A huge contingent of the Halo community hates Halo 5. Halo 5 was a good sci-fi shooter. It wasn’t a great Halo game.
Halo Infinite feels like a great Halo game, because they stopped chasing CoD’s coattails (H4) and toned down the advanced movement stuff in H5, and instead distilled down what made the old games fun with some smart modernizing choices put in. The fact that the community isn’t bitching at all about sprint or clamber anymore is a testament to that.
I had absolutely no idea this was the case. Interesting.
It’s kinda garbage tbh. I played them all til 4. 5 was a complete turn off
Plus, 5’s campaign mode was woof.
Halo 5’s story wasn’t great, but it was even worse because the stupid “Hunt the Truth” advertising campaign was effectively a big lie that bore no resemblance to the actual story. And then it ends on a cliffhanger even worse than Halo 2’s. The game also built on nothing from Halo 4 except Cortana being “dead”, and then did a shit job of explaining why she wasn’t actually dead, lol.
The single worst thing about H4 and H5 for me, was simply the aesthetic change. Everything became much visually busier, and the Forerunners switched from clean lines and metallic corridors to white floaty bits and LED strips.
The worst thing about Halo 4 and 5 for me is the Prometheans. They’re no fun to fight. I’m glad Infinite is ditching them.
The one thing that drove me nuts was that Halo 4/5 was a period of time in which 343 (as well as the rest of the games industry) thought it was a great idea to relegate important story events and character development to tie-in comic books that no one was actually going to read. Ubisoft did the same thing with Assasin’s Creed, and Eidos with Tomb Raider.
I think the concept of the Prometheans was interesting, but yeah… they were alternatingly annoying and boring to fight. The Promethean weapons were also all either useless, or essentially re-skins of existing Halo weapons. And the Suppressor was ass.
Halo 4 was extremely guilty of this. The lore 343 introduced alongside Halo 4 is actually super-interesting, but Halo 4 does nothing with it. And you need to have watched all of the hidden in-game terminals AND have ideally read Greg Bear’s Forerunner trilogy of books to fully understand everything.
Without that, you’re left with a paper-thin villain in the Didact who mostly just monologues at you a few times then dies (except if you read the comics, he didn’t actually die lol), and a lot of incomprehensible babble about the “Mantle of Responsibility”.
And the sad thing is - the Didact is a really interesting character! He could’ve been the antagonist of an entire trilogy! Not just a living Forerunner, but the leader of the Forerunner forces in their conflict with the Flood that eventually ended with the one time in history the Halos fired! And he goes out to… a grenade?!
Just a spectacular failure of videogame storytelling that utterly failed to capitalize on the new lore that THEY injected into the universe in the first place.
There are important story events and character development in Assassin’s Creed?
I really enjoyed fighting the new enemies in Halo 4. It was the first real addition to the series since the original Halo, and at least on Heroic difficulty, it was just deliciously satisfying combat.
It was disappointing to not really know what was going on in the story. I had assumed that was a Bungie thing, so I was hoping that when Bungie left, 343 would make the story in Halo games clearer. But they seem to have preserved the confusion as being a part of Halo I guess. Of course, Bungie went on to make Destiny, which is even more confusing.
It wasn’t just video games.
Tenrai event started:
The new event’s Fiesta mode is great, but good God what I did not want is another track of challenges that interfere with the regular progress. To add insult to injury, there’s an explicit cap on the amount of progress you can make on this track during the week because the event will be repeated five more times over the next few months and 343 doesn’t want anyone running through it too quickly.
I can’t imagine playing this game for the cosmetic unlocks. It would be maddening.
It’s a good time if you leave all that by the roadside though. I tried the new mode and the random weapon stuff was good. I need to figure out how they all work though. lol!
Apparently all the cosmetic unlocks in the store are unavailable as unlocks in-game. And the store cosmetics are $1,000+ in total.
Pretty sure that number was from the datamined list of stuff they have in the hopper to put in the store over time, if you bought all of it. They said cosmetics would be single-source, so I’m not surprised they can only be gotten that way.
I don’t care about the store - I’m fine with it existing, though I think some of the prices are ridiculous (granted I don’t know how they line up with other F2P games). The problem is simply that the rest of the game is too grindy and stingy with cosmetics.
I’ll be interested to see what 343’s reaction is, and what they do. There’s no chance they ignore the criticism, because it’s omnipresent and even being picked up by media. If I were them I’d blow it all up - move a bunch of the basic armor pieces to the default game, beef up the season pass with some of the stuff they planned to sell, and salt the rest in via events unlocks etc. Refund cosmetic purchases except the HCS ones and the battle pass, acknowledge that people clearly aren’t happy and you got it wrong, and that the store will be given a rethink and brought back at a later date alongside the new progression system. There is precedent for this - they did something similar with Sea of Thieves.
Loses you a bunch of money in the short term, but probably immediately buys you a ton of positive sentiment. If they think the game itself has legs (and I certainly do), it’ll be worth it in the long run. They supposedly want this to be a “platform” for 10 years, after all.
Dear god, the Covenant Pulse Carbine is absolute garbage in multiplayer. Its projectiles are slow as hell, and if by some fortune you actually land a lot of hits on the target, you can’t take them down.
By then, the target has killed you with any one of a dozen better weapons in the game.
Where the hell was the testing on this?
Unfortunately, in Fiesta you have no control over what you spawn with.
Hahaha. Amazing.
