People don't bitch because they hate, people bitch because they want to see it be as good as it can possibly be. This is the fundamental disconnect between some parts of HaloGAF and others. You could chalk it up to insanity, but the reason people spend ages writing lengthy posts about every aspect of the game for years isn't because people don't give a shit about or hate Halo. The latter have already left Halo 4. They're gone. They were gone the day Blops 2 was released. Juices touches on this a lot: what's frustrating is that those of us who are left, the people who play or played Halo every day for a long, long time, get resolutely ignored and crapped on over and over for no reason whatsoever. There's never an olive branch extended, recognition of problems, or a mea culpa. The closest we get is something like Frankie's letter which basically patted the entire team on the back for working hard and told the community "we'll do better next time!". Bullshit. It's 2013 yet we're still praying that the dice roll lands on a decent matchmaking update once a month in the bulletin. There's still no transparency. There's nothing. Waypoint is perpetually half-finished. The person whose full-time job it is to be Community Manager never leaves 343's message boards. At first I was stunned that 343 would remove a beloved playlist like SS while retaining TU BETA SLAYER, but now I see that was just a sign of the general disdain and incompetence towards the community to come. To people like High Speed Halo, I am sorry that 343 considers elements of the game that are the cornerstone of your community, the life-blood of your group of Halo friends, to be just another boring old unimportant checkbox that they can axe. I say that not because I mean jack shit, but because you certainly won't hear it from 343.
And it's hard for me to see where it all went wrong. David and Frankie clearly care about the series and love traditional Halo. The engineering team at 343 did pretty well with the visuals and netcode. The foundation was there, but the piece of the puzzle that doesn't make sense is how the multiplayer starting going in this shaky direction, and how everything else ended up so half-baked. I can't speculate much on the non-multiplayer portions, I'm sure that was a tangled web of employee departures and missed deadlines and scrapped plans, but for the multiplayer; do I think the team at 343 felt passionately about shoving COD features into Halo? Nah. To me, Halo 4 has all the telltale signs of being designed by executives and focus tested into oblivion, which is something we're feeling more and more as industry sales are generally down with this extended console lifespan and publishers are trying to scrape together a decent ROI. I'm sure some higher-ups looked at COD financials, studied the psychological components of what makes COD a success, looked at what they had (Halo), and issued some large directives - a purely business decision which I can certainly respect - to try to keep up. I guess it worked, it's a shame that once again the true, longtime hardcore Halo fans are the ones who get squeezed.
