Infinite has mostly felt great to play thus far but a major concern I’ve had is related to how the controls work. Specifically zoom and vehicle functions.
With regards to zoom, in Halo MCC there is a feature where having zoom set to toggle allows you to both toggle zoom and hold to zoom. This is extremely convenient and I use this feature every time I play without exception. It feels more natural and is inherently more versatile. Infinite does not have this feature, and it’s extremely noticeable whenever I’ve played, and I imagine it’ll be even more noticeable in BTB when bigger maps are bound to be introduced and ADS becomes more of a necessity. Given this feature is also sadly missing from Halo 5 Forge for PC, and so is probably missing from the Halo 5 on Xbox too, I’m assuming it’s not planned to be added at all. If it isn’t planned to be added, it’d go a long way if that were changed as there are no problems I can see with its existence but already I’m noticing problems with it not being implemented. It doesn’t seem like it would be too difficult to add either, given the functionality already exists in every single Halo MCC title and could be translated or potentially just copied to the new engine.
The vehicle function settings part relates to how, with only ~3 exceptions I can think of, every Halo title has the same combination of functions with respect to primary vehicle functions (boost, ascend where it exists, and descend) and secondary vehicle functions (brake, emergency brake/superglide, and tricks). For some reason, Infinite has completely changed this. The combinations for all previous titles except CE(A) (one of the exceptions I mentioned), is Boost + Brake, Ascend + Tricks, and Descend + EBrake/SGlide (5 splits this last one into two controls, another of the exceptions I mentioned). In Infinite, and this I can already tell based on the previous essay about zooming is going to throw me off and potentially others, has changed this to Boost + EBrake/SGlide (assuming SGlide has remained tied to EBrake), Ascend + Brake, and Descend + Tricks. I can’t think of any reason for this change other than just because that’s how it was made during development, and I don’t know how easy changing this is, however I think the ability to either change the combinations ourselves or to revert the combinations to how MCC has them would be far more preferable than leaving the combinations like this.
Neither of these are game-breaking and do not ruin the enjoyment of Infinite much however personally the zoom part has already been somewhat frustrating and I can see the vehicle part being frustrating too, so hopefully these can be taken into consideration before the game’s imminent release.