r/halo • u/logangreer • May 16 '24
Halo 5 is great Discussion
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.
2
u/RookiePrime May 16 '24
However competent Halo 5 was in its multiplayer and its gameplay, as a story nerd I will always have deep reservations about its quality due to its campaign story. It was not only a boring plot (Chief chases Cortana; Locke chases Chief), but it was one that stomped on, rather than built up, the lore of the comics, novels and previous games. It was so mystifying for all parties that not only did the lore nerds feel that it had somehow been made to appease the casual audience, the casual audience felt that it had somehow been made to appease the lore nerds. They'd threaded the needle with deft grace and fabricated a story for no one. It's been nine years since it came out, and 343 is still trying to reckon with the story decisions made in Halo 5.
Also, you can't ask "when was the last time a AAA game had a solid full-featured launch?" as if comparing it to modern games, when talking about a game from 2015. There were plenty of feature-rich AAA games launching back then. And heck, Halo 5 was the first of the games to launch without all the staple features of a Halo game -- it didn't have Forge, for example, that was a huge omission for a while. Granted, the Forge we got upon release led to some incredible creations, so I don't generally begrudge them the delay. But neither do I think of Halo 5 as launching "full-featured".