The mode came out yesterday and they made the game free for about a week, so I figured I'd try it out. I rented and beat the game when it first came out and did a little bit of multiplayer too back then. I liked Firefight in Reach - I don't like it here. I would've preferred it staying closer to Gear of War's horde mode, which is the best type of similar mode in any shooter. Now there are objectives each round, which is something like kill a certain amount of a certain enemy, kill all 3 bosses (who are so strong it feels like a boss in a MMO or MOBA, not Halo) - each round is always 5 minutes or you fail.

Simply killing all the enemies each round and the entire team can't be dead at the same time would've been fine. Now it feels like the game is rushing us to do their silly objectives. Having objectives is fine - I liked Mass Effect 3's MP a lot, but that also had way better objectives, which somewhat changed up the gameplay. Also, the REQ system still sucks, it feels like a scam to get a few percent of the hardcore fanbase to give them real money. I wanted to like it, but I'm not feeling it all so far. So I have to get cards just to use a carbine, lol okay. Maybe it's because I haven't played the game in a while, but seems like it's way easier to die in this than in the campaign, even against regular enemies. Luckily crappy Comcast upped my data cap, or else I'd feel silly for downloading this 80gb game.

How is everyone else liking or not liking it?

You're overlooking the fact that Gears' and ME3's gameplay isn't the same type of sandbox gameplay that Halo's is. Read: vehicles, and lots of them, in open battle spaces. I didn't play the beta for Warzone Firefight, but I think one of the big complaints was that a) the objectives weren't varied enough/there were too many "Kill X amount of enemies" (which are still present), and b) that the mode was far too easy with most of the team in vehicles (still a little bit of a problem at times).

I posted almost this exact same sentiment in the other thread on the H5 forum, but the fact that you find the REQ system so bothersome is simply because you haven't played enough. I can understand how starting out it may seem like you have limited access to certain weapons and vehicles because of the "limited" nature of the power weapon and vehicles cards, but after a little bit of time you build up such an over-abundance of those cards that using any of them is a non-issue. Trust me, you build up so many weapon cards which you'll never use that you end up selling most of them for RP (their in-game currency). The armor and other customization items (permanent unlocks) are the real "meat" of the REQ system, and probably why some players would shell out real money for these packs. Even with super-rare power weapons, at the rate you earn power weapon and vehicle cards, every time I'm in a situation to use one I'll earn 2 more within a few matches.

And some enemies are definitely stronger than their legendary campaign counterparts. The artificial ways they found to boost the difficulty, after the beta complaints of the mode being too easy, are one of the main issues I have with the mode.

I don't understand the problem with REQ, when I started in November I had a solid base of cards within a couple hours. Early on, you're gaining levels and hitting challenges at a quick pace. I've put 23 hours into Warzone now and I have like 70 Ghosts, 20 tanks, 40 rocket launchers without spending a penny.

And at this point, they're so liberal with giving you stuff. Each of the Firefight games I played last night gave me between 3 and 7 packs, and within 3 games I'd have enough for a gold pack. They're encouraging you to use them, sure, but I've never felt handicapped because I didn't buy a Best Value package.

Anyway, I really like what they did here. ODST Firefight had limited variety for limited players, now we're at 8 players and they're switching it up in smart ways. Instead of just throwing more dudes at you, they're keeping it from being a simple game of survival.

Man, I dunno what happened between the beta and now; but the difficulty in Firefight is out of control.

Increased respawn timers after every round (up to 30 seconds(!) in the final round), harsh objective timers, unpredictable enemy spawns, and an endless firehose of enemies that aside of Grunts and Crawlers, are all unimaginably bullet-spongey.

I've played about 15 matches between last night and tonight and only won three. Once or twice it would come done to the wire in the final round and we'd lose out to the clock -- but by and large, I've been on teams that lost because the game spawns in enemies that we just don't have the resources to deal with. Like a pair of Warden Eternals in round 3. Or the match I just finished where there was 20 enemy Ghosts clogging up the map in round 2 while we're all stuck on REQ 2 or 3. What were we honestly supposed to do against that? Bury them under an avalanche on Mongooses and Scout Warthogs?

I can understand wanting to make the mode challenging, but the way things are set up now, just feels downright mean. Especially the increased respawn timer after every round. Waiting 20+ seconds to respawn, to then have to run across half the map to get back into the action only to have the misfortune of getting caught in a clutch of Promethean Soldiers and Crawlers that just *appear* all around you; which you can't do anything against, you're dead in 3 seconds and sitting in the penalty box again. It feels vindictive. Doubly so when paired up against the super stringent objective timers.

There's potential for a lot of fun to be had here, but not in its current form.

Survival would be an improvement since their objectives suck and 5 minutes is too short. Sounds as if you like REQ because you have a million packs - it's just a pointless and annoying system. Someone shouldn't be able to order a sniper rifle or tank, but the other person can't just because they've played the game less.

Vehicles really has nothing to do with the lame objectives and a 5 minute timer. Hell, if someone is looking for vehicles in a horde mode then go play Battlefield's Onslaught mode - that's way better than this. This game isn't fun enough to play a lot to get a million REQ packs - partly because I spent 100s of hours in Halo when I was younger and there are too many other games nowadays that are better - the REQ system hurts the quality of game. Like I said before, it largely comes across as a scam (or a way to generate revenue at the cost of gameplay) IMO.

Right now, it feels the mode has balancing issues, primarily. I never played Firefight in the beta, but with a PUG group this feels too difficult. I shouldn't empty an entire clip of BR into a soldier and have them survive; I understand you must use REQs strategically based on enemy spawns, but you almost certainly need 2-3 high-powered vehicles on the 5th wave bosses to succeed. Therefore, at least 2-3 people need to save up and burn a 6-9 point REQ at the very end. Again, without communicating, very few PUG groups are going to pull this off. Of the 10 games I've played, we have only finished all 5 waves twice. If this is working as intended, then so be it. But I've been arbitrarily one-shotted by enough enemies at this point that I think I'm losing interest.

Also, the way they spawn enemies in mid-wave by simply drop shipping them (or randomly teleporting them) right on top of you just feels...cheap? There's no strategy or planning that could combat it, unless you memorize spawn points (this is sounding a bit MOBA-ish...). If 10 Promethean dogs suddenly warp on top of you, there's nothing that can be done. You cannot out-shoot them. Skill will not save you. I could definitely use a few more creative objectives, but that doesn't stand out as the worst part about the mode to me so far.

@assumedkilla: My point is I had a ridiculous cushion after a dozen hours of play. But I was perfectly viable after 2 hours of play and basically never ran low on stuff after that.

I'm really enjoying the mode but they still need to make changes. Especially around the spawn timers and difficulty.

Never understood the complaints about the req system. I've barely played halo 5 since December and I still have so many vehicles and power weapons and after every firefight you get like 4 packs.

I got your point, but it doesn't have anything to do with me thinking the REQ system is useless and just a money/business ploy. When I first heard about Warzone I got excited since I thought Halo was moving toward a more bigger scale combat or sandbox like Battlefield or Titanfall, but it's really nothing like that. It's just a more limited and bootleg feeling version of big team battle.

The more powerful vehicles should be placed on the map as waves get harder, normal weapons like carbines, shotguns, and DMRs should be on the map, explosive/powerful weapons should be on the map but in dangerous locations that players have to fight to get - since Halo used to be about weapon placement and getting there, not just spawning with coolest gun like COD. Spartans should feel badass like in the campaign. I've had so many random deaths from just elites and other foot soldiers - the balance is clearly off. Some of these things can be fixed like the balance, others won't like REQ, since they're making money from it. If Halo wants to compete with COD, BF, Overwatch, etc when it comes to players sticking around month & months after the game comes out then it needs to evolve some more. According to Xbox's own list Battlefield 4 is more played than Halo 5, even though BF4 is about 2 years older lol. Halo 4 nor Halo 5 resonated the way they should/could have, neither will Halo 6 unless they make the right moves. Really, it's pretty tacky that firefight is coming out 9 months after the game released and on top of that it still needs some tweaking/patching.

I don't know if I'm just completing challenges that I previously had unfinished (even having played a large amount of warzone before this patch), or if they upped the rate at which you earn req points, but there are req packs flying all over the place and often.
After a half dozen matches or so, I already had a repertoire of req options built up (after prior to the patch I had sold through everything related to warzone, as I felt I got my fill of its "I had a better req card than that guy, so I killed him" gameplay).

I don't see myself coming back to this mode time and time again just due to how repetitive it is (5 waves of random difficulty leading towards a kind of bad "boss" encounter in the 5th wave), but it's fine as a supplemental mode.

I will say I wish they didn't call it Warzone Firefight, because this most certainly does not play like previous games' Firefight modes. Whether that's good or bad is personal opinion obviously (myself, I would've preferred a Firefight mode like in previous games).

(Didn't intend to reply as a wall of text, but mistakes happen.)

@assumedkilla: Big Team Battle is still in the game, and active.

I've disliked the req system since really getting into the game back at launch, which killed any fun I could have with Warzone. Hearing Firefight relies so heavily on the req system is really dissapointing and means I probably wont give it a shot.

To date, the most fun I've had with Halo 5 mp is Breakout. I would love 4v4 Slayer but I really, really don't like where they went with sightlines in the map design (ie. lots of them, all the time, from everywhere)

Halo 5 is a bummer.

Here's what I want from a Firefight experience:

I want to spawn in to an arena. I want there to be guns, maybe a vehicle, and a power up scattered around that arena. Start pushing bad guys through something in the arena that makes sense. If we're outdoors, have them come out of a cave in the distance. If we're in a bigass space station, doors work. Dropships in addition to these are fine. Don't fucking teleport shit in. I'll shoot all those bad dudes, and then the next wave starts, and it happens again, but with more dudes, or more difficult dudes. The fifth wave should be something akin to a boss fight. If I get past the fifth wave, make me start doing it from then on with an additional challenge. Give the enemies more grenades. Make my ammo count halved. Get creative. Every five waves I get through, add a new challenge. When I die, the game ends. I can play it with friends. When they die, they are out for the rest of the wave. If someone lives to the end of the wave, everyone comes back at the start of the next one.

This shouldn't be hard to figure out.

Yep, I know.

I don't know. There are a lot of things I really, really like about Warzone Firefight - the short five-round system is a smart way to make this kind of mode actually work in matchmaking with randoms, it seems like there's definitely enough variation among the objectives you can get in each round to make it fun to replay, and they actually managed to design the waves so there's room for every member of an eight(!)-person squad to contribute. I'm mostly okay with the way REQs work in this mode, although that's probably partially because I never played Warzone in the first place so I already have way too many tanks and Banshees and rocket launchers. Still, I'm definitely earning more than I'm using.

But man, something about the difficulty tuning just doesn't feel fun. I get that this kind of mode needs to be challenging or it'll get really rote and I honestly don't mind that 343i seems to have aimed for a ~50% completion ratio, but I think a lot of the ways they amped up the difficulty are just bad. One-hit kills and mobs of enemies spawning right on you are annoying, but I'd probably be fine with them if they didn't lead to a 30-second respawn time in later rounds (and a long run back to where the action is happening). The bosses are super-inconsistent - I like most of the Covenant/vehicle ones (that Grunt mech is rad as heck) but a lot of the later Prometheans are insane with how bullet-spongey they are, especially when they're surrounded by buffed-up Knights. I like a good challenging boss, but some of those dudes take some serious time to kill and it's really easy to look at the round timer, see two or three barely-moving health bars and just mentally give up. I'm also a little worried that the dominant strategy for those waves is just eight dudes in tanks parked on the other side of the map, because that's fun exactly once.

Overall, I guess I'm just hopeful that 343i takes the right feedback from this launch? I can definitely imagine a version of Warzone Firefight with only a few tuning adjustments that I'd love, but right now I'm not sure how much more of it I want to play.

I agree with you and what Tonic7 said. Enemies spawning is a big issue. They randomly spawned/teleported two hunters, two elites, and a few grunts about 8 feet away from me in between rounds, which felt cheap as hell since I had to wait about 30 seconds to spawn when they instantly killed me. Doing a horde mode should be simple to understand - it almost feels like they outsourced this mode to another team. I'd be okay with no respawns until the rounds end if there were no cheap deaths, but between enemies spawning, normal enemies being way too powerful, and the bosses being so godly you have to fight them in a high-level vehicle (on foot isn't really an option) - I'm not sure what they were thinking.

A lot of the problems I have with Warzone Firefight make me honestly wonder how much time 343 spent playtesting the mode before launching it. Some of the shortcomings are headscratching, and some of the challenges feel literally impossible barring a perfect storm of circumstances. There have been multiple rounds in which our team has said, "We could have done nothing differently, we could not have played better -- and yet we still lost."

The potential is there. But it needs a handful of major tweaks to get right.

I checked back in to see what Firefight was like and it didn't really do anything for me either. I was just bored. Give me more vehicles instead of waiting for later rounds based around the REQ system.

I like that games are shorter here than they were in previous firefight modes, I think the maps look great, and I do like the challenge variation, but this mode isn't doing it for me. It seems like the REQ system is pretty controversial. Personally, I think the Firefight mode being couched in that system is what hurts it most. I've logged over 70 hours in the multiplayer, but I still don't think it adds up to the cards I need for Firefight. At some point it's not just a challenge, enemies have a health bar of a certain size, you only have a limited time to dispatch them, and basic weapons can only do so much damage. Vehicles and high power weapons become essential and these are treated as "Rare" drops, which are hard to obtain outside of Gold card packs. When you see hardcore players talking about the game they seem to be taking it as a given that a Round 5 requires deploying 2 tanks minimum. Unless you're paying real money or dumping a hell of a lot of free time into the game it feels hard to keep up with what would be required for Firefight. Then you have the long respawn timer, the way enemies can spawn on top of you, all the enemies that can one-hit you, the way the mode will spawn vehicles into areas where you can be one-hit, and it just feels like such a headache.

I think the level design in Halo 5 is pretty lacking. All these maps are just an open area with some hills and a couple of bases - the terrain is painted green, brown, or white. I know it's open for vehicles, but it still doesn't need to feel so bland. I remember city maps, alien ships, and so on in Halos 2 & 3. Also, the current level design largely rules out close range combat. Between the level design and all enemies being so powerful the mode boils down to: use BRs, DMRs, or the carbine until the last round or two, then you'll need a scorpion, wraith, or wasp (if the final rounds are kill bosses). I played the Halo Wars 2 beta - it would be nice if wolverines were real vehicles in this, because sometimes they want you to fight 6 or 8 banshees at once and some of them are bosses, which really isn't fun.

Playing this actually made my friends and I go back to Gears 2 (we didn't all have 3), so we can play a good horde mode. I wish ME3 was backwards compatible since my 360 doesn't work anymore. I might check out Titanfall's mode again. If anyone knows any other games with similar modes that are good let me know.

@assumedkilla said:

Assuming we're talking about the Firefight maps, I'm not a fan of the openness. It sucks to be able to die in 1-3 hits from many enemies and then to be spawned a good 15 seconds away from your team, especially when you can be waiting up to 30 seconds to spawn in. And you're right, the mode reduces the strategic options you can use against enemies. I'd argue that even in the third round precision weapons are rarely enough, you need significant vehicle and power weapon force on your team to take out the enemies. When it gets down to the last couple of rounds I even see throwing a bunch of high power vehicles at enemies fail. I just came out of a match where two Scorpions, a Wasp, a Mantis, and some power weapons couldn't defeat the final bosses. One thing the community has already identified as pretty crappy is the game spawning legendary and mythic bosses indoors. The game will put Wardens at the back of bases, which is a problem when you need to hit them from behind to damage them, and currently the agreed way to deal with a Mantis spawning in the top floor of one of the bases is to jam a Banshee inside the building and roll it back and forth across the floor, shooting the Mantis. It's nuts.

Yeah, I don't think it helps that these maps were all made for 24 players + AI for the traditional Warzone mode (except Urban, which is from Warzone Assault).

Ghosts are also pretty effective against Mantises, if you circle-strafe around them they can't keep track of you very well. More difficult with the inside boss but still semi-effective. And I didn't know the Banshees inside the base was considered an actual strategy, I've done it a few times myself. It just kind of breaks the AI.

@nasher27 said:

I'd at least give this a try, but I'm still a little sceptical. The stairs don't seem like they're be wide enough to allow a Ghost up there and there's only so fast Ghosts can change direction. There's also the damage issue. One of the reasons people choose the Banshee for this is that it has its plasma bomb and you need to be able to take out that Mantis fast when there are three others and the round has a pretty strict time limit. The Ghost doesn't have a lot of firepower for that.

It'd be a nice compromise I think, if killing bosses put some time back on the clock.

Also hey, about maps... the beach map, has anybody ever succeeded when you get the 3rd Round Two-Warden (and a bajillion Knights) in the water? ALWAYS get stone-walled when the game rolls that spawn...