Full disclosure: I’m a diehard Bungie fan and have been since before Halo, that said I’m also a diehard Halo fan who loves this franchise. This isn’t the rant of some angry Bungie fanboy, but rather someone that loves Halo and sees it slipping away. I originally posted this in the #Gaming forum on Bungie.net, but I wanted to repost it here because frankly I’m a long time fan that’s upset with the direction the series is taking and I wanted it somewhere that it had a better chance of someone from 343 seeing it, so here is my original post:
I’m a pretty hardcore Halo fan. I’ve read all of the books, comics, played all of the games over and over. Halo 5 is a complete disappointment. It massively fails in the story department by making a story that requires knowledge of the books to understand what’s going on while simultaneously disappointing the people who have read the books by criminally under representing Blue Team.
Warzone is a poor man’s Invasion mode. And the whole req pack system more or less revolves around Warzone as arena multiplayer doesn’t have classes, making most of the items you get from req packs useless if you don’t like Warzone (I don’t). The map selection is super weak and there’s no firefight/Spartan Ops type mode. The movement stuff like boosting, sliding, shoulder charge, and ground pound are fun and I like the way they handled aiming down the sights, but these features can’t prop up the weak multiplayer. Grenade spam is a serious problem in arena.
And then there’s the story.
What the hell does 343i have against Cortana? I mean damn. In Halo 4 they killed her off, now they’ve brought her back as the enemy of the entire galaxy. 343i has made it more than obvious that they want to replace Chief with Locke, but the way they handling it - shoving Locke down everyone’s throat while undermining Chief - is the worst possible way they could’ve handled it. The fact that this was to be the first game that featured Chief’s reunion with Blue Team just helps to really salt the wound when you look at what they gave us. We should’ve had 15 levels of Blue Team just being the badasses they are, instead we got 3 missions as Blue Team. Seriously 343? And the fact that Locke was able to hold his own against THE Spartan II is a complete joke. It’s like 343 hasn’t even read their own books. The missions were boring and dragged on A LOT, of course maybe it was due to the fact that I didn’t want to play as Locke and Osiris.Overall I feel sorely disappointed in Halo 5. The story is bad, the missions are boring, the multiplayer feels barebones and there is no forge yet. Compare this with Halo 3 and Halo: Reach, the pinnacle of Halo games (at least in content if you aren’t a huge fan of those games), and Halo 5 doesn’t stack up.
Edit: I also wanted to point out that one of the areas that I feel like Halo 5 really disappoints is content. Ever since 343 took over we have not seen the same amount of content we were used to getting with Bungie Halo games, just go back and boot up Reach, that game has more content than you can shake a stick at - great campaign, firefight, multi, invasion, best ever forge, theater, file sharing, full customization, a plethora or customization options for multiplayer and firefight, etc.
Halo 5 has campaign, custom games and online multiplayer. I know forge is coming but it should’ve shipped with the game and Theater mode doesn’t count because it’s no longer necessary since Xbox One has Game DVR.
EDIT: I just want to apologize to anyone that I may have spoiled the story for with this post, it certainly wasn’t my intention. Like I said at the beginning I reposted this from the Bungie forums where I had the spoiler code in it but for got to do it over here, so again, I apologize for that. Luckily it looks as though one of the mods fixed it for me.
As for all the people telling me to play Destiny, it’s cool, I do play Destiny, daily. But I have been a Halo fan since the Cortana Letters. I have every Halo edition console, all the Legendary Editions of the games, all the books, comics, loads of collectibles, I even have a -Yoinking!- cat named Halo (and I will never confess whether or not I tried to put the cat helmet on it lol). I posted this because Halo has always been my absolute favorite gaming franchise, I love the universe and I care about the characters. We were told a while back that this series of games would be Master Chief’s story, maybe his last. But the direction the game has taken makes me feel like 343i is leaving me behind, and that’s a -Yoink- feeling to feel like you’re losing something you love.
maybe you don’t?