Monocle
Member
It's not terrible, just flawed, and those flaws can be fixed in Halo 5 if 343 take a hard look at what made the earlier Halos so great.
Halo Xbox One "Legitimate", No Longer A Trilogy, Now A Saga
- Thread starter Darkmakaimura
- Start date
ChartzNGraphs>>> opinions
trying something different? they made Halo play and feel like every other FPS. all that's missing is ADS.
the one thing that made me not care as much about the yearly Halo releases was that at least Halo felt different from every other FPS. now it's just a generic FPS that's surviving by brand name
Synth_floyd
Banned
So 343 came up with plans for a trilogy but MS told them they need to churn out yearly sequels to keep the cash rolling in? They already ruined the multiplayer by turning it into Call of Halo and even though I wasn't a fan of the single player in Halo 4, they're making them compromise on whatever vision they had for it.
It really does seem like everyone in the Xbox division that had a passion for games left and the only people who remain are suits in search of profits first, with making good games only an unintended side effect of that pursuit.
It really does seem like everyone in the Xbox division that had a passion for games left and the only people who remain are suits in search of profits first, with making good games only an unintended side effect of that pursuit.
GarthVaderUK
Banned
My body and Halo shelf are ready.
Deadly Cyclone
Pride of Iowa State
Yeah, pretty much this.
Gucci Messiah
Banned
How could you even play the laggy mess that was Spartan Ops? On top of the technical issues, I thought it was nothing but repetitive gameplay in the same 2 or 3 environments.
Just because the gaming press gushes over something before the general public gets their hands on it does not make it good, that's one reason why I don't put much weight in metacritic scores. If you read through the Halo 4 thread shortly after launch you started to hear the same complaints over and over again from gaffers that professional reviewers failed to mention. Boring, annoying enemies, a hard to follow story, CoD-ified multiplayer, Spartan Ops lag, etc.
I appreciate the 343 was trying to do something different but the execution was terribly flawed and in many ways they were simply seeking to emulate the competition rather than create something truly innovative and fresh.
SlipperyMoose
Member
I enjoyed the last Halo and have been a fan since 1. I am ready.
Gucci Messiah
Banned
Yes, I guess hard facts and evidence are to be dismissed. You can have your opinion, it's just wrong.
Monocle
Member
Jesus Christ, some people were accusing Bungie of milking Halo back when ODST was announced, possibly even earlier, and it was no truer then than it is now. It makes no sense to complain about milking if the franchise hasn't had a bunch of awful rushed sequels.
BadAss2961
Member
Halo is so tired. Doesn't even hold the dudebro crown anymore.
flyingmonkeywhoa
Banned
Yes it is...Halo 4's multiplayer is basically CoD in space. An unbalanced Frankenstein mess of a competitive multiplayer
AllIsOneIsNone
Banned
I'm enjoying Halo 4 multiplayer again. Although I find it hilarious that 343 pretty much scrapped the original nice looking but non-functional maps for more classic style forge arena maps. Hopefully they can take a hint and actually START with fun maps for the next Halo. I'd even be okay with them only having forge maps for multiplayer and just making like 30 of them, but I know that's gonna happen.
My prediction is that they're going to push big team battle even more next time around and it'll be more unbalanced and less fun than ever. Don't do it 343, my xbone purchase is riding on you!
It's not overpowered anymore; if anything the BR is overpowered nowadays (but I love it). I'd really just prefer they scrapped loadouts altogether and started you with a pistol and an assault rifle if they find it necessary. Halo 2/3 were right.
My prediction is that they're going to push big team battle even more next time around and it'll be more unbalanced and less fun than ever. Don't do it 343, my xbone purchase is riding on you!
It's not overpowered anymore; if anything the BR is overpowered nowadays (but I love it). I'd really just prefer they scrapped loadouts altogether and started you with a pistol and an assault rifle if they find it necessary. Halo 2/3 were right.
LastChance2Frag
Neo Member
Xbox One Halo Edition could be on the cards to go with Day One edition.
I think with the Xbox One 343i will set up a spartan ops/something to work with the TV series. So weekly episodic content.
Then Multiplayer maybe along the lines of TF2 with constant updates and then bi-annual expansions/Map rotations to keep it fresh.
Then have the core game Halo 5/6/7/8/9/etc with the main campaigns and the multiplayer expansions included in the retail copy but a reduced price digital campaign only for everyone who pays for a season pass of sorts for the multiplayer.
The more Halo the better imo. Those who don't like it are quick to saying its being milked but its a still a quality shooter and has an amazing Sci Fi universe/story. What 343i did with Halo 4 was great and that was still trying to carry on the baton from bungie, now they can start a fresh in a lot of ways coming from behind bungie's shadow and actually compete with all the big devs.
I think with the Xbox One 343i will set up a spartan ops/something to work with the TV series. So weekly episodic content.
Then Multiplayer maybe along the lines of TF2 with constant updates and then bi-annual expansions/Map rotations to keep it fresh.
Then have the core game Halo 5/6/7/8/9/etc with the main campaigns and the multiplayer expansions included in the retail copy but a reduced price digital campaign only for everyone who pays for a season pass of sorts for the multiplayer.
The more Halo the better imo. Those who don't like it are quick to saying its being milked but its a still a quality shooter and has an amazing Sci Fi universe/story. What 343i did with Halo 4 was great and that was still trying to carry on the baton from bungie, now they can start a fresh in a lot of ways coming from behind bungie's shadow and actually compete with all the big devs.
TheGreyHulk
Member
get the game to 60 FPS
get rid of ordinance packages in MP
get rid of any dumb, overpowered abilities like promethean vision... never ever ever put something like that in a game again. walls aren't made to be seen through in MP unless it's glass, damnit.
put power weapons back onto the map in neutral locations or mirrored locations.
put the DMR and it's similar weapons on the map, not as class loadouts. it's too powerful to be a start out weapon unless it's only in a specific game type.
leave the mechs in. they're bad ass
definitely excited for Halo 5. I did enjoy Halo 4's campaign a lot and Halo is the one game that would get me to buy the xboner
get rid of ordinance packages in MP
get rid of any dumb, overpowered abilities like promethean vision... never ever ever put something like that in a game again. walls aren't made to be seen through in MP unless it's glass, damnit.
put power weapons back onto the map in neutral locations or mirrored locations.
put the DMR and it's similar weapons on the map, not as class loadouts. it's too powerful to be a start out weapon unless it's only in a specific game type.
leave the mechs in. they're bad ass
definitely excited for Halo 5. I did enjoy Halo 4's campaign a lot and Halo is the one game that would get me to buy the xboner
Just realized my typo, meant to incline about 4.
Caayn
Member
Depends on 343i. Are they to stubborn to see what we want for Halo 5? Or are they going to give us what we want, a true successor to the Original trilogy?
So no infinity stuff or other Call of Duty ideas. Game features (from previous games) that work from day one, not months after the release. No more lying about features and modes, that won't be in the final game. No altering to beloved community modes (Flood, Fiesta before the update). But most importantly just gives us back Halo!
Yup. 4's campaign made me sad for all the wrong reasons. Already got fatigued out of Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty series, looks like Halo is going that way too. Shame.
ebullientprism
Member
Halo 7 will bring back classic Halo!
But then we wouldn't have got the best one (ODST).
Latvian Hitman
Member
Halo 3 held down a much bigger peak population than H4 even 2+ years after its release when it was going head-to-head with MW2.
H4's MP population during launch week was 300-400k during peak hours. It fell off to 1/10th of that within a matter of months.
H4 isn't terrible, and 343 are a passionate group, and they're genuinely good people. They made a pretty good video game, just not a great Halo game. They strayed too far from the core principles that historically made Halo's MP so popular. In the interim, Treyarch, IW, and DICE have not been making this mistake with their respective franchises.
Gucci Messiah
Banned
Flawed is a better word, those claiming Halo 4 is a "terrible" game are being a bit dramatic.
People can have opinions, but it is possible for an opinion to be flat out wrong. For example, somebody could claim that in their opinion, Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States. That's fine if they want to believe that but his birth certificate, AKA hard evidence, says otherwise and makes that opinion wrong. The same applies to Halo. Someone can have their own personal opinion that Halo 4's multiplayer is better than Reach's and that's fine in regard to them alone. However, when you start to examine the statistical data and see that Halo 4 has the lowest online player base 7 months after launch than any other game in the series and that the decline was extremely sharp in comparison to the other titles, it makes that opinion hard to justify.
This isn't in direct response to you necessarily, just making a point.
Caayn
Member
Halo 3 went head-to-head with MW1, WaW and MW2. It was only after MW2 came around the corner that it began to lose momentum.
Agreed, I don't get the worshipping of the Halo 4 campaign. It's my least favorite campaign, there's too much fake drama and hollywood scenes. What happened to the mysterious and exploring parts of Halo?
I too got the dark feeling that Halo is going to be milked with yearly releases, just like Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed are now.
What is exactly concerning? I think it's better that games are considered to be parts of the saga, not parts of a trilogy. It will allow for the story of those games to be more standalone and self contained, without the situation like the original Halo trilogy, where Halo 2 merely serves as a bridge between 1 and 3 (with the infamous finishing the fight ending) and Halo 3 hastily closes threads from the previous games without explaining anything to the newcomers.
iLLmaticV3
Member
I honestly enjoyed Halo 4'a story. But if Microsoft is going to make the new trilogy a saga, I'm not interested. Not going to support the milking of a franchise with decent storytelling, at best. I'm sure there will be better multiplayer FPS's by the time Halo 5 launches. I'd rather support Bungie and their new franchise, which they don't seem to intend on milking for profit.
Gucci Messiah
Banned
Activision and Bungie both like money. This is a business, they are both going to do everything in their power to maximize profit margins. If you think Destiny isn't going to be milked if it proves to be very successful, I don't know what to tell you. I'm sorry but Activision and Bungie don't care about you, they care about your wallet.
As long as they keep Neil Davidge as the composer I'll keep buying. Marty will always have a place in my heart and i'm lookin(listening?) forward to hearing Destiny, but Halo 4's soundtrack was an eargasm! ( think Halo with a dash of Mass Effect, a pinch of Star Wars and maybe a sprinkle of Deus Ex:HR)
squidhands
Member
I consider it more of an overall disappointment than "terrible". Despite the beauty of the game's graphics, the gameplay itself was by far the most linear in the franchise. The new enemies were very poorly designed: H2 levels of bullet sponge, poor damage feedback, and the rote singular way to take out Prometheans in order to move on (Watcher, Crawler, Knight/Battlewagon/etc). Friendly AI were more glitchy than ever and I often found myself driving a warthog alone because the gunner was stuck running at a wall. The few QTE's were completely pointless, did the exact opposite of the immersion that 343 said they were going for, and actually made the end of the game an enormous letdown. Every past Halo has had several missions that I've enjoyed playing over and over again, and unfortunately Halo 4 had nothing similar.
And that's just the campaign. I was so excited to see what Spartan Ops had in store, and was looking forward to that hybrid of Firefight and campaign that 343 touted, only to get a laggy mess of enemies with one-hit-kill weapons, horrific respawn points, and "go here and press this button" objectives that were devoid of anything resembling fun. Factoring in the utter lack of theater mode and scoring for both Spartan Ops and Campaign didn't help in terms of replayability either.
I honestly don't know how the metacritic score was so high without going for my tinfoil hat, but I'm genuinely happy that someone was able to enjoy the game. When someone like GhaleonEB gets turned off by the game and stops playing it within a couple of months, that's more damning evidence about the quality of Halo 4 than I could ever produce. :-(
Why because you disagree? And what "hard facts and evidence" exactly? At the end of the day whether or not people feel H4 was a good game is only opinion and nothing more. Problem is people on the internets tend to feel "their opinions= facts".
Halo ODST is definitely good but I feel it missed it's potential by starting out as an expansion pack. Imagine ODST being akin to something like Metroid Prime where it's this 20+ hour adventure where the player actually has to do real detective work and problem solving to piece together what happened.
Latvian Hitman
Member
And even then it held onto a much bigger population than what we saw with Reach and especially what we're seeing now with H4. And all this was in spite of the fact that there were fewer 360's in homes and fewer XBL users at that point.
anexanhume
Member
Make them good and have interesting stories and I don't give a shit how many they make.
They can barely make one good game at a time HEYOOOO
I jest, but Halo 4 was rather disappointing. Unfortunately =\
Yeah, you're right. But we also wouldn't have got the worst one, 4.
That sounds kinda... ungood. Very much loved the mythos being center stage a la Halo 2, even having multiple protagonists and multiple supporting casts.
I'll happily call the game terrible. It killed my interest in the franchise for the foreseeable future. As someone who bought the OG Xbox and Xbox 360 purely for Halo I'm quite sad about Halo's current state. Both in the campaign and multiplayer 343 has made some major design choices which just don't resonate with me at all. I've made several long posts talking about my complaints regarding multiplayer, but this time I'll focus on the campaign:
-The scale of encounters is toned down.
Halo Reach already had smaller encounters than Halo 3, but Halo 4 doesn't do anything to fix that either. Battles like the ones towards the end of the The Ark or the double Scarab fight during The Covenant are nowhere to be seen in Halo 4. While playing the level with the Mammoth I was waiting for a battle against a big army, but all we got was a couple of Wraiths and a Ghost here and there at most. In total the level had quite a few vehicles, but that's only because you fought wave after wave of one Wraith and two Ghosts. I'm not sure why Scarabs didn't make it into Reach and Halo 4. Sure, after a couple of times they became easy to take down, but I feel like if they were expanded upon some great things could've come out of it.
-It's more linear than any other Halo.
This related to my previous point. Similarly, ever since Halo 3 (ODST) there's been a worrisome trend. The levels are getting more and more linear and there are less options to mix things up. Halo 1 was probably the most open of any of the Halo games. Levels like The Silent Cartographer and Halo were great examples of to gives people the option to take different approaches to certain encounters. Halo 3 also did a great job at this. While there aren't any levels quite as open as the ones I just mentioned, the levels were still designed with flexibility in mind. Halo 4 hardly had any of this. The most open level was the one with the Pelican, but in the end you didn't really do anything while flying it. So essentially the level was just three (?) linear encounters in one. Being able to mix things up was what made Halo so excellent for replayability which is something Halo 4 sorely misses, partly because of this.
-Promethean enemies are badly designed.
343 had the opportunity to do something Bungie never did: create completely new enemy types that would freshen up the campaign after 10 years of Elites, Grunts and Jackals. The result, to me, was quite disappointing. Initially I was pretty excited about the idea of the Promethean working closely together, but after playing it felt really lacking. The only unit that actually interact with his allies was the Watcher. It shielded Knights and even revived them after they died. Knights and Robodogs didn't really acknowledge their allies at all. This resulted in the Watcher being a priority target every single time there was a fight against Prometheans. Why bother killing knights first if the Watcher can revive them anyway? It made the fights less flexible as a result, especially compared to fights against the Covenant.
A bigger issue I had with the Promethean was how they felt like bullet sponges much more than the Covenant ever did. (Halo 2 Brutes were pretty bad, but even those died with a couple of headshots) Where with the Covenant you can quickly drains shields with Plasma weaponry there was no such thing with the Prometheans. Yes, you could drain their shields with Plasma weapons, but during most encounters with them there weren't any Covenant around to drop Plasma weapons. So you ended up mostly using either Human or Promethean weapons, both of which weren't effective at range. The Suppressorwas decent, but on higher difficulty levels getting up close with Knights is not recommended. Combine the lack of Plasma weaponry with the fact that the shields of the Knights are barely visible and recharge incredibly quickly and you've got a frustrating enemy. That's without even taking into account the teleporting and their screwed up head hitboxes.
-The story is a mess
The stories in Halo games were never that great to being with, but until Halo 4 there were at least fairly contained. Reach already made it a bit muddy by adding Halsey without even explaining who she is, but Halo 4 truly is a mess. If you hadn't read the books you'd have no idea who you're fighting or why have even hates humanity to begin with. The terminals to decent job at explaining some of this stuff, but they're not even viewable in the game itself. You have to go to Youtube or the Waypoint app to watch them. Something which I can safely assume rarely anybody does midgame. Even if you could watch them as soon as you unlocked a terminal it wouldn't have be great, because a lot of people miss out of them this way. They should've been woven into the gameplay and cutscenes in the game itself to work.
-It's too 'game-y'
Keep in mind, this is a relatively small complaint. It's about how 343's Halo feels less natural than those of Bungie. Quick Time Events, the same button press animation a million times, a predator strike section, calling in 'airstrikes' with the target designator, those short ingame cutscenes, that kinda stuff. Stuff like that never made it into Bungie Halo games for good reason. Halo was about dropping you into and environment and letting you do whatever you want. Those things I mentioned just now take you out of it and make it less... sandbox-y if that makes sense. They're unnecessary small things that when added up annoy me quite a bit. Another example of the difference between 343 and Bungie is the comparison between the The Maw Hog run and the Halo 4 Ghost run. You can see enemy troops run away during both these sequences, but there's a difference between how they're handled in both. In Halo 1 you can see Covenant fighting Flood, you can see squads made out of Elites and Grunts running toward safety. It all feels very natural and doesn't feel out of place. During the Halo 4 Ghost run you see nearly a hundred Grunts all running in a straight line doing the exact same animation. They look like they're placed there to give the player some cheap free kills. It feels fake. Again, these aren't major issues, but it does make me appreciate Bungie.
I won't argue that Halo 4 wasn't a commercial success, but from a personal point of view I definitely consider it terrible. The aspects that I liked most about Halo have been mostly ripped out or butchered so much that I can no longer support 343.
Gucci Messiah
Banned
The problem is that the data contradicts your opinion. You can have your own thoughts on a game which is fine, but you can also be wrong in your assessment.
http://neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=65368196&postcount=279