There are no QTEs at all; they're pretty much all repetitive tank-and-spanks. The mid-boss-fight checkpoints are pretty generous too. I'd say they're better but still not good.
Screw QTES!!! This is after playing Tomb Raider. Ugh. (Please, God, no QTEs in the next Tomb Raider.) I played some more multiplayer last night. I finally got a Wraith in Warzone. The map it was on was terrible for the vehicle. Wraiths are designed for open terrain, not the terrain in Dispatch.
I like Monitor Exuberant Witness [yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq7qHXK58lo[/yt] [yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USlygvsGJMc[/yt] [yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4VfrLzhGpo[/yt]
For myself, I count Exuberant Witness 031 as one of the highlights of the campaign. She really shines when she gets back at Cortana near the end of the game. (This moment is not in the videos seen above.) I hope to see more of this character in Halo 6.
Completed it on Heroic with a friend last night and my feelings are mixed. The 1st half of the story feels disjointed and half explained but it picks up in the 2nd half and the ending is superb (You Tube the legendary ending too). The gameplay feels a little un Halo at times forcing you into a more slow paced at distance gunplay rather than the more intense nature of the past games. Part of this is down to the OTT of Promethean weaponry which feels like nothing short of auto aim heaven for the AI. Halo 5 is challenging and that's good but at the expense of some of the mindless fun, which takes away from the game IMO. I will say the quick boost is an awesome feature though that saved my life ALOT Will just edit this for Multiplayer that I have just tried...IT SUCKS I know the is a reason I avoid multiplayer in general especially Halo, I shoot people and nothing they just somehow blat me in 1/2 shots. I emptied a clip into someone and he looked at me like I was firing blanks was my cue to turn off the XB1 and stick to SP, Co-Op.
I am plenty much done with Halo 5. I am completing Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition. I am looking forward to Fallout 4 and Rise of the Tomb Raider. And, I have a queue of games at Gamefly that I can try later. Jax, I can relate to your experience in multiplayer. I shot several people today with negligible results. I have read there is an issue with the deadzone, and with aiming, in this game, and that 343 Industries deliberately designed it this way before the game released. This issue ties into to aiming. There are forums where people are discussing the aiming in this game. My gripe with multiplayer is that the events are becoming shorter in duration as one team dominates the events. It is not helpful for me as a player, who wishes to improve their skills, to be in a situation where I am killed less than a minute into the event, and where, in one Breakout, a team completely decimated our team in five minutes. There were five rounds, each lasting one minute. At this point in time, I do not see much of a difference between Arena and Warzone.
I played the entire campaign over this long weekend and just beat it. It's a fun game and it handled well and the graphics looked great. I only played on easy to breeze through the story, and look forward to playing on normal with my friend with co-op. I really like the new mechanic of climbing up ledges, makes the game a little more three dimensional. I liked that there were mini boss fights throughout the game. The Story: I had some real problems with the story. First of all, Master Chief is only in a quarter of the game?! I don't care about Locke! I care about the Master Chief and Cortana. Which brings me to my second point: Cortana is the villain?! Foul! Her relationship with M.C. is one of my favorite things in video gaming. I really, really don't like her turning evil and taking over the galaxy. Boo! I also don't like the Master Chief being hunted down by his own people. This guy single handedly saved the galaxy. And I loved the hero worship going on for him in 2 and 3. I don't like seeing everyone turn on him so easily. I did love John's single minded faith in Cortana though. They've got the best romance in video games And what the hell happened to the Diadect? I thought he was the villain of the new trilogy. We open with some cult that follows him, but he never appears! I know he "died" in 4 but come on so did Cortana On another note. I know there's a trilogy of novels about the Forerunners. Are they totally in continuity with these new games? Does the Diadect appear in it? Looking back on it, Halo 2 was really the perfect shooter for me. With a fascinating story that expounded on the first one in so many wonderful ways. And playing the Arbiter was fun. I'll never forget the first time the Scarab appears and walks right over your head.
I'm actually gonna start reading those tonight. The opening page was a quote by or about the Diadect.
I thought it was pretty good, definitely better than 4 and better than 3 in my opinion. I didn't care for that one much, it had some cool added gameplay aspects but I found the story very boring. I've been playing the Master Chief Collection too, is it just me or is HCE a lot harder than it was on XBOX? I used to play the old game on Legendary and on MCC I've been banging my head against the wall on Normal. I beat it, but with MANY deaths and a few rage quits. It wasn't as bad for 2-4. And so many of the deaths were unavoidable, like killing a grunt with a fuel rod cannon or an exploding Flood Carrier sets off a chain of grenades that kills me from 20 yards away. And I don't remember there being so many Flood running around with rocket launchers, I'll come across 2-3 at a time. I think I had an easier time LASO-ing Reach. I keep checking to make sure I don't have a bunch of active skulls or something, but it's just Regular mode no skulls.
It's not just you who thinks it's harder, I've seen others say the same thing. I don't think there's been any confirmation that they actually altered the gameplay, though.
LOL LOL, maybe so. I considered that but I'm still pretty good at Halo 2-5. Or at least better than I am at Halo: CE. I could still LASO Reach as recently as a year ago, and I breezed through 2-5 on Normal. Most of the difficulty I encountered with CE wasn't due to not being quick enough with the reflexes, but rather chain explosions or coming around a corner to be fired at by 2-3 Flood sporting rocket launchers. Maybe the games have just gotten easier over the years and I forgot how hard the original was.
Halo 5 was underwhelming as finding out Full House was making a comeback on Netflix. With this new trilogy I’m just not sure why it was even made, I think at this point it’s clear that Microsoft is just trying to keep the cash cow going. I mean Halo 4 wasn’t awful by any means and neither is Halo 5 objectively speaking but this is a low point for the franchise and I’m not entirely sure what to pin this on, maybe the formula is just stale and it’s tricky to innovate once you’ve played through every Halo game such as I have. But one thing that is clear is the story has gone bonkers and is just stupid. *Major Spoilers ahead* To me Halo was so magical and interesting because we didn’t understand it all, the Forerunners, who they were and what they did were a neat mystery to uncover… But at this point with the Forerunners its creativity overload and the idea that humanity was a space faring people before and then were put down by the forerunners etc. See I’ve noticed this when franchises reach a certain size or length they send the story tail spinning into an overcomplicated and contrived mess. Halo 5 makes this even worse with the idea that Cortana has gone rogue and all of a sudden wants to take over the galaxy with an army of buried Mega Ship Monsters called the “Gaurdians”. Ok 343, layoff the Meth, on top of that it was bad enough your entire marketing campaign was a lie, I mean Halo has always marketed in a way that wasn’t entirely accurate to the way the game was going to play out, I mean we never got to play a mission that looked anything like the diorama battle for the Halo 3 marketing commercials and that to me was fine, I didn’t consider that misleading or anything. However on this point the marketing for Halo 5 was very specific that we would see a darker side to Master Chief and that there would be a serious confrontation between him and Spartan Locke. That was pretty sleazy because if you’ve finished the game… You know for a fact that nothing even close to that occurred. Anyway… There’s nothing wrong with this game objectively, sure the story is dumb, but the gameplay is exactly what you’d expect from a Halo game and the multiplayer is still ok I guess, oh they added Warzone, a mode where… you fight AI things… and human players… whatever… Ok. Just ok I guess. *This is my metacritic review.
I agree, the Forerunners were better as a mystery, so was the Chief but they've explored him a little too much for my liking as well. I thought that 5 was a little better than 4 as the focus of the plot seemed on what was going on then and less on the convoluted history of the Forerunners. While Forerunner technology and enemies were definitely front and center it wasn't about some centuries old feud between the Didact and the Librarian, or the Didact and humanity. It was about Cortana going nuts and claiming the Forerunner technology for herself. To me the Halo story started going downhill in 3. At least as far as the Master Chief's story goes, Reach was great. I'm just kind of tired of Cortana. In the first two games she was your sidekick/guide, starting with 3 she started to become more of the focus and an irritating liability. Always having to rescue her, trying to save her from rampancy and now finally she's the bad guy. She's been a nuisance for 3 games now. Not just that but it started to become almost a love story between her and the Chief. I prefer the old Chief: silent, detached and deadly. Not chasing after an AI like some lovesick teenager. I guess they thought they were giving all the gamers who got nerd-chubs over Cortana exactly what they wanted. I thought the gameplay got pretty repetitive near the end, once everybody is on the Forerunner planet. Especially the last level you play as Chief. Cortana tells you that you're almost there, the Warden shows up and Cortana yells "NO!", then you fight a bunch of Forerunner, Cortana tells you you're almost there again, Warden shows up again and Cortana yells "NO!" again, rinse and repeat. I felt like I was on a wild goose chase. I find the Forerunner really boring as enemies, and almost as irritating as the Flood. I didn't hate the ending of the game story-wise (since we're already going down this road), but like 4 I didn't think the last level of gameplay was very cinematic. 1 had the blowing of the Pillar and the Warthog escape, 2 had the epic Great Journey level where you escort Johnson's Scarab and fighting Tartarus, 3 had another Warthog escape that wasn't as epic as the Pillar but still pretty cool. 4 and 5 just have you fighting wave after wave of enemies like you did in most of the game until most of the action takes place in a cutscene. I still enjoyed it though, and I'm interested in how the story plays out. I hope we just get to kill Cortana but I bet we're going to get some lovey-dovey romantic ending with her and the Chief. The first half to 2/3 of the game are really replayable, but the later levels aren't in my opinion.
Microsoft will be releasing a PC version of Halo 5's Forge later this year, with some PC specific features: Xbox Wire This is good. I always felt Forge controls were awkward on a controller.
I still haven't made it through the campaign. I can't even point to any specific flaw with the game (gameplay feels perfectly fine). I just don't care, which is probably the most chilling thing I could feel about a Halo game.