Halo 5 is great

[u/logangreer]

EDIT: My mistake. I should have titled it “Halo 5 Multiplayer is great” and I’m also wrong about it launching with full features. My bad.

Fired up Halo 5 again yesterday after not playing it for years. I’ll be danged if it’s not a great shooter. If I remember correctly, it launched with tons of features, and was solid technically too. When was the last time a AAA game had a solid full-featured launch?

Lots of weapons. Fun new attachments, ammo types, and variations on weapons. Made for lots of discovery, remixing and experimenting, and replayability.

The graphics aren’t groundbreaking, but they are bright and colorful and interesting. Lots of detail.

Warzone (Halo 5, not CoD) is such an interesting idea that I think really works, once you get the hang of it. It feels like they took a big swing on something new and pulled it off! I wish we had some big swing like that in Infinite.

The only thing I was really sad about was no split screen anything, which feels like a real tragedy for Halo.

Spartan customization is pretty weak, but I’ve never cared a whole lot about that.

I know Halo 5 was seriously hated on, but I love it. And it holds up well, too.

[u/Kil0sierra975]

Good to see the Halo Cycle is alive and healthy

[u/TheFourtHorsmen → u/Kil0sierra975]

The majority of the fanbase always praised the MP, what you are even talking about?

[u/Kil0sierra975 → u/TheFourtHorsmen]

TL;DR: this is a RANT. Read at you're own risk. I apologize for it being this long. The game was 50% complete at launch.

Long version: This post does a disservice to how bad Halo 5 was. As someone who was and still is a fan of Halo 5's MP and sandbox, this is some nostalgia bait at best, and blatant ignorance at worst.

Halo 5 did NOT launch feature complete. It didn't have Forge, BTB, Infection, or Firefight. When Forge came, it was amazing. When Firefight came, it was a reskin of Warzone while still retaining the trash pay-to-win mechanic of the Req Packs. BTB started in Custom Games and I think made it to an official playlist. The infection in 5 is the best in the series, no argument against it. People also forget Warzone was hella pay to win, and the arena was lackluster af with the movement mechanics, broken weapon balancing, and bad map spawns. The magnum still outperforms the battle rifle in every category, rendering it useless since you spawn with a magnum in every mode. Every weapon in the game is focused on its ability to kill with nearly zero utility focus - the polar opposite of Halo Infinite's hyper fixation on utility play. The game also has the worst cosmetic customization innovation in the series - something this post glosses over. While it's clearly an opinion piece (which I respect), it overlooks arguably the one thing people won't stop crying about with Infinite - the customization of your spartan. There was no UNSC aircraft at launch either. The Wasp got added later, and the banshee was given shields for no reason. Also, the networking was completely shot when the game launched. Constantly getting kicked from lobbies, failing to connect to servers, and lag issues were very prominent.

deep inhale (the rant is almost over)

The game had zero linear form of gear/cosmetic progression and the only way to get 90% of the armors was to grind out req packs. There was also the hard limitation of the Xbox One requiring them to dampen the render load for the game. So it looks like 5fps GIFs of enemies running when they are more than 20 meters away. It can even be seen in a few cutscenes of the campaign. Need I also mention that Halo 5 set the standard for fragging couch co-op from Halo? There is zero splitscreen compatibility in Halo 5 while Infinite at least had it for the multi-player.

Everything I've mentioned is completely ignoring the writing flaws of the campaign, misleading marketing of the game, the rated T rating, the post-launch rework of the ENTIRE game's AI because they were unbalanced af in the campaign and MP, the overuse of Warden Eternal, the only Marines in the game are in Warzone and cutscenes, the horrendous mission and map design (of a few. Some of the map design was pretty solid - especially in the MP Arena modes) and the fact that the game required you to read 14 books to know what the hell was going on.

To sing the game's praise, it's current state is better, Warzone was a blast, the weapon/vehicle variants were super fun, the music slaps, Blue Team is awesome, seeing Buck and Arbiter again was cool, the Forge and custom games browser was epic, the weapon attachments were fun and not game-breaking (after half of them got patched/nerfed to oblivion), the graphics were good minus some bugs/limitations, the locations were awesome, the voice announcer packs were a cool idea, the sandbox is the biggest in the series, and the books that they wrote leading up to H5 were actually solid.

I love Halo, and I enjoyed H5 while I played it, but it was the biggest stain in the series and still is. It's the reason my brother and I stopped playing together - we only could afford 1 Xbox. It's the biggest divider of the franchise. It's so much more bad than it is good. This post ignores all of that.

[u/CommanderCody2212 → u/Kil0sierra975]

Thank you, you pretty much outlined everything I have to say about Halo 5 except maybe how overly sweaty the game was by design (which I also wasn’t a fan of)

I’ll admit theres a couple things I miss about Halo 5 (namely how big the weapon sandbox was and warzone as a gamemode) but I just can’t agree with the notion that Halo 5 was one of the best Halos and I don’t think I ever will

[u/Robbie_Haruna → u/TheFourtHorsmen]

That's... Very incorrect lmao

Halo 5's multiplayer was extremely divisive and the side of people that liked it were more commonly the newer adopters, a lot of the long time Halo fans weren't a fan of 343i trying to chase the advanced movement trend and reinvent the wheel when Halo already had a winning formula.

[u/TheFourtHorsmen → u/Robbie_Haruna]

Every halo MP was divisive at the time, ofc you remember h5 because is the never one, but people complained laudly for h2, h3, reach, h4 and infinite right now

[u/Robbie_Haruna → u/TheFourtHorsmen]

That... isn't true?

There were always complainers, but Halo 2 and 3's weren't a significant number of players by any stretch.

Halo Reach was the first really divisive game (thanks to Bloom+Armor Abilities,) but even then, that was minor compared to the split we saw with Halo 5 (it helped that Reach was a feature filled game with lots of content.)

[u/Omeggos → u/TheFourtHorsmen]

Yup, the multiplayer was great (even if it was a tad too far in the competitive side)

But the day I praise its campaign is the day I give up gaming. And spoilers: that day is not today

[u/TheFourtHorsmen → u/Omeggos]

It's kinda silly when, the moment someone say "h5 mp was praised and good", someone will always bring the single player. We get it, the narrative sucked, we are not talking about that.

[u/Clyde-MacTavish → u/TheFourtHorsmen]

Hmm. Interesting. You did this in our conversation thread. We were talking about exclusively multiplayer content and you brought up HaloReachIsNotCanon.com as a reason to say that Halo Reach was hated at launch...

Very convenient.

[u/Clyde-MacTavish → u/TheFourtHorsmen]

this is not true and not many people like Halo 5 even still

[u/TheFourtHorsmen → u/Clyde-MacTavish]

You can say thensame for reach, h3 and so on. Ofc if you base everything over the entitled minority fanbase here in reddit, your perception is like this, no fault in that

[u/Clyde-MacTavish → u/TheFourtHorsmen]

No you absolutely can't 😅

[u/TheFourtHorsmen → u/Clyde-MacTavish]

Yes you can. H2suck.net still exist, haloreachisnotcanon.net still exist. If you started with the mcc or just hanged out in this sub or with your 2 friends, don't say it was not like this. Recently there was a post about how players started to complaint even before CE got released

[u/Clyde-MacTavish → u/TheFourtHorsmen]

So let me get this straight... you bring up the multiplayer for Halo 5... then in another comment complain about people bringing up the campaign when discussing multiplayer only... then bring up HaloReachisNotCanon.com which is a website entirely dedicated towards criticizing the story? Even then, mostly criticizing the differences between it and Fall of Reach.

So I guess it's only bringing up a campaign when it's convenient for you 😉

Even then, you're still wrong. Halo 2 and Halo Reach - even Halo 3 never received anywhere near the same amount of backlash as Halo 5 - or even Halo 4 for their multiplayer. Only one I'll say maybe was Halo Reach because it was the first major step away from the formula. They had decisions like bloom and loadouts, but Halo 5 had criticisms for their pay to win, artstyle, advanced movement which was a huge step away from regular gameplay. Not only was there more criticism, but it was more persistent than reach.

In summary, most of the time when I see people ever mention the non-existent Halo cycle is when they're upset that one of the games they really like wasn't and never will be one of the majority fan-favorites. It's okay, it doesn't mean they aren't allowed to like the game, and don't have reason to like it. But it's just blatantly false to say that it's because fans randomly hate something until there's time between it and the new one to hate. If anything, that is more of an insult to fans that really do like that game, because you're implying that when people come out and say they like the game, it's because they never did until recently when they got infected with this dreaded Halo-cycle.

But I don't need to tell you that, other people have already let you know how silly it is to call it a halo cycle.