> It changed things a little too much from what a lot of the old crowd really enjoyed. And many, many features were cut.
I’d argue that the latter was more important. I noticed with Reach that a lot of what kept people going after the campaign and multi-player was the forge options and the like. The vast amounts of tools you were given to play with and fiddle about with added a large amount of replayability to the game. Halo 4’s Forge was what could be charitably called a “cliff notes” version.
> Given some of the things 343 Industries has pulled with the story aspect of Halo, in the games and books mind you, I wouldn’t mind if Halo had just stopped.
Yes, the… questionable decision to have the Destroyer of Intellectual Properties be set loose in the Halo Franchise after she’d already wrecked the Star Wars EU and had Gears of War’s expanded universe scrambling for damage control was a very questionable one, and I would love to get my hands on the minutes from that meeting…
> As for everything else, it isn’t about them not copying Bungie either, it is about them keeping Halo from having a set identity. Did Halo 4 really do anything to set itself out from the crowd of modern shooters? Not really.
They had some good ideas at their core, its just that the implementation had been botched horribly and 343i was strangely… obstinate, I guess, is the best way to put it, when it came to responding to the fans concerns. You could say that they’ve had a great deal of trouble admitting that they’ve screwed up and swallowing their pride.
Hmmm… come to think of it, that creates a disturbingly apt comparison between 343i and their would-be break out character, Sarah Palmer. How very curious.
> As for the story, I didn’t like the campaign very much. Too much of the story relied on having read the books. I felt lost throughout most of it. I found Spartan Ops to be much better.
I found it quite the opposite myself. I rather loved the campaign for its focus on building up the Chief’s character and the like (though I will be the first to agree with you that there should have been time taken to explain, in the game, that you were fighting a Covenant splinter faction (Lasky, Del-Rio, or Palmer could all have very easily filled the Chief in on this during one of the cutscenes) and to explain why the Didact, thus far presented in-game as a noble upstanding idealist per the Halo 3 terminals, is suddenly a kill-crazy psychopath with a frothing-at-the-mouth hatred for all things Human (i.e. there’s two of them, and this is not the one you read about in Halo 3. This could have been explained by the Librarian)). The result of not explaining this resulted in a disconnect and a lot of confusion among the player base. I’m all for including the EU more, just, well, if you’re going to do that, make sure that those who haven’t had a chance to familiarize themselves with it won’t be confused in game (i.e. a little contextual exposition, 343i, this is basic storywriting 101)).
Spartan Ops… ooooohhhh, don’t get me started on that mess. I’ve read higher quality fanfictions than that literary piece of garbage that Brian Reed or whoever the heck has editorial control over him has tried to force down our throats.