Me and my gf stopped playing multiplayer because the sbm caused her to always get stomped. Also the game regularly disconnected. And then they removed bot bootcamp for a while.

Custom games are pretty much the solution to this, except it's almost impossible for us to get in the same game, my install crashes when interacting with forge objects, and the matchmaking/ browser for custom games is garbage.

Every previous halo game I played (all the way back to 1), I played extensively because of custom games.

I think people give infinite too much of a pass because the gameplay feels good. Any competent game design team could recreate a halo - like arena shooter, and that's pretty much all it brings to the table.

Edit: I stand by my last statement, especially considering they inherited the game engine from Bungie. The hallo infinite engine is built on top of that same old engine.