I tweeted about this last night, but I wanted to elaborate on it a bit.
I went a couple weeks without playing Halo 4, and then came back to it over this weekend. And that time off, mulling stuff over, and then seeing the game again has helped me better understand some of my feelings about the game.
In short, it feels like there are two different, incompatible visions for what Halo is at work here. One is what Bungie created, the more methodically paced shooter with a two weapon limit, a 'golden tripod' combat sandbox, fluid movement and the shield recharge system. The other is this more frenetic "modern" shooter that 343 wanted to make.
In preserving Halo's "core", as has been said so often, and making the changes they did to the game, 343 has created a game with an identity crisis. Is it still the more methodically paced shooter with cool down times between encounters, or the one with rapid kill times and instant respawns? Is it a game where everyone starts out on equal footing, or one where people who have the better unlocks have advantages?
That's the gameplay. I've dumped enough text about it here already. But the same kind of schism is at play in the overall feature set, so I wanted to try and articulate what I see with Halo 4 there.
Over the course of Halo 1 and Halo 2, Bungie invested deeply in player customization and options. With Halo 3 they expanded that to include ways to share both community creations, but also experiences. Part of what I've loved about Halo has become the ways we can not only define how we experience Halo, but then to also share that and the ensuing experiences with the community. That brought us Forge, Theater, File Share, Campaign Scoring, Skulls, and deep multiplayer customization options.
It was a pretty cohesive vision for collaborative content creation and sharing within the community. And a big part of this community for a while; custom game types, screenshot stories, shared video clips (rendered on b.net).
Here's what 343 did to those features:
Forge
Development outsourced. Deeply flawed Forge World pieces carried over. New lighting and a handful of new items and features, and the loss of fine editing tools, among other problems. A decidedly incremental take, and given what the mode lost, perhaps even a sideways step.
Theater
Removed from Spartan Ops. Removed from Campaign. Vague promises of maybe coming later, but it's clearly not a priority.
Skulls
Featured in Campaign only, inexplicably not available in Spartan Ops. Uses the exact same set as Halo 3, ODST, and Reach. A token carry-over feature with no thought into moving the ideas forward.
Campaign Scoring
Gone.
File Share
Rendered almost useless by the lack of Waypoint functionality and neutered in-game functionality. And what will people be sharing? The scope of content available has dropped dramatically.
In fairness some of these things 343 has talked about adding at some point down the road to Halo 4. But they were clearly not a priority to them. But to me, they formed a cohesive suite of features that worked in concert, allowing players to have a great degree of control over their experience and then share those experiences with the community; creation and collaboration. (Play. Forge. Film. Share.) I used them extensively; they were part and parcel of how I played the game.
343 moved some token elements of Bungie's suite forward but key parts were lost. And they are not replaced with another vision. It's just a set of now fragmented, jumbled features that are there mostly because they used to be there. Well, some of them anyways. What's 343's vision for community collaboration, for player customization, for content sharing? I have no idea. I can only see fragments of Bungie's vision here. I think 343 didn't really have a vision, or at least one different from Bungie's, for that part of the game.
But those things were important to me, and had become a part of why I loved Halo. And it's just another way in which the Halo 4 moved away from what I wanted. It would be one thing if there was a new, different vision to embrace here. But there's not. I think 343 needs to step back and ask themselves what their overall vision for this kind of stuff is. Because some of Bungie's left overs, and only some, do not make for something very cohesive. They need to dream a little bigger, or dream a little different, next time around.
