I have seen on these forums a lot of mentioning about the campaign on halo 4 being boring and not wanting to play through again. When I look back on Halo 2 and 3 I must have played through those campaigns hundreds of times.
So why does Halo 4 not have this impact? In my opinion this applied for reach as well but I think its a multiplayer experience system that rewards the length of time playing the game. In halo 3 I played multiplayer matchmaking in its last year before reaches release and still felt the need to play through campaign. This was because you earn’t exp for wins and a grade through ranked matches.
Then when reach was released a majority of people including myself got sucked into this earning credits to go up levels and earn armour. You got credits for campaign but it was nothing compared to matchmaking and the almighty horde of credits for firefight. People where not interested in the story any more and only making their Spartan look good.
Then the same system was in play for Halo 4. You get drawn in to play matchmaking and earn the specialisations and armour variants. As a consequence people are less likely to play through the campaign cause they don’t get rewarded like the do in matchmaking. Halo as franchise always did a brilliant job of telling a story, a story people followed for over 10 years but I feel the story may have been overshadowed by the multiplayer experience.
As a final note I do enjoy multiplayer and I am willing to admit I have fallen for the gimmicks of multiplayer and making your Spartan look awesome with no significance to gameplay. I started this thread to see what other people think made the campaign not as goods as the previous titles
I actually find it fun. Although Halo’s campaign has low replay value to me due to Online multiplayer, I found it alot of fun, more so than Reach.
At least the story started, added new characters, kept them mostly from making plot holes, and ended it. Unlike Halo 2 where it started and stopped, and Halo 3 where it continued without us and ended.
It’s really good, but I just play them for the story, then the achievements, and then I’m just about done with them.
the campaign seems very laborious to me. goal or trigger at the end of a level and tons of enemies in the way, nothing really to it. It looks great but I actually remember H3 and Reach’s campaign as more memorable than Halo 4. Don’t get me wrong it was fun and had a couple nice moments with Cortana but on a bigger scale I found it lacking in some areas. activate this or de-activate that, kinda un-inspiring to me, much like the Sp Ops missions. just my 2 cents
Try and remember more than five encounters CLEARLY and IN DETAIL from one mission of this campaign. Encounters you ENJOYED.
Now that you’ve got a headache, try and do the same for any of the other Halo campaigns, maybe even ODST.
I didn’t hate the campaign, but I didn’t like it. There was nothing special about it, and there was nothing particularly memorable that didn’t involve me groaning and cringing (like QTE ending and the occasional bit of frustration with the Promethean dogs respawning so much)
Hell, the only thing I can remember clearly was when one of my marines fired his first shots (after about six minutes of fighting, the patient -Yoink-) at a dead dogbot, screaming “TAKE THAT, YOU ALIEN SCUM!”
> Well, you see, the enemy design is poor, the environment design is poor, and the encounter design is often poor too.
>
> The Promtheans are just more overpowered and annoying versions of Covenant enemies.
>
> The environments often too simple, and give you no space or alternate angles.
>
> And their encounter design is mostly about dropping a lot of enemies all in the same place.
>
> This goes triple for Spartan Ops.
The whole campaign is linear - the only choices you have in path is on the open sections like the loading bay or the open plane where you use the Mantis. Everything else is “go down corridor, fight bad guys in room, repeat.”
In the other Halos, you could decide - high/low, left/right, through the front door/sneak and snipe. “Do I go out on the patio and meet them as they drop, or wait until they come through the doors to the concourse?” “Take out the guys on the ground first, or the ones on top of the hill?” “Do I try and bypass this group, and get to the ammo dump and hit them from behind?”
> I have seen on these forums a lot of mentioning about the campaign on halo 4 being boring and not wanting to play through again. When I look back on Halo 2 and 3 I must have played through those campaigns hundreds of times.
> So why does Halo 4 not have this impact?
I think those are excellent points, with all the incentive programs focused on multiplayer the campaign, though by comparison an experience with much greater integrity, doesn’t recieve the attention it deserves. Another part of it may simply be that after playing the campaigns from Halo 1, 2, and 3 hundreds of times over the basic Halo format of “go kill -Yoink-” can’t have quite the same impact as it once did, but considering where the focus was in at least Halo 3 (improving the AI, adding equipment to their repertoire to make combat more varied, adding new types of encounters like the Scarab battles) there has to be more than that. Halo Reach simply tried to be yet another Halo game and Halo 4 was all about adding a new type of enemy (which can be said only to be a different variety of the same level of AI we’ve fought before.)
So I think on multiple levels the campaign has been upstaged, 343 has put a lot of effort into making multiplayer the thing to play even though they had a lot of potential to make the campaign stand out for the first time since Halo 1. They could have included a progression system (supplemental or tangential to Infinity’s) or more basically could have done more with the resources that I think were wasted trying to make Multiplayer worth something again (when I think that’s almost an impossibility at this point. For however long we’ve played the campaign we’ve generally played multiplayer a whole lot more so the point of “simply getting bored with it” becomes I think to many a deciding factor.) Better AI, completely different ways of interacting with each other and the player (the watchers are a start but they still fall short of what’s needed for the entire sandbox), new types of encounters, more involving level design than what just seemed like stringed out multiplayer maps (perhaps except for the jungle and research station), and perhaps a bit of non-linearity to up the replay value tremendously (different paths, different AI spawns with each playthrough.) Also, new skulls! It was lazy of Bungie to copy and paste the set from Halo 3 to Reach a few years ago. For 343 to have done it now is reprehensible.
Anyway, 343 could have done a lot for Halo 4 to make the campaign great and to make it the social hub that matchmaking sorely isn’t. But that shouldn’t stand in the way of making that change over for Halo 5. We don’t need so many multiplayer levels, not when that need can be satisfied with a small set of highly variable forge maps, we don’t need so many gimmicks, we don’t need most of what’s offered in matchmaking now. What we need is new content in more than just the technical sense “oh, well you haven’t killed this particular NPC model before” and unless 343 is going to revolutionize multiplayer, to tear it down and build it back from the ground up, then the effort should go to the other side of the game which has some hope of making us all happy again.
I Halo 2, I could explore the maps like crazy, not to mention the scarab gun, and scattered easter eggs, and SKULLS YOU ACTUALLY HAD TO FIND, but no 343 forgot about those.
I liked the campain for the first time, now im doing legendary. Reach had more replay value. Doing the challanges were fun in reach. Im just missing something in Halo 4. Not sayin the campain is bad, not at all.
Maybe it hasn’t been mentioned cause it’s pretty near perfect? I loved it! I haven’t replayed it as much cause the games only been out 2 months…not 5 years.
A thought I didn’t express in the op was I think the lack of reward in campaign helped make it less desirable to play. It’s almost as if people don’t play a game for a story only for a pixelated picture to brag about or inflate and already bulging ego.
Not saying this applies to all to appears to be the common perception.
> I Halo 2, I could explore the maps like crazy, not to mention the scarab gun, and scattered easter eggs, and SKULLS YOU ACTUALLY HAD TO FIND, but no 343 forgot about those.
That’s why loved Halo 2, Finding skulls was actually fun
> > Well, you see, the enemy design is poor, the environment design is poor, and the encounter design is often poor too.
> >
> > The Promtheans are just more overpowered and annoying versions of Covenant enemies.
> >
> > The environments often too simple, and give you no space or alternate angles.
> >
> > And their encounter design is mostly about dropping a lot of enemies all in the same place.
> >
> > This goes triple for Spartan Ops.
>
> The whole campaign is linear - the only choices you have in path is on the open sections like the loading bay or the open plane where you use the Mantis. Everything else is “go down corridor, fight bad guys in room, repeat.”
>
> In the other Halos, you could decide - high/low, left/right, through the front door/sneak and snipe. “Do I go out on the patio and meet them as they drop, or wait until they come through the doors to the concourse?” “Take out the guys on the ground first, or the ones on top of the hill?” “Do I try and bypass this group, and get to the ammo dump and hit them from behind?”
>
> I feel there are a lot fewer choices in Halo 4.
actually after palying on legendary there are many different paths for combat encounters. on 04 there are upper walkways that you can progress on and get different angles. 03 same thing when fighting coveies and provies there are extra walkways, off to the side. all of the levels have these things, there are more options than halo 3 and halo 2…
As much as I hate to say it and this is what Cliff Bleszinski said before Gears of War 3 launched “Shooters these days shouldn’t be a campaign rental anymore.” Now it wasn’t word for word, but that’s pretty much what he said.
Halo 4’s campaign is really sweet, however that’s the only sweetest thing people will find when they look at Halo 4. Spartan Ops is only available online and only available to you the first five episodes.
