With only a month until the Second Coming of Master Chief, I’m sure all us Halo fans are eagerly awaiting the time when we can flip over the October calender page and finally hold the game within our hands.
Now, Halo 4 is the only game I know of that has a 2012 release and is dumping SO MUCH information onto the users. Hell, Assassin’s Creed III comes out before Halo 4 does and we probably know less about the former. Of course, with all of these revelations come discussions and the asking of the question “Where is Halo going?”. Now, I don’t mean that in a generally bad way, but after seeing how many additions are being made to the Halo structure, it’s hard to see nothing but catastrophe.
Halo fans have always pride themselves over the fact that while most other FPS games today tend to focus on things like “Perks”, “Killstreaks” and “Custom Loadouts”, Halo has generally stuck to it’s Arena FPS roots, and instead has focused far more on skill and teamwork than “eyespy” and “twitch-shooting”. However, whether you want to admit it or not, Halo 4 seems to adopting all of these trends that many Halo fans have deemed “tacky” and simply detrimental to gameplay, favoring those who play the game longer than those who play it better just for the sake of drawing in the “casual” crowd. Instead of creating a skill gap, this creates a level gap where lower-leveled players are simply too outclassed by other players, only because the latter was granted the better weapons and abilities. Well I’m sure we won’t get anything as game-breaking as the Blops FAMAS or Martyr, the whole idea still makes me very worried about the direction 343i is taking with Halo.
Now, Halo 4 isn’t the first game to adopt features from Call of Duty, and it certainly won’t be the last. Games like Bioshock 2, Crysis 2, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and Revelations have all adopted “CoD-like” features in the hope of making their games more enjoyable for the masses, but generally only end up shooting themselves in the foot. The thing is: people who enjoy Call of Duty don’t just enjoy it for petty things like making their gun purple or having multiple game-shattering perks, they like it for the actual fast-paced gameplay. If a progressive system with perks and loadouts was all it took to entice the average CoD player, then games like Revelations and Brotherhood wouldn’t have a piss-poor population.
Yes, yes, I know fans have already gotten some hands-on time with Halo 4 at some press event and they’re all proclaiming “OHMEHGAWD HAY-LOW IZ BAX!!”. Thing is, I can’t take these claims seriously because I just don’t think you can fully understand a game just because you’ve played an hour or two of it. Hell, when I first played Call of Duty I remember thinking “This is actually pretty fun!”, but then after I played a few matches I went from that to “I don’t want to play this anymore…”
TL;DR: I am concerned that Halo 4’s new addition will potentially only end up detracting from the game’s enjoyment.
Well, that was my two cents. How do you feel about the additions to Halo 4’s multiplayer? Do you believe that 343i will manage to balance all of these Perks and Specializations so that new players (to Halo 4, not necessarily to Halo)will still be able to engage them in combat without getting their -Yoinks!- completely handed to them, Or do you think that the new additions will only serve to weigh Halo 4 down and prevent it from being the masterpiece we know it can be?
