Halo 4 can be enjoyable, but I fear for the direction they're taking the series. A few new things that have been introduced are nice (the mantis not being one of them), and I can see Damage Boost, Speed Boost and Promethean Vision working well in the on-map powerup pool. However, the way they're approaching the rest of game in general just bothers me. They're chasing a crowd that doesn't exist and shoehorning veterans into corners of the game. I don't want to be force-fed Infinity Slayer or face people with Camo and Plasma grenades everywhere, but classic 4v4 gameplay is nowhere to be found. There's one playlist out of 15 or 16 without this stuff, but the only map anyone ever plays is Haven because you can't even find the DLC anywhere once its playlist is gone. They just went out of their way to put "343" on the game, and in doing so almost entirely abandoned what made Halo good in the first place.
The worst part is, Halo 4 really isn't getting any "better". Changes like disabling sprint, a 4 shot BR, CSR, and adding certain features are great and all, but they're also things Halo already had when Bungie left the series. Adding back things that were taken out is just bringing it up to par with past Halo games, and that's not even enough to reignite the spark the other games held for over 2 years. We're barely over 6 months and most have already moved on. They said they'll do better in Halo 5, but unless it's a sequel to Halo 3, these players are not going to be coming back.
Everything was already in place to make Halo 4 a hit, so I don't understand how that went wrong. Now I sit on the main menu, either out of denial or brand loyalty, trying to find a reason to keep playing. One Spartan Ops mission, one Campaign mission, and one playlist in Multiplayer really aren't enough.
I agree, particularly with the shoehorning, the terrible DLC implementation and the things that should have been there in the first place.
I was thinking back to Reach's firefight and how that was handled too. I remember Ghaleon writing up a huge essay on its issues and how to approach fixing them, and also what he enjoyed about the mode. My recollection is hazy but I think 343 started cutting back real Firefight modes that offered challenge and required at least basic cerebral activity in favour of Arcade modes with rocket launchers and fuel rods with unlimited ammunition and unlimited lives (sounds something like spartan ops). It's all part of that mania I described in my previous post where somehow for 343 a mode isn't 'fun' or is 'too stressful' if it isn't absolutely drenched in missile explosions and endless sniper rounds.
It's another really damaging side effect of implementing both a commendation milestone system and an EXP based bar filling system. A
lot of players are strongly motivated by that urge simply to fill the bar without consideration for the attendant gameplay. One could argue that the MM Firefight survival mode in Reach deserved to be retired when one saw the huge population numbers Arcade-fight had. Really though, what do you expect? The most rudimentary motivation for a player of a PvE videogame is to 'complete' the game, reach its end. In today's terms, for many gamers reared on online play, completing the game means completing the progression system. Rocket fight et al offer the path of least resistance whilst giving the bar filler-seeker the most profitable time to EXP ratio around. It's easy to set up from a playlist management perspective; it doesn't take valuable resources, time and bandwidth devising new enemy progression waves, carefully considering weapon placement and playtesting multiple times to determine just how many lives should be in the pool for a fine tuned survivor experience. They simply turn god-mode on, set the jetpack to infinite and the rocket clip to bottomless and get the easy population tick from the Inheritor chasers. Rip and run, street rips, clean and simple, in and out.
But what's the point in that? What does a player learn about himself from holding the jetpack button down and launching rocket after rocket after rocket at nothing enemies on Corvette for the sixth time in a row? I've made much of the great benefit a visible signifier of a players skill can have on player behaviour; a higher skill level is desirable and so games take on more significance, players try harder, many players will be less liable to quit for fear of losing rank, players are energised to plug in their microphones to communicate enemy positions more and the lust to learn new ways to gain an edge in the pursuit of a better rank drives players to keep playing, learning, learning. In a stroke of genius, Bungie took inarguably the most coveted in-game status symbol in Halo 3, the Recon armour set, and made it available to all. The really clever part was the unique challenges they set the player in order to claim the prized set. The Annual Vidmaster, with the Iron skull enabled and the epic four way Ghost run finale and the ODST Endure achievement, taking hours to reach the forth set with three buddies over Live, narrowly avoiding Brute Chieftans, scraping your way through on a limited pool of lives, ... unforgettable co-operative experiences that haven't been close to being rivaled since in Halo. Reach didn't have a Recon set to dangle in front of the community to drive them to experiment with interesting and awesome ways to tackle Campaign or FF missions co-operatively but it did have the EXP credit system. Sadly, it wasn't utilised to its true potential. They should have been offering fifty thousand credits for all four players lasting in FF survival mode for a long period of time or something to that effect. For a solo mode maybe have had credit multipliers in game so the longer you survived, the more you had in the 'bank' and you could either choose to 'cash' the credits or go another round against the Brutes and Elites to see if you could double your kitty, your decision predicated on how many lives you had remaining, the weapons you had left over from the last round and how well you were playing.
