Main Takeaways:
- The issues with Warzone are just as bad as they ever were, but now they infect BTB
- Weapons feel better than the first flight, but often lack impact
- Real-time feedback (hit markers, targeting for thrown items) feels iffy.
Warzone was never as much fun as it should have been, and that can be chalked up to a number of things. Huge maps with nothing in them but distances to run, ever-increasing respawn times, a slow and clunky progression system, and teams too large for any one person to feel like they had any real impact on the game. Infinite BTB feels like that- no impact from individual actions, not enough vehicles or power weapons to cut loose and have fun. I’ll skim over how terrible I found the objective game types (since apparently I’m the only person who doesn’t enjoy rushing the same two focal points on a map and bashing my brains against a brick wall when I could just be playing Slayer and using the whole map).
To me, as much as I love Halo and BTB, I have never wanted to stop playing more than this flight. I could try to articulate it and describe everything wrong with this approach to BTB, but I’m sure someone has done it better elsewhere and no one cares what I say here anyway. The simple fact of the matter is, I didn’t have fun- something I’ve almost always been able to have in Halo.
It’s detrimental to fun to have a minute of walking around a canyon, hacking a door, getting just the tools you need, then diving into a three-second engagement that you lost because the other side had one more assault rifle than you- and having to start the process all over again. It’s detrimental to fun to drop in one tank thirty seconds before the end of a match instead of letting people roll with it throughout the game. It’s detrimental to fun to have giant battlefields if you’re going to focus all the attention on one flag or three little dots a two-minute sprint from where you spawn. It’s detrimental to fun to have a team so large that you can’t even feel like you’re helping unless you’re camping the same objective as three other guys. It’s detrimental to fun to have a respawn timer take you out of the game when you could, at the very least, be dropped right back in and get back to playing. It’s just not fun.
Warzone had a shelf life of around a year and a half before people realized it just wasn’t fun. Given that we’ve learned this lesson once before, I believe it will be faster now- and without the commitment of having paid for it, I feel that BTB in Infinite has a year, tops, without some major redesigns with fun, active game play, and impactfulness in mind.