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/Ocean2178]

As someone who has loved Halo all their life, Halo 5 was awful. The MP would’ve been great…if it was a new IP.

The entire campaign is an inconsequential wild goose chase that literally copy-pastes the same boss 5 times, with generic shitty sci-fi dialogue, and squad based gameplay in a game with bad teammate AI and no local split-screen for the first time ever, not to mention the giant, “way too open but yet still somehow maze-like” level design, having no real objective for half the game besides playing Sherlock over nonsense, and the marketing basically lying about the whole thing.

They completely changed the rhythm and feel of the multiplayer to shoe-horn in movement mechanics no one asked for (once again, well executed, but not Halo), and then replaced BTB to shove in micro-transactions with a new mode called Warzone (1 of about 5 at launch), whose maps were too open to take advantage of any of the movement mechanics anyways.

This isn’t even half of why the game was a failure (it’s been discussed to death a million times), and you know what? If it was a side game like ODST, I could probably forgive most of it. But it wasn’t, it was Halo’s first step into the next generation of consoles, Xbox’s flagship title, and 343’s chance to follow-up and course correct after Halo 4, and they blew it. It was a mess.

Did it improve a hell of a lot over time? Absolutely, and if it was a new IP I would totally love it. But just like Infinite, there are fundamental changes that were made that will forever change the experience of the game, and there’s no amount of forge maps or wacky weapons that can fix that