Believe it or not, Halo 4 is right around the corner. It is now March, and we can expect the game to be released in the next six to eight months from now. They finally released bits of information on the game. What we can draw from the video (as vague as it may have been), and the history of Halo, we can presume that it’s about time to get excited.
Halo 1, the beacon of hope in the franchise - what many other first person shooters try to be and future installments of Halo try to match, was a rushed development in the end. For example, the multiplayer so many of us are fond of was merely a game mode Bungie slapped on. As deceased artist, Bob Ross would say, it was a happy accident.
Halo 2 was a revolution. They gave us the ability to board vehicles, dual wield weapons, Xbox Live matchmaking, and implemented an impressive clan system that has yet to be rivaled.
Halo 3 was the attempt to take everything they created, and make it bigger. They gave us more vehicles, more weapons/weapon types (support weapons i.e. missile pod), Forge, Theatre, and equipment.
Halo: Reach was the attempt to take what made Halo 3 great, streamline the process, while trying to cater to retroactive players (fans who want an experience more akin to Halo 1), while innovating Firefight.
The campaigns all had their own evolutions. Halo 2 attempted to give the Covenant more personality, while Halo 3 helped players empathize with the Covenant, being stuck on a death march when their leaders go blind through questionable faith. Halo: Reach taught us the desperation of the warriors who gave everything to humanity’s greatest war, emphasizing the inevitable victory they would face through the humanity they share.
With the new tech, we can take a page from Halo 1 to understand how Halo 4 will emphasize massive environments. Halo 1 used an engine and graphics the original Xbox had little problem processing. This allowed the feel of more massive environments we so rarely got to experience in the later installments.
In Halo 1 they also had better competitive maps that helped birth MLG. The maps were not crafted as cookie-cutter scraps from the Campaign. They were made for the sake of competitiveness and well balanced gameplay in head to head combat.
From the video we saw, they are doing just that yet again. 343 proclaimed they are not grabbing the environments out of Campaign, and that their main target is to manufacture competitive, balanced environments for fair, intense gameplay.
We are also fortunate that 343 is going to make the Campaign a more personal story. Yes, we will be playing as Master Chief - a super soldier and will feel like a super soldier. Physically, he’s a tank. But now we will delve into his emotions more. Emotions can be all the more mortalizing (I know, it’s not a word) than physical ailments.
Personally, I think 343 is going to bring us a clan feature back. I also think they’re going to give us a more massive, battleground-like multiplayer mode with alternating, heavily team-dependent objectives. They say they have learned from past installments, so they would really want to emphasize lasting appeal, both in Campaign replay value and multiplayer lasting appeal. This is what I have drawn from the information they had recently shared.
What are your thoughts? Do my ideas sound accurate? Are you excited yet? What plans do you think 343 could/should implement for better lasting appeal? What should they implement from past games or take out?