Can somebody explain what’s so egregious about the monetisation in this game? Isn’t it purely cosmetic and entirely avoidable?
I honestly didn’t even know if had MTX until I dug into the menus, it’s literally a non issue.
But then I don’t care that my avatar has a pretty new helmet or whatever.
The egregious nature of the monetisation stems from two things: Halo's previous games setting a standard, and the brutal monetisation of frustration at Halo Infinite's core. And no, you can't "avoid it" because they tied it into everything.
In prior Halo games, you had a progression system that was XP based, like a lot of games these days. Play more matches, win matches, do cool stuff in those matches, and you earn XP, and with enough XP, you levelled up. You progressed faster if you played better, and so for Halo fans who played a lot, they unlocked things at a good pace. This brought lots of customisation for your character just from playing the game at a steady pace.
Enter Halo Infinite. In the change to F2P, they shifted to a challenge system. Now, no more XP for playing better. Now you need 5 kills with a particular weapon, 3 killing sprees (5 uninterrupted kill streaks) in a particular game mode, or perform a difficult to achieve action like blowing up a flying vehicle with a Tank 4 times. Perform a large number of these, and you'll progress your Battle Pass enough to unlock customisation items.
That doesn't sound too bad, right? Now you add in everything else. That weapon you need 5 kills with? That's a random spawn. You might not see it for 10 matches, and when you do, you still have to compete with every player on the map to get it just to
try to complete your challenge. That game mode you need to get killing sprees in? That's random - you can't pick specific game modes, so you might not see it for hours and hours. Driving that Tank? That vehicle is a random spawn that occurs during the last 120 seconds of BTB, a mode which doesn't currently work. When it spawns, it's the most sought after vehicle, and you have to pray the enemies flying vehicle has also spawned or you're shit out of luck. Because you can only have four challenges active at a time - and you can't pick them - if you get four challenges that are extremely difficult, you're now progression locked until the weekly reset.
Enter the monetisation system. You can swap challenges if you pay money. Not getting enough Battle Pass levels quick enough? You can buy Battle Pass levels. Battle Pass doesn't have the customisation items you want? Jump into the FOMO-ridden store where AUD$15.00 colours are locked to one specific armour, AUD$10.00 emblems need to be purchased once for armour, once again for weapons, and once again for vehicles, and slight changes in colour constitute entirely new skins because you can't select to colour specific pieces so 343i can sell vast numbers of duplicates.
All of this leads to the monetisation system incentivising 343i to make the challenges unenjoyable, to frustrate you into spending money to skip them. And these frustrating challenges leads players to game 343i systems to complete their challenges to get the customisation items they want. So, at the start of every game you typically see at least one quitter on each team. This player didn't get the randomly selected game mode they need for their challenges, so they quit. You get another quitter about 30 seconds in on both sides when players have checked what randomly selected weapons and vehicles have spawns. Don't have what they need for their challenges? No point playing, so they quit. At about the half way point of a game, you'll get another round of quitters when it's clear their side isn't outright winning. This is because they need wins for their challenges, so it's a waste of time to continue. On top of this, you end up with team mates fighting and competing for weapons and spawns for their challenges. And then we have the players camping to farm melee back attacks for challenges, players not going kills because they need to farm assists for challenges, players using weapons they don't enjoy for their challenges. After a while, this creates a pretty lacklustre gameplay experience in comparison to prior titles. Not because Halo Infinite is a bad game - it's core gameplay is solid - it's because of 343i's monetisation systems.
After the community outright revolted at launch, 343i added a reoccurring daily challenge that grants XP. To provides a small passive amount of XP to each game. Then after players started quitting, they shifted to making it provide more XP for the first six games to incentivise players logging in every day. This just created a swarm of AFKers looking to get the customisation that prior Halo titles provided for free, because the monetisation system 343i made is absolutely fucking terrible.
You can't avoid the impact of their garbage monetisation system, because they built the entire gameplay experience around it. Combined with the atrocious de-sync issues and absurd network connectivity issues, Halo Infinite is a pretty unenjoyable experience. And it'll take 343i years to un-fuck it.