TL;DR at bottom.
You want to know something? I have never played a game that has had such a good campaign, such an innovative way of weekly story telling for free…and then such a terrible multiplayer experience that forsakes almost everything Halo was known for.
Let me explain. The multiplayer part, anyway. I think almost all of us can agree campaign and Spartan Ops is cool.
Jeez, where do I begin? The DMR being a death star, even better than Reach’s no bloom DMR? Personal ordnance discouraging map movement? Dynamic spawns on the premier BTB map Ragnarok? The inexcusable amount of glitches and bugs found so far? Instant kill weapons in loadouts? Slayer Pro not really having ‘pro’ settings but stripped down features? The awful bullet magnetism? Aim assist?
All of those are off the top of my head. Top of my head. I know I’m missing some things. Let’s just go down the list.
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The DMR. It’s the best loadout weapon in game. It will trump every other loadout weapon unless the user isn’t that good. The shots fire faster than the BR’s burst, it’s magnetism is higher, and the bloom is meaningless. The range is so ridiculous there is no reason to push up in BTB anymore. Camp middle or get punished. That brings me to my next point.
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What’s better than a gun that discourages getting closer and map movement? Personal ordnance! Not only can you camp the middle on Ragnarok with no reason to move, you can get your very own weapons dropped at your feet so you don’t need to move into enemy territory and grab power weapons! You have no reason to go there. Spawn trapping was a skill, now it’s discouraged.
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Oh, nevermind…you couldn’t spawn trap anyway. There are dynamic spawns on premier BTB maps like Ragnarok (and probably all maps). This is a pure noob friendly and casual catering mechanic. If you risked the chance to go into the enemy base and grab the sniper and get back out? You had a good team and or good individual skill. Sure, you can do that now, but they’ll spawn at your base now.
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The inexcusable amount of bugs. Enough said, you’ve all seen or heard everyone talk about crap like fake ordnance markers, ordnance stuck in the ground, the FOV zoomed in randomly, exploit spots, instant reloading and backpack reloading, active camo blue dots not showing, so on and so forth. I made a thread a while back that I can’t find, but within two weeks of the game being out…the glitch count that affected gameplay was something like 31. And 343i said they didn’t need a public beta. That’s funny.
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Instant kill weapons in loadouts. Who thought of this one? Hell, who thought of putting the boltshot as a secondary? Best case scenario is that the boltshot ruins CQC and you can hardly ever avoid of because of terrible lag compensation methods (more on that later).
The worst case scenario? It’s completely absurd and people will do this, and it will be god awful. People will use the DMR and Boltshot in conjunction, along with active camo (to get easy DMR kills and the Boltshot when charging doesn’t take you out of camo and if they’re lucky the blue dots on radar dont show) and Wetwork Stealth. They’ll do this in BTB at the middle of the map, they’ll call down personal ordnance and have no need to push up…and when someone comes to them and happens to have Pro Vision? They won’t be seen anyway.
That’s just…wow. Can you comprehend the awfulness of that?
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Slayer Pro is not ‘pro’. Slayer pro is a boring game with everything stripped down with some stupid mechanics left in anyway. Okay, maybe you purely outskilled this one guy with the BR? Well thanks to instant respawn he can attack you again before your shields are up! Does this seem like ‘pro’ to you?
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Bullet magnetism. For anyone who doesn’t know about this, do yourself a favor. Go into forge, lay down several weapons, sign in a guest controller and do tests with the weapons. Aim a tiny bit off their body, shoot, repeat until you find the end of the bullet magnetism. The automatics are freaking hilarious with this, and the DMR for what it is has too much of it.
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Aim assist kind of goes hand in hand with magnetism but it is a different noob friendly aiming mechanism for players anyway. Unload a full clip of AR or SAW into your guest while rotating your aiming stick around and around as fast as you can. Chances are your gun is still on the target. Now do the same at the air. Your screen goes crazy. What the heck.
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Terrible netcode/lag compensation. Now, I’m not going to get off into a huge tangent full of technical terms and all that because my last thread that did, hardly anyone posted or understood. I’ll just explain some things to you in layman’s terms.
Ever blasted a guy with a shotty in CQC and they faceplant the floor, then all of the sudden their sticky manifests on your torso without any warning? Lag compensation. Ever been shot by a guy behind a wall a split second before he actually comes into view? Lag compensation. I can go on and on but this happens to me and it happens to you if you have a GOOD connection.
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Castrated customs and forge. Enough said. What couldn’t you do in Reach with customs? What couldn’t you do in forge for the custom you made? Halo 4 has so much less. The only cool things are better color in forge pieces, and trait zones. Sorry, but that’s it. Dominion was a cool concept but you can’t forge good BTB dominion maps. Forgeworld would have been great for that.
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I’m sorry, but it’s true. When you have a perk system with a loadout system there will always be some combinations that are completely broke. Like I said above, the DMR, bolt shot, active camo and stealth loadout…come on…really?
You know what? Halo 4 fixed the few flaws Reach had but introduced a ten page checklist of other problems. I’ll take being out-bloomed occasionally and not being able to strafe as well over ALLLLLLL OF THAT STUFF I’ve pointed out.
In fact if having Forgeworld still ripe with oppurtunities, great and awesome customs, a good Forge, and balanced weapons means being out-bloomed occasionally (only in default settings)? I’ll take it!
TL;DR: Reach is better.