Okay, so I loaded up the Multiplayer in Halo 5 today. I don’t come to the website to read the news, because… well… What’s the point?
I load up “Team Arena” since it’s the ONLY playlist you can find Capture the Flag and Strongholds (no separate playlist for these, you see). Sure, it’s got some slayer in there too (no clue why, what with a SLAYER PLAYLIST RIGHT THERE FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT TO PLAY SLAYER), but it doesn’t show up very often. Much to my surprise, we’ve added “Breakout” to Team Arena! Oh joy of freakin’ joys.
So, not only do we have an ENTIRE PLAYLIST dedicated to playing Breakout (you know, for people who WANT TO PLAY BREAKOUT) and an ENTIRE PLAYLIST for SLAYER (you know, for people who WANT TO PLAY SLAYER), but we’ve got no dedicated playlists for even TEAM OBJECTIVE game modes. No CTF playlist. No Stronghold playlist. But, we’ve got dedicated playlists to slayer variants and then got those same slayer variants thrown into OTHER playlists because 343 wants to force you to play those game modes even if you didn’t select that you wanted to play those game modes.
Look, I’m sorry, 343. I don’t want to play Breakout. It’s a game mode that sucked in Gears of War, and it sucks here. “only one life to live” has always really kind of sucked and is pretty much determined by whichever team makes the first kill of the match for who will win. There are some that love that, and that’s fine. There’s a playlist for them. They can play the playlist! I, however, do not want to play Breakout. At all. I would very much love to avoid it at all times. But, I can’t, since there’s no “Team Objective” playlist available, and the only place you even OFFER Objective gametypes is in Team Arena where I also have to deal with Team Slayer and now Breakout.
Why? Who thought this was a good idea? It isn’t. I would love either a “Team Objective” playlist (it’s what I prefer as I bore easily of simply getting kills mindlessly) or just the removal of Breakout from Arena so I don’t have to deal with the nonsense of that game mode. This is a problem that is only compounded by the atrocious “matchmaking” system in place where you get matched against people of vastly higher skill than you or you play the same map and same gametype upwards of FIVE TIMES IN A ROW before you get something different. I’m sorry, this crap needs fixed. It’s silly and stupid. Why, oh why, can I not just play what I want to play when everyone else gets to? Why do I have to complain about it and come to the forums to complain about not being able to play what I like? I know, traditionally, team objective game modes house about one tenth of any given playerbase for a game (unless you’re playing Battlefield where it’s like 90% of the playerbase because objective game modes in that game are infinitely more fun and awesome than standard slayer game modes, which tells you all you need to know about how to make objective gametypes fun and interesting instead of bland and boring), but surely we’ve got enough players AT LAUNCH to hold one of these Objective Playlists for a while. Right?
Can we please just fix the playlists so it’s not an amalgamation of already existing playlists? Or, if you want the “play random playlist” crap, why not just add a playlist entitled “I don’t care” and it’s a mix of every gametype and game mode on every map? Instead of, you know, muddying already existing waters by planting existing playlists into other existing playlists.