Aside from the absolutely insulting monetization of the game, there are a number of gameplay issues that have been created in Halo Infinite, which genuinely haven’t been a problem before, buckle up, because I’m writing a book (For the record, I understand it’s “free to play” but please look into how you’re going to reward players 343, I bought the pass once, I shouldn’t have to buy each individual level of the pass because I don’t want to use the pulse carbine for 8 hours)
Friendly fire, and player collision:
Team collision seems fine as an option for chaotic custom games, but the fact that it is also applied to enemies is match making is appalling. The ability to completely miss a melee, or have players walk through you because some arbitrary, and honestly pointless change was made is upsetting. I don’t think anyone actually asked for this change, and I’m fairly certain I’ve seen posts about it all over the internet.
Friendly fire not being on in almost any objective mode means there’s literally ZERO reason not to spam the abundance of grenades at the objective while your team is trying to capture, or hold anything. This upsets the flow of gameplay mostly on Oddball, but I’ve seen it become an annoyance on any mode with a capture zone. Once again, a change that wasn’t needed, and is actively hurting the game.
Crossplay:
Crossplay itself is functioning completely fine, and I don’t think anyone truly wants it gone, that being said, watching something as a player sprints straight at you, realizes they’re going to lose a fight, does a 180 in half a second and gets out of harms way is genuinely upsetting. If you guys could take a page out of Destiny 2’s crossplay launch, and double or even Triple how fast console players could rotate, it would be greatly appreciated. In the mean time, it’s just infuriating watching someone do something that I completely understand and WOULD do, but simply cannot do, due to the fact I use a controller.
Weapon Ballance:
I have no idea why other weapons exist, when you spawn in with arguably the best loadout in the game. There’s very little reason to look for “sidegrades” as the sidekick is insanely good, and the AR has people pelting snipers from across the maps in BTB. Some weapons feel off-putting, simply because the AR or Sidekick exist, and it feels disadvantageous to swap off that loadout (aside from power weapons of course).
Also worth noting; the random weapons per map makes it even less worth looking when you either A; go way out of your way to find something you don’t like (looking at Behemoth weapon spawns), or B; immediately see that nothing on the map has spawned to your liking, and proceed to use the starting loadout exclusively. I know that some of this could be a “just git gud” argument, and I agree, but when 90% of the loadout you find viable is given to everyone at the start of the game, it’s difficult to care at all about anything that won’t insta-kill my opponent.
Spawning:
This may only be me, but due to the extremely low time to kill, I feel like a lot of the time if you’re the only one who dies in a fight, you will constantly be spawned directly in-between your team, and the enemy team, with little chance of surviving if you get caught off the spawn.
More times than I can count, the game has spawned me or my buddies directly in line of sight of enemies, or in a few cases directly in front of the whole enemy team. When playing objective modes, it almost feels like the game will purposely put you as far from both the objective, and your team if you’re the first to die in a fight. I don’t know why/ how this is an issue, considering previous instalments have been very well done with their spawns.
Menus/UI:
Sure hope your Monitor/TV is automatically set up for the deadzone, because you can’t change it. There’s “horizontal/vertical display margin” slider, but the way it’s worded, makes it seem like it’s exclusively for the in game UI/HUD.
Game modes:
I won’t get too riled up over the choice of “fight bots, quick play, or BTB”, but I will say it was a poor choice to throw slayer in with the Objective modes. Some people are exclusively there for their challenges, some exclusively to get kills, there’s no reason we couldn’t have had a “objective mosh pit” type playlist, and a Slayer playlist as a separate selection.
Big team battle 2.0 is pure chaos(this isn’t a bad thing), but when a majority of the matches I’ve played are either complete stomps, or complete stalemates, it’s not enjoyable. It feels like there’s literally just stuff happening for the sake of it happening, and I’m hoping we’ll see a more refined mode, or even a return of the 8v8 we’ve seen previously, as I feel it’s just a moshpit game mode for the sake of “look, we can make it happen”. Don’t get me wrong, it’s cool to see Warthogs, tanks, and weapons rain from above, but when you have literally no clue what’s actually going to drop, I find myself once again just using the stuff that I spawn with, and if it’s on the way, maybe I’ll look for a new power weapon. Once again, I think the RNG of what weapons will spawn is hurting the game.
Customization:
There’s not a single reason other than “muh shareholders” why the helmet, visors, shoulders, gloves, wrist pieces, utilities, and kneepads shouldn’t be universal. The armor core system would still work just fine, with your undersuit (the core of the armor) is the big change across multiple. I could MAYBE see the chest being an issue, due to how things would mount on “newer” armor vs “older” armor, but that’s about it.
It still baffles me how we could have an infinitely better paint system, if they simply let you create and edit one. They could still sell cool designs on it like “digital camo” or “this one is battle damaged” or something that you would need to unlock or buy. Even something like “buy a monster energy and redeem the code to unlock this dope green color and some new shader/coating”. A hybrid system would by far be the best choice for both the developers, and the community, and I’m pretty sure corporate greed is the only reason we won’t see it change. I understand that “more will be out at full release” but given the state of the game right now, it’s going to be a bunch of people just looking like Noble Team until they change any of this, or give us something cool to chase.
TL;DR
Bring back friendly fire and collision, less RnG per match for weapons, tweak some of the weapons to make them more appealing, some slight UI tweaks are needed, BTB 2.0 feels like mostly noise, and please rethink the customization.
Disclaimer: I understand that this is a “Beta” but it’s unlikely that any major changes are going to be made at “release” a lot of these things were previously talked about before release during the flight, up to and including collision and the Battle pass, to see nothing get changed is a little bit more than worrying. I don’t want to see the hype die out, and I want this game to thrive, I’m simply putting my neck out there because these are some of the things I’ve experienced playing so far, and would like improvement where it can be made.