Why no one cares about H5 on PC

Games Halo 5: Guardians
1

I went to go check back on the customs game browser on PC, and there’s literally around 15 people playing custom games online right now. That is shocking for such a huge IP, that has a free game out on PC.

I believe there are many things that contribute to PC Gamers not caring about Halo 5 on PC

1.) Windows 10 exclusive, uses Windows Store (OS upgrade costs money now, Windows Store is slow and buggy and a general pain to use)
2.) Lack of FOV slider (leads to motion sickness, headaches, I myself have suffered from this from playing H5 from too long, because your view looks like you’re looking through a cardboard tube you begin to feel queasy)
3.) Poor chat lobbies (you cannot type to other players in pre-game lobbies, and there is no chat log whatsoever, if someone says something and it disappears, it’s gone forever, proper PC games have real chat logs and you can chat at all times to others)
4.) Custom games browser being introduced too late, not as a launch feature, too little too late, nobody really cares anymore. This needed to be day 1
5.) General buginess, and sticky interface of Halo 5 Forge. Lots of bugs still present, such as custom game types overwriting themselves and resetting to vanilla settings, menus and interfaces are sticky and not optimized (you can hit F for friends like 6 times before it actually does what you want it to)
6.) Console limitations on PC players. Having such artificially small budgets and constraints doesn’t do much to entice PC players to Forge when they have machines that can handle 5x the budget (yes I know it’s so the maps are playable on XB1, obviously)
7.) Frame rate cap of 60. 60 is standard, but you can’t go higher than 60? Why not?
8.) Console graphics parity, see Candyland graphics comparison video

There are a lot more reasons but I touched on a few big issues. It just makes me sad that Halo 5 in a tiny blip on the map on PC right now, because if handled properly it could have been massive. (As in released on Steam for free, not Windows 10 exclusive, proper chat logs, good FOV slider and frame rate options, smooth and optimized game, iron out all the bugs, custom games browser day 1, console limitations taken off with a warning that your map will not be playable on XB1, if they did all of that this game would have been HUGE I’m talking consistent 40-100k players at all times but instead it’s dead at 10-50 players lol) Unfortunately it’s already faded away into obscurity. Will Halo 6 on PC be done right and have a large PC following? I don’t know but if Halo 5 Forge is any indication, it’s not looking good, and it sucks to say that because I love Halo, and I game on PC, but if you want PC gamers to care, you have to do your game right, PC gamers have 3 million other choices of games to play if yours sucks and doesn’t cater to them, unlike consoles who have a small selection of games to play and they just accept whatever you hand them.

So please don’t botch Halo Wars 2 and Halo 6 on PC. PC Gamers have higher standards, they can either be your best friend or your worst enemy, it all depends on how you treat them (hint: don’t treat them as an afterthought like Halo 5 Forge)

2

Playing a console game on PC while complaining about the short comings of console games. Seriously , it would be like trying to play Star Craft on consoles and complaining “I don’t have enough hot keys”. You are playing a game on a medium it wasn’t efficiently or inherently designed for.
I am not saying it is excusable , but what do you expect in today’s world of half -Yoink- game ports and lazy development?

3

> 2533274847627340;2:
> Playing a console game on PC while complaining about the short comings of console games. Seriously , it would be like trying to play Star Craft on consoles and complaining “I don’t have enough hot keys”. You are playing a game on a medium it wasn’t efficiently or inherently designed for.
> I am not saying it is excusable , but what do you expect in today’s world of half -Yoink- game ports and lazy development?

That makes no sense whatsoever, absolutely none. Halo 1, 2, and now 5 are on PC, it is not a purely console game. How on earth are FPS games not compatible with PC as a medium?

“You are playing a game on a medium it wasn’t efficiently or inherently designed for.” What does that even mean? FPS games were not meant to be played on PCs? I seriously hope you don’t believe that… Again Halo 1 and 2 were ported over to PC before Microsoft abandoned PC gamers.

If you take a complex input system (M&KB) and a simplistic input system (game pad), simplistic games can be configured to work with the more complex input system (FPS games are very simple), but complex games being shoehorned into a simplistic input system has poor results (Halo Wars). That Starcraft comparison has no merit.

All I expect is 343 the caretakers of a huge popular IP that I happen to love, along with the deep pockets of Microsoft, to at least put a little bit of effort into trying to repair the bridge Microsoft burned down long ago. H5F felt so half-hearted, and bogged down by bad decisions, that it’s got me extremely worried about Halo 6. It’s like watching a loved one fighting to survive against a horrible disease. I don’t want Halo to die, but they have to get their **** together, because what they are doing right now is not working.

4

Halo 5 was not built or optimized to play on PC. It was ported (or portions were) , which means it was not built for it. I am not saying the genre wasn’t built for PC , but the game specifically. You complain about Frames per second from a game designed for a machine that is lucky to hit 60 frames regularly. Chat lobbies from a game that is designed for voice chat. Console limitations on a console game.
I understand Bungie made smoother ports (mostly) for their PC products , however even they had issues. No port is perfect , and far rarer for it to be better than the original.

And as far as 343 making a decent Halo game , I have been hoping for that since they gained control of the IP.

5

and the H5g wasnt exactly praised as a good game.

6

Just because it wasn’t initially made with PC in mind, doesn’t mean the port has to be horrible. The entire reason of the port is to cater to the PC audience, as in removing the console limitations (which they choose not to). Why set yourself up for failure like that? I do not understand.

You and me both. Halo 5 has no presence at all on PC. If this is the best they can do… (Which they originally touted Halo 5 Forge as a tool for console gamers to make maps easier on the PC, then play them on console, which was quickly changed to we are shipping a free Halo multiplayer experience on PC after the backlash and confusion, stumbling out of the gate is a good sign) All these little things add up into one off-putting package, they can fix it but they choose not to, so frustrating.

7

You are right it doesn’t have to be horrible , but more often than not they are. Console games don’t generally port well to PC and vice versa with few exceptions. Unfortunately this has been a problem for some time and an issue i had hoped would be resolved with current consoles being more like computers than ever before. There are lots of PC games I would love to play but am unwilling to spend the money to buy or build and I hate M&KB.
Here’s hoping they resolve these issues with the Scorpio or whatever comes next and we can both be happy.

8

The simple reason that Halo 5 Forge is not very popular on PC is because it’s not—nor was it ever intended to be—a fully fledged PC release. If you went around asking, probably few people outside the small intersection of people who are hardcore Halo fans and PC gamers and own a sufficient Windows 10 PC even know that such a game exists. Not to mention the game was released on the extremely pointless Windows app store, instead of a major platform like Steam. So, to be honest, a few dozen players at any given time seems about right for a game that

  • is not a full game, - didn’t have a proper marketing campaign, - is extremely tied down to a praticular OS release, - released on a particularly unpopular platform among the people the game was meant for.So, while all the criticism you raise is definitely important, I doubt any of them but the first and fourth were any significant contributors to the low popularity.
9

I feel like most people are forging maybe? I know that’s what all my friends do on PC halo.

10

You forgot to mention the number one issue.

The mouse emulating a controller stick!

11

> 2533274825830455;8:
> The simple reason that Halo 5 Forge is not very popular on PC is because it’s not—nor was it ever intended to be—a fully fledged PC release. If you went around asking, probably few people outside the small intersection of people who are hardcore Halo fans and PC gamers and own a sufficient Windows 10 PC even know that such a game exists. Not to mention the game was released on the extremely pointless Windows app store, instead of a major platform like Steam. So, to be honest, a few dozen players at any given time seems about right for a game that
> - is not a full game, - didn’t have a proper marketing campaign, - is extremely tied down to a praticular OS release, - released on a particularly unpopular platform among the people the game was meant for.So, while all the criticism you raise is definitely important, I doubt any of them but the first and fourth were any significant contributors to the low popularity.

Also the custom game type settings are incredibly buggy STILL, I will load up a custom game type I spent time thinking about and testing, only to have it reset itself randomly to vanilla settings without warning (really makes you want to invest time doing custom game modes since none of your progress saves). This is the most frustrating bug I’ve seen in recent memory. When you have a lobby of people waiting to start the game, and you have to re-enable and tweak every single setting you did previously because it decided to erase itself and reset all values back to vanilla. Makes you want to throw your PC out the window. This bug almost defeats the entire purpose of the launch in itself, at least maps don’t delete themselves or reset to previous saves (thank God). I’ve gotten into many lobbies where the host will pick a popular custom game type, we get in game and it has reset itself to vanilla, completely ruining the game and map.

On top of that, PC players still can’t type to each other in pre-game lobbies. So everyone just sits there awkwardly not knowing what’s going on while you desperately try to remake an entire custom game type quickly (flipping through all those damn menus) enough so people don’t start leaving (is host AFK? why are we not starting anything? what’s going on?) plus you can’t coordinate anything, you can’t ask anyone what they want to play, even doing so in game is a waste of time because of how fast the text disappears and the lack of a chat log means you can’t look at previous typed messages if you were in a firefight and couldn’t look at the chat. This leads to incredibly poor in-game communication

And bringing this up makes me want to punch through a wall, whose bright idea was it to have the option arrows to the left move with how long the word is??? You have to constantly move your mouse back and forth trying to hit the arrow, good luck doing that quickly, going right is the only logical way. Just keep the stupid arrow in one place so you can quickly go through all the meaningless fluff weapon variants. (I know you can use the arrow keys but why you do this?)

Another problem is the always online aspect, forgot to mention that. Can’t Forge offline lol, if the servers are down you are done for

12

> 2533274842209449;10:
> You forgot to mention the number one issue.
>
> The mouse emulating a controller stick!

Does it really do that? Do you have to move your mouse back to the middle to make you stop moving?

13

All fair points but 7. It just doesn’t matter imo.

But I would like to add one point of why people do like it:

People using keyboards and mouses [most everyone] don’t know how to sprint, GP, Charge, etc.

This leads to slow gameplay, not unlike Halo 3. Still far off, sure, but it’s progress

14

im sure gamecheat13 cares.

15

If it was on steam it would be insanely popular.

16

My computer cannot support Forge, and I am too cheap to buy an expensive gaming computer. Besides, why play on PC if you have an Xbox with the full game on it?

17

> 2533274805919869;15:
> If it was on steam it would be insanely popular.

Pretty much. I made a video about it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jxw6kcGbBwo&t=33s&ab_channel=MindsAblaze2

I can’t even be bothered to play it anymore, nobody plays it, saved custom game types are completely broken and reset themselves (which breaks maps) so there is no point since nothing saves. Such a great tool and multi experience mishandled to the max and riddled with huge bugs, Halo came back to PC and was doa lol

18

You mean no one on the whole Earth cares about Halo 5 on PC?

I’m just joking.

19

> 2535460550943257;16:
> Besides, why play on PC if you have an Xbox with the full game on it?

I don’t find the multiplayer of Halo 5 good enough to justify continually paying for Gold, but of course I have nothing against being able to play some custom games for free. So, that’s why.

> 2535426076338058;17:
> Halo came back to PC and was doa lol

I wouldn’t describe releasing a demo on Windows store as “coming back to PC”. Definitely not if we don’t count Spartan Assault as part of this “comeback”, which was also released on PC ages ago, and was actually a full game that cost money.

20

> 2535460550943257;16:
> My computer cannot support Forge, and I am too cheap to buy an expensive gaming computer. Besides, why play on PC if you have an Xbox with the full game on it?

I have friends that won’t play Halo 5 on Xbox One because of the lack of certain features (co op) and almost the whole game being locked behind XBL Gold, and they don’t rate the multiplayer either, so they’re happy enough to mess about on Forge and customs on PC.