Ultimately this game has the potential to be great. I’m not even talking about the battle pass, I don’t care about the battle pass in its current form so I wont be buying it. I will rock default skin for the existence of this game and not buy anything if it doesn’t improve and be 100% okay with that. I think people who play video games for skins are the useful cash cows who make games and DLC free for guys like me, but sure if the progression improves I might fork over the 10 bucks for the pass. But this post isn’t about skins.
Before I start, lets address the most common argument I hear on this board “b…bu…but its still just a beta!!!” the word “beta” now means “final release” and has meant that for a long time within this industry. Stop -Yoink!- for cooperate America and realize that you are the consumer, and 343/Microsoft are selling us a product. You might pay for this product with time spent playing, money for skins, money for battlepass etc, but even if you are playing for “free” as I am you are paying with your time. You are filling up server pools so other people who might be paid for players can find matches faster and show off their super cool 20 dollar pixels to you. Finally, if you can spend real money on it, its not a “beta”, its the game.
The gameplay is considerably worse on launch than any other Halo game ever (I’m on a Series S). It’s very clear to see where the emphasis went to for this game, 343i expects you to worry about busting out your credit card first and worry about gameplay second. I’m not going to do that.
1. Grenades
These grenades feel more powerful than any other grenade in the series. More powerful than the Reach beta 's (which was an actual beta) mini nukes. More powerful than CE grenades even. I can think of no other halo game where a firefight happens that starts on open ground, where both players see each other at the same time, can throwing a grenade be considered a great idea. You can chunk grenades faster and farther in this game than any other halo game. It takes milliseconds to lob a grenade, this is the fastest throw time in halo existence. Now on its own that seems like a good thing, it makes grenades more usable in combat than other games but paired with the explosion radius, damage dealt, and fuse time, frag grenades become mini nukes again. Getting third partied after a firefight ends is annoying, getting third partied with a grenade thrown across the map is infuriating.
Fix- Increase the time to throw a grenade, decrease blast radius, and slightly increase fuse time while keeping the damage high. Grenades should feel powerful and useful, but they shouldn’t be the go to weapon when engaging an enemy.
2. Half baked weapons sandbox
Bulldog and Heatwave
Why do we have not one, but two useless shotguns in this game? Stripping out the ability to one hit kill an enemy spartan at close quarters destroys the usefulness of these weapons and makes them feel more like the Mauler from H3. If they wanted the Mauler in this game, then they should have given us that and just removed the shotgun entirely. Also, why the complete design change for the shotgun? It looks great and powerful but change for change’s sake doesn’t really present a good look when everything else is so broken.
Assault rifle
The assault rifle is ridiculous. I’m not saying it should be as useless as the H2 SMG, or as soft as the H3 AR, but I think most people would agree that the reach assault rifle was the sweet spot. Meaty, and could go toe to toe with the magnum, but would lose out to it at range. This new assault rifle shreds at medium range and completely destroys at short range, making the pistol irrelevant at anything but 3rd party clean up and the already nerfed to hell shotguns completely useless. I get the pistol is called the “sidekick”, but it shouldn’t feel like one. Each weapon should feel powerful, but the assault rifle eliminates the usefulness for 3 weapons in the sandbox. The only reason I can think of for the AR being so powerful is so first time players can shred pistol veterans and hopefully buy more skins.
Commando
The commando felt great in the true beta (the test flights) for this game. It still feels great when you can actually land your shots, but I’ll get into that later because the whole aiming system in this game is broken. This weapon has the potential to shred an AR user at medium range and absolutely should be able to.
Pulse carbine
Pulse carbine felt great in the beta. Really felt like the go to weapon for killing enemies out in the open, had a faster fire rate and harder tracking so popping in and out of cover to shoot a plasma burst really was the tactic for this weapon. I’m not sure what happened to it but it doesn’t feel right anymore. I think the fire rate and projectile speed was nerfed but I cant put my finger on it. Its useless compared to the BR now.
Plasma Pistol
I’ve been begging for a CE style plasma pistol since CE. Just get rid of this gun and make a new gun that only can do a charge shot if you’re going to continue making its tap firing useless 343. Glad it cant disable vehicles anymore, that felt very cheap although I feel like its charge should do some kind of damage to vehicles as a compromise. Maybe like three hydra shots worth of damage in exchange for a longer plasma charge time.
Hydra
Speaking of this gun, wow what a joke. What is the point of this weapon in the sandbox? Its a nerfed rocket launcher with a significantly lower reload time. Its okay against infantry and bad against vehicles. Its too slow to do anything in tracking mode other than let a scorpion / wraith hide behind a rock and instantly reveal your position to said tank.
Sentinel Beam
They’ve managed to make this weapon more useless than ever before. Recoil is really tough to manage on this thing but I believe its because of the overall aiming issues with this game. The only role it currently possesses is a medium range shield -Yoink!-, and even that is outclassed by any other medium range weapon in the game.
Skewer
A worse spartan laser. Could have been a great complement to that weapon if it was in the game, with the spartan laser holding maybe 2 lasers this time but being a one hit vehicle kill while the skewer being the light vehicle destroyer. As it stands its another “why did they change this” weapon role.
Hammer
The worse cousin of the sword. Better than the shotguns though as it retains its one hit kill. I haven’t used it enough to get a solid opinion of it although it needs more of a kill range at minimum.
Shock rifle
Its good. Feels like the a “scout rifle” option capable of two shot kills. Outclassed by the sniper at long range and the BR at medium range, but makes sense for BTB and bigger maps.
Ravager, cyndershot, sword
Haven’t picked up these weapons except for one time with the Ravager, feels like they unnecessarily nerfed it from the beta.
Battle Rifle, Rocket launcher, Needler, Mangler, Sniper and Stalker rifle feel great. Disruptor could use a faster fire rate, as a pick up weapon it should outclass the sidekick, but otherwise feels great.
Every weapon in a FPS should feel powerful. As it stands we have several useless weapons that in their current state should be removed from matchmaking and replaced with their better counterparts. Take the commando and sentinel beam off the walls and replace them for the BR and Stalker rifle until they are made useful. Take the shotguns off the wall and replace them with Mangler’s and Assault rifles (LOL, as a side note when I saw Assault Rifles in ranked on the walls I nearly died of laughter). And for gods sake make the plasma pistol a good close range weapon for single tapping.
- The inconsistencies in aiming.
On console at least, aim assist doesn’t kick in until you move the right thumbstick over your target. So when your right thumbstick stops moving, aim assist stops. This makes precision weapons like the commando and sidekick frustrating to use with their low bullet magnetism. So when it comes to aiming it is hilariously better to use a controller with stick drift so you can get the advantage of aim assist while on console. I haven’t played this on pc yet but can absolutely confirm that aim assist turns off when you stop moving your thumbstick. This one problem makes the AR a beast, the sentinel beam useless, the commando useless and the sidekick near useless. Precision weapons feel frustrating to use at close quarters to medium range because of the lack of aim assist on controller. I’m not saying that they should dominate the Assault rifle, but they should at least give you a chance against that thing. Aiming also feels very inconsistent, with bullets missing that clearly should have hit. This is where 343 needs to focus their immediate efforts to make the game “feel” like halo.
- Cross platform
The one thing halo could learn from COD is how to do cross platform. Dont want it? Turn it off entirely. Want it? Well its going to be input based matchmaking, so pc and console players on on as level playing field as possible. Mouse players dont want to play against controller and Controller players dont want to play against mouse. At minimum give the option of input based matchmaking in other gametypes than ranked, although I think crossplay should be able to be turned off entirely.
- Sprint
Sprint cant be fixed anymore and it never will be by 343, but I’m still going to complain about it. Sprint makes maps need to be larger. I come from the old school area shooter games like unreal and quake. You didn’t need sprint in those games and the game benefited from it. Now you have two different movement speeds and every aspect of the game needs to be balanced around two movement speeds when they could have ultimately just increased base movement speed and called it a day. Notice how even the smallest maps in infinite are nowhere near as small as CE, H2, and H3? You can blame sprint. We will never see legendary CQB maps like battle creek, guardian, or foundry in their original map sizes again because of sprint. Also what a bonehead move to shy away from how H5 handled sprint, shields absolutely should not recharge while sprinting. Now you can reset fights simply by running away for a few seconds rather than be forced to fully retreat from the battle like H5.
My head is hurting from typing all this out but why would anyone play this over MCC? MCC has better customization, better gametype selection, better progression, and a whole lot more I’m not listing here. Isn’t the new game supposed to be better than the old games? What reason would any gamepass subscriber have to play this over the better games in the series? 343 has show us, once again, that they are unable to launch a good halo game.
This game can be great. It should be great. It should be the best halo game of all time. No other halo game has looked this awesome since H3/Reach. The campaign looks sick and I will be no lifing that for a while. This multiplayer though is garbage. I can accept that sprint will always be a part of halo from here on out (to Halo’s detriment), but everything else needs to be fixed, and quickly. I dont want to see more battle pass crap come out until 343 makes the effort to fix the gameplay.