It’s the lack of creativity, the same thing over and over. In this day and age, the technology available to make a good story come to life, and they didn’t bother, just the same repetitive filler instead of actual content. The game is okay, but I found myself saying, “I’m doing the same thing again and again and again”. Weather systems would make a bit of an improvement, but from what I understand they cut that.
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You forgot two extra "Blah"s in the title
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Its the best campaign since H1
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Narratively, it isnt anything impressive. Dont care much for the open world either as it is quite bland. I was under the impression there would be a lot more to explore but the only real points of interest are attached to the main missions. There really should have been more foreunner buildings, caves, structures, secrets, mysteries etc. The world is just so bland.
I would have rathered they ditched the open world in favour of a better narrative, as well as better and more missions.
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It’s interesting - they pulled so much influence from CE in narrative setup (i.e. it’s limited in scope, and is basically setting up a mystery that never gets fully explained in its first outing, the plot of the universe gets moved along, but only a few things resolved). I really thought that would have resonated more with folks, given that their aim was for the CE-like approach to things. IMO, 343 won’t be able to have their Halo 3 moment until they get ahead of narrative backlash from Halo 5, which Infinite lays the groundwork for I think. It just had to reset back to a CE-like state to allow them space to undo the H5 missteps. It’ll certainly be interesting to see where any DLC/Chief-centric plotlines evolve to.
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Bassus is the only one I hate. I give you a tip: Just grapple to the roof most of the time you are far away from him. His slam wont affect you. Honestly, just grapple all the time and he will never touch you. You are also more affective on M&K.
Certainly not about the campaign.
It was the only one (besides Infinite now) I never bothered to even play a second time.
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I thought Infinite did boss battles better than i expected them to be handled. On heroic they’re difficult, but definitely not impossible. Legendary is a little much sometimes…
I just got to the very final boss room on my legendary run through. I’m not looking forward to fighting the leader of the last mob wave on legendary. The dude was so fast it’s crazy
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I actually think the campaign is good but the maps do need to be bigger much bigger
Fully upgraded drop wall and thruster are your friend with that guy (if you’re talking about the Chieftain that’s a pain). Drop the wall, shoot through it to get some electrical on him, thrust backwards, hit him again, thrust away into a grapple. Works best if you’ve taken out the other folks he spawns with first.
Too true. I never understood the rave reviews for the campaign. It feel like they were really onto something cool, but then gave up or ran out of time. Good enough rather than great. Run here kill this, run there kill that isn’t the halo experience I want. 343 has never given us the big epic campaign moments that bungie did.
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It definitely doesn’t draw you in in any way. The open world is kinda boring after it’s all done. Not even being able to repeat stuff if you wanted too. I won’t be surprised if they don’t drop campaign all together and just keep making cosmetics for the store. The replayability of the old games is so much higher than Infinite. Just being able to redo missions any way you like. Another think I miss is the blood. It is way better mowing down the grunts and seeing that blue blood fly. No satisfaction in Infinite, just the sound of a shelled hard boiled egg being squashed when you get the kill. I have thought about maybe trying to make a heroic or even legendary run at infinite campaign but it is just more fun in campaign in MCC I would rather replay them for the challenges and keep building my xp as I would like to get to tour ten. Maybe come back to infinite after that.
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Right but even in the context of CE, there was just more going on. There were more human characters, and some small sense of combined arms on the ring. Infinite does a terrible job at making it feel like there are actually marines scattered and fighting on the ring.
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The problem is its like 1/3 of the CE-approach narratively. CE sets things up and provides satisfying resolutions to whats going on. We’re introduced to the Covenant, Flood, and the Halo, and they’re developed, given satisfactory explanation and locally dealt with. It also doesn’t drone on about the fall of reach.
Infinite meanwhile doesn’t do a terribly great job explaining Zeta Halo (“This ring is older. Its mysterious. See we said the word mysterious, like it cause its mysterious!”), the Banished, nor the Endless (worse than the flood…somehow…also we barely fight them). We kill some mouth pieces and move on. Also it feels like all the cutscenes are about halo 5’s wrapup rather than telling its current story.
CE had variety, it did a lot to try to wow you with the variety of environs on the ring. Even each forerunner installation on the levels has different shapes. Its giant cliffs while effectively being invisible walls, made the ring feel enormous and wonderous It limited its sandbox in different ways to create variety between levels. It then even remixes levels by introducing the Flood and the Sentinels to shake up engagements and atmosphere.
Infinite feels the same throughout. The forerunner levels all look the same, the banished levels all look the same, and the outdoor environment is extremely tame outside some hexagon pillars. Also everyone loves the color grey in this. You have almost the entire sandbox available all the time (even all the power ups) and the banished feel pretty much the same 90% of the time. Its nice to see Sentinels again, but they’re nothing special.
The ring in CE feels enormous, full of life, variety, wonder, and mystery. The Infinite ring feels sterile, small, tame and despite how much they use the word ‘mystery’, feels really known.
Infinite also has an addiction to boss fights which CE didn’t have at all.
Infinite was fun up until the Harbinger. At that point you’ve experienced everything the campaign really has to offer and everything else is just filling time till you kill the talking aliens. Its rather telling that this was also the limit of where they allowed people with early review copies to talk about it.
“Halo, its finished” “No, I think we’re just getting started” encapsulates what CE did well. You got a conclusion, but you knew there was so much more out there. Nothing is finished at the end of Infinite. Its highly likely we’ll still be fighting Banished and Endless on the ring next DLC.
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Infinite does lean heavy on the audio logs for the wider picture - and I can see that not doing it for some people (my wife and I thought the audio logs were one of the best parts, so I’m definitely biased). I did like how as you rescued more Marines/FOBs, more Marines were around. I do wish they did more dynamic skirmishes with the Banished. I’m wondering if they were expecting to have an expansion out by now, or if they were expecting to have further features available for the world at launch and it just didn’t happen.
When I first played CE, I felt it was actually a very open ending, and didn’t resolve much - the ring was blown up, but it was clear they weren’t ending the war, and we were merely playing through an important battle. Not trying to argue your view of CE’s narrative - I just didn’t have the same experience. Personally, I feel CE’s narrative plays better now with the context of the subsequent games than it did all those years ago without the context of the sequels. Between CE and 2, I always felt like I had started a movie halfway through and all these things being referenced had no meaning to me. IMO, the Flood in particular didn’t get great explanations until explored in the EU. They were just kind of the mid-game twist to shake things up from a gameplay mechanic perspective.
I think the thing with Infinite is the explanations require digging into the side content - the mystery in the Forerunner artifacts and trying to figure out who/what the Harbinger is, the audio logs to discover why the Banished are here, to discover what happened with the crew of the Infinite (I want the Lasky cliff hanger to be resolved!), and what happened in the 6 months while Chief was out of commission. IMO, there was never anything Infinite could be other than a wrap-up given the premise that Chief was out of commission for 6 months and you’re trying to put the pieces back together to figure out the current state of things. It simply has to be a wrap up story, to catch the player up to current time, IMO.
CE definitely did have a broader environment variety (though IMO, both CE and Infinite have similar levels of samey-samey for the Forerunner environments, mainly because Infinite riffs off of CE’s Forerunner architecture IMO, with a touch of H3 thrown in) but CE’s environments also got so heavily recycled starting halfway through that really I view it as kind of a wash, personally. I think Halo 3 did environmental variety better than any of the other games, most of the other games retread environments heavily. H4 and Reach were close, but H4 ended up recycling the Forerunner stuff too much and Reach was in the gray/brown era of gaming visuals, so every time I play that everything feel so bleak to look at to the point of being unenjoyable for me (Reach is probably my least favorite of the series, but likely only because I haven’t played H5’s campaign since it’s not on PC, so I discount it from how I rank my favorites in the series). I think all the games have well done environments, just none of the other ones have hit the variety that H3 displayed.
I just have really different experiences than you when I play CE and Infinite regarding the feel of the ring. CE always feels like a corridor shooter to me, which isn’t a bad thing - I love corridor shooters, but I definitely don’t get the huge/wonder with CE (even though I enjoy the game very much). Infinite feels bigger to me, with less overall variety in environments due to the way they chose to have everything be contiguous on the “islands”.
Sorry you stopped having fun after the Harbinger, though. I think the only thing I found less than fun with the campaign was Escharum’s boss fight on Legendary, specifically. That was basically Gravemind levels of design jank when the cutscene ends and you’re launched across the room by the scrap cannon over and over. Generally, I do find the bosses to be too spongey, and I wish they got “dossiers” like how the HVTs did. I rather enjoyed reading about the HVTs and providing some back story to why they needed to be wiped out.
But I do agree - DLC/expansion will likely be Chief vs Banished (though I do want to have DLC/expansions that explore other characters at some point like Alpha 9, Osiris, ODSTs, etc), with hopefully some Endless explanation thrown in. I enjoy the Banished as a Covenant replacement (they’re effectively just the metal version Covenant with red stuff instead of purple stuff to me) and I’m curious to explore the Endless. I’m holding my judgement on them until 343 fleshes them out. Overall, I’m hoping they’re not just Flood 2.0.
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Halo CE wasn’t about the war. It was about the ring. The menu is just the ring floating around, the game starts with the discovery of the ring, transitions into exploring the ring, then moves to realizing the purpose of the ring and destroying it. Halo CE is the story of the halo ring itself. The covenant and flood are honestly just there to fill in action.
Contrast this to Infinite where we start off introduced to Atriox, have him punting off screen, and go fight some random mook who idolizes him.
Largely they didn’t need it. They were space parasites that infected everyone they could. Its explained well enough and having the halo meant to stop them from consuming the universe explained the level of threat they were.
Which is not good design. Even from what ones i did find, I didn’t find anything terribly interesting.
Silent Cartographer, Assault on the Control Room, 343 GS, and the Library are all very different in terms of size, shape, and scale of their forerunner structures, only thing really similar is the doors. I could probably tell you what level a picture of forerunner stuff is just by looking at it.
I don’t. Even with rehashes there’s still 4x the variety of Infinite’s levels. Two Betrayals is the most reshashed, but it changes up its sandbox focusing on flight, adds the flood and sentinels, and generally changes up the whole experienced. Keyes is very different from Truth and Reconciliation, and the Maw is pretty much a new level that uses some damaged elements of the oldfirst one.
Yeah, we’re very different, as I feel like infinite is a corridor shooter with some random open world bits tacked on.
Honestly I hate how the 4 major boss fights are all “fight one bullet spunge melee guy in a tight room”.
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- No flood.
- No covenant.
- No big wars with heavy vernicles.
- Locations are all the same (no night battles, or snow battles).
- No info about what have happened with Spartans from HALO 5.
- No air battles like in Reach e.t.c.
Most of the time I was just walking around, killing small group of mobs from a rifle.
Yea, it was interesting to build your own base, and do side tasks. But I personally have chose HALO because of its space story. In HALO infinite unfortunately the story was lame.
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The over reliance of some of the equipment really killed the fun
I think it would have been better to have a larger diversity of few-use equipment scatter across the maps
and use them to create interesting fights (repulsor, active camo, trip mine, sentry beam, bubble shield, gravity lift, etc).
Another thing that killed the fun was their need to force the player to play the game their way instead of letting the player experience the world like any game should do. Don’t force the player to use the grappleshot to fight the bosses. That’s a nice equipment and it must have been a pain to design it, we get it. No need to base the whole game around it and to shove it down our throats. Currently in the game any chieftains can teleport from across the room and end your free trial of life in half a second. That’s bad design. Im surprised it made it to the final product
There is a lot that need to be worked on and i really hope they update the base game with different biomes and more balanced enemies before adding any new DLC because so far thats aint worth 60 bucks
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I always viewed CE as more about the turning point in the Covenant war and a scramble to deny the Covenant the ring - an armada wiped out on the heels of a devastating loss at Reach, the discovery of the array and how it threatens everything, and the complication of a “second front” with the Flood.
I always felt they did, especially after H2 having them more front and center. In CE, however, when I first played it I wanted more narratively around the Flood. “Space parasite that makes space zombies” was always something I viewed as a veneer narrative plastered over a gameplay choice to try and tie it in when it was just added for the fun of it all.
I think the design is what it is - it’s whether or not it resonates with you that’s the key. It does resonate with me, and I love that kind of design (giving people who are willing to do the looking at side elements more details and information - very much like Sadie’s story in ODST), but it doesn’t resonate with you and that’s all well and good. IMO that doesn’t make it objectively good or bad, but rather subjectively good or bad, which is important to remember in these conversations.
Similarly I feel that the individual missions in Infinite have differences that I think most people gloss over. The I think some of this likely spawns from the lack of inclusion of mission replay. Foundation with the long hallways alongside the chasm, broken chunks floating about. Conservatory with its tall windows around the central shaft and the large pyramid with the excellent gold accents from Sandtrap. Repository with the light bridge down the long shaft with the view of the ring outside. The gondola on Nexus in the large chamber. The Command Spire with its rebuilding of materials floating through the large rooms. All different, but the lack of mission replay really hampers the ability to get familiar with the differences.
I view sandbox and environment differently. AotCR and Two Betrayals play differently, but they are the same level, just backwards. While I enjoy the fact they play differently, I don’t enjoy the fact that it’s the same place I’ve already been. Same with T&R and Keyes. Though, to Keyes’ credit, there is the destruction aspect, but to me it ends up just being Covenant hallways regardless.
I don’t necessarily hate it, but this isn’t my favorite either. Best bosses Halo has done, but that’s a low bar. I don’t like bosses in games generally anyway, though.
I always spend more time in the open world than in the corridor bits, so I end up viewing it as 2/3 open world, 1/3 corridor. I like to mix up the open world by varying on foot vs in vehicles. Most all of the Halo games feel are corridor shooters in my interpretation. H3 may be the one, aside from Infinite, that comes closest to breaking the formula.
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Nice, thanks for the advice. I was trying to be kinda vague because I’m not sure if OP has gotten there 
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One thing I will say is legendary has taught me how to switch through all the equipment way faster than I had to on Heroic lol
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