The op points out a common problem with gaming in general. People buy games and have way to high an expectation of the content, or have expectations that at odds with the actual game information and content.
Personaly I have no real “hangups” when it comes to gaming. I play every genre and lots of different titles in the same genre’s. I also take every game “as it comes” and judge it on its own merits. I dont look to previous titles and have any expectations of the next iteration. I just look at whats there and how good or bad it is to me. Ive done that since the 80’s with every game Ive played.
Not a lot of people do that. Infact its more likely that people are opposite of me and based all of the expectations of a new title on past iterations. Which is probably why we get so many disgruntled gamers these days.
Now imo for what its worth; Halo 4 on its own merits, is a good fun game. It has issues of balance and performance but these can be overcome via patching. Im not a “fan”, I have no emotional attachments to games and certainly not to Halo. I enjoy playing them, but I maintain a rational outlook. On this basis I see there are quiet a few issues with how Halo 4 currently plays and I have a few suggestions to resolve those in various ways. But none of them involve ripping out parts of the game, nor adding in fundamental changes to the way it currently plays.
Why? Because I think that fundamentaly its a good game and better than previous Halo games for enjoyment. Scoff if you will, and respond with your claims of H3 superiority in X or Y department and throw number around. That is your opinion, you are entitled to it.
But when it comes to facts, the are…well facts. FPS shooters these days are 10 a penny. Because of this “Arena” style FPS games no longer have the player support they used to have. Other games have superceeded them in popularity. The ones still going that have an active playerbase are the very players that are NOT going to move on to another title any time soon. And thats fine, and as it should be. People like X over Y and decide to continue with X instead. Normal behaviour.
The irrationality is in expecting more players than a previous title from several years ago when FPS shooters were NOT as “10 a penny” as they are now, and were relatively sidelined compared to other bigger titles of the time (The early MMO craze for instance). One can even say of the FPS titles there were of the time of H3, even it was not as popular as some, BF2 is a prime example. Way way bigger playerbase than H3 could ever wish for at the time. So on numbers alone we dont get an accurate representation of how much has changed in that time between the “then” and the “now”.
Now to put all of this in to context; Gaming evolves and changes every year in some way or another. A new device can come along and change the demographics, or a particular franchise might see an exploision of customers, while at the same time older styles of play are left at the wayside because they are not as popular anymore. Look at hot-seat gaming, thats practically dead these days with a handfull of titles having options for it, it being replaced with online gaming instead.
H4 is a new direction for Halo. “Fans” are just going to have to bite the bullet at realise that this is how its going to be from now on. Major sweeping changes to the H4 are not going to happen, but improvements to its implementation can be done. We as gamers just have to build a concensus on what are critical changes needed to existing mechanics and what are prefferable changes, and what if any minor changes we would like to see.