GDC: Halo 4 Post Mortem starts right now.

Clint Beastwood said:
why is it good on him for apologizing? not only did they shit on the faces of disabled people, they shit on the faces of Halo fans all for some attempt to be clever/funny

only after being called out for their stupidity he apologized. i don't think people should get props for forced apologies, especially when it was easily avoidable
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Really? Google "accessibility icon". I think it's pretty obvious that a person in a wheelchair is a universally accepted depiction for accessibility, so this Geoff character was taking far too much offence at this.
 
Dax01 said:
People make mistakes. Sometimes you say or do something that you don't realize is offensive until after the fact. As I said, I didn't realize how offensive that was until somebody explained it to me. I easily could've made a similar mistake.

He didn't have to apologize, but I'm glad he did.
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yeah people make mistakes, but this is different. the only way you could think this is not offensive is if you use disabilities as jokes/insults daily.

this isn't like forgetting you made plans with a friend or something

JohnnyWestlake said:
Really? Google "accessibility icon". I think it's pretty obvious that a person in a wheelchair is a universally accepted depiction for accessibility, so this Geoff character was taking far too much offence at this.
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there's a reason no one else in the 7 years this gen has lasted has associated accessibilty with the universal handicap logo

this gen has been all about accessibility and no one has been dumb enough to do that
 
Clint Beastwood said:
yeah people make mistakes, but this is different. the only way you could think this is not offensive is if you use disabilities as jokes/insults daily.
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Obviously that's not the case, because I didn't know it was offensive and I can assure you I don't use disability jokes or insults on a daily basis.

Get off your high horse. Josh made a mistake - he didn't realize how offensive it was – he apologized, and that's the end of it.
 
tea_and_crumpets said:
I loved Halo 4, single player was great and the multiplayer still felt like 'Halo' but with some great updates. Don't understand the hate.
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Because the "great updates" caused it to not really play lime Halo. A core of Halo's MP was starting on equal ground and map control. Also loadouts ruined BTB and vehicle combat....also close quarters thanks to the boltshot.

Also 1-flag and Assault no longer exsist and a lot of custom game options were cut.

THAT is why it gets hate and the population dropped like a rock.
 
wwm0nkey said:
Because the "great updates" caused it to not really play lime Halo. A core of Halo's MP was starting on equal ground and map control. Also loadouts ruined BTB and vehicle combat....also close quarters thanks to the boltshot.

Also 1-flag and Assault no longer exsist and a lot of custom game options were cut.

THAT is why it gets hate and the population dropped like a rock.
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Thats not why, but it certainly didnt help. The population has been dropping every Halo game now since 3, and that ever since the release of COD4 MW.
 
Silly.Mikey said:
Thats not why, but it certainly didnt help. The population has been dropping every Halo game now since 3, and that ever since the release of COD4 MW.
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I think it has to do more with Halo going another direction in each game rather than cod 4. Halo 3 still topped cod 4 and waw. It was MW2 that finally took down halo 3.
 
This is what happens when you put all the resources into making a game that's too pretty for the hardware it runs on. Not only does everything else suffer (Super linear campaign, weak enemy design with lack of variety, weak multiplayer), but you get a game that's "screenshot pretty". Halo 4 doesn't look all that great in motion, just because they had to cut so many corners to get the game to look screenshot pretty for the Xbox 360. Horrible aliasing that is barely touched by the super blurry FXAA, the most aggressive LOD I've ever seen, hilariously low shadow resolution, with the shadows fading out at extremely close distances, low res, static skyboxes (that background image of the covenant fleet in the first level is atrocious), empty, small scale enemy encounters, and a simplified lighting model. No thanks.

Halo 4 is the first Halo game where I did not revisit the campaign after my first playthrough, and I stopped playing the MP after less than a month. Very disappointing.

At this point I would be much more excited if they announced Halo 3 for PC than if they announced Halo 5.
 
Syphon Filter said:
The updates part is where you're wrong. It's unnecessary and just makes the game more convoluted if anything. Lets hope they learned for the future.
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How is he wrong because he like the updates?

Have you personally played Halo 4 or it's multiplayer?

Pretending Halo 4 is convoluted at all in my opinion is straight hyperbole.

Reach is where the Halo series first divulged into loadouts that was made popular post COD.

Halo 4 has continued down that same path.

In my opinion, It hasn't hurt the core Halo multiplayer experience at all.

343i is going to learn exactly what Bungoe learned, is that you are never going to be able to please every Halo fan.

The hardcore Halo gamers I have played with since Halo 2, still love and frequent Halo 4 as much as they normally would whether it was Reach or otherwise.

Like every single Halo game, we will be playing it for years. The difference is Halo simply isn't the biggest show in town anymore.
 
FleckSplat said:
The forerunners are boring to fight. They are nothing but bullet sponges.
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Yup. 343 managed to design an enemy more bland then the Flood.

The only thing 343 did for the franchise with Halo 4 was make Halo a prettier game but that came at the cost of substance.

However, from what Holmes has said in the postmortem I'm still hopeful that with Halo 5 they can right the ship.
 
ii Stryker said:
Yup. 343 managed to design an enemy more bland then the Flood.

The only thing 343 did for the franchise with Halo 4 was make Halo a prettier game but that came at the cost of substance.

However, from what Holmes has said in the postmortem I'm still hopeful that with Halo 5 they can right the ship.
Click to expand...

Prettier campaign, perhaps.
 
SenjutsuSage said:
That line pretty much speaks for itself. I can't tell people what to like, just as they can't tell me what to like. You don't have to like my opinion, but it's my honest opinion and it ain't changing. I loved Bungie's work; I thought they did a fantastic job with the franchise, but the campaign experience needed something that I feel maybe Bungie weren't up to the task of providing, not due to lack of talent, but maybe due to decreased interest, as obviously they had grown tired enough of the franchise to move on. I do genuinely feel after playing Halo 4's campaign that Bungie moving on was indeed to the benefit of the franchise. I thought the campaign was, all around, the best that I've ever played in a Halo game.

Bungie's Halo games were always excellent, but they were rarely, if ever perfect, and neither is Halo 4, but that doesn't not make it an excellent game. Everyone has different things that they like, or different things that may appeal to them in entirely different ways, particularly on the gameplay design/pacing side of things. I think Halo 4's pacing is the best of the franchise. I enjoyed the fights more, I enjoyed the weapons and their diversity more. I thought the level design and art was much better overall than what is present in any previous Halo title. And this next part probably isn't fair, but I don't care. It's one of the major ways Halo 4 stepped up compared to past games. The performance capture and character performances were among the strongest and most believable I've ever seen. You had more characters of lesser importance to the main storyline leave a strong lasting impression than has ever been the case for me in any previous Halo campaign. I think they've give more life to this franchise than what might have otherwise been there without Halo 4.

And you can poke fun at Cortana touching my manliest of men's chest in Halo 4, but I'll tell you one thing: Halo 3, one of the most important games in the franchise, while still a great game, fell flat in damn important areas. The scenes with Miranda and Johnson were handled so badly that it was hard to feel anything when they both died. I felt happier for their respective voice actors when life left their game counterparts than I did for the characters themselves dying. That game didn't feel like the epic conclusion and experience that I was hoping for. For a game with such big implications and significance, it felt pretty small. That was no way to send off the Chief. I honestly don't think they truly got it right until around the end scene of the game with the Chief and Cortana on the Forward Unto Dawn. Reach, despite lacking Chief and a vocal Cortana, by comparison, is a much, much better executed game, with even better executed gameplay than was the case in 3, in all areas. For all the talk that I often hear about gameplay from many fellow Halo fans, a lot of people sure seem to gloss over some of Halo 3's most glaring weaknesses. Those epic scarab battles don't do nearly enough to cover up these problems, nor do they make up for the mess that was equipment in Halo 3. It was a total mess. I remember going through the game and never having the time to really appreciate or understand sometimes what piece of equipment I was holding, leading to situations where I ended up wasting what I had before even realizing what it was for. Well, I'm ranting here, so I'll just end by saying what I've been saying. Halo 4's campaign to me, is the best of the games and is a major step in the right direction for the franchise. Never have I been more excited about what's next for Halo's campaign.

I stress campaign because I want to make it clear that I don't play Halo MP, because Halo's MP has never interested me. And much Kudos to Josh for taking responsibility and apologizing for that. I didn't make a big fuss over it, but I myself thought it was rather insensitive and silly that it made it in there. I'm sure he meant no offense, but I loved what 343 did with Halo 4 (campaign), and even I saw it and immediately didn't like it. It was even worse once I found out it wasn't some GAF made mockup, but was actually official. Still, he owned up to it, which is always the right thing to do when, even when you unintentionally cause such offense.
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To be fair, Microsoft didn't mangle the Campaign as badly as they mangled the Multiplayer. The fact is that all of the Bungie games had this awesome tone and Halo 4 misses it completely. The characters aren't themselves, even in the context of the expanded universe Microsoft manages itself. They added all kinds of one-dimensional characters that have great motion capture but horrible dialogue and non-existent development. They made visual feedback worse, despite improving some aspects of the graphics. They expanded the sandbox but few weapons felt polished. They appeal to the lowest of brows by turning the wisecracking sidekick into the emotionally vulnerable, whimpering, desperate, super-sexy female that needs her big strong man (save for the moment when she takes out the RAWR definitely EVIL bad guy). It's fucking crap (relatively speaking, of course). It's like they gave the franchise a lobotomy, the body's still there, but the person we knew is gone.
 
Forerunners are a bit like brute bullet sponges with a little more AI then the brutes ever had, but then even the elites in 4 have been toned down and have a problem with standing still and not using cover unlike reach, which did elites really well IMO.
 
I hope all the Halo 4 hate doesn't make the developers change their game design 100% for the next game. Halo 4 was easily the best single-player campaign out of the Halo games, even with the prometheans. As for multiplayer, I dropped it fast. And even though I'm mostly a Halo fan for the multiplayer, I was more than satisfied with the tradeoff.
 
Halo 4 is the definition of an average game - short, linear and weak level design, uninspired environments and really bad storytelling.

The gunplay was not bad, but this game was just unimaginative as it gets.

Halo 4 killed my interest for the series.
 
HiredN00bs said:
To be fair, Microsoft didn't mangle the Campaign as badly as they mangled the Multiplayer. The fact is that all of the Bungie games had this awesome tone and Halo 4 misses it completely. The characters aren't themselves, even in the context of the expanded universe Microsoft manages itself. They added all kinds of one-dimensional characters that have great motion capture but horrible dialogue and non-existent development. They made visual feedback worse, despite improving some aspects of the graphics. They expanded the sandbox but few weapons felt polished. They appeal to the lowest of brows by turning the wisecracking sidekick into the emotionally vulnerable, whimpering, desperate, super-sexy female that needs her big strong man (save for the moment when she takes out the RAWR definitely EVIL bad guy). It's fucking crap (relatively speaking, of course). It's like they gave the franchise a lobotomy, the body's still there, but the person we knew is gone.
Click to expand...

I mean, it's your opinion and I respect it, but wow, I can't believe the line that I bolded. Can anyone seriously look at Halo 3 and how that was mishandled on this front, and seriously say that Halo 4 is somehow worse off in this regard? I felt the dialogue was very well done. It wasn't just great mo-cap, the dialogue and situations that played out were some of the most interesting I've seen in a Halo campaign, up there with Halo's best moments. For example, when the Chief told the
scientist that the composer had to be destroyed, basically her life's work and something you knew she was at least very proud of, I thought that scene was handled so extremely well. You actually felt sorry for that lady, you got a sense of how much it hurt her to hear those words. This was an unimportant character, but they made her seem far more than what you usually get out of these kinds of characters. You really thought there was a chance you might save her, and that she may come to play a role in future halo stories, and then bam, dead.

I mean, hey, I like what they did with the campaign. With regards to the weapons, I've never found myself enjoying a set of weapons more in a Halo campaign. They all felt genuinely different and useful in specific ways. And, as silly as this may seem, I liked situations where, for example, Cortana took forever to open the doors to the landing zone and the entire time as I'm getting my ass kicked by all these prometheans, I'm thinking "What the fuck is Cortana doing!?" And immediately after you clear that area, the game reinforced exactly what I was thinking, making it clear that it was due to Cortana's malfunctioning but the Chief was acting like it was no big deal, when it was, because it nearly got him killed. Maybe I'm just a sucker for things like this, but it worked for me. Then there were also little things, of Cortana acting like an AI and not just being a conversation buddy that gives me information here and there. I liked the idea of her modifying that Elite's stealth pack to work with my suit. I liked the extra fictional justification for the chief suddenly using armor abilities. I liked when she diverted all the power from my shield's to the banshee's booster, giving me unlimited boost. This is the kind of stuff you read about in the books. And when Cortana pulled that multiplication stunt that I think she learned from a Covenant AI in Halo: First Strike, that just made things better. Halo 4 is my ideal Halo campaign. Even the end discussion between the chief and lasky, that was very well done. The dialogue in this Halo campaign I thought was some of the best of the series, but, again, different opinions, understandable.

Another big factor in my enjoyment was the pacing. Right when you think you want a change of pace, or that things might start to become samey, they toss you something new, or an awesome vehicle section. The broadsword was so damn memorable and well executed. With regards to level design, I felt that the worst thing that could have ever happened to Halo was that once it went to the next generation, Bungie lost sight of mission design and started just going for big battles for the sake of big battles. Halo 4 is called a corridor shooter, when I don't believe it's anything of the sort. I liked that 343i seemed to take tighter control of the mission design, and that levels were better designed and only as big as they needed to be. Some of the most memorable parts of Halo campaigns of the past, even Halo CE, was in fact some of the most linear feeling parts.
 
Played every Halo game and Reach MP up until Halo 4's launch with a few buddies. The changes they made to H4 made it unplayable to myself and my friends and we all stopped after two months. Such a shame because it's one of the few games I could always go back to and play and have a great time. Ordinance drops, boltshot, starting camo, etc all broke the Halo mold and have gutted it of it's original character and competitiveness.
 
clutch.as.it.gets. said:
Halo 4 is the definition of an average game - short, linear and weak level design, uninspired environments and really bad storytelling.

The gunplay was not bad, but this game was just unimaginative as it gets.

Halo 4 killed my interest for the series.
Click to expand...
You really liked the storytelling better in previous entries? If I concede maybe the storytelling is better previously, I still feel the characters through which the story is told are much better in Halo 4. This alone sets 4 above the others, for me. I'm a sucker for the Chief/Cortana interactions in 4.
 
op_ivy said:
i sware, people hate on halo 4 just because it introduces things that CoD does - and not because they are necessarily bad things (see also, JiP). 4's progression of unlocks is such a non-issue. it takes all of a day or two of playing to get what most would want to costomize their loadout AND from game one you are given prefab loadouts with the sought out weapons available.

ideally, and IMO, there shouldnt be any progression affecting gameplay at all - but don't act like we all didnt over come that shortcoming a looong time ago.
Click to expand...

No we didn't. It's completely against everything that makes Halo good and different from other games.

I'll echo the idea that Halo 4 removed my interest in playing Halo 5. I don't care what happens next in the universe, nor will I probably be buying an Xbox 720, simply because Halo was the only game series that I really cared about on consoles.

It's possible Destiny could be a flop. At least Bungie is following their own vision with that game and trying to create their own audience, instead of chasing after another game's audience that won't have any interest in staying with the game past a week.
 
I guess I feel for the MP folks, as it's almost tough to find very many who like the MP, or maybe this is another one of those vocal minority type deals. I don't really know.

Halo 4's campaign made me more interested in what the franchise has to offer going forward. This might seem like taboo, but I was stunned that COD4, a military shooter, felt more epic and intense than Halo 3. I thought that was inexcusable, but it was my honest to god opinion. After I first beat Halo 3, I thought it was a fun ride it for what it was, but it was once I played COD4 that all Halo 3's flaws stood out to me even more. I've said before to a friend that it's insane when you have a bigger emotional reaction to the death of some random soldier you could care less about in COD compared to the deaths of Miranda and Sgt. Johnson in Halo 3.

And, yes, just like I don't play Halo MP, I also do not play COD MP. I got COD4 Modern Warfare and MW2 solely for the campaigns and then haven't bought a COD since after the whole infinity Ward stuff.
 
Halo 4 is best Halo. :) blasphemous to some, but whatever..Halo 4 was the first Halo campaign I actually finished and enjoyed. Its MP is also world's better than Halo 3 and Halo: Reach for me. Not at Halo CE or Halo 2's level (for MP), though. That aside, for the first time in Halo's short history with me, I am actually looking forward to the campaign in sequels.

I played Halo CE when I was 13, though. I think I should go back to that one to give it a better shake.
 
Kinda sucks that Halo is going down this direction. I always liked Halo because it was simple and still was fun for competitive and casual players, developers need to understand that simplicity is what we want because it works.
 
sp3000 said:
I'll echo the idea that Halo 4 removed my interest in playing Halo 5. I don't care what happens next in the universe, nor will I probably be buying an Xbox 720, simply because Halo was the only game series that I really cared about on consoles.
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I am also not buying a 720. Not solely for this reason, but it's a part of it.
 
SenjutsuSage said:
I mean, it's your opinion and I respect it, but wow, I can't believe the line that I bolded. Can anyone seriously look at Halo 3 and how that was mishandled on this front, and seriously say that Halo 4 is somehow worse off in this regard? I felt the dialogue was very well done. It wasn't just great mo-cap, the dialogue and situations that played out were some of the most interesting I've seen in a Halo campaign, up there with Halo's best moments. For example, when the Chief told the
scientist that the composer had to be destroyed, basically her life's work and something you knew she was at least very proud of, I thought that scene was handled so extremely well. You actually felt sorry for that lady, you got a sense of how much it hurt her to hear those words. This was an unimportant character, but they made her seem far more than what you usually get out of these kinds of characters. You really thought there was a chance you might save her, and that she may come to play a role in future halo stories, and then bam, dead.

I mean, hey, I like what they did with the campaign. With regards to the weapons, I've never found myself enjoying a set of weapons more in a Halo campaign. They all felt genuinely different and useful in specific ways. And, as silly as this may seem, I liked situations where, for example, Cortana took forever to open the doors to the landing zone and the entire time as I'm getting my ass kicked by all these prometheans, I'm thinking "What the fuck is Cortana doing!?" And immediately after you clear that area, the game reinforced exactly what I was thinking, making it clear that it was due to Cortana's malfunctioning but the Chief was acting like it was no big deal, when it was, because it nearly got him killed. Maybe I'm just a sucker for things like this, but it worked for me. Then there were also little things, of Cortana acting like an AI and not just being a conversation buddy that gives me information here and there. I liked the idea of her modifying that Elite's stealth pack to work with my suit. I liked the extra fictional justification for the chief suddenly using armor abilities. I liked when she diverted all the power from my shield's to the banshee's booster, giving me unlimited boost. This is the kind of stuff you read about in the books. And when Cortana pulled that multiplication stunt that I think she learned from a Covenant AI in Halo: First Strike, that just made things better. Halo 4 is my ideal Halo campaign. Even the end discussion between the chief and lasky, that was very well done. The dialogue in this Halo campaign I thought was some of the best of the series, but, again, different opinions, understandable.

Another big factor in my enjoyment was the pacing. Right when you think you want a change of pace, or that things might start to become samey, they toss you something new, or an awesome vehicle section. The broadsword was so damn memorable and well executed. With regards to level design, I felt that the worst thing that could have ever happened to Halo was that once it went to the next generation, Bungie lost sight of mission design and started just going for big battles for the sake of big battles. Halo 4 is called a corridor shooter, when I don't believe it's anything of the sort. I liked that 343i seemed to take tighter control of the mission design, and that levels were better designed and only as big as they needed to be. Some of the most memorable parts of Halo campaigns of the past, even Halo CE, was in fact some of the most linear feeling parts.
Click to expand...
You can't believe the bolded?

-Didact--bad
-Del Rio--asshole
-Palmer--grunt

You cited one of the few nuanced interactions in the story, and they are few and far between.

Bungie games never took themselves so seriously. They always struck this great mix of light-heartedness and fun amidst danger and dire circumstances. While the story may have been grandiose, the gameplay was what was truly epic. Halo 4 had nothing that compared to experiences like Attack on the Control Room, The Ark, or the Covenant. They made just about every covenant enemy look shittier, and had glitches up the ass, especially with audio. Oh, and the music and mixing were absolute shit. Davidge made an awesome soundtrack that was paired poorly with the game, and overly compressed to the point of being a travesty to the great music of Halo games.

Halo was what was holding me to the Xbox. No longer now that Bungie is gone. Hey Microsoft, keep your new shitty Halo games.
 
I didn't find it a bad game by any means. In fact I liked it. It just wasn't as good as the rest of them. Calling it the death of the franchise is premature though
 
Vincent Alexander said:
I'm a sucker for the Chief/Cortana interactions in 4.
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Please no.

The "storytelling" in Halo 4 was abysmal at best, non-existent at worst.

A cheesy, over the top story about the love between a boy and his virtual girlfriend. An enemy with no setup and no mystique. A lackluster at best ending. The entire thing sprinkled with one-dimensional characters (with equally one-dimensional relationships) and patently offensive writing.

I'd go so far as to say that every single Halo title previous (except maybe Halo Wars) did it better.
 
soulassssns said:
Personally I enjoyed it because I have read all the books and played all the games.
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If you have to read books in order to enjoy a game's story something has gone very, very wrong. Whoever thought that it would be a good idea should be fired immediately.

Prior games in the series, sure, but definitely not books.
 
soulassssns said:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/opinion

Personally I enjoyed it because I have read all the books and played all the games and it was nice to see more of the story from the novel side in the games.
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my decision to call it a bad halo game has nothing to do with the story. my decision to call it a bad halo game has everything to do with the fact that 343's design philosophy with respect to the multiplayer is nowhere close to that of past Halo games. Large maps, fast, chaotic gameplay, and more random elements than you can shake a stick at.
 
soulassssns said:
Are you assuming that everyone had issues with the story because they did not read the books?
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Was that not your implication? You said you enjoyed it because you read the books and played the games. If you weren't trying to imply that the books had a direct impact on your enjoyment you probably should not have used "because."
 
Izayoi said:
Was that not your implication? You said you enjoyed it because you read the books and played the games. If you weren't trying to imply that the books had a direct impact on your enjoyment you probably should not have used "because."
Click to expand...

That does not mean I ONLY enjoyed it because of the books.
 
I personally think that the story would have been better in 4 if it was just a get back to earth mission, throw in some rogue elites who don't know about the peace between them and humans and throw in the new villan who escapes at the end, somehow I feel that halo 4 tried to squeeze in too much especially with the cortana stuff, that went a little overboard maybe.

The last 2 or so missions in halo 4 played really well and felt like a little throwback to some areas from halo 2 but the very last encounter, what the feck was that, was quite easy too compared to say mission 2 to 4.
 
tonitoni said:
So I take it you didn't like the two button press QTE final boss fight.
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well I did expect more, the halo 2 boss battle was better then that.

The last area before then when you fight between platforms was ok but it felt easy compared to what has been thrown at you before then.
 
I think it was Stan Lee who once said fans don't want change, they want the illusion of change. There is definitely a part of the Halo fanbase that just wants to play Halo 2 multiplayer with better graphics and a few slightly remixed Halo 1 maps, but thats also going to kill franchise.
 
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