The good parts of Season 2 are such a tiny glimmer that is immediately snuffed out by the atrocity that is the state of Halo right now. The new maps are cool, but the game still has fewer maps than Halo: CE did - after over 6 months since release. The new game modes are decently fun, but they feel like things that should’ve been in the game at launch, so it’s not really impressive or exciting, just a small relief from the monotony. The only really good thing this season is the radar change, which I will say, is actually pretty cool; I like a big radar with basically an outer, low-detail ring, and an inner more-detailed one.
But then there’s the bad, and the really bad…
- Forge is still in beta and “targeted” for months from now, when it should’ve been in at launch. And 343 has destroyed all my trust in their “target” dates, so I’m expecting maybe Forge will be ready by the end of the season.
- Co-op campaign, a basic and staple Halo function, will not be available for even longer and is only gonna be available online at that. Pair that with the crappy excuse for “splitscreen” in this game, and it really feels like 343 just doesn’t care about people who want to play local with their friends at all.
- Still no real progression system at all; such an easy thing to make. I’m a game dev, I’ve made progression system before. It’s not hard. They just aren’t bothering to work on it.
- The “outline opacity/thickness settings” they advertised are such a monumental letdown, it’s honestly really depressing. How can you mess up this bad 343?! They advertised settings to change the visibility of outlines in response to people complaining that it’s too hard to clearly see people; but the settings only let you turn the visibility down, not up! Such a disappointment.
- Along with the above, they still don’t have any options to override player’s armor coatings and set a forced color for each team, to make it look like how every other Halo did. Such a simple option to set up, and something I know people have been asking for since day 1; why is it not an option still?
And the absolute worst of all, the outright lie of “you’ll be able to go back and progress your old battle pass with no time limits.” This big thing they told people they were gonna do different from other F2P shooters, making the battle pass last forever, and it was a complete load of BS. I was waiting to see if they really meant it and, big surprise, 343 pulled the classic “well you can sort of do what we said you could” and made it only a feature if you buy the premium pass.
The free items are locked to the limited timespan of each season still, so if you, like me, don’t feel like playing this broken game and wanted to wait a couple years for when maybe it’s actually decent, you get screwed out of all the free content they’ll add up to that point. @343 Left that part out when you originally advertised this whole setup, huh? What a freaking disgrace.
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Also, from what I’ve read on the forums, many people are having even more Lag Spikes and De-Synch issues than before. As well as guns not firing, missiles disappearing after firing and other great Q&A untested things.
I’m so glad I didn’t even waste the free bandwidth to re-download and install it on my Xbox One X.
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Yup, I played for one day when Season 2 dropped to see if it had gotten any better. Played like 3 games and it’s still laggy even though every other game I play is just fine.
Game still sucks. I’ll try again when Season 3 drops and then maybe the game will be worth playing for more than half an hour lol
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Game is even laggier than when i stopped playing about a month ago.
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With you on a lot of the ongoing points of frustration, absolutely. Forge and Co-Op being absent from a Halo game, in addition to some pretty sparse variety in gametypes/maps and the countless issues with progression and monetization still feel pretty inexcusable, especially when the game was delayed a year presumably to allow for maximum polish and feature richness going into launch.
That’s all completely fair to criticize. It’s clearly not what many fans and players wanted it to be.
But the “I’m a game dev and making a progression system is super easy they just don’t care” is an underbaked take.
Clearly, the nuts and bolts of this game going all the way down to the Slipspace engine itself were designed with a certain reality in mind, which isn’t being borne out by reception in the real world. The seasonal/battle pass progression system that exists in the game was their legitimate idea of a great progression system that everyone would love. They truthfully thought that we’d be thrilled with how customization works, core-locked and all, and okay with the monetization elements as they exist today.
Now that the product is in consumers’ hands and (perhaps predictably) a lot of people dislike a lot of things about it, 343i finds themselves in the process of having to attempt to rebuild the proverbial plane in midair. I don’t envy them that, even if I think they probably should’ve seen it coming given the design decisions they’ve been making for the past half decade on this game.
Generalized dev experience doesn’t give insight into proprietary tools. The only folks who know how messy going back in and implementing re-designs on things as fundamental as core progression will be for this game are the actual devs who’ve worked with this game. I’m guessing that what should’ve been designed one way for best results was just designed a completely different way, and they’re having a doozy of a time trying to turn a screwdriver into a hammer.
I agree with you heartily in one regard, though. This game probably isn’t going to be an incredible overall experience for a few years of steady improvement and revision to come, at least, and weaponizing FOMO to maintain emagagement in the meantime is gross.
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At this point it doesn’t even matter anymore knowing all the vary poor decisions they have made, and yet to come.
There is no hope for this beta to even head in right direction knowing 343 doesn’t even care to try.
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Yeh I’ve had enough. I noticed I can see previous season and yet can’t ‘equip it’ and the thing is once again no way to actually earn credits like they claimed we would be able to and instead they blocked it behind a paywall. Seriously feel like 343i are so out of touch and I can’t tell if there sabotaging their game on purpose. I thought to myself to have a look and see if things have got better and sadly 343i still haven’t done anything they originally promised before the launch. I kind of feel like the complaints are just being ignored.
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It’s not a lie if it was stated outright since the beginning my guy.
Just because it wasn’t a fact known to you doesn’t mean it was a lie to the majority of players who knew about it over the last 6 months.
Edit: the exact quote:
06/25/2021
“All Battle Passes will be permanent. This means that the Season 1 Battle Pass will be around forever; you can always go back, select that as your active Battle Pass and continue to earn progress in it. If you decided to take a Season off, or you simply didn’t have time to play, that’s fine. You can always go back and purchase any prior Battle Pass as well.”
https://www.comingsoon.net/games/news/1180215-halo-infinite-battle-pass-no-grind
Keyword rounding everything out being “purchase”, implying that the premium BP is the way to progress through older BP’s.
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They did state that these BPs lasted forever. Just omitted some fine details like the free items merging into the premium track.
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I dunno about omitting, just published details at a later date.
Yep exactly. Many people saw that 343i did lie to us. It’s most likely part of the reason why people are mostly avoiding Infinite. The state of the game at the moment is depressing.
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Did this horse ever get raised from the dead? Or are we still beating on the same corpse?
See first comment.
“Such an easy thing to make. Trust me I’m a game dev.” Okay broski. I’m Pressing X to doubt. Anyone that’s spent any length of time creating systems for big budget games knows that creating any system is time consuming.
Uh are you sure about that? This forum was awash with people that wanted outline opacity to be turned down. Seems like a direct response to those players.
The absolute irony of complaining about critical systems that aren’t in the game yet while simultaneously demanding the team raise the priority of minor quality of life features. Gamers are truly a wonderful breed.
Well to be fair, this implementation of the battle pass is in fact different from other games. Not exactly what was promised, but yeah in other games it doesn’t work like how it does in Halo Infinite.
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It may not be outright lying or even intentional. I just know what not mentioning those details looks like to customers.
Lies.
Can’t blame them for seeing it that way as they’ve had multiple chances to come forward and give us a heads up.
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Oof… That is the main fix I have been waiting for. Whelp, next season I hope.
please tell me im not the only one absolutely losing it in last spartan standing
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Ok…
Sorry to hear about your problems…
yeeeeeh thats definitely soured it abit for me.
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This game legit makes me want to cry.
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I understand your concerns but for you to complain about the already super glowing outlines to be turned up is rediculous. You should be complaining about the many bugs and removing skill jumps etc…
Had a game where I was dealing nearly 3k damage but I can’t manage to kill a single person. Logically my KDA should at least reflect my kill participation but in a 30 - 50 game, I was only credited 2 kills and 10 assists.
Where the heck did my damage go lol.
1 Like