Beta Impressions
Beta Impressions
I was able to sit down and play around 30 games over the last 24 hours. Here's what I think so far:
-Spartan chatter, while good, is too much. The callouts they do is fine, but some stuff isn't needed. With all the other sounds of the game (pinging, movement, grunting, etc), is can be too much at times.
-Kill cam needs to go. More than likely, you know where the guy that killed you is located (barring 343 implementing some stupid camo ability). I would rather know the situation of my teammates than the kill cam. I can gather much more pertinent information cycling through my teammates than watching a replay of how I died.
-Thruster is waaaay overpowered. It either needs a longer cool down period or decrease its movement ability.
-Speaking of overpowered, the AR and SMG need to be toned down. They shouldn't be able to defeat a BR/DMR at mid-range. Their range needs to CQ to short-mid. I shouldn't be able to get an overkill exterm using 1 grenade and 1 clip of my AR at mid-range (yes that did happen lol). Also went 15-5 using nothing but my AR just to see how OP'd it was.
-Controls are tight, even better than H4's, which I thought was best in the series.
-Still not sold on the BR's ADS.
-Sprint is still broken. While they tried to fix it with the no shield recharge while sprinting, it only does two things: 1. Makes battles longer as both people sprint off and hide in cover to recharge their shields, or 2. Makes chasing a priority, and we all know chasing is bad. It honestly feels, at times, that battles are even longer than H4, which is frustrating.
I'll post more thoughts later.
what's up with the nades? They're way OP and they're really hard to track. There's no marker, which is fine but they should be easier to see or hear. I'm constantly just exploding without warning. Also, when jumping away from a nade you should retain most of your shield. Seems like it gets taken down every time, or you die.
Remember when medals you received during the game meant something? The days of checking your or someone elses medals on bungie.net to give an indication of their skill and how you/they play is long gone. Congratulations! You were about to die but a teammate saved you. Distraction medal! BxR medal? Ridiculous. Generic kill? Congrats. Guess people need to feel good about themselves all the time. Here's a participation ribbon for you. Medals are worthless now. I don't even look at the medals earned page anymore.
What's even more stupid is that they took out one of the most special medals, the Perfection, and made it one of those commendation things in Halo 4. I used to love getting those and then seeing the number go up in my medal chest in Halo 3.
The assist medal is the only useful one they've added. It's handy to know that one shot guy got cleaned up.
the video is private. Is that some kind of statement on the beta itself, or just that the video is now set to private for whatever reason?
so you don't like an ability that rarely even kills anyone.
RE: the medals -
You can just ignore the lower ones. Just look at the ones you care about. There was a SHIT LOAD of H3 medals - I think you might be misremembering.
57 Halo 3 medals
http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Halo_3_medals
171 Halo 4 medals
http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Halo_4_Medals
While some of those medals won't be back, 343 is adding plently more. You sure I'm misremembering?
Sorry, I thought we were talking about Halo 5 beta? No?
When you play the beta, you'll see for yourself. Someone on either the teambeyond forums, /r/halo, waypoint, or one of the various halo forums I visit, made a spreadsheet of all the medals he had encountered or seen in the pre-beta. I'll look for the post when I have time and not on my phone. Anyway, the spreadsheet had quite a few new medals in addition to the typical ones in Halo 4. That person calculated that you earn nearly an additional 0.3 medals per kill. Now, you can probably see the problem with that calclulation in that the full game hasn't been released so we have no idea on how many medals there truly are, but based on the amount of new medals encountered, I think it's fairly safe to assume there will be somewhere around 200 or more medals in Halo 5. We haven't even come across the new weapons yet, and we know how 343 and Bungie added medals for specific guns now (rocket kill medal anyone?). So while my previous post alluded to the amount of medals between H3 and H4, it was more to point that if Halo 3 had a SHIT LOAD of medals, what do you label the amount of H4 medals? And what will you say about H5 when there's even more medals?
I didn't really play Halo 4, so I can't really comment.
But when I posted this, I'd already played the preview beta. So I saw the medals. They popped up a lot, but were mostly for the same things like Kill or Headshot.
Spreadsheet for medals? This seems like people care a little too much about this.
On another note, I could've predicted Deep wouldn't like H5 beta so far, since it's two very competitive maps and mostly precision skillful weapons. Just wait until they bring in the btb maps and rockets/shotguns and other wacky weapons.
Unlike a few twitch jockeys around here, Halo has not been just about who is the best shootist for me. Never was. Halo has always been about playing wth large parties of like minded people. Having fun. Been like that for almost 10 years without a break. Now it seems as if 343 thinks courting the competitive crowd is the final solution. I hope it's mostly a charade but you never know.
Without my usual friendly contacts, the Halo 5 beta has little appeal to me. Even after the new maps are added, the newness will be overshadowed by solitary precision shooting. Blah.
I have no expectations for Halo 5 beyond campaign. After that, who knows.
Keep in mind the experience for any Halo game is night and day different when you're playing in matchmaking as opposed to custom games with friends. A lot of what you're describing (having fun with like-minded people, not being about winning) is just part of playing customs as opposed to playing MM against strangers, not necessarily things inherent to Halo 5.
The huge difference between friendly customs and MM also explains the difference in perception of the last two Halo games. In customs with friends, everyone is there to have fun, nothing is at stake, nobody is out to screw other people over. I always thought H4 and Reach would be fine as party games. But it's incredibly annoying playing against Timmies in MM who jet pack out of the map the whole game, camp with camo and snipers behind their base on Ragnarok for 10 minutes, and so on. I for one am so glad I won't have to be fighting against an entire team of jet packers anymore. On maps like Uncaged in Reach it was enough to make you want to throw your disc out the window.
They're not things inherent to Halo, period. Even truly terrible games can be a blast when you're in a private game with friends just screwing around and having fun. Enjoying a custom game with your friends doesn't mean the game is good, it means your friends are.
So a mis-misremembering?
Lost first game 10-50.
Never hated a new Halo. First time for everything.
Never got one kill, not even an accidental one.
Colours are terrible, sounds suck, etc ad infinitum.
You need to play a certain amount of games to get ranked. Once you're ranked, you'll be matched with similar people in your skill set. More than likely, you are encountering others who have yet to be ranked too, but just had the unfortunate luck to come across some better people. The ranking system is actually pretty accurate. Give it some time.
It's already taken more of my time than it deserves.
I'll play it for 3 weeks with my firiends but like I said, it's the first Halo I've ever disliked on first experience.
I know how MM works.
First impression: server timed out. Twice. Back to chores.
(Will do another hard reset later. There may have been general XBox Live issues)
Down loaded the beta this morning and fired it up only to get message - "you are almost there - available on 12/29" or something like that. Thought I was in the Twilight Zone there for a minute. Not a good first impression for me... and yes my system clock was and is ok. Checked a few minutes ago and can now get in, but now have to go do real life stuff. Might get on for a little while this evening before I go raiding.
Edit: Just saw in another thread that it would be available at 9AM Pacific which is noon for me. I tried to fire it up a little before noon so that explains it. I must say that I couldn't find the noob instructions anywhere.
Hard Restart. Picked slayer. Got a list of 8 players. "loading slayer"... By the time I pulled up 2old2play on my phone, navigated to this thread, and slowly single fingered this message I had been timed out three times. Currently on my fourth list of 8 -- oops, "server issue." Think I'll go play destiny now. Heck: one more time. I'll force restart first.okay, pulling up beta again. Main menu now.lets go. Arena. Slayer. Searching. 8 listed. Loading ... Cunning warrior actually has a service record. Good sign. Still waiting ... Server issue. Okay. Done here. May try later
Tried hours later. Still couldn't get in a Slayer match. Inv from Vaht. Twice. Failed. Twice. Force Quit. Twice. Hard restart. Open NAT. Still no game. I give up!!
Slight correction: did manage to team up with Vaht after his second invite. But no audio. I gave up after matchmaking attempt failed yet again.
The game plays pretty well. No annoying randomized weapons or stupid armor abilities that destroy the maps (*cough* jet pack).
I'm still a little in the dark with some of the game mechanics. Sometimes when I jump and try to shoot someone, it pulls my aim down to the floor. I'm not sure if it's the ground pound mechanic or what. You can't go into a custom game to test it out.
That said, the game has most of the exact same issues that are still plaguing the MCC nearly 2 months after launch. Voice chat doesn't work most of the time. The party seems to split up every time the leader backs out. And 343 sure loves their loud menu music that plays nonstop while you're sitting there saying, "Can you you hear me? Hello? Is this working? Testing 123." to your teammates ad nauseum.
343 just seems completely incompetent with basic functionality. At least this game splits 8 players into 4v4 instead of 6v2. Maybe between now and November they can hire someone who knows how to get voice chat to work.
Had fun actually playing the game but lobby (network?) issues remain. I knew that others on my friends list were playing but they were either not on the roster or were on then not on. Decided to not try to party up but just go it alone on this first try.
Same here with the roster.
I used to think in the back of my mind that maybe some of MCC's issues were due to the outsourcing to different studios and also the different engines having to work together, some of them on different chip architecture than the original games were written for (the original Xbox and the One both use x86 CISC processors while the 360 had a PowerPC RISC processor), but the fact that all the exact same lobby and party issues are present in the Halo 5 beta shows that the common denominator is 343.
Back on topic, I think most of the new gameplay mechanics (ground pound, sprint, clamber, etc.) are pointless but not game-breaking like some of the previous armor abilities.
Sprint: All it does is make the maps have to be bigger. The Midship remake is like 3x bigger in order to play the same way as it did without sprint. What's the point?
Clamber: Same thing. Why not just make the map geometry work with regular jumps instead of adding a gimmick?
Ground pound: One of the 343 devs said in a tweet that ground pound was only added for the "ooh-ahh" factor for people watching tournaments. I'm not opposed to it per se, but the more junk like this that gets added, the more there is to break. I think the ground pound targeting mechanic is what's causing my reticle to pull down to the floor when I jump in the air while trying to shoot someone. I get killed because the game is trying to read my mind and do something I'm not wanting to do.
Tried to get on again this morning hoping less traffic would mean better success. Yes and no. Still a long series of: Setting up Slayer; Loading Slayer (usually followed by siezure inducing screen flicker -- not a good sign); Unable to Join; Your request has timed out; OK; click Slayer; Server Issue; OK; Setting up Slayer; Repeat 3 times. Force quit. Repeat 3 times. Force quit. Hard Restart. Repeat 7 times.
On the 8th try: SUCCESS!
Played a Control Weapons match on Midship. Nice graphics. A bit shiny. Competition was pretty brutal for my skill level, but my guess is that on game one they just throw you in and use the resulting data for future matchmaking.
After first game, stayed on and played two more: Midship slayer and another Control Weapons match in The Pit (?). Chat between games appeared to work okay. In-game chat was spotty -- other players confirmed. AI chatter only made human chat issues more annoying. My attempt at a fourth match ended due to "server issues." Tonight's Over 50 should be interesting ...
Tried this out late last night, first time the lobby filled up with 8 people and then sat in 'loading game' or whatever for about 3 minutes.
Restarted xb1 and tried again, got into a match fairly quickly and went 6 and 10 in a slayer match. Not bad for a first time. Have to agree with prior comments about appearance and movement, and overall first impression is that I'm not liking this Halo too much. I will give it a chance during the beta and will probably end up buying it, but it's not a lock for me at this point.