Frankie responded to this topic when it was originally posted. I couldnt tell you which page, but he acknowledged the complaints and said that they've learnt a lot.
Halo 4, One Year Later: What Happened?
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Frankie responded to this topic when it was originally posted. I couldnt tell you which page, but he acknowledged the complaints and said that they've learnt a lot.
Caayn
Member
It's not just GAF, entire Halo communities have disappeared and almost the entire internet(not counting waypoint) is for once in agreement over one thing.
I'm sure that MS/343i is really happy with all the negative feedback they've received since Halo 4.
What has 343i done to be forgiven? I'll forgive 343i when they make Halo Halo again.
Here ya go.
This.
Halo 4 was a great game. I think it'd be hard for anyone to justify that it was actually poor quality. The production was amazing. Everything felt like huge improvements to me except for a few things: the music, the enemies, the lack of open environments, and a lack of 60fps for the multiplayer. I think what went wrong with Halo 4 was chiefly COD, which was not as big of a thing when Halo 3 came out. I imagine Microsoft realizes the same thing, which is why they've focused on releasing the next Halo at 60fps.
Masquerader
Member
I suppose that the Halo Series as a whole (Read: Bungie) has provided them with a get out of jail free card in my eyes. Viable for one game only, though. They used it. Halo 5 had better be a step up.
Synth_floyd
Banned
Halo 4 was very mediocre. Bland singleplayer and a "Let's turn it into CoD"-multiplayer. Killed off any interest I had in the series as well as desire for an Xbox One. I did love Halo 3 and Reach though. Played their respective multiplayers for months and months. I gave up on 4's multiplayer after about 2-3 weeks.
Princess Carl
Member
yeah here's the thing though, cod fatigue is at its peak right now. I think if there was any a time to bring back the classic halo multiplayer, its now with Halo 5. Here's hoping 343/Microsoft feels the same way. Because the last thing the industry needs is another high profile cod clone.
HiredN00bs
Banned
The production was not great. The game was rushed and significant portions were contracted to other developers. They shipped with A LOT of glitches, probably more than Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, and Halo: Reach had, combined. Some still exist to this day. I just played yesterday, and I can confirm, the vehicles sometimes don't make any sound, and the killcam still sometimes plays back gun sounds at incredibly loud volume. The UI is far less useful, and the visual and audible feedback is worse.
As someone who has put hundreds of hours into every game (and in the case of 2, 3, and Reach, thousands), I find it hard to see the things that Halo 4 did better. Resolution and performance capture are the two things that come to mind.
SocksForWoks
Banned
Personally I'm more hyped for the Halo 3 4k Remake PC version than Halo 5.
Dash Kappei
Not actually that important
So for the 360 you count 50M Live users while for PS4 you count the whole 7M playerbase as PS+ users.
Gotcha, that seems fair, I see you aren't trying to skew the data to push your agenda AT ALL. I'm done here.
Utterly stupid and meaningless comparisons.
rokkerkory
Member
I actually liked the SP. Didn't even touch MP because it was CODified.
I think 343 has been humbled by the hoo hum response so they better rectify the MP.
Gfx was sublime btw, absolutely gorgeous. I loved how Cortana looked.
I think 343 has been humbled by the hoo hum response so they better rectify the MP.
Gfx was sublime btw, absolutely gorgeous. I loved how Cortana looked.
shacklesmcgee
Member
To me, these are core tenets to Halo. Well, looking at the numbers, a lot of people agree too.
Yeah, I could've gone further and said Halo 4 was a great game, just not a great Halo game. I thought the gunplay felt fantastic, and the sound design was awesome. The graphics were a pretty amazing technical achievement as well. The voice acting and the motion cap, all top-notch. But, as you said, it wasn't as Halo-esque as previous entries. Still, a bad game? I find that a real stretch.
VGChampion
Member
The post sounds to me like the game was good as a game, just not as a Halo game. I didn't have any issues playing the game like I do with others, but it just wasn't a good Halo game. My friends and I were joking around during the campaign because everything just felt... dumb. And this is coming from a group who played hours a day with Halo 1 and played ridiculous amounts on 2 and 3. Halo was our life for a long time before we graduated. We didn't even resubscribe to gold for 4.
shacklesmcgee
Member
Yeah, I agree. I loved the way 3 had these huge vistas, or 2 introduced dual wielding vs. grenades. While Halo 4...is a game that exists, yes. So strange that the series that is damn near the soul of the xbox family, felt so soulless.
the game is actually very good and fun I think it's more about other FPS for folks to choose from, and less of it being a bad game, it's fun on and offline.
It's possible to be below the top on XBL while still having very good staying power. BF3 had a significantly smaller XBL launch than Halo 4, but after the initial spike cooled off, its population dropped off very slowly and it stayed somewhat high on the UUs rankings for a couple of years.
Whereas Halo 4 had a gigantic launch and then fell off a cliff. It's been fairly stable over the last six months, but at a baseline that's astoundingly low for such a young Halo game.\
(Ugh, I still haven't added BF3 to my UUs spreadsheet...)
I don't miss it. I hate Halo now. Fuck you Halo you stupid...hate you. Why yu do dis???
I was angry and raging at Halo back in late 04 and 05 when Halo 2 came out. I was at least very passionate and interested back then, despite my disappointment with the game. Now, it's just sad, I look back on Halo 2 and remember all the fun I had, despite its problems, I yearn for something like Halo CE. I've been dejected and despondent since Halo 3 came out, I can't believe how bad the franchise is now. Halo 4 is just boring and barely a Halo game.
I'm so bitter that I hope Halo 2 Anniversary is butchered like Halo CE Anniversary was, just so that a wider portion of the Halo audience will feel the same pain that I felt when that game came out. This series needs a serious rethinking and revitalization.
Syphon Filter
Member
Well Halo 4 is not a bad game but its not a good Halo game. It copied so much features from COD that it messed with the Halo formula. It needs to be its own thing like Halo 3 and older titles were. No 60 fps will fix that,its another issue.
how was Halo CEA butchered? The campaign was done amazingly. I'll give you that not every single MP map was included, but the favorites were.
VanquishUK
Member
Halo 4 was one of the best CoD games ever but a mediocre Halo.
I hope that whatever they do with Halo 5 convinces me to buy an Xbox One, because god I love this franchise.
I hope that whatever they do with Halo 5 convinces me to buy an Xbox One, because god I love this franchise.
mcz117chief
Member
Is the problem the fact that it is just too same or too different, I honestly can't tell :/
No Halo CE MP on XBL. Original Xbox Halo CE looks better than "Classic mode" of Halo CEA.
Framerate is pretty bad as well on the newer graphics. I would have preferred if Anniversary would have just meticulously tooled the Halo CE engine to work at 60 FPS, use the original assets, clean it up to 720p or more, and let the gameplay and 60 FPS on XBL sell the game for you.
Graphics and Campaign sells Halo games though, so this is impossible to expect, but I would have least liked the original MP on the disc to play on XBL.
Latvian Hitman
Member
Too different and changes were not for the better. They took an arena shooter with a moderate skill gap where everyone started on equal footing and map control was paramount and transformed it into a class-based mess with a low skill gap and made map control irrelevant.
The only people who said Halo 4 didn't "innovate" enough were reviewers and casuals who hadn't really played enough classic Halo to know what it was or how the MP was structured.
mcz117chief
Member
Yeah, I guess you are right. Especially true about map control :/
There was Halo CE MP on XBL. So I'm not sure what you're talking about. It had a selection of maps to play MP.
The way it was done was overlaying new on old graphics and had the neat trick of allowing instant switching of graphics. I doubt doing that play also making the new 60fps (which doesn't look like Halo of old) would have been possible. I'm not sure why you're so worried about 60fps. No Halo has been 60 fps
TheMissingLink
Member
This is my favorite thread in NeoGAF history. The OP is very well researched/written. I'm glad it got bumped.
Latvian Hitman
Member
No. There was Halo Reach MP for CEA with a few classic maps. Two very different things.
There was current engine MP, but you had classic settings.
It played completely different from the original game's multiplayer though. People wanted the actual original multiplayer (although I still quite enjoyed what we got instead).
HiredN00bs
Banned
Reach Anniversary modes were VERY different from playing CE in just about every way. It was a neat, but flawed mode for Reach, but for a CE fan, it was woefully inadequate.
Latvian Hitman
Member
Right. Meaning it was not Halo CE's multiplayer.
I understand the reasons why they did it the way they did, but that doesn't mean we get to pretend they didn't do it.
Hmmmm, 3 months after Frankie posted said message
343 released an update with 3 new perks (including one which automatically ejects you, alive, from your exploding vehicle). They apparently didn't learn anything that most fans wanted them to :/
I was a huge Halo fanboy until 343 took over but almost everything they've done has turned me off from the franchise. Plenty has been said about Halo 4 so I won't repeat those criticisms but imo... the Karen Traviss novels are bunk and seem to be a trilogy of novels made to shit on
After H2A I'm probably done with Halo unless Halo 5 is spectacular (or unless they release Halo 3 on Steam!)
I'm a reformed Xbox fanboy, ambassador, owner of two 360's and several Xboxen, the vision cam, wireless headset, purchaser of every Halo game made plus PC versions..
Halo 4 was directly responsible for me stepping back and trying to take a fair, objective look at PS4 vs Xbox One, and ultimately is the reason I bought the PS4.
Halo 4 was directly responsible for me stepping back and trying to take a fair, objective look at PS4 vs Xbox One, and ultimately is the reason I bought the PS4.
I spent hundreds of hours playing Halo 2 online back in the day, never thought I'd be so lax about the release of a new next gen Halo game this year, hopefully they can redeem themselves but I doubt it based on the time it took them to even attempt to fix 4. God damn the base multiplayer maps were terrible, what the fuck 343 there was like 2 small maps and 5 large maps?!
what does one game have to do with deciding which console to buy? Sounds like you weren't an Xbox fanboy but were a Halo fanboy.
Pretty sure this was in response to the fact that anyone could have a plasma pistol at spawn now, and the vehicles seemed way easier to blow up.
If that's true I'd rather they removed the ability to spawn with plasma pistols. Imo that would prove that they had actually learned more than them chucking more perks on top of the game.
Broken mechanics used as band-aids to cover broken mechanics. The same problem most of the other perks in the game have.
Even having read all of the books up until that point, the Didact's motives still made no sense until the next book was released, four months after the game's launch.
Don't think they could do that after the fact, especially considering how the unlocks worked.
Iirc in Team Throwdown they had 5 fixed loadouts players could pick from. If they did this for every playlist the problem would have been solved.
Edit: I forgot you had to unlock weapons haha. They could have fixed loadouts in most playlists and left one or 2 with custom loadouts so that their pointless unlock system didn't go entirely to waste.
And in 343 fashion they decided to add more nonsense to balance out the nonsense they created themselves.
If they hadn't learn a lot I would have been very, very worried.
I'm surprised you've lurched all the way to getting a PS4 - and backing yourself into a corner to say you're not going to buy another Halo game. Can be a dangerous position to take.
That said, you're not the first person to say about them introducing more perks in the DLC (or whenever they did it). It doesn't inspire confidence. As much as I'd wish they would strip everything back, I just don't seem them doing it. Perhaps the pathetic population numbers will force them to do it though.
Really, all they had to do was follow Halo 3's lead. Pretty simple.
The MP was crap thats what happened.
Halo 3 lasted 3 years is because the MP was balanced perfectly almost. If I am going to buy Halo V day one they need to go back to the Halo 3 formula.
No Bullshit Armor ability's that you can just spawn with. Scatter weapon pick ups though the map along with what gametype it is. Halo 3 was more tactical as everyone spawned with the same weapon.
Bring back Dual Welding and finally make Phantoms and Pelicans and what not pilot able.
Halo 3 lasted 3 years is because the MP was balanced perfectly almost. If I am going to buy Halo V day one they need to go back to the Halo 3 formula.
No Bullshit Armor ability's that you can just spawn with. Scatter weapon pick ups though the map along with what gametype it is. Halo 3 was more tactical as everyone spawned with the same weapon.
Bring back Dual Welding and finally make Phantoms and Pelicans and what not pilot able.
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