Played about 10 games so far. Initial thoughts:
1. I've noticed a lot of people complain about this one, and I agree, that it is WAY too easy to complete/win the game (and I was playing solo with scrub teammates the whole time, I might add). The rounds need to be more difficult. When I think of playing firefight mode, I think of it as a near suicide mission. That is not what this is. I want a firefight where it is near impossible to win. There needs to be either A) more rounds than 5, which surpass the difficulty of that last round each time. Maybe 10 rounds total. Or B) make the objectives harder to reach (ie. more enemies). Or C) just completely remove the objectives and make it to where players have to eliminate every single enemy in each round to move on. But you would need to implement some sort of death penalty for that style of play. Which I think a penalty for death is needed in this game type regardless. Right now players can die as much as they want, but hey if you complete the objective you still win the round, good job guys! There should be more than one way to lose the game other than just failing to complete an objective. Like adding a limited amount of spartan respawns per round, as well as per game. Would make it way more difficult to win and force players to play more strategically.
2. This kind of goes hand and hand with my first point, but there need to be more enemies. There are not enough enemies out on the battlefield to decimate for the 8 players out there. At the beginning of each firefight game when they are flying you into the match on Pelicans the spartan voice says "fight off increasing waves of difficulty" (or something to that measure), however... There were many times where I found my self having to sprint around the whole map trying to find enemies to kill well before the objective was reached. The red blips above the enemies heads towards the end definitely helps. But again, when I think of firefight, I want absolute carnage, not killing the first two drop-ships worth of enemies and then sprinting around the whole map to find other enemies to kill for the second half of the objective. That is definitely not fighting off "increasing waves of difficulty" at all when you have to go find enemies to kill. Maybe other people had a different experience than I did here, but that's what I found.
3. I don't get the placings at the end of each firefight game. There were many times where I had the most kills, assists, boss takedowns as well as the "highest score" out of all my teammates, yet I would not be in 1st place at the end of the game, but rather 2nd or 3rd. Not quite sure how you guys decide who gets 1st, 2nd, 3rd...etc because this doesn't make sense to me. It happened multiple times, so I don't think it's a glitch from what I can tell.
4. Maybe you guys have plans to add this when you release the actual Warzone Firefight in the future, but I think there should be an official firefight stats page under warzone stats. Where you can see stats such as your firefight KD, how many kills you have for each kind of enemy (jackals, grunts, elites, soldiers, crawlers, watchers, knights, bosses...etc), most used weapon, most used power weapon...etc
5. I really really really hope this goes without saying, cause I know this is just a beta, but... there obviously needs to be more maps than just Escape from ARC. It would be really cool if you guys created a couple of maps made specifically for firefight. Or had a community forge competition for some new firefight maps.
6. I think it would be awesome if you guys added an offline version of firefight as well, like in Reach. Sometimes it's nice to just lone wolf it.
7. I gotta say I really love the "defend the garage" objective. There need to be more "defend ____ location" objectives. Why is this my favorite? Because it's the only objective where I actually feel like I'm holding off wave after wave of attackers like a real firefight. All the other objectives I had to go find enemies to kill. This objective is, simply put, pure carnage. Which is how I envisioned firefight to start with.
All in all, I feel very positive about this game type. I loved it in Halo Reach, so I'm really glad you guys are bringing it back to life, with the online cooperative aspect added.
