Played some Halo 4 for the first time in about 6 weeks last night. What an awful experience.
I went to my friend's house for a gaming night and we decided to give the doubles playlist a go. I will say that it is a marginal improvement compared to when I last played but Halo 4 multiplayer is IMO still not very enjoyable at all. After about 5/6 games we just couldn't take playing it anymore and had to take out our Halo 4 discs vowing to never subject ourselves to such a frustrating experience again. Everytime I leave Halo 4 for a while I question whether my opinion of it is too harsh and how maybe its not all that bad, then when I play it I remember exactly why I stopped playing.
Problems we encountered playing doubles:
-Narrow skill gap of DMR/BR. This is the first thing that hit me, even players that were clearly not very skilled had little problem landing most shots with these weapons, especially at anything over very close range.
-Terribly slow movement speed. After playing some PC games recently Halo 4 strafing was actually quite amusing in how near useless it is coupled with the hitscan DMR/BR.
-Sprint double beatdown. In doubles pro without radar this was incredibly cheap and annoying reminiscent of reach. One of the pros of the bolt shot is that you don't have to put up with this which is even worse and even more cheap.
-Railgun. This is like the long range bolt shot in doubles. I was killed with this weapon almost exclusively in some games as players relied on it as a crutch and couldn't get kills with either the DMR/BR or the not quite as easy to use sniper rifle. The degree of auto aim, quick charge time and instant kill nature of this weapon made it very annoying to get killed by.
-Infinity slayer. We came across a couple of good players who chose infinity slayer over 2 options of slayer pro and absolutely abused jet packs in the cheapest ways possible along with various cheap personal ordnance weapons such as the saw. This reminded how winning in Halo 4 comes down to who can abuse the cheap tactics the most rather than master skilful weapons and meta games of map control / weapon control such as in the first 3 Halo games.
I'm guilty of this. It's difficult not to go straight for it, as it's absurdly effective. Combine that with the ammo perk and it gets kinda silly. I would propose changing it to a 3 minute timer, and hopefully if the TU allows for it, banning the ammo perk in Doubles.
As for Jetpack, I still think it could be interesting if the three more effective AAs, ProVis, Invis, and Jetpack, would be placed on the map. I've never understood why AAs always had to be loadout only and couldn't be considered power-AAs on the map, Halo 3 Equipment-style.
Infinity slayer desperately needs to be taken back to the drawing board.
