I bought all the halos of past, tons of reqs on 5, all the dlc, even other microtransactions in hw2 and spartan assault. I went to Outpost Discovery in 2019. I like the art style direction. This game is a joke. It isn’t even an Alpha version. The multiplayer is a rotting pile of repetitive uncooked junk. While working in Africa I took time out of my days to go visit the local internet cafe and play Halo Infinite when it came out to see what changed since the flights. I can’t tell the difference. It was fun and cool for a bit, but after 3 days of playing and unnavigable menus, poor connection to armor stats, and god, the store.
The store is the biggest insult out of everything. While Infinite might’ve not launched as broken as the MCC when it first came out, the utter incompleteness of it all is nauseating. This in addition to the fact 343 has decided to monetize virtually every item, and have a fully working store that works better than the game itself, just goes to show which aspect of 343’s attention is focused on [wallets). Halo Infinite came out on the 15th and didn’t even have coop. Even CE had coop 20 years prior. Infinite launched with less content and abilities than any other Halo prior, and that’s a tall task given even Halo 5 didn’t launch with Forge, the least game modes and maps at that time, and a sub-par customization system that was a downgrade from Halo 4, which itself was a downgrade from Reach’s customization (though still acceptable).
If Halo Infinite really will be the platform for the next 10 years, will the next Halo contain low rez textures that I will have to buy in game for higher rez textures? Will it be missing slayer? Slayer isn’t even selectable as a gamemode in matchmaking.
What really irks me about all of this, are 343’s responses to all of this. The response to slayer being in the same playlist as team objective iirc was something along the lines of splitting population. If one were to look at the Steam pop numbers alone, a few weeks ago and even now this wouldn’t have been a problem, and probably would’ve been less of a problem now if this had not been the case from the beginning.
There is so much more to express, and little patience left of being able to do so. I won’t leave Halo, and if that means I need to live on XLink Kai and go full-time LAN given the old 360 servers are shutting down in 3 days, this is the path I guess we will all have to take. MCC potentially too, but it ain’t the same.
Do not confuse quality with nostalgia. Halo can be awesome again, but it needs to rediscover and be honest with itself. Suppressing discussion or acting as if everything is being taken care of prevents diagnosis of the problem and leads to decline. I remember with Halo 5 if detailed criticism had came earlier we might have been in a better spot now.