I meant to post this right after E3 but I’m just now getting around to it. I’m relatively new to the forums; I only got involved when the Halo 5 beta hit. I’ve kept my expectations low ever since then, and it’s paid off because now I can’t be so disappointed. It’s that the more I see of Halo 5, the worse it gets.
The beta was fine. A work in progress for sure, but fun to play. The balance wasn’t the greatest, but I liked being able to do some things I hadn’t done in Halo before. I don’t like that there’s sprint, but I can get over that. What was game breaking was the shielding system. By the third week of the beta, I was getting on to play just because I knew it wouldn’t be around anymore soon, so I’d get as much exposure as I could when I still could. But with that shield system in place, making the flow as choppy as it is, I couldn’t see myself putting in a lot of time to play Halo 5 online.
No worries. I don’t play multiplayer online nearly as much as I used to. For the last year or so, it’s been splitscreen with friends. Not to mention Halo’s story and lore are the best out of any video game ever! And while Halo 4 messed up the story more than I thought it possibly could, there were many ways it could be saved. For example, even though every mission, every line of dialogue, every shot fired, and every button pushed in Halo 4 felt utterly meaningless, stuff like the Ark Theory would fill the void. Halo’s story could still go places in 5.
Unfortunately, then came the announcement about splitscreen. That was the deal breaker. Halo 5 looked like a fun game, it just wasn’t the game I wanted it to be. Halo 4 was a good game by all means, it was just a bad Halo game because I hold Halo titles to such a higher standard that other games. But none of that matters when there is no splitscreen. No staying up late beating the Halo 5 campaign on legendary with my friend and a pack of beer. No more Halo nights playing local 4 player free for all on whatever crazy game type we decided to make. I’m a relatively new Halo player. The first game I played was Halo 3 but I really got into it when I finally got a 360 with Halo Reach. Throughout the next year, I went out and played every other Halo game. I fell in love. Bungie was able to notably improve the game with each new sequel. But I always considered splitscreen to be the soul of Halo. 343 has cut it out.
As for the campaign, after E3 I am no longer interested. The demo looked like a typical Call of Duty reveal. And I’m not just comparing Halo to CoD to make it look bad, no, I really felt like I was watching Activision show off their next CoD game. It felt the same to me, I don’t think I can explain it better than that. And the art style looks like anything but Halo. 343 has radically changed the UNSC, Covenant, and Forerunner themes. Compare it to Reach and everything looks worse. The enemies all look worse (except the Hunters maybe), Spartan armor looks worse, Forerunner and UNSC structures look worse, the weapons look worse (emphasis on the Rocket Launcher). Halo 5 may still have a good story, but not only don’t I think it’s capable of living up to the original trilogy, ODST, and Reach, at this point that isn’t enough.
At this point, if Halo 5 announces 4 player splitscreen, I will buy it. But this will most likely be my last post on the Halo forums. Halo will always be my favorite game, and I will continue to play it frequently with all my friends, so if you want to tell me to just go play the old Halo games instead, I already do. Those games were meant to have infinite replayability, they were made to last forever. Now Halo has lost its soul and it will probably never find it again. As far as I’m concerned, Master Chief and Cortana died at the end of Halo 3. This is KamikazePerro signing out