I’ve been playing for a few hours and I’ve finally gotten bored enough to come and post my thoughts here. I’m going to set them as positives and negatives.
Postives:
The gameplay is fun, not extremely taxing on hardware even at the highest settings. As far as 343 Halo goes, this is their best entry to the series for sure.
The sound design is mostly very good, I especially enjoyed that the Energy Sword seems to sound more like it’s older versions rather than the beat stick noise it turned into in Halo 4 and 5 .
Negatives:
Obviously, I’ll have more negatives than positives, simply because I don’t notice all the good stuff (Because it’s good).
The battlepass is slow, slow, slow. Something needs to change here whether it is rewarding players credits, increasing the amount of challenges or just simply giving players the ability to earn XP in more. Heck , reducing the xp required would be a good start too, it took me four games just to get past the first level. The reason I stopped playing today is that I felt I was making no progress.
The maps aren’t really all that interesting? It’s very arena shooter, which I guess is the point, but it felt that in most earlier Halo games, there was a mix of fun map design and shooter elements whereas Infinite is just very symmetrical and dare I say, boring, in it’s map design.
I found it pretty interesting that there is no custom games browser for Infinite, despite it being one of the most requested elements of MCC for about five years. I would have thought this would be a day one decision. It is also really unintuitive to pick game modes and maps you wish to play, at the moment all I can do is objectives and slayer, is infection even in?
Just miscellaneous stuff here, no collision, lack of very good physics etc, stuff which has been mentioned elsewhere thousands of times.
I understand that this is a “beta” and the general response for these types of posts in the past has always been “They’ll fix it later” but regardless, posts like this need to be made so that feedback can actually get out and more often then not, without sufficient feedback, they don’t “Fix it later”.
What does everybody else think? Am I right or wrong and why? Has your experience with the game differed? Thanks for reading.
Agree wholeheartedly with your first point. Even thinking about progressing the battlepass is giving me a headache. Played the entire day and got to 3/4ths to BP level 4.
don’t fall for the beta sign they put on it, its really not a beta at all.
Generally, I’m disappointed by the lack of content generally. much of it isn’t new from the tests and aim still needs some more work. I feel like RRR needs to come back, cause I know people are going to cheat in the game regardless of its presence or not.
I completely agree with your initial points, as well as the first one in the negatives. I didn’t even reach level 1 after a few hours of gameplay due to a lack of focus on my bigger challenges, which is a weird problem to have.
As for the second, the shock and effect of both Bazaar and Recharge wore off on me during the flights, so I can somewhat agree. As for the new BTB map and Streets, I can’t say anything to their design, but they were fun to play on :]
The third point is… well, I don’t know why there isn’t a custom games feature. Maybe they haven’t finished that one yet or something, I don’t really know.
I thought the physics were alright and I never really had an issue with no-collide, but I wasn’t really paying attention.
You really aren’t wrong about a lot of this. But for me, the biggest issue is XP gains. I could forget about everything on this list if I could cruise through my challenges at a steady flow instead of a painful crawl.
Most of my negative points were only really visible to me as a result of being thrown at the same maps just to grind that tiny amount of xp. It made be very critical about everything else which was going on. I feel like if xp was faster, I would have a lot less time to spend with a critical eye on the game as a whole.
I played only two games. I don’t like the DMR replacement and I don’t like how you start with an AR is BTB. As for maps I can’t say since I’ve only played two.
Halo 5 multiplayer was a lot better. I agree that the maps seem bad, they are very detailed graphically but there seems to be too much open space. I guess that’s where the grapple will come in but not everyone is gonna love the grapple. I don’t, unless it’s just a spartan ability that constantly recharges. This game has too much luck mixed in imo, luck of whether or not the item you need is gonna be there when you pass. That’s fine for the super weapons, but dash and grapple shouldn’t be something you are actively going after. One or two items fine, but the more you are concentrated on picking up stuff the more you are less engaged with actually shooting people, which is the whole point…
I could not agree more with most of your points, notably the progression one, but alas.
The main issue I currently have is definitely the way you progress through the battle pass.
And on the note of sandbox/weapons, I feel like the AR is far overpowered for a starting weapon. There have been multiple times I will just be shredded by a more skilled player and I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong. I just match with people who are clearly higher skill than me and end up getting punished for it.
I’m glad there are, so far, no “get x flag captures” or “win ctf games” challenges, but I can’t help but think they are most likely on the list of challenges.
I really like the gameplay and the visuals of this game, but it’s just so painful to actually play, since every time you open the game you’re just reminded of the battle pass.
The battle pass is meant to last at least 3 months. I honestly don’t quite get why everyone’s complaining.
3 levels in one day sounds another right to me tbh.i gues toy could probably say it should be maybe be 5, but I think everyone it’s hurray totally discounting that it’s F2P.
And I think no one is considering how -Yoink!- it would be if tuner battle pads could be grinded through in a week, but then there’s 2.75 months until any more unlockables. Then everyone would be complaining about that…
This is a really well done post OP, constructive, to the point, and describes opinions on the games way better than I have on the forums.
I suppose one of the benefits of Games as a Service is that some of these problems can be ironed out over time. Here’s hoping the XP problem can be sorted out soon (double XP weekends in a the short term maybe, pretty please?)
I dont see the issue with the battle pass tbh. Its slow but so what? you have 5 months to get all the stuff, and even then you can switch between different seasons to get them all. If you are impatient you can just pay to unlock it all. Unlocking everything super fast people will run out of stuff after a month and be left waiting for new content / unlocks for the nt 4 months.
As for the maps, i think the BTB maps are fantastic, that banished turret that shoots into the sky when you cap a flag for example or when the halo array fires all great. flow i really nice. The smaller maps are very detailed and cool, i only wish there were more maps and more forerunner / halo style maps for the 4v4 gamemodes
the browser is missing because it will come with forge. So we’re going to have to wait for that next year.
Overall really happy with the game so far, and it is still a beta btw.
I 100% agree with your map complaints and it was one of the main things I was afraid of since the flights. There’s only a tiny handful of maps, and most of them fall into the same category aesthetically, a problem I also had with Halo 5.
For Arena, it’s mostly “death box with a million hallways and staircases” and more egregiously all of the BTB maps are “dusty mountainside littered with rocks”. There are a couple of standouts like Behemoth and Bazaar, but the map variety is abysmal so far.
To add to my previous comments. Does anybody feel rewarded for playing well at the moment?
I just got a flawless victory in CTF and, since I did not complete my objectives, recieved nowhere near as much xp as in a previous match where I completed three but performed poorly. At the moment, I feel rewarded for following a path but zero reward for actually playing well.
The amount of XP you get per day is OK to me… if I were only playing Halo Infinite. If next battle pass has the same progression pace, I would not buy it because I value more my time on other games.
Having said that, we have > 5 months to finish Season 1… so I am not worried. Surely progression will change by then.