Halo 5 is fun, but the networking with the game is really bad. I know some of you may have not of had any problems, but I am having all sorts of issues with the game and so are my friends.
Issue #1 - No leaving match making
When you are searching for a match there is no way to back out. The only way to back out is to turn off your Xbox or quit. This is not good design. I know it may of been an oversight but it’s bad when there is no way to abort a search.
Issue #2 - Stuck in loading screen
When you finally find a game, you think it’s time to play. Then someone leaves and it stops and starts looking for another player, but it never finds a player. It becomes stuck at this screen and never goes into the game. Since there is no way to back out from here other than turn your system off, or quit, you have to wait for it to error out. This takes about 2-4 minutes.
Issue #3 - Not joining a game with party
Halo is all about playing with your friends. I can’t do that. I join my friends in party chat, then we join each other in a fire team. We click to start finding people to play against. Next thing I know I am still in a loading screen and my friends are playing the game with out me. It even found another person to replace me. So it’s not like I dropped or got DC’ed. It just boots me and find another. We all can play solo and be fine, but as soon as we party up we start to have more and more issues.
Issue #4 - Intermissions
Intermissions are very long. That’s not the point though. When people leave during this time, it’s fine but the networking required to find other to fill empty slots is not. 90% of the time it just freezes and never finds other to play with. Then we have to wait for the error and then try and join a new game again.
Issues #5 - Spectator mode
Cool idea, bad follow through. The service it self runs great. But, it freezes up and pauses what you are watching then it never auto plays when it’s done buffering or whatever it’s doing and it once again just sits there doing nothing. I understand it needs to be on a timed delay but the issue is with it never auto playing once you catch up.
Overall, networking issues aside, Halo 5 is a lot of fun. I enjoy the fast paced combat and new breakout mode. It just sucks that the networking issues with the game force it to be so bad. I hope whoever is working on the networking side for 343 is replaced or they bring in someone who can correct the ship because as it is now, if 343 has another issues like they did with The MCC, Microsoft may be finding another team to work on Halo for them.
TLDR; Gameplay - good, Networking - bad, very bad.
