I respect your opinion, and I'm actually planning on re-playing 5 before infinite comes out, so before I say this, I wanna say that I reserve the right to change my opinion on it after I replay it, and I will keep an open mind. My biggest issues with 5 pre re-playing it, and a lot of Halo fans and friends I have talked to seem to share this opinion on a few of these things, so I'm gonna lay it out in no particular order:
story:
- spartans were too much like superheroes and didn't feel vulnerable. Even in the original trilogy when Chief did some ridiculous shit, it was either something you could see him reasonably doing, or he was struggling to pull it off. In reach you see lots of spartans die. No tension at all in 5. In reach you had Kat getting domed mid sentence because her shields were down for a second, Carter having to go down with the ship because his team would die if he didn't act immediately. It didn't need to be a massacre because Reach was about Noble dying and 5 is more lighthearted, which is fine, but there needs me to be something to make me feel fear for the heroes. No Noble team, Miranda, Sgt. Johnson, or hell even Arbiter, I legitimately thought he might die the first time I played H2. The opening of team osiris running down the mountain looked cool, but the covenant looked like a joke. Idc if it's like that in the books, I don't care to read them, it should be faithful to the tone of the game above all else. Jul Mdama getting absolutely jobbed was so funny and stupid, RIP to all the suckers who forced themselves through Halo 4 spartan ops and were expecting a payoff.
- the marketing was incredibly misleading, watch the act man's video on it for more details, but even my 15 year old brain at the time of release was fuming.
- the members of blue team and team osiris, basically any character that wasn't Chief, Arbiter, or Buck, only due to previous games, lacked charisma and any notable qualities. To include blue team or osiris, but not flesh them out at all is a bad move. In reach, you don't get a lot of time with noble team, but you still get a sense of who they are, the battles they have been through, and they were all still memorable in some way. I can't even picture in my head what any of those spartans aside from Chief, Locke, or Buck even LOOKED like, much less their personalities.
- Cortana was horrendous, Chief acting like a little bitch the whole game. He should be somewhat emotional still, but he got got and looked like an absolute chump. Our hero made the wrong choices and dumb choices the entire time and ended up a clown,
- Locke could have literally been the most badass character in the franchise if they dumped osiris team and spent the time teaching us who Locke is, some of the things he is done, maybe a flashback mission for his assassination attempt of the Arbiter. The voice actor was incredible and even with little to do, he still came off as cool. What a waste.
- The elites and grunts are hideous, the forerunner architecture ignores what the original trilogy established as what it looked like, and honestly its pretty obvious why 343 dumped this art style.
- This is more a personal nitpick, but I preferred Buck as an ODST. Felt like they only did this so they could have Nathan Fillion in the game, which is fine, whatever. Would have rather Osiris get dumped, and if they were insistent on it being a squad based game, have it where Alpha 9 is forced to work with Locke. Might be some actual tension between characters and make some interesting character moments.
gameplay
- fighting the warden eternal 7 fucking times is absurd. They were so lazy they just recycled this boss fight instead of giving us different ones. We could have had something cool like playing as Locke and fighting Chief and Blue team, but instead we got a shitty cutscene where they punch each other like 90 year old men.
- Your player health getting nuked to compensate for it being a squad game, making the most viable strategy hide behind cover and use a precision weapon, Better not wanna experiment too much. I go back to CE and I can run and gun with the AR, pick people off with the sniper, rush with the shotgun, abuse the pistol, literally use anything but the needler, and that game is old enough to buy cigarettes.
- your squad AI and the AI in general is horrendous. The reach elites on legendary shit on anything this game has to offer.
- lots of cannon fodder enemies that are boring to fight and suck up bullets, the encounters didn't feel as thoughtfully designed with enemy composition compared to original trilogy and reach.
Probably more, but I don't want to keep listing my complaints off and talk myself out of playing it again. I'm going to try and make myself forget all of that and just go in and see how I feel about if after a few years.
I'm not crapping on your either, mind you. You like a game, or you don't, and that's cool. I'm simply pointing out I don't get most people's complaints about it. I recall we've talked about almost all of your points before as well, so instead of typing bible replies, I'll summarize rebutals for them:
- Spartan-II's are supposed to be on par with Elites, more or less, yet how many Elites has John killed? Kelly? Fred? As the fiction and franchise has gone on, it's clear Spartans are tougher than Elites by a good bit. And remember John's primary attribute for surviving what he has is "luck." That's canon. It's so ridiculous, 343 Industries created the Librarian's plan for John in
Halo 4 to further justify things. So generally speaking, Spartan's are the super heroes of the
Halo universe.
- False marketing was done by another
Halo game first.
Halo 2. You were supposed to fight and save Earth
on Earth, yet you only spent two missions of the whole game there. Three if you include Cairo Station. Roughly a fifth of the game.
Halo 5: Guardians' marketing was about Locke hunting John, and Fireteam Osiris did. For four missions. Slightly more than
Halo 2.
- Osiris absolutely has personality, and the characters talk a lot about their pasts, where their from, relationships, motivations, etc. if you let them. You learn far more about Fireteam Osiris in game than Noble Team by a large, large margin. Noble Team are generally quite basic. They're Spartan's, they're a team that has banter, and they want to protect Reach because Covenant and Covenant are bad. That's it. Noble Six (and even the Rookie) are bland and not developed at all in-game; Locke's got far, far more personality than both of them put together. Blue Team also has talk and development, but much less so, as 343 was, it appears, relying more on EU knowledge there from fans.
- I don't see how she was horrendous; we finally got the "villain" Cortana people have been looking for and predicting since
Halo 2 ended. John wasn't a "bitch" either, he just made mistakes based on attachments, emotions, and loyalty. And he did so because the Spartan-II's are, in many ways, broken and socially inept, and Cortana manipulated this in him; John actually began to realize this through the penultimate level. It was actually a very interesting character arc for him.
- See my above comments on Locke.
- This isn't
the Covenant though, and these aren't the same disciplined and professional military of Elites and Grunts we fought in the original triliogy. This is Jul M'Dama's Storm Covenant, and the bulk of them came from a distant Covenant colony that hadn't even heard the Hierarchs fell. They're basically irregulars, and look "lesser" because, well, they are. Atriox, and some other Elite Commanders, enlisted/conscripted a lot of actual and proper Covenent-ex military (which is why in
Halo Wars 2, the Elites and Grunts look classic-like). In the footage I've seen of
Halo: Infinte so far, Grunts look like irregulars as well. I'm pretty sure I've seen a mix for the Elites, but might be wrong there.
- They were actually going to go with another character other than Buck (for the life of me I can't recall who), but switched to Buck because it's Nathan Fillion and more of a fan fav than the other character was. So yes, he was forced into things, so to speak.
- For the Warden Eternal battles, most of them are actually not bad, and he uses different abilities in different ones and the map layout and support he uses makes the engagements different. "Boss" battles are always hard though, as Hugo Martin said. People with either love them or hate them. Personally, I think every boss battle in
DOOM (2016) and
DOOM: Eternal is hot garbage as it forces you to abandon the general core gameplay loop. At least in
Halo 5: Guardians, that's not the case.
- Since you typically get "downed" instead of killed, I actually found you had far
more liberty to run around out in the open. And having a perma-Sprint as well as always having Thrusters added to this viability. At least on Heroic. Legendary was too tough for me beyond the first third of the game.
- I posted my thoughts on the AI earlier.
- I didn't see any issue with the encounters, generally, outside of the select few balance issues I mentioned earlier.
I am curious to see if your opinions change after a replay now, since I'm guessing it's been years. Let me know!
For
DOOM: Eternal, I tried Horde briefly last night, and aside from me being horribly rusty (as I haven't touched the game since June), it was pretty nifty. Hard with only the Shotgun. I didn't pass the Second Arena and got a Bronze medal overall.
