the challenge of Reach or H4 abilities. The abilities in those games were a mix of the physical (evade, thrust, jet pack) and the mental (armor lock, invisibility, promethean vision) - if a player excelled at controller manipulation, timing, dexterity, and so on, then they could excell with the physical abilities. But those games gave players other options - abilities that only required judgment for effective use. Halo 5 is 100% about speed, dexterity, aim, and timing. H5 abilities help the dexterous and fast player to put himself at the right spot in three-dimensional space in order to execute the shot, the melee, the charge, or the grenade throw, so if you have speed and accuracy going for you then Halo 5 can amplify their benefits. To put it another way, I really don’t think anybody has to be very smart to be good at H5 - they only have to be athletic. And that’s certainly no sin, and nothing very different than we’ve had with most of Halo - it just doesn’t happen to be a state of affairs that suits me.
On the subject of gun mechanics my opinions are on more subjective ground and I’m willing to hear anything anyone might say to contradict me, but: In sixteen years of Halo I’ve watched as weapon play has become steadily more difficult. Many will laugh at me when I say this but in my experience every generation of the game has made staple weapons harder to use. Some games have done this in obvious and known ways, such as the projectile BR from H3 or the DMR reticle bloom of Reach. In some cases the difficulty is added post-launch in the form of weapon nerfs - I’m thinking in particular of the first H4 weapon tune which changed the AR from a useful, all-purpose weapon into a useless steaming pile of automatic air rifle. The Halo 5 AR, by way of example, is a gun everyone seems to think is over-powered, and I’m not unaware of the reasons for that assessment, but using myself as an example, I don’t really care how much stopping power it has if I can’t aim it. People claim it has plenty of aim assist - some say too much. I say it has none. Worse than none. I can’t hit the broadside of a barn with that gun. I hate walking around with it because I know that if I have to use it that the odds of me being able to maintain any amount of control over it are next to nothing. To me that gun is a joke. The fact that my targets are jumping and leaping and thrusting and pounding and clambering in eight different directions simultaneously is not a help. And what is true of H5’s AR seems to be generally true across the spectrum of weapons: too difficult to aim. And again, I can acknowledge that there may be an element of age working against me here, and there almost definitely is an element of my attitude working against me since physical challenge is not something I value very highly in a game. But when I go back to H4 the weapons are slightly easier to use even to this day. Reach weapons are also still usable - something I put to the test fairly often. That says to me that age is not my only problem. That says to me that these guns are being designed to be harder to use by way of providing a wider skill gap (good for sweats) and more physical challenge to players (good for players who are not me).
The short version of all this is that, while I still wouldn’t call H5 a twitch shooter, it’s closer to the twitch mark than any other Halo has ever been, and by a wide margin. That’s a perfectly legitimate vision of what Halo can be, it just isn’t what I want it to be. I want a game that puts thought and intelligence on some kind of a footing, even if not an equal one, with speed and accuracy. Stupid players with crazy reflexes should not be able to just shoot their way out of bad tactical moves, and in this game they do that multiple times in a match. To me that’s very one-dimensional game design.
Sorry for the wall.
