I think I'm just about done with this, so this is my 2 cents on everything. As I've already proven (in this thread!) I'm not fantastic with putting my thoughts together so this may be kind of a mess, but hopefully they'll at least see another voice with these concerns. Short of any significant and substantial changes I'm more or less done with the game unless I get dragged on by somebody.
Campaign
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-Largely lackluster from start to finish, outside of looking pretty. Hold X to push this button, now we're going to mark where the next button is.
-IMO, previous Halo campaigns were often characterized from epic and large levels that gave you at least some freedom of choice; nothing at all like that in this game. Narrow corridors, and you're rarely rolling with Marines or anyone else.
-The soundtrack is fine, but the lack of certain notable Halo tracks is extremely obvious. This is also made worse by the audio mix, which seems to be pretty awful. The only other thing that sticks out at me is how incredibly fucking awful the Warthog sounds. In multiplayer I actually avoid it now because of it, it sounds like an annoying, high-pitched RC car. Baffling.
-The enemy AI is awful, and noticeably worse than previous games. Outside of the pretty consistent and hilarious "Banshee stuck on wall" moments, the AI will frequently stand still as you shoot them or run up to them, etc. On the mission with the Convoy, I was able to consistently break the same large encounter and get like 20 enemies running away from me, and they would all get up on the same cliff wall and just run forever up against it. Which reminds me...
-No Campaign Theater is ass; the best moment I've had in this game in any mode was the ONE time I played with friends and it wasn't laggy, but it was in Campaign so now it's gone forever.
-This is subjective, but I think all three (!?) of the new enemies are fucking awful to fight. Not any fun, no good feedback, etc.
-The story for people who haven't been intimately following fiction outside of the game is confusing, and is largely not explained at all in-game. Even reading up on stuff prior to playing the game, you still have to make some leaps in logic. I've lost track of the number of people in Party Chats myself or someone else has had to explain things to, and looking at the OT on the Gaming-side as well as elsewhere this a very common issue. The defense that the terminals explain a ton of stuff is garbage since they're hidden (albeit not that well), but also they're not even on the goddamn disc. I finally had to youtube them, because I couldn't even get them to load on Waypoint. You don't hide major story beats as hidden things that you then have to view outside of the game, and the fact that those couldn't be ready in time for the game to ship makes me seriously wonder how fucked their production pipeline was. I'm still not even sure I completely understand what happened at the end either with you-know-who, but quite frankly I don't even care now. The only thing that's even remotely interesting is what they wind up doing with Chief, but they've gone about "humanizing" him in such a ham-fisted way that I actually laughed out loud during some points in the ending that were obviously supposed to be poignant.
-I've beaten the game three times now, and absolutely nothing sticks out at me, and I will never play it again. Offering worthwhile Challenges maaaaaybe could have done it, but you don't get regular XP for doing Campaign, just the Challenges which doesn't make it worth it. Which actually doesn't make any sense, since my understanding is that you get XP in Ops because that's "your" Spartan. So not getting XP in-Campaign makes sense if you want to make that canon or whatever, but then why do you get XP for Campaign Challenges?
Spartan Ops
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-There is an enormous disparity between the quality of the CG cutscenes and everything else remotely related to it. Also a relatively minor complaint, but no subtitle options for the CG cutscenes, good lucking out for your deaf and HOH customers 343 (unless I'm completely missing it?).
-The writing and characters are amateurish at best. I want every person who speaks in this series to die in a fire. Most of the dialogue is actually embarrassing, I saw better stuff out of my high school drama class.
-Not only are environments re-used (which is fine and expected to a point), but they're re-used repeatedly, often from week-to-week.
-The encounters are largely terrible; with a few notable exceptions, it's just the game dumping a hundred people on top of you, while randomly deciding to tag 15-20 of them as though it wasn't already obvious. I don't need 15 HUD indicators on top of an already super busy HUD, thanks 343.
-I have yet to play a single game of Ops online that isn't a laggy disaster, whether in custom games or matchmaking. Also not allowing players in matchmaking for Ops to vote for the difficulty of the Chapter is stupid.
-Maybe my biggest complaint, but it's completely baffling that game doesn't scale to the number of players. I'm literally forced to play solo since it's unplayable with other people, and it's ridiculous. It also highlights how completely fucking terrible the spawning is in it; sometimes it will spawn you on the other end of the map nowhere near where you were, sometimes it will spawn you in the middle of 20 enemies repeatedly.
-When there's a Challenge active for something in Ops (like killing X number of this enemy) it tends to pop-up the Challenge progress box EVERY SINGLE TIME. Hold on guys, I can't see the 15 people marked for death over this challenge box, gimme a second!
After 4 Episodes I want literally nothing to do with Spartan Ops. I'll finish next weeks' to wrap up achievements, then that's probably it, assuming I even still own the game past that point. Unless the last few Episodes are a completely enormous turnaround in every possible category, they've completely underminded any interest I have in future installments, much less paying for them. This had incredible potential, and instead it's a shitty replacement for Firefight with pretty CG. Outside of the CG this feels like a fan mod, down to the dialogue and encounters. So fucking awful.
War Games
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Random Ordinance drops and being able to (usually) instantly respawn with long-range weapons completely breaks most maps. There is no flow anymore; they threw in CoD-esque systems, but didn't balance anything else around that, which is made extremely apparent in Ragnarok. It's lifted from Halo 3, except in Halo 3 you couldn't take the hill and Pelican then hang out the entire match on them because all 8 people on your team have long-range weapons. Every match on that map (at least in Slayer) turns into both Mantis' being cautious on their respective side of the map until one gets destroyed, then the team with the surving Mantis (or the momentum) takes the middle and dongs on the other team behind cover for the duration. I've been on both sides of it plenty of times, and it's just stupid.
Also I'm forced to require a full section to how fucking broken the online is. Literally every single day I have played with friends, at least one, and usually more than one of the following happens:
-JiP into a match less than 10 seconds before the end on the losing team, which they explicitly said would not happen.
-JiP either splits your group onto different teams, or as hilariously has started happening to us, it splits us into different GAMES.
-Matches start uneven; a lot of matches start 4v3, 5v4 etc, except that when it does it will almost never fill in the remaining slot, and being down a person in a lot of playlists (especially objective ones) will often cost you the game. Alternatively, BTB seemingly refuses to start unless it has the full 16 players, so a lot of the time you spend 2+ minutes at 15/16 players waiting to find the last one.
-You lose some or all of your Loadouts for random periods of time.
-You are stuck on the backup servers for extended periods of time.
-You lose all of your Loadouts AND any spent Spartan Points and unlocks, so you're stuck with default in-playlist loadouts because you can't even just re-setup your Loadouts if you've lost them because everything is re-locked but you're not given your points back.
Everyone in our group has an open NAT, and two of my friends went so far as to buy a new fucking router recommended by Microsoft for the 360, and shit's still broken as fuck for them. I will say that outside of the issues above, in the actual game I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen lag, so that's something I guess.
Other Random thoughts/fixes on Multiplayer:
-X on death is gone, removing callouts. This is made worse by most of the maps not having super-defining features to identify locations in the heat of battle.
-Why the fuck does EMPing the Gauss Hog not disable it's ability to fire like it does with the Scorpion, Banshee, or Ghost? Shit's broken yo.
-They need to remove the ability to play a map twice in a row. In BTB Ragnarok gets voted twice, then Exile, then it repeats (or vice versa). Even then Ragnarok and Exile need lower weighting, otherwise most matches will flip-flop between those two maps back and forth. Only being given one chance to vote is good though.
-Why in the fuck do the Gauss Hog, Banshee, and Scorpion exist on Exile in BTB (can't remember about Dominion)? It makes literally no sense.
-Tying armor unlocks to specific Commendations was a baaaad idea. Already seeing people just running around on vehicles not killing people trying to get splatters, or idiot teammates trying to get kills with stupid weapons like the Storm Rifle just to unlock armor pieces. You shouldn't be forcing people to play weapons or modes they don't want to for cosmetic things, it's encouraging bad behavior.
-It's been harped on enough, but Camo: what the fuck were they thinking?
-Along the same lines, the Boltshit is ridiculous in 4v4/5v5. It's a bit more high risk, but it's essentially a shotgun, yet ironically the Shotgun/Scattershot are Ordinance Drops. Hmmmm.
-The UI both in-game and out of it are fucking terrible, and would require such an extensive overhaul to correct that it'll never happen.
-Getting a DNF for backing out of a match BEFORE IT BEGINS is retarded. As far as I can tell you don't get the DNF for voting then backing out; that would still be terrible but almost make sense. But once you've voted you can't back out normally anyway and I've never dashboarded out, but I have a bunch of DNF's. But it could also be broken because Waypoint is just outright missing games I've played, has full matches I've played listed as DNF's, and has some matches listed twice.
-Any sort of trueskill matching they're doing is crap. Most matches in any playlist I play are total blowouts. Just now I played a 4v4 Oddbal match where our team just got utterly and completely fucking destroyed, the other team was a group of 4 guys in a Party chat who all had ridiculous K/Ds and were at or almost at the level cap. Worst I've been donged on in a long time, went like 4/18 or something. We back out after the game, then it puts us right back against the same team who completely dongs on us again, even harder this time. Not only should we never have been matched against them to begin with, why the fuck would it put us with them again when they just completely destroyed us and we backed away from them?
The game is largely souless, and I only find real enjoyment out of filling bars. This game doesn't seem to satisfy traditional fans, but I don't feel it goes far enough in the CoD direction to satisfy that crowd either. They should have either gone all-out CoD crazy with it or not, but they're straddling a line that's not going to work. For filling bar potential it just makes me want to play an actual CoD game, and on the Halo side of things it just makes me want to play Halo 3. It's mindless, and it's sometimes fun, but it's not really special or fulflling in any way and most of the time I am either just frustrated or indifferent. I went something like 36/4 in BTB earlier, didn't notice it until someone pointed it out to me, and I was like "eh." It would be a disappointment under any name, but for being a mainline Halo game it's even moreso.
