I got into the Halo scene a little late; my dad had rented Reach for me on GameFly one week and I didn’t have XBL at the time so all I did was play the hell out of the campaign. I eventually connected to XBL servers and fell in love with the Halo experience. My K/D was below average; about a .98. I met up with some people that showed me how to play better and smarter and my K/D started to rise. About 4-5 months prior to the launch of the highly anticipated Halo 4, I got really good at Halo. I put up a 4.00 K/D in that time, and brought my ratio from minus 4k (~61,000 kills to ~65,000 deaths) to just above a 1.00 (1.03).
This game though… it feels off. The TTK of weapons is awful. It really shouldn’t be an entire mag of AR or 5+ shots to the body with the BR (I’ve had it be 4+ to the head multiple times in the passed few weeks). And if I have someone one-shot, they should not be able to Reversal me with a sidearm. There are a lot of changes that need to be made to this game, and I know I can’t be the only one feeling this game is lackluster.
Between the missing game modes, or not having a list of game modes to choose from is super lame; not to mention the lack of a non-battlepass progression system, or rank system, and no way to unlock armor or variants with an in-game credit system similar to Reach.
Half of the weapons are trash (I’m looking at you, Bulldog), and I am unsure of the amount of times I’ve broken shields only to get -Yoink!- on at the last second, or the amount of people I see hitting headshot after headshot (I play on PC, not all of us cheat).
The matchmaking algorithm is also bad and needs to be fixed. I like that K/D isn’t tracked anymore, but that shouldn’t mean different skill levels shouldn’t be matched with me. I’m not as good as I once was, apparently, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be able to have fun–and getting stomped by people that are on a different skill level as me should not be matched with me (this is a blanket statement; this should apply to the entirety of the player base). I’d rather have a K/D tracker back with improved matchmaking, then deal with people who are on a higher level of skill than me every game.
If 343i is really concerned about losing players, they should highly consider adding some things to the game that we actually want. I’m sure I speak for more than myself when I suggest that they add some of the game modes that made Halo fun such as:
Grifball: this should absolutely be added STAT.
Infected: this was a fun game mode to play when I didn’t feel like playing Slayer.
A PvE mode (i.e. a Spartan Ops like mode or Firefight).
As for customization, such things should be added:
A credit system to purchase armors and variants. Think Reach but more expansive. I’m guilty of buying armor from the Store, but we should be able to unlock everything via a credit system. Each game you earn XP and Credits. The XP goes towards the Pass, and the Credits can be used to purchase armors and variants from the Armory. To go along with this, there should be a ranking system like H2, H3, and Reach. I would love to be able to track my progression through a rank-based system. That was one of the things that kept me in
Reach for so long–I wanted to be Inheritor.
I really try to play for fun, but with how dull the game is currently, it saddens my heart that a once great franchise has been reduced to nothing. The way the game stands now, it will be dead in a year or better, and that might be me being generous.
This game has the potential to be great, but as it stands right now is not the best it can be.
Edit: slight edit as I did not see the playlist change announcement before I posted. Too tired to go back and change the parts of my rant about playlists.