Open World Campaign was a bad choice. We need a rework

Games Halo Infinite
, ,
1

Let’s get this out of the way. Halo Infinite isn’t Destiny, Genshin Impact, Breath of the Wild, or any form of RPG game. There are no real side quests, no side stories, and most importantly, there is no loot or incentive to fight and explore.

Unlike other open games, if I see a group of enemies, and they’re not guarding a chest of loot, and killing them drops no loot, why would anyone ever fight them? This question multiplies based on difficulty, especially Legendary. Why would you want to waste your time fighting powerful enemies that give you nothing for doing so? It would be faster and easier to go around them. Unlike previous titles which are linear, and have unavoidable enemies, this game does not. They are just standing around doing and guarding nothing.

The open map has some pickups, skulls, pads, and “armor” lockers, but other than that, there’s no reason to explore, or look closer around walls and corners, or scan caves for openings for secrets. There are no secrets. You might find a doll or a giant sandwich, but so what? I appreciate little easter eggs, but I’m not going to go look for them when I can watch a video listing all of them.

Lastly, the campaign is grapple spam simulator. Walking in barren empty wastelands of trees and mountains sucks, and the vehicles are awful at traversing off road. The second you grind enough valor for a Wasp, it becomes Wasp simulator, killing bosses from a distance, and flying all around to collect the pickups left, until you 100%. This completely negates any reason to use any other vehicles, or walk on foot. More importantly, when more campaign DLC comes out, everyone will just fly there. There is no incentive to explore or walk on foot anymore. It’s automatically out the window. It’s ruined. Other open games don’t have these issues.

The only thing I can see to fix this would be having an open campaign Spartan Ops, similar to Destiny, where you can get side quests and challenges from comms around the map. There’s all these ₹ looking microphone things around the Ring. They remind me of the flashing comms in Destiny that trigger events. You also need loot. What would the loot do? Pfft. Idk, 343 you should figure that part out. Maybe Destiny Eververse Bright Dust style free currency for a free currency cosmetics shop. All I know is that future campaign DLC is screwed from the get-go, thanks to this botched system 343 decided to go with.

7 Likes
2

This is one thing that really bugs me. It feels less immersive than other titles because banished are often standing around…doing nothing.

Why are all high value targets out camping in the woods? If they’re so high value shouldn’t they be, you know, doing stuff?

Why are marines being held in random places in the woods and not a proper fortified location?

11 Likes
3

It’s also pretty dumb how small the Campaign was. All these big bads are just chilling in a tiny neighborhood of islands on a single area of the Ring. The map is smaller than a GTA map. You’d think they would be spread all across the whole Ring like every Halo game before it. Instead, the bosses are all just a brisk hike or quick fly down the road. In what realistic scenario would any bosses try to control 5% of the whole Ring, by camping in the woods, guarding nothing? Massive lack of immersion. Terrible strategy. The Banished are being treated like absolute morons.

3 Likes
4

I assume the banished are across the ring, this is just the only ones that are relevant to our current objective.

But yes, it feels like the banished are camping people around for the purpose of just having people places.

Its also weird they never come back to reclaim our FOB’s. Its not like they’re heavily defended.

4 Likes
5

True. If they captured the FOBs and Marines before, what’s stopping them from doing it again? There’s no alerts that your FOB is under attack and you need to go help them. Makes no sense. Obviously the Banished don’t want to win that bad or get their stuff back. These could be considered for 4+ player co-op Spartan Ops side challenge events.

4 Likes
6

I think the idea of introducing an open world to Halo was an interesting one but agree with others I think the execution was a bit disappointing.

For me the open world killed the pacing of the story, it’s hard to feel the urgency if you can run around doing side missions for hours if you want to between story missions.

I think when you compare Halo Infinite’s open world against other open world games it’s hard to think of anything it does better than anything else out there.

The open world didn’t feel dynamic at all, you had enemies sitting within range of friendly positions but the two groups not interacting, the world didn’t feel very alive, everyone seemed to just be standing around waiting for you to turn up.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was bad but it certainly didn’t push the envelope for open world gaming and for me personally the best bits of the game were the linear sections.

6 Likes
7

Those poor Marines are fighting to survive. They might only last 5 minutes. Luckily it’s 5 Namekian minutes, so you can always go save them after the whole campaign. There really is no sense of urgency at all. You can take all the time in the world to do everything. All the times the Pilot rushed you to hurry because there was no time, the ship would explode, or he would get found, you could realistically blow hours if you wanted to, just walking around at your own pace.

1 Like
8

Didn’t someone in 343 say the campaign in this was bigger or longer than the other Halos combined :rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl: phew what a lie.

5 Likes
9

Maybe in ten years after they milk all the DLC they possibly can sell

2 Likes
10

It’s not that the concept itself is bad, hell I’ve wanted a large scale open-world-esque Halo title since I even played CE. It’s simply the execution, thousands of ideas across history which were grand in concept were botched on first attempt. (This isn’t to say that there weren’t those who succeeded, because there most certainly were.) It can work, but it needs to be taken back to the drawing board for perfecting.

5 Likes
11

It was a marketing money grab just like in Gears.
Gears 5 open world was horrible, bland, boring winter wasteland with nothing in it but oh look you get to sail a boat on ice…wow
It is simply the strategy of this corporation coming fully into video games.
They needed open world to go with the marketing…nothing more.
force feed into the campaign same as gears and provided nothing.

2 Likes
12

I don’t think a rework is necessary. I think we should offer a strong opinion on how we feel about it though, so they’ll know what to avoid with any future campaigns.

For that reason, I agree with the idea of the post, but they can’t (and realistically won’t) just scrap their own work. The time for that was long past and we’re post-launch now.

13

Yeah because it doesn’t have a robust skilltree/progression system for players to go through.

That’s basically what the audio logs are for?

Also basically freeing marines and building up Valor is the side mission.

There is loot. HVT’s and Armor Cores.

This was argued a lot before release, the person I remember the most for stating this was Favyn. Grapplehook hurts the exploration system, just as the FOB’s do. Yes its fun but arguably not good for open world setting.

Well if it weren’t open world in the first place DLC would be drastically more difficult to do, but ultimately I think this is a bit much. It would still be really fun to fight new enemies or use new weapons or what have you.

Edit: Real issue is that they would be unable to add more equipment into Campaign, because of all the equipment being put at specific spots on D-pad and because of the armor core system making it impossible to do so unless they use other spartans or characters.

Spartan Ops was a huge failure. Doubt they would bring it back.

1 Like
14

I really liked the open world. In Halo 4 and 5 I very much felt as if I was being hurried along from combat to combat. You’re ferried to the Didact really quick when I’d rather have had a little more time on Requem before the Hans Zimmer starts blasting. Yes it does create a sense of urgency and tension in the finale but early game it’s not really necessary.

Room for improvement and more stuff. Yeah. I’d love for more stuff to do. But I didn’t feel like I was cheated out of content. On Heroic it took a good solid while to clear those bases and I think the world adds to the ambience and tone of the story. You feel like you are fighting the Banished on a ring world.

I think a purely single player interpretation of the story would have been worse as that’s essentially the dungeon areas but without all the rest.

2 Likes
15

not gonna lie this whole game needs a rework, from the game’s engine up