Wow. SpOps 4 not fun. I quit halfway through the Valhalla mission. I'll pick it up again tomorrow to see if my mood about it has improved, but no guarantees.
I seem to remember in one of the Halo 4 BTSes that Frank said something along the lines of "We needed a new way to introduce enemies to an encounter." I can tell you that teleporting Prometheans on top of the player is not a good way of doing that. Here's why:
-Players prioritize targets. They do this based on the order in which they see them and then assign a priority to them(a priority queue for you few programmers). If a player sees a Fuel Rod Elite, it has a higher priority than a Plasma Pistol Grunt. When everything is instantly spawning around the player, there isn't enough time for the player to get all of the variables and assign priorities to enemies and track their locations. A great example of an encounter where priority assignments come in is the river section of Sierra 117 in Halo 3. The player sees the purple Jackal heads and knows that they are the biggest threat. The player takes them out first with whatever precision weapon they can find. Then they proceed to take out the Brutes, Grunts, and Jackals in a different order depending on other variables.
-Enemies can have instant-kill weapons. Now this can lead to an entirely different rant about whether enemies should have OHK weapons, but that's another 2500 character post. Since they can teleport anywhere with a weapon that can instantly kill, the player loses control points simply because the enemy teleported there at a random moment to the player. It is even more map breaking than Jetpack in multiplayer. When the player dies to one of these weapons, chances are they are going to spawn right in front of it again.
-The player analyzes routes that the enemies can take to get to them, and prepares a preemptive defense. In previous games, this would be taken out by massive amounts of small infantry or by the cunning of larger infantry. The player's initial defense was taken out, but if the player was smart enough, there is a back up plan such as retreating, using a piece of equipment to turn the tide of battle in favor for them, or even shooting a grenade on the ground to create a confetti of dead enemies.
A few notes for my later analysis: The Knights feel like a poor version of the Halo 2 Brute to me. There isn't a clear way to take them out. I can see a slight blue pop when their shields are gone, but it is incredibly faint. Also, once the shields are popped, there isn't a clear way to kill them aside from pumping them full of lead and hope they fall over. There isn't a headshot(and if there is, it is incredibly inconsistent). The Crawlers feel like a 2-dimensional Halo Reach drone. Shooting them in the head is satisfying, but finding the head is a pain. Watchers need a clear way of knowing how much damage they have taken. I only know that they take 4 DMR shots to blow up, and my way of killing them is counting the DMR shots that hit.
