May contain spoilers of the campaign, writing this on a phone so can’t do spoiler marks too well.
I agree with you. The game feels like a bare bones Halo inside a broken shell. The core gameplay is good, and it is better that we have good gameplay than bad gameplay with a shiny shell.
But current there are too many problems in every aspect of the game and makes it feel like early access rather than a complete game.
The open world was a mistake with the repetitive content. And getting banshees and the wasp at the end was annoying (this should have been right from the beginning). And although the grapple is fun, spamming it wasn’t.
It did have similar issues as Zelda that it had too little content (few enemies and weapons and single biome) stretched out to a hundred.
And the bosses were really lame and unfun. Just get a sniper and skewer and you’re good. Hunters were also too weak, no need to hit weak spots, just spam all weapons. (been playing on Legendary, since I don’t want to play this again).
Regardless of having performance issues I’ve been playing the campaign and with the repetitivenes and 20-30 fps on intensive areas like the Banished bases is really unfun.
I also played Halo 3 yesterday with a friend and I had a lot more fun on those simple straight forward missions since a lot more was happening.
Instead of an open world, they should have made bigger linear missions with interesting scenarios and varying biomes. And overall what the story is missing is suspension and this is why it is rather weak.
Only missions I enjoyed were the first two and when you go into the spire and fight the monitor, that boss fight was good.
As of yet I haven’t finished the campaign since now I’m collecting all the collectables from the game, but going back and forth is really boring. And I captured all the banished bases and Fobs and got a achievement that everything is captured… I still have over half of the visible map unexplored…
So is the other half of the map for dlcs? Do they have the same biome since on the map it doesn’t look that different.
And now that I just played against flood in Halo 3 (which was a blast btw). The endless better be a lot bigger threat than what the whole Halo franchise has deemed the biggest threat.
The Endless are better be a variation of Flood, because if they are lacking then this story is even worse.
I don’t believe the Harbinger and Skimmers are Endless, they felt more like basic enemies comparable to elites and the flying drones but with snipers (shock rifles). But if these guys are the Endless then seriously WTF.
PS.
Sorry for the long post, I do like to write all my thoughts in one sitting instead of scattering them in multiple places.