01011001
Banned
Since I still see so many people on here vehemently defending Halo Infinite with simple statements like "the core game is amazing" and other vague statements like that,
I decided to make 1 long post on here showcasing everything wrong with the game.
I'll try to stay as short and objective as possible, BUT THERE IS A LOT, and only throw in opinion points when necessary.
I want to go beyond what its defenders often do and just write the negative opposite-equivalent of:
"The game is great it just needs some more content guys!
"
but let me say this right away, if you Like Halo Infinite, and you are ok with the state it is in, great for you, but please don't try justifying the CLEAR lack of content, polish and lack of unique game-design choices 343i makes in order to make the game more mainstream!
You don't have to justify liking a game, just like I would never tell you Crackdown 3, a game I like quite a bit, is anything more than a 6/10... it just happens that I like the game even with its flaws, just like you like Infinite despite the flaws.
What I will say tho is that it is VERY CLEAR that what 343i is doing doesn't work, not for Halo fans and not for the Mainstream shooter fans, so there is clearly something wrong here, at least acknowledge this please!
CHAPTER 1: The Campaign, aka. the best part of the game, that is still pretty mediocre tho
The Campaign is often held up by the Infinite defense forces as "what really matters" and "amazing!!!". Well, while it is true that the Campaign isn't bad, it ultimately is nothing special either, and not only follows the dreaded UbiWorld formula, but also lacks any real highlights as well as gameplay and biome diversity.
UbiWorld Formula: The game has the typical always samey "take over this spot to reveal icons on your map" loop of Ubisoft games.
you take over an enemy base, dozens of side-content icons pop up on the map, you get a fast-travel point and can call in weapons.
very generic open world stuff, once again following a trend to "make the game appeal to a wider audience" and lacking imagination and innovation.
No Highlights: Due to the open world nature the game feels extremely void of any real high points and feels samey throughout the duration of the campaign.
Since weapons are now basically throwaway items that you don't really need to manage or hold on to since you can just spawn in a new Sniper by spawning back at a base, you never get hyped to score a sniper, a rocket launcher or even strong vehicles... afer all, a quick trip back to the nearest base and you just can have all that for free.
Since it is an open map, and most missions either happen on that map or in relatively claustrophobic structures placed in the map, we don't ever get anything close to any of the more iconic Halo Missions of the past.
Just think of Halo Reach, how that game mixed things up with missions like "New Alexandria", where you are in the rainy sky-scapes of New Alexandria at night, you star at the roof of a skyscraper, a Falcon next to you. You get into the Falcon and start flying towards the city, fight enemies in the air, until you land and infiltrate one of the towers, maybe you take out their ground troops first with your Falcon... then you go in, you are in an abandoned night club, the music is still going the neon light decorations still turned on... you fight your way through...
...
..
You know what, just look it up on Youtube as a reference.
Or maybe in Halo 3 in the mission "The Storm". You and a squad of marines come to an infested bunker complex to take it back over. you fight through bunkers, through an open area where you have to defeat multiple enemy Wraith tanks, you go through another bunker until you get out to a wide open spot... while you are fighting enemy ground troops and vehicles you suddenly hear a over the radio: "It's getting closer!"... you hear rumblings... and a gigantic scarab tank crawls over the roof of the bunker you just defended. now it is your mission to take it down using a multitude of possible ways from trying to get to a high place and try your luck with a leap of faith over to the Scarab, to destroying one of its legs using one of the stationary rocket turrets... or many other strategies.
this should be enough examples, but there are tons more.
the biggest highlight Halo Infinite's campaign has is maybe some of the boss fights. but outside of that, I have to tell you, I barely remember anything from my playthrough that isn't the most basic running through corridors and shooting random enemy types... even the bosses are not really that great and often are just bullet sponges with cool designs.
Infinite just doesn't have any "wow" moments. and the first 2 + the final 3 missions are the closest it ever gets to feeling like it has actual leveldesign in the first place.
The final thing I will say about the campaign itself is, the Banished are a poore excuse for an enemy faction!
What are they even trying to accomplish? what is their goal? what is their purpose?
They are pissed at Cortana... as are the Humans... so why are they fighting the Humans?
They want to... go to war... and fight... in honor... or something... but for what? they don't have a clear goal! The Covernant had a VERY CLEAR and THEMATICALLY FUNCTIONAL goal! They wanted to take over the Halo Rings and the Arch in order to fire the Halo Rings and wipe yout all organic live in the galaxy, which they believe will makde them ascent to a higher form of existence... The Banished want to, be honored... or something... and are pissed at an AI that is already dead... YAY!
CHAPTER 2: Presentation + Graphics, aka. WTF DID THEY DO FOR 6 YEARS?
So yeah... this game isn't really a looker is it? The best you can say about it is that they FINALLY went back to an art style that is reminiscent of the Bungie days, meanign it doesn't look as fucking butt-ugly anymore as the style of Halo 4 and 5, with their gummy-bear-space-powerranger Spartans and over-designed EVERYTHING.
but from a technical standpoint it's not at all what people expected after that original Splipspace Engine trailer.
I'm no graphics whole but I think this is also worth bringing up because it is a symptom of the things that went wrong during development.
The graphical fidelity is simply not great, neither is anything that has to do with physics and animation.
It starts with the fact that EVERY cutscene in the game stutters... this is true on console, on PC, any mode you play. Animations are played back below 60fps, camera movement jerks around, audio gtes mismatched... all of this happens and you can't do anything about it. it's worse in some scenes and less bad in others but all of them exhibit it.
THIS HAS NOT YET EVEN BEEN ACKNOWLEDGED BY THE DEVS.
The Intro cutscene also was encoded incorrectly
notice the blaclevels are completely wrong... black in this is simply grey, even the black "cinematic" bars on top and bottom are grey not black. the whole encode is flawed and has not been fixed yet either.
Next, physics...
Vehicle explosions and general physics are just awful. Vehicles feel like ass to handle and nothing has any weight.
when a vehicle explodes, most of it just disappears in a really bad looking "poof" while the rest just sits there on the ground all sad and awful looking.
for comparison, here is an explosion in Halo Reach when a Warthog is shot with a Rocket:
and here is the sad excuse of it in Infinite:
this is sad, and just so fucking bad... if you excuse my opinionated expression here.
and many aspects of Infinite's feel, presentation and graphics suffer from similar issues. The Sound for example is a joke, every weapon that hits you just sounds like someone is farting directly into a really bad microphone that has way too much base!
You can barely make out what killed you without looking at the kill-feet. you hear the aforementioned fart noise and you are dead... but what fart noise was it? the fart noise that is supposed to be the BR? or maybe the fart noise that is supposed to be a melee attack.
the lack of visual feedback by the way of animations and phyics also makes this hard to make out, as getting hut by a rocket launcher sometimes just makes you collapse to the floor
not really what you expect from getting blasted by a rocket... and of course seomtimes all you hear is, again, the bass laden fart noise
Chapter 3: Gameplay, aka. it's not as good as people claim it to be
So, you will mostly hear the defenders of this game say "but the gameplay is amazing!" or similar statements, well... not really.
While it is true that Infinite feels more like Halo again than 4 and 5 did, it only does so in some ways and not others.
Part of the issues the game has in this category the core gameplay chasing trends for no reason, the weapons feeling weird at best and completely fucked at worst, and last but not least THE AWFUL NETCODE THAT IS WORSE THAN Halo 3's which ran on P2P connections...
Let's start with the core gameplay:
well, Halo Infinite has all the things you would expect from a modern shooter... but why does it have these features? to make the game better? or to simply chase trends in order to make the game "appeal to a broader audience"?
I think by playing the game it becomes quickly clear that it is the latter part that is the case.
Halo Infinite has a Sprint button. you know, like Call of Duty or Battlefield... you click the left stick and you star running faster while lowering your weapon.
why do I think this is not in the game to make it better but only there to chase trends? well, it's quite self-evident really.
The Sprint feature in this game barely does anything and is almost completely cosmetic. They couldn't make it 100% cosmetic of course in order to have a little deniability.
The feature really doesn't bring anything to the table other than make Call of Duty players feel like they get a speed boost by clicking the left stick.
In regular gameplay with corners and ramps, the speed increase of spring is even less of a factor since Spring also gives your Spartan some inertia that will make your character lip a little while running around corners, further slowing Sprint down.
Clamber is next. Clamber is the name given by 343i to the popular feature in modern Shooters to pull yourself up ledges by lowering your weapons and grabbing onto the ledge above.
Is this beneficial to the design of Halo or is this just there to make the game "feel modern"?
Well, what does Clamber accomplish? In short, it accomplishes that the game feels slower and less dynamic than other arena shooters that don't have Clamber.
Why is that? EASY! Before Clamber was introduced in Halo 5, Halo Maps were designed in a way that you can jump up and above clearly layed out paths + paths found by the community, usually known as "skill jumps".
Without clamber in Halo Reach for example, or Halo 3... or any Bungie Halo, you can fight an enemy while walking sideways or backwards and doing complex jumps blindly without ever stopping to engage in the gunfight you are involved in. The maps are designed for your jump height and trick jumps only require exactly that, your jump... be it forwards or backwards.
The Halo community was very vocal about how Clamber slows the game down, but 343i clearly was too afraid to go with their core audience and to make their game distinct from the competition (although not so distinct if you actually look around a bit)
All that Clamber accomplishes is that Maps are now designed with it in mind, meaning there are jumps that simply require you to turn your view basically against a wall, and locks you into an animation during which you can't fight or move other than up or down (should you let go)
Now to the people that will eventually say "but a modern Halo Game Needs Sprint and Clamber!!! Shooters without it are outdated!!!"... well... Valorant, CS:GO, Overwatch, ever heard of these?
Neither of these games have a sprint button nor the ability to climb up ledges, yet they are successful and have found a very big audience over the years. Valorant especially is highly popular and relatively new.
Going away from the stuff copied over to "feel modern" or whatever,
issues with gameplay in combination with Weapons are also everywhere,
You can't do Rocket Jumps anymore... neither can you do Grenade Jumps anymore... this is yet another thing that makes the game less dynamic, less like Halo, less like an Arena Shooter and LESS FUN.
Almost no weapon has any tangible influence on character physics which makes trick jumps using rockets or grenades completely impossible, and also affects stuff like the Gravity Hammer that now feels more like, well a normal Hammer... as the Gravity aspect of that thing basically has been toned down to a level that might as well just be non-existent.
Now something they thankfully took away, only to introduce it back into Infinite... BLOOM.
Bloom is when a weapon gets less and less accurate the more you spam it. This bloom is not controllable and is completely random.
The low IQ defenders of Bloom that already existed back when Reach introduced it and still haven't died out sadly, will come with the defense of "ThIS IntRODuceS SkILL tO The GAmE! YoU JUst suCK! PaCE yoR shOTS nOoB!"
well... fuck off, quite frankly.
Bloom does not add any amount of skill. shooting slower DOES NOT TAKE SKILL... Shooting slower means you can more easily line up your shots... how does that require skill?
Not only does it take away from the skill required, it also introduces a really strong randomness factor, that is CLEARLY DESIGNED TO MAKE THE GAME EASIER FOR BAD PLAYERS.
If you are a skilled player and you pace your shots to mitigate the bloom effect of your weapon, you can literally AT RANDOM lose against a bad player that just spams the trigger like an idiot and gets lucky random bullets hitting you while his Weapon's bloom is in full effect.
It is never a good game mechanic in an Arena Shooter when a random chance mechanic makes it so that the better player loses a gunfight. That shit belongs in party games but not in Halo. It didn't belong in Halo back in Reach, and it still doesn't now.
If they want to balance weapons to be harder to spam they should either limit the fire rate to what they deem OK, or they should introduce counteractable recoil like any other decent shooter out there! The Commando has recoil and basically no bloom... why isn't every weapon like that?
The only thing they finally should start copying from other shooters is the FUCKING AIMING ON A CONTROLLER!
343i is stuck in the past with this. they refuse to acknowledge the advancements many high-profile shooter developers made over the years when it comes to aiming on a controller. but to make that easier for me, I will just copy a post here that I made about this very topic in another thread, that should explain what is wrong with it in a somewhat complete fashion:
THE ONLY POSITIVE aspect of the core gameplay to me is the Slide. the slide feels decent and makes the movement more dynamic. instead of a Sprint button they should have just added a slide button, so when you hold left and press down the left stick you slide left, if you hold forward and press the stick down you slide forward etc.
_____________________________
(HAD TO SPLIT THIS INTO 2 POSTS DUE TO THE 30,000 CHARACTER LIMIT ON POSTS)
I decided to make 1 long post on here showcasing everything wrong with the game.
I'll try to stay as short and objective as possible, BUT THERE IS A LOT, and only throw in opinion points when necessary.
I want to go beyond what its defenders often do and just write the negative opposite-equivalent of:
"The game is great it just needs some more content guys!
"but let me say this right away, if you Like Halo Infinite, and you are ok with the state it is in, great for you, but please don't try justifying the CLEAR lack of content, polish and lack of unique game-design choices 343i makes in order to make the game more mainstream!
You don't have to justify liking a game, just like I would never tell you Crackdown 3, a game I like quite a bit, is anything more than a 6/10... it just happens that I like the game even with its flaws, just like you like Infinite despite the flaws.
What I will say tho is that it is VERY CLEAR that what 343i is doing doesn't work, not for Halo fans and not for the Mainstream shooter fans, so there is clearly something wrong here, at least acknowledge this please!
CHAPTER 1: The Campaign, aka. the best part of the game, that is still pretty mediocre tho
The Campaign is often held up by the Infinite defense forces as "what really matters" and "amazing!!!". Well, while it is true that the Campaign isn't bad, it ultimately is nothing special either, and not only follows the dreaded UbiWorld formula, but also lacks any real highlights as well as gameplay and biome diversity.
UbiWorld Formula: The game has the typical always samey "take over this spot to reveal icons on your map" loop of Ubisoft games.
you take over an enemy base, dozens of side-content icons pop up on the map, you get a fast-travel point and can call in weapons.
very generic open world stuff, once again following a trend to "make the game appeal to a wider audience" and lacking imagination and innovation.
No Highlights: Due to the open world nature the game feels extremely void of any real high points and feels samey throughout the duration of the campaign.
Since weapons are now basically throwaway items that you don't really need to manage or hold on to since you can just spawn in a new Sniper by spawning back at a base, you never get hyped to score a sniper, a rocket launcher or even strong vehicles... afer all, a quick trip back to the nearest base and you just can have all that for free.
Since it is an open map, and most missions either happen on that map or in relatively claustrophobic structures placed in the map, we don't ever get anything close to any of the more iconic Halo Missions of the past.
Just think of Halo Reach, how that game mixed things up with missions like "New Alexandria", where you are in the rainy sky-scapes of New Alexandria at night, you star at the roof of a skyscraper, a Falcon next to you. You get into the Falcon and start flying towards the city, fight enemies in the air, until you land and infiltrate one of the towers, maybe you take out their ground troops first with your Falcon... then you go in, you are in an abandoned night club, the music is still going the neon light decorations still turned on... you fight your way through...
...
..
You know what, just look it up on Youtube as a reference.
Or maybe in Halo 3 in the mission "The Storm". You and a squad of marines come to an infested bunker complex to take it back over. you fight through bunkers, through an open area where you have to defeat multiple enemy Wraith tanks, you go through another bunker until you get out to a wide open spot... while you are fighting enemy ground troops and vehicles you suddenly hear a over the radio: "It's getting closer!"... you hear rumblings... and a gigantic scarab tank crawls over the roof of the bunker you just defended. now it is your mission to take it down using a multitude of possible ways from trying to get to a high place and try your luck with a leap of faith over to the Scarab, to destroying one of its legs using one of the stationary rocket turrets... or many other strategies.
this should be enough examples, but there are tons more.
the biggest highlight Halo Infinite's campaign has is maybe some of the boss fights. but outside of that, I have to tell you, I barely remember anything from my playthrough that isn't the most basic running through corridors and shooting random enemy types... even the bosses are not really that great and often are just bullet sponges with cool designs.
Infinite just doesn't have any "wow" moments. and the first 2 + the final 3 missions are the closest it ever gets to feeling like it has actual leveldesign in the first place.
The final thing I will say about the campaign itself is, the Banished are a poore excuse for an enemy faction!
What are they even trying to accomplish? what is their goal? what is their purpose?
They are pissed at Cortana... as are the Humans... so why are they fighting the Humans?
They want to... go to war... and fight... in honor... or something... but for what? they don't have a clear goal! The Covernant had a VERY CLEAR and THEMATICALLY FUNCTIONAL goal! They wanted to take over the Halo Rings and the Arch in order to fire the Halo Rings and wipe yout all organic live in the galaxy, which they believe will makde them ascent to a higher form of existence... The Banished want to, be honored... or something... and are pissed at an AI that is already dead... YAY!
CHAPTER 2: Presentation + Graphics, aka. WTF DID THEY DO FOR 6 YEARS?
So yeah... this game isn't really a looker is it? The best you can say about it is that they FINALLY went back to an art style that is reminiscent of the Bungie days, meanign it doesn't look as fucking butt-ugly anymore as the style of Halo 4 and 5, with their gummy-bear-space-powerranger Spartans and over-designed EVERYTHING.
but from a technical standpoint it's not at all what people expected after that original Splipspace Engine trailer.
I'm no graphics whole but I think this is also worth bringing up because it is a symptom of the things that went wrong during development.
The graphical fidelity is simply not great, neither is anything that has to do with physics and animation.
It starts with the fact that EVERY cutscene in the game stutters... this is true on console, on PC, any mode you play. Animations are played back below 60fps, camera movement jerks around, audio gtes mismatched... all of this happens and you can't do anything about it. it's worse in some scenes and less bad in others but all of them exhibit it.
THIS HAS NOT YET EVEN BEEN ACKNOWLEDGED BY THE DEVS.
The Intro cutscene also was encoded incorrectly
notice the blaclevels are completely wrong... black in this is simply grey, even the black "cinematic" bars on top and bottom are grey not black. the whole encode is flawed and has not been fixed yet either.
Next, physics...
Vehicle explosions and general physics are just awful. Vehicles feel like ass to handle and nothing has any weight.
when a vehicle explodes, most of it just disappears in a really bad looking "poof" while the rest just sits there on the ground all sad and awful looking.
for comparison, here is an explosion in Halo Reach when a Warthog is shot with a Rocket:
and here is the sad excuse of it in Infinite:
this is sad, and just so fucking bad... if you excuse my opinionated expression here.
and many aspects of Infinite's feel, presentation and graphics suffer from similar issues. The Sound for example is a joke, every weapon that hits you just sounds like someone is farting directly into a really bad microphone that has way too much base!
You can barely make out what killed you without looking at the kill-feet. you hear the aforementioned fart noise and you are dead... but what fart noise was it? the fart noise that is supposed to be the BR? or maybe the fart noise that is supposed to be a melee attack.
the lack of visual feedback by the way of animations and phyics also makes this hard to make out, as getting hut by a rocket launcher sometimes just makes you collapse to the floor
not really what you expect from getting blasted by a rocket... and of course seomtimes all you hear is, again, the bass laden fart noiseChapter 3: Gameplay, aka. it's not as good as people claim it to be
So, you will mostly hear the defenders of this game say "but the gameplay is amazing!" or similar statements, well... not really.
While it is true that Infinite feels more like Halo again than 4 and 5 did, it only does so in some ways and not others.
Part of the issues the game has in this category the core gameplay chasing trends for no reason, the weapons feeling weird at best and completely fucked at worst, and last but not least THE AWFUL NETCODE THAT IS WORSE THAN Halo 3's which ran on P2P connections...
Let's start with the core gameplay:
well, Halo Infinite has all the things you would expect from a modern shooter... but why does it have these features? to make the game better? or to simply chase trends in order to make the game "appeal to a broader audience"?
I think by playing the game it becomes quickly clear that it is the latter part that is the case.
Halo Infinite has a Sprint button. you know, like Call of Duty or Battlefield... you click the left stick and you star running faster while lowering your weapon.
why do I think this is not in the game to make it better but only there to chase trends? well, it's quite self-evident really.
The Sprint feature in this game barely does anything and is almost completely cosmetic. They couldn't make it 100% cosmetic of course in order to have a little deniability.
The feature really doesn't bring anything to the table other than make Call of Duty players feel like they get a speed boost by clicking the left stick.
In regular gameplay with corners and ramps, the speed increase of spring is even less of a factor since Spring also gives your Spartan some inertia that will make your character lip a little while running around corners, further slowing Sprint down.
Clamber is next. Clamber is the name given by 343i to the popular feature in modern Shooters to pull yourself up ledges by lowering your weapons and grabbing onto the ledge above.
Is this beneficial to the design of Halo or is this just there to make the game "feel modern"?
Well, what does Clamber accomplish? In short, it accomplishes that the game feels slower and less dynamic than other arena shooters that don't have Clamber.
Why is that? EASY! Before Clamber was introduced in Halo 5, Halo Maps were designed in a way that you can jump up and above clearly layed out paths + paths found by the community, usually known as "skill jumps".
Without clamber in Halo Reach for example, or Halo 3... or any Bungie Halo, you can fight an enemy while walking sideways or backwards and doing complex jumps blindly without ever stopping to engage in the gunfight you are involved in. The maps are designed for your jump height and trick jumps only require exactly that, your jump... be it forwards or backwards.
The Halo community was very vocal about how Clamber slows the game down, but 343i clearly was too afraid to go with their core audience and to make their game distinct from the competition (although not so distinct if you actually look around a bit)
All that Clamber accomplishes is that Maps are now designed with it in mind, meaning there are jumps that simply require you to turn your view basically against a wall, and locks you into an animation during which you can't fight or move other than up or down (should you let go)
Now to the people that will eventually say "but a modern Halo Game Needs Sprint and Clamber!!! Shooters without it are outdated!!!"... well... Valorant, CS:GO, Overwatch, ever heard of these?
Neither of these games have a sprint button nor the ability to climb up ledges, yet they are successful and have found a very big audience over the years. Valorant especially is highly popular and relatively new.
Going away from the stuff copied over to "feel modern" or whatever,
issues with gameplay in combination with Weapons are also everywhere,
You can't do Rocket Jumps anymore... neither can you do Grenade Jumps anymore... this is yet another thing that makes the game less dynamic, less like Halo, less like an Arena Shooter and LESS FUN.
Almost no weapon has any tangible influence on character physics which makes trick jumps using rockets or grenades completely impossible, and also affects stuff like the Gravity Hammer that now feels more like, well a normal Hammer... as the Gravity aspect of that thing basically has been toned down to a level that might as well just be non-existent.
Now something they thankfully took away, only to introduce it back into Infinite... BLOOM.
Bloom is when a weapon gets less and less accurate the more you spam it. This bloom is not controllable and is completely random.
The low IQ defenders of Bloom that already existed back when Reach introduced it and still haven't died out sadly, will come with the defense of "ThIS IntRODuceS SkILL tO The GAmE! YoU JUst suCK! PaCE yoR shOTS nOoB!"
well... fuck off, quite frankly.
Bloom does not add any amount of skill. shooting slower DOES NOT TAKE SKILL... Shooting slower means you can more easily line up your shots... how does that require skill?
Not only does it take away from the skill required, it also introduces a really strong randomness factor, that is CLEARLY DESIGNED TO MAKE THE GAME EASIER FOR BAD PLAYERS.
If you are a skilled player and you pace your shots to mitigate the bloom effect of your weapon, you can literally AT RANDOM lose against a bad player that just spams the trigger like an idiot and gets lucky random bullets hitting you while his Weapon's bloom is in full effect.
It is never a good game mechanic in an Arena Shooter when a random chance mechanic makes it so that the better player loses a gunfight. That shit belongs in party games but not in Halo. It didn't belong in Halo back in Reach, and it still doesn't now.
If they want to balance weapons to be harder to spam they should either limit the fire rate to what they deem OK, or they should introduce counteractable recoil like any other decent shooter out there! The Commando has recoil and basically no bloom... why isn't every weapon like that?
The only thing they finally should start copying from other shooters is the FUCKING AIMING ON A CONTROLLER!
343i is stuck in the past with this. they refuse to acknowledge the advancements many high-profile shooter developers made over the years when it comes to aiming on a controller. but to make that easier for me, I will just copy a post here that I made about this very topic in another thread, that should explain what is wrong with it in a somewhat complete fashion:
I thought I might do a visual demonstration on how weird and fucked Halo Infinite's aiming is with some hastely put together graphs, because I don't wanna be told I am throwing out vague statements (which most of the people that object my criticism do usually by just saying "you're a hater, the core game is amazing! HURR DURR!")
the issue lies mostly in 2 things:
#1: The Max turn speed/sensitivity is RIDICULOUSLY SLOW... as in basically what 50% speed is in a modern CoD. you can't turn around for shit, and this makes the game feel sluggish and undynamic
#2: the sensitivity curve, and this is the biggest issue with the game's controls, and the reason why the ridiculous aim assist is needed. you have for one, aim acceleration* THAT CAN NOT BE DISABLED! you can only change how fast it ramps up. and secondly a curve that's just a joke
here a few graphs that show for 1, Halo Infinite's curve that is close to shooters of the late PS2/Xbox to the early PS360 era, before CoD started to perfect controller aiming. and 2, some other curves, including the one used by many popular mainstream shooters
you can see how shallow the curve is, and how abrupt it shoots up, and even then still has a slight angle on top for additional unevenness
this curve was found by EternalDahaka on reddit using a TitanTwo
it uses most of the stick for extremely slow turn speeds and then shoots up right at the edge and then trails off even higher
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this is roughly what I use in games that allow it, but if the have either of the ones below this one, i'm also fine with that usually.
you can see I prefer a smooth ramp up with precision in the inner part of the stick that steadily increases in speed towards the edge for max turn speed
while keeping the ability for granular precision.
I also usually use ones like these because you can normally use a 0% dead-zone and still avoid drifting or at least have only slight drifting. but a 0% dead-zone allows for extremely granular movement with ease.
in Apex Legends for example I barely move my stick when counteracting recoil for most guns and can counteract very efforlessly
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many pro controller players play linear, which is what you see above. most games that give a "Linear" option don't have an actual "true linear" curve though.
many look more like THIS
This gives 100% consistency but also needs the user to be extremely precise in high sensitivity settings as there is no precision zone in the inner circle.
most games give this as an option (Infinite of course doesn't because it sucks) and some other have this as the only option. although most use a different one.
which brings us to the last one below
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this is what most of the games that are commonly said to have really good controller aiming use as the default. of course they aren't 100% identical to this but they usually use this with slight variations and options to tweak further.
CoD's and Apex Legend's default look similar to this, this is also the default Steam uses when you emulate mouse movement on your controller's stick I think.
this is a very balanced curve that doesn't offend anyone. it gives some precision in the inner most circle but also is not too far off from linear to get in the way of people that really prefer a linear curve
this is also roughly what Splitgate, a Halo Clone made by a handful of students, uses and why it feels 10x better than Infinite and why it doesn't need Infinite's ridiculous aim assist to be playable on controller.
it lacks options to change the curve, which is suboptimal, but this curve is the least offensive to most players. so a good choice as the one to use
here a pic of the sensitivity curves that Modern Warfare uses:
(dynamic is fucking horrid btw! lol, some people like it tho so the option is there at least)
as you can see the CoD standard is very similar to the curve I presented above as what is basically the modern standard of good controller aiming
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so this is why the aiming in Halo Infinite sucks. it uses a curve similar to the one used by Halo 2 back in 2004, before controller aiming was truly perfected by countless iterations of Call of Duty, which became as popular as it is due to how smooth and good the aiming felt compared to other shooters at the time. it was a standout reason as to why people fell in love with the series around Modern Warfare 1 and 2. it just felt better than the rest.
Halo Infinite meanwhile is stuck in the pre-Modern Warfare 1 era when it comes to the controls. it feels clunky, stiff, slow and inconsistent as hell. and that is AFTER you turn off axial deadzones, which is a whole nother dogshit option that Infinite has on as the default (but at least you can turn that off, unlike the acceleration)
and remember, most games have multiple curves as an option, Apex Legends even lets you create a custom one from 100% Linear to extremely curved to the edge
*aim acceleration is when you tilt your stick a certain amount, in Halo's case ~95% in default, and the game does not immediately give you the maximal possible speed, but slowly increases the turn speed over time. this leads to inconsistent feeling aiming and depending on implementation can lead to uneven movement in the horizontal and vertical axes
THE ONLY POSITIVE aspect of the core gameplay to me is the Slide. the slide feels decent and makes the movement more dynamic. instead of a Sprint button they should have just added a slide button, so when you hold left and press down the left stick you slide left, if you hold forward and press the stick down you slide forward etc.
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(HAD TO SPLIT THIS INTO 2 POSTS DUE TO THE 30,000 CHARACTER LIMIT ON POSTS)
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