So, last night I was playing BTB and I wondered why I had enjoyed BTB in the older Halos so much more. I then came to the realization: Halo 5 is only fun if you win. While that might seem obvious, it’s also the fact that if you lose, Halo 5 isn’t fun. Which means that, for the most part, only half of the playerbase will be enjoying Halo 5 at any given moment. Seems kind of wrong, doesn’t it? I mean, I’ve never seen so many quitters in a Halo game, and the fact that it happens every match is really not what “fun” should be like.
Lets take, for example, an Infinity BTB match on the OG Longbow from Halo 4. There were a couple snipers that spawned at the beginning, a Splaser in the middle, and a few random Railguns and such thrown in at random points. The only vehicles were Warthogs, Mongeese, and Ghosts. That was it. There weren’t any horribly long Sightlines, no real threat of Spawnkilling, and power weapons respawned only after they had already been completely used up. It wasn’t a fast-paced game, nor was it painfully boring and drawn out. Of course, I haven’t discussed Personal Ordinance, the reason that everyone seems to hate about Halo 4. What that did, and did so in an unpredictable manner, was that it gave everyone, be it the last place noob who has gotten only a single kill, to the 1st place MLG tryhard (to the extent that they played Halo 4), a chance to have an advantage, be it a Power Weapon or even an Overshield, to something as simple as two Plasma Grenades.
You’re probably thinking to yourself, ‘isn’t just catering to the casuals?’, and you would be mostly correct. But if everyone who doesn’t win is a “casual,” then why bother playing a game with what limited time they have that they can’t enjoy? But I digress. One of the things that 343i did very well regarding the Ordinance system was the weighting of the truly “Powerful” weapons. I still haven’t gotten more than 10 Binary Rifles from an Ordinance drop since I started playing Halo 4, and I doubt most people have. By limiting that way, the flow of a game on Halo 4 felt more “balanced,” or should I say, fun for everyone. It didn’t matter whether you were driving that Warthog around the map, or the guy who’s setting up to stick it on the next pass, you still felt like you could make an impact on the end result of that game.
In Halo 5, it doesn’t feel like that. The maps have no “safe” spots to just breath in, you have to always look around since your motion tracker only tells you when it’s too late to do anything, and you can’t even be a just a little inattentive when you respawn, or you’ll get spawn killed more often than not. It just isn’t enjoyable to feel like you can’t do anything, and when the score in, say, a Warzone game is 867-324, enemy’s favor, why would you even bother trying? Why would you waste a REQ, knowing it won’t be used for anything besides delaying the inevitable?
The reason people quit when they’re losing, or even when they’re winning (but in last place on their team), is because there isn’t any motivation to keep playing. They can’t do anything to help their team, be it because they’re losing an unwinnable game, or just because they’re the reason the enemy team even has any points. No one wants to be in that position, and I know Halo 5 is supposed to be competitive. It’s just that “competitive” doesn’t always mean “fun.”
Just my two cents. Whether or not you agree is your opinion, if you don’t agree, that’s what you think, and who am I to tell you how you should think?