(3/5)



Then there's the issue of the map aesthetics and how poor visual design hurts gameplay. Every light source in Halo 5 has bloom, bloom that blinds and distracts the eyes. The beta also features maps that are too dark and too high contrast where blue walls camouflage blue team's Spartans. Do 343 Industries's map creators really need a Beta to understand that coloring walls using similar hues to playable characters can frustrate the players who must shoot those characters against that backdrop?



To further compound things, the latest release of multiplayer maps for the beta are remixes of existing maps in the beta. Are remixed maps supposed to be a feature in Halo 5's multiplayer? Players can already create variations of a map themselves through forge, but they can't create new art assets that go into new maps. These remixed maps seem like an unabashed way for 343 industries to pad the map count for Halo 5. How can 343 Industries showcase the strength of the Halo 5 by showing us maps where the bare minimum of effort was applied to their creation?



Oh, but think of the prospect of playing identical maps with swapped textures, changed lighting, and this box sitting here instead of sitting over there. How exciting! To be honest, I am surprised that 343 Industries would even release map remixes--it's just so slovenly lazy to do so. And it's not because a beta deserves inifinite maps (I do not expect all of Halo 5 to be finished or showcased in a beta), but I'm surprised that they released these alternate maps to tell the playerbase, "Hey, you'll be getting these nifty things on release. Look forward to it: This is the quality of content you can expect from us and our game."



Killcams



Why were killcams coded into Halo? 343 Industries could not mishandle their time and resources worse than by developing this feature for Halo 5. Killcams were created as an evolution of gameplay for a completely different game series; they do not belong in Halo.



Killcams are shamelessly ripped from Call of Duty, and it is there where killcams belong. With CoD's almost infinite weapon assortments, instant kill-times, and map designs full of crevices, windows, and camoflauge locations, Call of Duty needed killcams. They were created to relieve stress from frustrated players and to punish campers, and they work marvelously to both ends--they're perfect for CoD and its gameplay.



In Halo, dying is rarely a mystery. Due to the power of your shields, you often die fighting the guy running right at you as you both unload your weapons at each other. There is no need to view his perspective; you saw plainly how he killed you. If you get killed from a rocket blast shot offscreen, the explosion and scorched earth beneath your feet reveal your fate. A quick melee to the back of the head, though surprising, is also easily discernible as you hear the loud "thwack!" and watch your body slump forward. Halo 5's killcams do not reveal some secret to your death, or set your defeated mind at ease. They simply waste your time by removing you from the action.



Everyone who is dying in a lost gunfight in Halo has tried one last, desparate manuever: He has naded the ground at his feet, or the wall in front of him, or he's even tried to stick the bast@rd who is gunning him down. Then, after his death, what does that player most want to see? Answer: Whether the guy that killed him got killed, too. This is the number one post-death desire for anyone who has played Halo and fell in a close gunfight. We instinctively pivot the deathcam around our corpse to see how the battle unfolds after our passing. Anyone who has played Halo would realize this overpowering desire to stay in the fight, to be ready to jump back in as the respawn timer bips down.



A question: Has 343 Industries played the older Halos? Why, then, would they think Halo players needed killcams? A game mechanic like killcam should be added to fill a need; Halo had no such need. Not only are the killcams poorly done (They playback too soon before you died to reveal anything but your last second of life, if they show your death at all), but even if they displayed your death at a good time, the transition between a death and the killcam is jarring, even disconcerting. The black screen, the sad music, the uninformative footage--most players I see on Twitch just mash X to skip the thing and return to the deathcam in the present.



I can't stress this enough: Killcams are anachronisms in Halo. More than that, they're plain bad design for this game. Why does 343 Industries want to disconnect the player from his play every time he dies? They've already tried killcams with Halo 4, and it failed (343 Industries ended up removing them), yet here 343 Industries tries again to incorporate the same detestabe thing in Halo 5. This bullheadedness in their approach to Halo suggests the worst, that Halo 4 was not a fluke of experimental game design but rather a template 343 Industries wishes to use and improve upon for Halo 5. How else could they think to bring back a mechanic universally rejected by its own community of players?



Halo's pivoting deathcam evolved between Halo games as a mechanic to keep the player's mind in the action, even past his death. A dead player still maintains control of his camera (And, in turn, his Spartan) so that his fingers are ready for his revival to return and finish the fight. This subtlety to the deathcam is lost on 343 Industries. They'd rather strip you of control and force you to be a passive observer every time that you die.



On the subject of passive gameplay, contextual actions are not Halo. Try this: Zoom in with the sniper on an opponent running away from you. Jump up and stabilize your thrusters to nail the perfect shot on his fleeing behind. Whoops! Stabilize is also the button for zooming in--now you're de-scoped because you tried to stabilize yourself mid-air. You pressed the right button combinations, it should have worked. Or did you mean to crouch as you jumped to lower your profile in the air while you were shot at? Pressing that button combination sent you into a ground pound--too bad. 343 Industries created too many actions and mapped them to too few buttons, and sometimes their mistake will cost you the kill.



Now imagine you've flanked the enemy. While your bros are shooting them at the front, you've crouchwalked behind them and prepare yourself to strike. Heres your chance to jump out and insta-kill the red guy in front of you with a whack to the back of his head with your rocket launcher, then jump again and triple kill the rest of his team with one rocket. So you jump up, but you hold melee for a half-second too long when you meant to tap it, and now all his teammates are shooting you as you perform an assassination animation you never intended to trigger. Now they have your rockets, and you watch a pointless killcam as you feel frustrated because the game wrenched control from you to show you doing something cool instead of you doing it yourself.



Give me back control of my character, 343 Industries. I preferred having it in Halo. Even if assassinations look cool (They do), they're still cutscenes in disguise: The game is taking me out from first-person where I'm killing the guy to third-person where I'm shown a Spartan kill the guy. Heck, I even prefer tea-bagging to assassinations because at least there I controlled the speed and tempo at which my scr0tum bounced against the shoulders of the man I killed.