Pretty much my take too. I still have a lot of fun whenever I play Halo 4, spartan ops and multiplayer.
I like intrinsic sprint, I like loadouts where appropriate, love most of the AAs and honestly think their heart was in the right place when it comes to personal ordnance. But too many of their decisions painted them into a corner to where they couldn't easily make adjustments to keep classic Halo multiplayer gameplay intact.
I can only hope their in-house post-mortem was a lot more honest and painful. Because if they can learn from their missteps (presuming they can realize them first) Halo 5 could be something amazing.
watching the video again, i honestly can't be optimistic about it, i dont think that's the case. I just went through the promethean designs, and they're completely ignorant of their own gameplay decisions. He's promoting the prometheans as a unique gameplay experience, yet, i dont know a single person who can point which aspects of the promethean gameplay kit is inherently unique in the game design. The only thing which comes close is the support promethean, and even then it harkens to the engineer. So you have a bunch of new enemies that are fundementally the same as older enemies, which don't change the sandbox in any meaningful way. Same goes for the new weapons.
Visually they're a clumsy design, it's hard to pinpoint weak spots, its hard to figure out which weapons are useful or appropriate, and this forces players to take a single approach. Take for example the phase thing they do, the teleportation effect doesn't give you any information on the characters next position, and it's hard to tell if it's tied to characters health, so all it does is needlessly extend the length of the fight through a fustrating mechanic. It forces players to take the approach that they feel works the most consistantly, which in turn reinforces your medium - long range weapons, and as a result, the game never changes. Compare this to the flood, who are primarily close range, with sporatic movement, low health, and rely on numbers, this forces the players to adopt close-mid range weapons with large ammo clips, a complete contrast to the mid-long range approach which is suited against the covenant.
I find it interesting that in the following section they discuss weapons and they talk about the fact that players original ignored them in the design stage. Yet there are a couple reasons which they completely dismiss.
1. the new weapons are unclear in their use and purpose. It's not clear why the lightrifle has a ammo type which changes. The bolt shot's effectiveness is hard to determine. The visual design is hard to understand. It's hard to tell which weapon is which when they're lying on the ground.
2. these weapons are the same as current weapons which people already understand and feel comfortable with. They even say, "the scattershot is a shotgun" well, then why are you making it if theres already a shotgun?
3.Theres no clear thought into why additions to the sandbox were made. Even in reach they attempted to remove redundant similar weapons, while introducing new ones. The looked at the covie sniper thought it was too similar to the human sniper, and so they turned it into the beam rifle.
these elements, along with what i would consider are the increase push for a directed and cinematic experience is leading me to believe that the goals for halo 5 will be at odds with what long time players want. In story, in gameplay, and ultimately in experience. Even the whole puppet-vehicle analogy, it tells me a lot of what the goals 343 is putting in place. They dont want this to be "your" master chief adventure, their want it to be "theirs" and that's depressing to me.
No, but it is funny how 343 managed to out graphically in one game what Bungie had been kinda lacking in for say 3 Halo games? Makes me wonder bout the 3D modeling talent over there a Bungie a little........just a little though (They kinda did step their game up for Reach)
I think there's more to the argument then meets the eye. 343 cut a lot of features. I can't think of a single halo game bungie made which did the same. It has nothing to do with talent, but with budget, budget for time and man power. They would rather give players a robust firefight mode, and multiplayer options then spend their time making the pixels look x amount better. The levels also feel far smaller in scale, and far more linear. So if scaling back core game mechanics in return for better graphics is what people want, then so be it.
