Halo Infinite - What is it?

Games
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Halo’s somewhat unique in terms of mechanics, compared to other shooters.

The big thing that differentiates it, is that there’s no reticle bloom when you move or jump. Aiming down the sights of your gun really doesn’t do anything besides zoom the screen, where in other games zooming is essentially required for accuracy.

This creates a different gameplay experience, that’s more focused on jumping around than other modern shooters. It definitely takes some getting used to, if you mainly played games like CoD, and it could be considered “old school” in these ways.

303

So like Unreal Tournament?

304

Kind of but the movement of Halo in general is slower.

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For me, I kind of prefer a hard-core version of CoD or Titanfall 2, with very low TTK’s. But at the same time, I think there’s a place for a game like Halo, because we really don’t need every shooter to just be the same… which is pretty much where the shooter market is now.

Virtually every shooter is just a poor-man’s version of the CoD recipe that Infinity Ward came up with, rarely ever having real innovations, or significant differentiators beyond the cosmetic skin on top.

I’m not sure that Halo’s gameplay is really “my thing” when it comes to a competitive shooter, but I can at least respect that it’s not just another CoD clone.

(seriously though, Microsoft needs to just give Respawn a mountain of money and say, “Make titanfall 3”.)

306

I enjoy punching a tank to death with my fists.

Also dodging aircraft and then hijacking them and punting the pilot out a couple hundred feet up.

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I don’t agree with your post at all. It’s not true that every shooter is a poor-man’s version of the Call of Duty recipe. That’s not even close. Hardly anyone is making multiplayer games that focus on a 6v6 small map shootout with occasional objectives.

There is a massive diversity of first person shooters in 2021 to the point that players have a ton of options to choose from, and that’s even leaving out old games like Titanfall and its sequel, which are now five years old and older.

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The Halo games have always been kind of overrated, especially if you came from the PC shooter scene back then. It was kind of like Goldeneye. If you had been playing Doom/Quake/UT, you were kind of like, “You guys are freaking out over this?”

The nostalgia was amplified by the strength of these games in split screen. Playing in person with your friends made even stronger memories, especially for folks who were in college etc around that time. The percentage of PC players who got to play at LAN parties etc was relatively small, so that part of the experience was somewhat new.

All that being said, Halo is a pretty good one of those at this point, and part of the draw is the variability of the experience. They do “light” vehicles in a way that no one else is doing at this point (maybe only UT3 was close) that make them a fun addition to an infantry-focused game. There are a lot of game modes in the series (that may not be in Infinite yet?), like Skulls, Infection, Forge that kind of always kept things fresh.

For some reason, it appears they want to filter everyone through Quick Play, which doesn’t allow you to choose what kind of game you want. That’s kind of baffling. But I think more than one match is required to see the breadth of the offering. But they’re not really helping you find that out.

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For me it was the opposite. Both for Goldeneye and Halo. Goldeneye was the real eye-opener for me. I simply ignored it at first. How can you have a good shooter on console? Doom 2 and Descent and Duke 3D all the way, right? But my brother who also played Doom 2 and Descent and Duke 3D kept saying how good it was, and it just didn’t compute until I tried it myself. Holy smokes, it was so much better in terms of animations and AI reactions and such. You shot someone in the foot, and they hopped around on the other foot, holding the shot foot! PC games had nothing like that. You shot someone in the head and they died in one hit! PC games didn’t have that yet.

To me, the reaction was: why aren’t more PC Gamers freaking out over this? I want all this stuff in my PC FPShooters as well!

You already covered Halo pretty well, having split screen coop throughout the campaign was huuuuge, there was no equivalent experience on the PC. Same with all variations of gameplay with the AI making it so no two runs from a checkpoint ever felt the same. PC games of that era, when you loaded a saved game, it usually played out the exact same way again, so any kind of checkpointing system just felt horrible, or even just forgetting to quicksave.

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These are good points. Even though I didn’t say it, I was thinking about multiplayer. I think I agree with you when it comes to single player, Goldeneye in particular was great. But Goldeneye multiplayer pretty much sucked if you had anything decent to compare it to.

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I never got into any Halo game, don’t enjoy FPS on a gamepad, but I do give Halo props for inventing that control scheme and making it work. They also invented the shield recharge system-- before Halo you had to scrounge for health packs all the time and could get stuck in a failure state where you don’t have enough health to continue and no bandages to heal back up.

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Sorry I wasn’t clear what I was talking about specifically…

From a fundamental mechanics perspective, essentially all shooters play pretty much the same. Your weapon has bloom that changes based on generally the same set of things… moving makes it bigger, ADS makes it smaller. This creates certain fundamentals about gameplay that impact the interplay between movement and shooting. There are of course minor variations, but virtually every shooter plays like this, with the exception of a few like Overwatch.

Halo plays very differently from these, in that movement has no impact on your accuracy. On the flip side, ADS in Halo also doesn’t impact your movement speed. It’s really JUST a zoom function. And then there’s the fairly unique de-scope mechanic which I don’t think really exists in other shooters that I’ve played recently.

Those mechanics in Halo result in a fairly dramatic difference in how it plays compared to other shooters.

Certainly, the broader mechanics of the overall gameplay that you’re describing have more variation… although I still wouldn’t say there’s a huge variation there either. You’re generally still falling into a few bins, either old school CoD squad based gameplay, Battlefield style gameplay, or now a bunch of battle royale games.

I’m not really seeing a lot of innovation on the front of those games right now… there aren’t any current shooters that I think are particularly memorable, and will have any lasting impact on the industry’s direction.

(and, to be clear, Halo’s not really “innovative” here, and is in fact perhaps more of a harkening back to older style shooters… but it is still fairly unique in its actual shooting and movement mechanics)

Of course, that’s just my own opinion, and ymmv.

This is definitely true… Halo was very highly regarded by console players at the time, often because they hadn’t played shooters on PC’s much.

That being said, the campaigns of the early Halo games were extremely well done.

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Even now, jump into Halo MCC and pick a campaign out of the set, play it, then compare it to any other modern pure shooter FPS campaign. Unless it’s something like Titanfall 2, you’ll be hard-pressed to find an equivalent experience.

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There were 3 things about Goldeneye that made it great:

  1. The level design and placement of enemies. GE was very very difficult in some of the missions, and the balance of that difficulty was pretty much perfect. It was a really well produced game.

  2. You could use 2 controllers in “domino” configuration, which I believe was the actual first ‘dual analogue’ control scheme. That was a huge game changer, if you’ve only ever played GE with one controller, it’s not even the same game, this goes for multiplayer as well.

  3. Proximity mines in multi player. Endless hours of fun trying to trap my buddy in somewhere.

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I stumbled across the tutorial and played through it last night and had to kind of laugh. I’ve never been in the military, never gone through basic training, but that has to be about the nicest drill sergeant I’ve ever seen. She’s all, ‘hey, you’ve been through a lot, you ok buddy? Just head over here, pick up that rifle and shoot the targets. Hey, you did great! Now can you run through this little obstacle course? Yeah, that’s awesome! OK, now we’re going to shoot at you with live fire. It’ll be fun! Let’s go!’

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One thing about Halo’s multiplayer seems to be that there’s really no progression system? I mean, I guess some minor cosmetic stuff, but it’s pretty subtle from what I’ve seen.

Of course, part of this impression may also be based on the fact that after playing for two days, I’m… level 2? The speed of progression is almost non existent.

On some level, that’s fine… for a competitive shooter, I prefer that everyone have access to the same setup immediately. But still, it seems kind of weird.

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Yeah, it’s bad and 343 knows it. They’ve instituted some quick fixes.

https://twitter.com/HaloSupport/status/1461369370303598598

https://twitter.com/HaloSupport/status/1461369371427688452

https://twitter.com/HaloSupport/status/1461369372442644482

https://twitter.com/HaloSupport/status/1461369373512253448

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I still think there’s maybe an issue with the fact that I’m not seeing any real reason why progression even matters.

Having no progression system at all is maybe ok? But having one that’s entirely pointless seems even worse.

I can look at a game like CoD or Titanfall, where there’s a progression system that unlocks tons of stuff that opens up new gameplay… but it progresses fast enough that it doesn’t really limit your ability to play, and after some point it’s really just a number that’s going up.

But I’m not seeing anything in Halo’s progression that actually does anything. It’s different armor pieces and paint schemes? That’s it, right?

Again, I guess I don’t have a good feel for it, since it’s been so slow thus far. The notion of only cosmetic unlocks is fine, if those unlocks are actually interesting… but they seem very subtle in Halo, as compared to something like the different skins in a game like Overwatch or Apex.

Like… “Oh… I can make my gun… very slightly darker grey. Cool.”

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I think there are two competing things at play here. On one hand, 343 wants to make a game where gameplay stuff isn’t locked behind progression, so the only things you can unlock are cosmetics. I dig that and am on board. But on the other hand, the human side of the Halo universe (which is all that’s represented in Infinite right now) is fairly “grounded” sci-fi, and all of the players need to look more or less like a Master Chief. So they can’t really make any crazy cosmetics because everything needs to have a visor and not radically change the player silhouette.

I’m really enjoying the multiplayer, though. It is a breath of fresh air for its simplicity. And I’m sure there’s a non-zero amount of nostalgia there as well.

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It was like that in 5 too IIRC. Cosmetics in Halo are super subtle, because they don’t have the will to do what CoD does with the crazy anime/horror/action hero stuff.

It’s really about playing and enjoying the base game and that’s it. Also, for my money, Halo has the best customization and setup for small friendly custom games with your buds.

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Preach.