Everyone no doubt remembers my previous thread, 343i did not make a halo game, in which I detailed all the stuff 343i did wrong and un-haloly in Halo 4.
Since the Halo 5 OT is 100% multiplayer talk, I am creating a thread to talk about the problems I had with the campaign of this less bad but still not good sequel. I have beaten every halo game many many times in the last 13 years, and I have beaten them all again within the past two years. After playing H5 and not caring for it, I went back and played some more H2A and H3 to see if I was being too harsh. I was not.
First, the positives. It is quite a lot better than Halo 4. The additional movement options feel good and fit well with the idea of cyborg super soldiers. The levels are less claustrophobic than H4 and have more of that journey feel from previous halo games. The story is just as dumb as all halo games since H2 so I will leave that alone.
The problems:
Uneven Difficulty According to waypoint, I died 60 times in my 9 hour heroic playthrough. Id say more than half the deaths and 90 minutes of the play time were spent on the god awful Warden fights (more on that later!). The non-boss areas were the easiest of any halo game, mostly due to the abundance of power weapons and the addition of ADS. Playing H2/H3 again a few days ago, there are many challenging encounters which are just a room with a handful of enemies. Even today, I die a few times and actually have to stop and think of a strategy to clear them out. Another encounter I recently played had a room FULL of power weapons to load up with, and I still died a few times and had to work out a way to clear the area. There was only one instance of "stop and plan" in Halo 5, and it was unsurprisingly a fight against covenant enemies. I mindlessly plowed through everything else, rarely getting killed/downed. Legendary would be a better challenge, obviously, but I think I would pull my hair out trying to solo those boss fights.
Stupid shit dumb crap ass Warden fights Who in the jesus fuck thought these were a good idea? Not only is it extremely lazy to have the SAME EXACT FIGHT 5 times (6? I lost count), but it wasnt even fun the first time! His moves are all one hit knockdown, which is annoying. He only has a few lines of arrogant banter, which is annoying. Why is he still talking shit in the 5th fight after Ive kicked his ass 4 times? The distraction enemies he spawns are annoying, since they mostly add no challenge and the ones that do make it more difficult only accomplish that by having one hit knockdown weapons/abilities. Rather than layering challenges to make a difficult but rewarding fight, they layer annoyance on top of annoyance until you think a viable strategy for getting past the fight is quitting videogames altogether and taking up pottery.
Small combat areas Less of a problem than H4 but still very apparent almost every time you enter a vehicle. Aside from the warthog sections on Meridian, every time I got into a vehicle I felt like I was bumping into walls constantly and would be better off on foot if not for the free infinite ammo. Also the mongoose was almost undrivable, not sure what happened there.
Someone from 343i posted The H5 campaign features the biggest, most open campaign spaces in any Halo game, which if not a blatant lie, is only true through some technicality that I cant currently imagine. Everything always felt cramped with super high walls on all sides and very limited sight lines. I assume part of the reason for that was to prevent too much from happening on screen and affecting that smooth 60fps.
ADS makes the combat less interesting The ability to shoulder aim any weapon has moved the distance for engaging enemies way too far out. I rarely need to get within 50 feet of enemies in this game and usually when I do its because Im desperately trying to make it more interesting and more difficult for myself. I barely used melee and the ground pound was essentially useless. ADS may not be completely to blame, though. It may be more the encounter design and weapons given to the player.
Sloppy encounters In previous halo games, there were always plenty of unique encounters, which while not always challenging, were at least different. Halo 5s idea of encounter design is Walk into empty area, black lightning cloud, spawn 8 crawlers, 4 soldiers, 2 captains, 1 knight -- Repeat until combat area is suitably chaotic. There appears to have been no thought put in to how encounters play out, aside from bust through this crumbly wall to get a power weapon and flank! Why does every fight need a knight? Pretty dull and not memorable on the whole.
Not enough interspecies combat A hallmark of halo games is walking into a battle between two warring factions and wreaking havoc. Very little of this in H5, and enemies seem too easily refocused toward me, completely forgetting about the enemies right next to them.
Too many weapons There are a lot of weapons in this game. A lot of them are unnecessary clones of other weapons (scattershot = shotgun). Some of the new ones are actually interesting, but most of the weapons that only appear once or twice are set up like this: Ok, 4 knights are about to spawn, take this and kill 3 of them in 15 seconds. With the overabundance of overpowered weapons, there is never any reason to pick up many of the weapons such as the plasma pistol or the thing the crawlers drop. This is one thing that may actually be worse than in H4.
The promethean are awful enemies.
- Knights boring bullet sponges
- Soldier easy to kill, even when they annoyingly teleport all over the place
- Soldier with launcher easy to kill, annoying
- Crawlers If they were totally removed from the game, the only difference whatsoever would be that the game is 15 minutes shorter. Completely worthless.
- Floating Turrets Jesus Christ why?
The AI for these is very simple and makes the dullness of fighting them even more apparent. The crawlers just run at you and shoot, the soldiers hang back and shoot, knights lob shit from far away or melee if you get close. Zzzz. The way the story is headed makes me fear for Halo 6. Will the covenant be even more marginalized in favor of the stupid prometheans?
Most of the levels are ugly Aside from Sanghelios, which looks amazing, the game is pretty dull looking. Even Sanghelios doesnt fully escape the ugliness. Sunaion looks like a bad Ratchet and Clank level with the lights turned out.
Misc stuff:
- Action packed cutscenes write checks the gameplay cant cash
- No Halo in Halo 5
- Hub areas are completely unnecessary padding
- AI is not great, both enemy and squad
- There should be an option to disable revive while playing solo
I dont entirely blame 343i for these problems. As I said at the beginning, the OT is 100% multiplayer talk. Does it make financial sense to put a ton of effort into creating assets and fights most people will experience somewhere between zero and one times? Maybe theres just no incentive to make a great single player FPS experience anymore.
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Since the Halo 5 OT is 100% multiplayer talk, I am creating a thread to talk about the problems I had with the campaign of this less bad but still not good sequel. I have beaten every halo game many many times in the last 13 years, and I have beaten them all again within the past two years. After playing H5 and not caring for it, I went back and played some more H2A and H3 to see if I was being too harsh. I was not.
First, the positives. It is quite a lot better than Halo 4. The additional movement options feel good and fit well with the idea of cyborg super soldiers. The levels are less claustrophobic than H4 and have more of that journey feel from previous halo games. The story is just as dumb as all halo games since H2 so I will leave that alone.
The problems:
Uneven Difficulty According to waypoint, I died 60 times in my 9 hour heroic playthrough. Id say more than half the deaths and 90 minutes of the play time were spent on the god awful Warden fights (more on that later!). The non-boss areas were the easiest of any halo game, mostly due to the abundance of power weapons and the addition of ADS. Playing H2/H3 again a few days ago, there are many challenging encounters which are just a room with a handful of enemies. Even today, I die a few times and actually have to stop and think of a strategy to clear them out. Another encounter I recently played had a room FULL of power weapons to load up with, and I still died a few times and had to work out a way to clear the area. There was only one instance of "stop and plan" in Halo 5, and it was unsurprisingly a fight against covenant enemies. I mindlessly plowed through everything else, rarely getting killed/downed. Legendary would be a better challenge, obviously, but I think I would pull my hair out trying to solo those boss fights.
Stupid shit dumb crap ass Warden fights Who in the jesus fuck thought these were a good idea? Not only is it extremely lazy to have the SAME EXACT FIGHT 5 times (6? I lost count), but it wasnt even fun the first time! His moves are all one hit knockdown, which is annoying. He only has a few lines of arrogant banter, which is annoying. Why is he still talking shit in the 5th fight after Ive kicked his ass 4 times? The distraction enemies he spawns are annoying, since they mostly add no challenge and the ones that do make it more difficult only accomplish that by having one hit knockdown weapons/abilities. Rather than layering challenges to make a difficult but rewarding fight, they layer annoyance on top of annoyance until you think a viable strategy for getting past the fight is quitting videogames altogether and taking up pottery.
Small combat areas Less of a problem than H4 but still very apparent almost every time you enter a vehicle. Aside from the warthog sections on Meridian, every time I got into a vehicle I felt like I was bumping into walls constantly and would be better off on foot if not for the free infinite ammo. Also the mongoose was almost undrivable, not sure what happened there.
Someone from 343i posted The H5 campaign features the biggest, most open campaign spaces in any Halo game, which if not a blatant lie, is only true through some technicality that I cant currently imagine. Everything always felt cramped with super high walls on all sides and very limited sight lines. I assume part of the reason for that was to prevent too much from happening on screen and affecting that smooth 60fps.
ADS makes the combat less interesting The ability to shoulder aim any weapon has moved the distance for engaging enemies way too far out. I rarely need to get within 50 feet of enemies in this game and usually when I do its because Im desperately trying to make it more interesting and more difficult for myself. I barely used melee and the ground pound was essentially useless. ADS may not be completely to blame, though. It may be more the encounter design and weapons given to the player.
Sloppy encounters In previous halo games, there were always plenty of unique encounters, which while not always challenging, were at least different. Halo 5s idea of encounter design is Walk into empty area, black lightning cloud, spawn 8 crawlers, 4 soldiers, 2 captains, 1 knight -- Repeat until combat area is suitably chaotic. There appears to have been no thought put in to how encounters play out, aside from bust through this crumbly wall to get a power weapon and flank! Why does every fight need a knight? Pretty dull and not memorable on the whole.
Not enough interspecies combat A hallmark of halo games is walking into a battle between two warring factions and wreaking havoc. Very little of this in H5, and enemies seem too easily refocused toward me, completely forgetting about the enemies right next to them.
Too many weapons There are a lot of weapons in this game. A lot of them are unnecessary clones of other weapons (scattershot = shotgun). Some of the new ones are actually interesting, but most of the weapons that only appear once or twice are set up like this: Ok, 4 knights are about to spawn, take this and kill 3 of them in 15 seconds. With the overabundance of overpowered weapons, there is never any reason to pick up many of the weapons such as the plasma pistol or the thing the crawlers drop. This is one thing that may actually be worse than in H4.
The promethean are awful enemies.
- Knights boring bullet sponges
- Soldier easy to kill, even when they annoyingly teleport all over the place
- Soldier with launcher easy to kill, annoying
- Crawlers If they were totally removed from the game, the only difference whatsoever would be that the game is 15 minutes shorter. Completely worthless.
- Floating Turrets Jesus Christ why?
The AI for these is very simple and makes the dullness of fighting them even more apparent. The crawlers just run at you and shoot, the soldiers hang back and shoot, knights lob shit from far away or melee if you get close. Zzzz. The way the story is headed makes me fear for Halo 6. Will the covenant be even more marginalized in favor of the stupid prometheans?
Most of the levels are ugly Aside from Sanghelios, which looks amazing, the game is pretty dull looking. Even Sanghelios doesnt fully escape the ugliness. Sunaion looks like a bad Ratchet and Clank level with the lights turned out.
Misc stuff:
- Action packed cutscenes write checks the gameplay cant cash
- No Halo in Halo 5
- Hub areas are completely unnecessary padding
- AI is not great, both enemy and squad
- There should be an option to disable revive while playing solo
I dont entirely blame 343i for these problems. As I said at the beginning, the OT is 100% multiplayer talk. Does it make financial sense to put a ton of effort into creating assets and fights most people will experience somewhere between zero and one times? Maybe theres just no incentive to make a great single player FPS experience anymore.
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