I see a lot of people extolling the virtues of the Halo Reach ranking and progression system, and tons of criticism over challenges in Halo Infinite. People say that challenges force you to play a way you don’t want to progress, it’ll force you into playing game modes you don’t want to play, change player behaviours that’ll ruin others experience.
Do people not remember that reach had challenges? That plenty of these involved playing different modes, using different weapons you might not like to use? I distinctly remember having a challenge that required me to get a certain number of grenade kills in 1 match, that wasn’t exactly fun. But it didn’t ruin the game for me, and clearly didn’t ruin the game for everyone else, so why is it going to ruin Halo Infinite? The daily challenges, while not perfect because they don’t reflect player ability, will provide a steady stream of XP just for playing. Halo reach prioritised game length over any other criteria for credits awarded, and winning gave no bonus. The credits you got from just basic play in Halo Reach were small, probably a healthy average was 500 credits a match for a 10 minute match.
People seem frustrated at the idea you’ll have to grind to get to higher ranks in the battle pass, but have they forgotten just how much of a grind it was getting to Inherator? If you played for 3 hours a day, every single day, and got 5000 credits an hour, it would take about 4 years to reach max rank. Getting to max rank within 4 years means spending about 20 hours a week playing the game, it becomes a part time job. By the time you got a little over halfway through the progression system you would only rank up once every few weeks or months. All the armour you’d want would cost either hundreds of thousands of credits, up to 2 million credits to unlock.
I enjoyed the Reach system, but it had tons of flaws. The daily credit cap was a pain. The credit lottery system, why was that a thing? I don’t see how the system we have here is all that different. Instead of the gap between ranks getting progressively larger, they stay the same. Instead of having a max rank, you now rank up infinitely instead. But in terms of actually playing the game and gaining XP, it’s a very similar system. I understand people wanting to have that rank to show off, it’s not my thing but I get it, but is that such a huge deal breaker? Maybe I’m missing something, but other than those things I listed are the systems really all that different?
The issue is that challenges are the only way to progress, not an optional thing like Reach. There is also no true rank to grind for like inheritor or 152, only the Battle Pass. This is made worse by the fact that those who don’t spend money will be stuck with little to nothing to grind for, considering the free portion of the Battle Pass in most games is like a calling card and 2 emblems, with maybe one weapon skin if you’re lucky. So, there’s nothing there to show your prestige, which you think isn’t a deal-breaker, which is true. Its such a basic thing every single game has, and it amazes me 343i manages to fumble that despite having developed Infinite for 6 years (when in comparison Bungie made most of Halo CE, then Halo 2 and Halo 3 in that same timespan)
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> The issue is that challenges are the only way to progress, not an optional thing like Reach. There is also no true rank to grind for like inheritor or 152, only the Battle Pass. This is made worse by the fact that those who don’t spend money will be stuck with little to nothing to grind for, considering the free portion of the Battle Pass in most games is like a calling card and 2 emblems, with maybe one weapon skin if you’re lucky. So, there’s nothing there to show your prestige, which you think isn’t a deal-breaker, which is true. Its such a basic thing every single game has, and it amazes me 343i manages to fumble that despite having developed Infinite for 6 years (when in comparison Bungie made most of Halo CE, then Halo 2 and Halo 3 in that same timespan)
But all the daily challenges in Halo Infinite are awarded just for playing and then winning matches, and there’s enough of them you’re almost never going to run out in a day.
That’s essentially the same as getting XP from playing matches. It’s functionally the same thing. And 343 already confirmed that the free track of the battle pass would include armours, visors and coatings. It won’t be the same amount as the paid track, but you’ll have items on the pass worth playing for.
As for the whole “6 years” argument, I’m getting a little tired of hearing that. It means very little. Halo CE, 2 and 3 all released on one console each, Halo Infinite is launching on four different SKU’s of console and on PC. As resolution and graphical quality has increased the length of time it takes to make art assets has increased as well to match. It takes time for designers to make those. They didn’t spend 6 years working on Halo Infinite purely anyway, they only had an engine showcase to show at E3 2018 because they were probably only in either pre-production or the very early stages of production of Halo Infinite then. Which means 3 years of active development for the game. That doesn’t take into account that Halo Infinite was made during a global pandemic as well.
Dont forget people praise H3 ranking which ONLY rewarded you for winning. The daily challenges are trying to do both (given tier 3 only rewards for wins).
Reach was a grind fest and even had a daily xp cap. Infinite technically does as well, but reaches was way easier to hit then 14-18 hrs of play a day.
The Halo 3 ranking didn’t tie many armours to rank though. Lieutenant was the highest rank to unlock Rogue. You just needed 70 wins in any matchmaking mode and rank 10, the equivalent of getting to high bronze.
The daily credit cap in Reach was 120,000 before being raised to 200,000 at the start of 2012. Doable but difficult to hit. Challenges were neat but were nowhere close to hitting the cap in any given day, you just needed to play. All challenges did was lessen the time it took to reach the cap, 20-30k for weekly and 2-3k for daily challenges. Winning and individual performance gave you more credits, winning under performance bonus I believe, and your performance just added to base credits. Commendations also added credits. At the end of 2011 you could also create custom challenges that gave a huge amount of credits meaning hitting daily cap halved in terms of playtime.
You earned more credits the higher rank you were also. There came a point where every complete game, even 6-7 minute games were in the 1-2k range, might of been as early as legend or mythic. It isn’t the grind as much as your only option to increase rank is to do the challenges. In Reach if you completed the challenges you could still continue earning credits.
If infinite has ample tasks i’m sure there’s no problem and I won’t really care either way. Just needed to clarify some things as the criticisms of Reach and 3s progression ranking wasn’t quite correct.