This a long read. TL:DR at bottom.
We all know that Halo 4 is undoubtedly in almost every regard, the best looking Halo game when you’re in the action. You can see the tiny specks and scratches on your gun, you can see the colored hexagons of your gauntlets on your fingertips, and you can see the very pretty particles from explosions and so on and so forth.
But what about when you’re not in the frenetic battlefield, when you’re off on your own for what ever reason? You may be in Forge pondering over your inevitably insane methods to manifest your ideas into the digital playspace, or you are in the boots of Master Chief and taking a short interlude between skirmishes with Requiem’s natives.
When you’re in these scenarios and surely others, have you ever just looked around you and thought to yourself ‘I want to explore this area completely and know it’s secrets’? I know I and other people have but alas there is a sad reality to our exploratory ambitions in Halo 4. Look out to the distance in game, 90% of the time…it’s just a background, a picture, a pretty wallpaper. Looking at it by itself without close inspection, it’s beautiful and nice, but it’s not actually ‘real’.
In EVERY past Halo game (excluding wars), the backgrounds were real 3D objects that had detail and all that, the stuff you’d expect to find in your play space. Some set pieces even stretched on for literal kilometers in game. It just went on forever. Granted, there usually wasn’t too many interesting things past a few hundred meters, the fact it was like that was really cool.
You may think, ‘Oh whine whine whine over another insignificant detail!’ like other people may indeed do, but I’ll tell that maybe not a majority of players care about what’s ‘out there’, the act of tricking and glitching out of maps has long been a tradition in Halo for meta gamers. Sure, what’s over the hills and far away wasn’t meant for the player to see, it’s defintiely added replayability to campaigns. For example, Reach didn’t have the best campaign ever, and I would not have replayed it but maybe a handful of times if it were not for tricking out of maps.
Believe it or not, it was lots of fun treading the unbeaten path. Heck, half the fun was trying to figure out how to get out of the levels. Reach made it the most hard to get out of levels, but it also had the most level of details outside the beaten path. Then there Something about exploring the limbo-ish lands of unfinished areas places was ominous, curious, and exciting. Pair this with the fact there was SO MUCH out there and get a couple of friends? You’ll be exploring for hours. Did you know there were some easter eggs in game that either REQUIRED you to go out the map or LET you go outside once you completed the easter egg? Or what about in Halo 3, you could glitch out of current areas of the level back to other unloaded areas? Or what about in ODST where you could butterfly jump up a 90 degree corner past shield walls and into the unused areas of New Mombasa? You could do these! You could explore.
Here is a video for reference.
Now, back to Halo 4. Simple fact is, there is mostly nothing out there except a picture, in a few cases you may get past a few soft kill zones, but the rest of the time if you ever somehow managed to actually get out there past the absurd amount of invisible walls and soft kill zones, you’ll just fall into a void and fall forever. This reduces campaign replayability by a lot. This kind of fun was sacrificed for better ‘immediate’ graphics. I’ll admit, huge areas you can’t normally get to takes a hit to the RAM. Probably a huge hit. I just somehow think they could have made the immediate graphics -somewhat- better and retained the huge levels. Perhaps if they didn’t spend half the RAM on the gimmick of dressing up your toy soldier, who knows.
Beyond this, it seems as if they wanted to keep things consistant among campaign and multiplayer. The same kind of restrictions are in place and even more. Pretty wallpapers, invisible walls and soft kill zones. These soft kill zones are very liberal as well, just try to walk along the edge of the map in Complex. NO, YOU CANNOT STAND ON THAT BIG ROCK ITS NOT AALLOOOWWEEEED. Some of these even taunt you to no end, the back of the map on Vortex looks fully rendered and so close you can almost taste it. You would not die from fall damage getting there, but no. You can’t go there. If you want people to not go places, make REAL preventative geometry, not misleading areas with a LOLNO countdown timer. Putting that there is just completely lazy developing and makes every player sad about what could have been.
Along with the likes of the aforementioned, HLGing and tactical spots may as well be dead now. Many few HLG as losers who hide because they can’t win, and while I say it is a legit tactic I can understand where it is pretty much a jerk move. However, there were many spots in past games and countless ones in Reach that were simply ‘tactical’ spots. Good vantage points, good line of sight spots, etc. You made yourself wide open to the risk of being killed super quick for the advantage of sight lines. It was a very fair trade off.
Now almost every spot like that in Halo 4 maps have soft kill zones or invisible walls. The same logic still applies in this game, if you’re up high with no cover you’ll have good lines of sight and you can be killed quick. Hell, you can die much faster in this game. Killtimes are much quicker and now you have Promethean Vision. If you can’t kill someone from their tactical spot, you’re just a bad player, no other reason.
But instead of letting players think outside the box in Halo 4, 343i completely and artificially restricts player movement, tactics, and clever thinking with the things I’ve mentioned. LOLNO countdown timers and lazy developing AKA invisible walls. The only time invisible walls are okay is if you have aerial vehicles, the rest of the time a much more professional developing method is making real geometry.
Look, I still like this game, and there are improvements. Combat is better, immediate graphics are astounding, and it’s fun. It could have been so much funner if 343i didn’t sacrifice huge levels for immediate graphics and if they didn’t completely lazily and artificially restrict player thought and tactics.
P.S: I’ve still found spots to hide in and get a leg up, 343i.
TL:DR: Campaign has fake wallpaper backgrounds that completely destroys out of level exploration and glitcihing. Multiplayer has so many invisible walls and soft kill zones it isn’t funny. Totally inhibits creative player tactics.