Let me start by saying that I’ve been a huge Halo fan since CE and I’ve loved all the time I’ve spent with each game. I’ll also say that Halo 5 was, while at times not perfect, overall a fun experience that I committed about 4 years to. But priorities shift with getting older, increasing family life, and increasing career goals.
I accomplished just about everything I wanted in my Halo 5 career. My wife got me the Halo 5 console upon release…I hit 152 rank…I got my killionaire…I got my unfrigg…I got my perfection…had some great memorable warzone comebacks…and so on. With the onset of warzone turbo the other week, I thought I’d go out with a bang, by going through my entire req collection.
Now, Halo 5 in 2020 was starting to get a little tougher for someone that plays solo and without a mic 99% of the time (Having a wife and baby doesn’t lend itself well to being able to sit on the couch uninterrupted for very long while playing with a team). Warzone (my favorite mode) became sweatzone all the damn time. It’s actually amazing to compare the fact that while playing solo, I haven’t heard another player’s voice in Halo 5 in years. Blows my mind. In Halo 2 you couldn’t go a minute without hearing call outs/fighting/music/joking/etc. It truly was a social time in Halo’s life. Anyway, figured I would go out with the sheer chaos and fun of turbo. My God was I wrong. Again, running solo in 2020 when it’s mostly hardcore players left was -Yoinking!- miserable and the complete opposite of fun…
I played 40 warzone turbo games. I went 16-24 in those 40 games. They were mostly all blowouts one way or another, with only 7 of those games finishing with 1000-800 or closer. I know it’s turbo…but it was horrible, it was like playing on LASO. With all my top tier vehicles like Helios, Hannibals, Onis, etc. I couldn’t even get killing sprees before being destroyed. I’d equip legendary weapons with O/S and get chewed up as soon as leaving the base. I’d crouch walk into enemy bases with banes and multiple times would get killed by enemies in camo who must have been using Promethean vision for -Yoink- sake. I’d get matched against the same stacked teams multiple times in a row. Matched against Nas’ team on Sanctum, knowing what would happen and just hoping to get a kill or two on him just to get something out of it. Nah, we got cored before reaching 200 points (bare in mind, you get 75 boss points by the 2 minute mark on that map…)
Two of the last games were the worst. Arc map, other team gets garage and is pounding us pretty hard, had us triple capped at one point. Got our base back but every time u even walk onto the top of the armory you get sniped. I end up taking an ad Vic into the garage and kill like 6 people in the process of capping it single handedly. We take the legendary boss and even manage a triple cap. After being down a few hundred points all game we also kill a few more bosses and finally manage to pull ahead around the 950 mark. They get their base back, but we’re still winning with a two base cap. What happened next? If you said the other team would outslay the -Yoink- out of us and win comfortably you would be right. W…T…F
The last game was on stormbreak. We somehow managed to cap fortress and controlled both bases all game long. But the other team was so far better than us, it felt like WE were the ones pinned down all game. Seriously, in that entire game our team LITERALLY killed only ONE boss!!! Besides our 2 min, the other team killed every single boss and beat us on points by the time the 16 min hunters came out. Again, we controlled BOTH BASES all game. W…T…F
I just wanted to break my controller at that point.
Having had time to reflect now, I’m better off with my Halo 5 retirement. I have more time for more important real world stuff now. But I am looking forward to getting back in the battlefield for Infinite. Halo 5 provided me countless hours of fun…but it’s finally time to say goodbye. It wasn’t the farewell that I was hoping for…but it’s not about the battle, it’s about the war. And I feel like a worthy veteran Spartan …waiting on the next war…
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