The Academy is so wasted in Infinite. It should really be changed into something of a multiplayer hub. You should be able to load in with your MP Spartan and you can walk around and interact with characters, like a requisitions officer to track your Battle Pass progress and view the shop, or a training sergeant to start weapon drills or begin a training mode match. Then a deployment officer is used to view matchmaking playlists and the custom game lobby. The Armory should be a physical space within the Academy, where you can go view all your customized weapons, vehicles, and armors, and make changes to them.
And you should definitely have your party load into your academy instance when you invite them, so you can run around and do drills and stuff together, or show friends some funny Easter eggs the devs have hidden around the social space, and show off your cores and weapon skins to eachother.
Finally, to make sure players don’t have to waste time running around to interact with everything, make it so all the features are available in the pause menu options, allowing you to skip interacting with the social space if you just want to get into a match asap, or teleport to the armory to customize. And allow players coming out of mp matches to search again without returning to the academy so they don’t need to waste time with more loading screens.
But yeah, this would make the academy, and the process of customizing and upgrading your MP Spartan feel so much more like it’s part of a story. I know that’s what 343 was going for, an MP story featuring our Spartan as the main character, but outside of the tutorial it doesn’t feel like it at all, and making the Academy a place we go, and interact with eachother in would really help with that.
8 Likes
I fully agree! Social features like this would add so much life to the game. Especially since it would give us one more place to show off our cosmetics to other players. I know it wouldn’t add much to the gameplay, but I think just adding in more social features in general would help retain more of the player base.
3 Likes
The way they built it up before release, I thought it was going to be something like that. It’s fine how it is but the hype they tried to generate around it kind of backfired and made it come off as rather lackluster to me
4 Likes
I wonder if they plan to expand upon it in Season 2. It’s mostly a hopeful sentiment, since we know little to nothing about it, but I really hope they try to drive a multiplayer narrative.
Same here. Infinite’s multiplayer being a “Spartan story” was their whole excuse for not having Elites in multiplayer. If I have to, yet again, sacrifice the character I considered my Halo identity for 8 years, make it worth my while. Make my multiplayer Spartan feel like a character and not just a customization tool.
2 Likes
Honestly when they announced it I thought that’s what it was going to be. The Johnson military academy should act as a hub world for customization and interacting with MP in general. and it should partially if not completely replace the GARBAGE UI/menu system we have now.
2 Likes
I definitely would love it for it to be a hub. Normally most think of Destiny’s Hubs, but I actually want more like CoD WW2s.
Have everyone walking around showing off their armor without the outline system mudding it up, a public 1vs1 arena with a leader board, maybe publicly do your weapon drills?
2 Likes
if you can join lobbys with random spartans it would be nice to see there armor too
3 Likes