To be fair, I am not an awesome Halo player. I love Halo, and have played every Halo since Halo 3 onine (though I didn’t get a 360 until late in the Halo3 lifespan). I have even played through Halo 1 and 2 campaigns prior to the MCC. However, I am not liking the beta overall. There are things I like. Some people have complained about the announcer callouts, and the superweapon icons. I actually think those are fine, and they add to the experience. Let’s face it, a good portion of the time people play without mics (myself included at times), so this actually helps the game play communication. However, overall the beta just feels weird. The ADS just feels odd to me. Because of the ADS I keep wanting to play Halo 5 like Battlefield 4 or (egads) COD. However Halo does not play like either of them, it is a twitch shooter at heart and it just feels “wrong”. The over all balance seems off. I throw grenades that seem to barely harm the opposing team yet seem to die from grenades that are yards away. Something feels off to me. Although the armor abilities of Reach and Halo 4 were interesting, I can’t help but feel that Halo needs to move back towards the Halo 3 gameplay and not worry about try to mimic other modern shooters. Halo has always been it’s own genre, and doesn’t need to copy other types of shooters. Halo invented the 3D shooter on the console, and it needs to return to it’s roots, and not “modernize”.
To compound the issue, as a self proclaimed “not very good” player, the beta matchmaking is horrendous. I am guessing (or more likely hoping) that since this is a beta that skills based matchmaking is not enabled. Because if it is, it is horribly, horribly broken. I keep getting into matches were I am completely outmatched. Since the MCC matchmaking is a complete failure, I really hope this can be fixed since at the moment after playing the Halo 5 beta I have little interest in purchasing it for the online play. What I am confused about is why bother showing ranking in the beta if you are not using it for matchmaking purposes…
I was so excited to play halo on my XB1, yet have been discouraged by the MCC and Halo 5 beta online play. The simple limited sprint in Halo 4 was actually fine IMHO however the H5 beta seems very confused in it’s identity and it’s gameplay.