I’ll be frank: the Halo 5 reveal made me angry. It was to be expected, since there were a good number of changes to the standard formula that made Halo the FPS leader for over half a decade. But as time passed, I began to relax and realized there isn’t as much wrong with Halo 5 as I originally imagined. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say Halo 5 looks more impressive and Halo-like than Reach and, obviously, 4. I might even go so far as to say I’m quite excited about getting my hands on the beta. I love the idea of thrusters, clamber is neat, and I’m 80% sure Spartan Charge won’t make it to a final release anyway.
But there are two glaring issues that jumped out at me, one of which isn’t discussed so much. The first of course is how sprint, judging from the exhibition match, broke flow numerous times and forced the creation of the grotesque “Bigship” map and lord knows how many other bastardizations of good maps. But who hasn’t talked about that.
The other is AI speech during multiplayer, i.e. “Spartan chatter”. This is what I want to talk about. If any of you are from Team Beyond forums, this post may look familiar. Anyway, many of the issues a lot of people have with Halo 5 right now is that it neither looks nor sounds like Halo–and I’m not just talking about the gameplay. There are many ways to make this game at least aesthetically resemble Halo, and right now 343i is objectively ripping Halo’s guts out in that regard. For example:
• Spartan “chatter”, including things such as “We have the power weapons!” feels like a very awkward thing for Spartans to do. One of the worst phrases I heard was “It’s time to put them down once and for all”, referring to their training partners on the blue team. I hate to bring this up because it’s such an overused phrase, but this isn’t Call of Duty. You aren’t supposed to hate these people, lore wise. The phrases, voices and sounds all sound like they were taken straight from any given military shooter of “army vs. terrorists”. Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. It just doesn’t add anything, but it CAN take away, and could only serve to cause division.
• Announcement chatter ANNOUNCING the power weapons are spawning
• The general look of armor feels like it’s stuck in Halo uncanny valley. It doesn’t feel like Halo, yet looks just close enough that we can tell something is very wrong. It looks generic sci-fi.
• THE ADS SCOPING on the pistol and AR
• Bigship. Call it Midship all you want, it didn’t look like Midship but it’s overweight ugly brother.
• The sounds. Every gun sounds like a plinking weapon. There’s no power, no personality, no feeling to them. The Prophet’s Bane specifically sounds pathetic compared to H2A’s energy sword. The energy recharge sounds don’t bother me as much, but they are annoying.
We don’t need these things aesthetically. All they do is take away from the feel of classic Halo–one of the things I would say ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT BE TAMPERED WITH. Of course this is all my opinion, and again, I think 343 is closer than ever to a good Halo formula. But there are a lot of things that feel oddly “un-Halo” from an aesthetic perspective that, if changed, could make many, many people feel better. I want to know if anyone else feels like half of the problem with this game (barring sprint) has to do with the aesthetics; the sights and the sounds? Or am I the only one?
P.S. The main reason I’m potentially excited is because of this video showing how the Halo beta would look with minimal sprint being used. You can just FEEL the potential here:
**TL;DR** Halo 5 right now has obvious potential marred by decidedly un-Halo sights and sounds. If these things change, it will do wonders for making the game "feel" more like past Halos without altering any gameplay. For 343i, this should be the first thing they look into, since no radical altering would be necessary.
