What if Halo 4 went by a different name, and it was completely unaffiliated with the Halo series? Still the exact same game, same devs, what have you, it justs completely out of the Halo context. Let’s call it…‘Infinity Warfare’ or something. Better yet, let’s pretend the Halo series doesn’t even exist.*
There are numerous factors as to why we don’t like Halo 4, and among these is the fact that Halo 4 in so many regards goes against what we know to be the trademark Halo kind of gameplay, especially as a main entry starring the Chief. Compared to the original trilogy, it’s even more spin-offish than Reach was in regards to gameplay. We know what made Halo the best first person shooter and more recently we’ve learned that changing those things has critically inhibited Halo’s success in regards to player retention. So many players (be them uninformed casuals or hardcore players alike) bought Halo 4 because Master Chief was on the cover art. These consumers, of course, used basic logic and related Master Chief to the other games he was on the cover of. These prior games, Halo CE, 2, and 3, had the trademark Halo experience. When these consumers, regardless of playstyle or amount of love for the series, discovered that the it was just a let down, that the ‘Master Chief Deception’ had worked them over…the majority of normally retained players simply upped and left.
BUT…what if, like I said above, Halo 4 was completely unaffiliated with the Halo series and was called something else, because the Halo series doesn’t exist in this scenario. This game, Infinity Warfare, everyone would be buying the game and going into multiplayer completely unencumbered by predisposed notions of how the game and series should play, because they’ve never played it and DON’T KNOW.
If we found ourselves in this scenario, what would your opinion of ‘Infinity Warfare’ be? How would it differ from that of Halo 4’s?
For me, I’d generally be a lot more happier. The way I see it, is that Halo is always the top-dawg as for as shooters go for me. Halo 1-3 was kind of like the king of kings, and Halo 4 is kind of…JUST a king. Halo 4 is a pretty bad Halo game for me, but Halo 4 out of context of the rest of Halo, and compared to other games…it’s still a lot better. If Halo never existed, and this game Infinity Warfare came along, I’d be all over it, because I’d be clueless as to just how much better games could be. (Halo 1-3)
*Ignoring the paradox of other popular FPS series existing, since if Halo was never made, FPSs would be radically different or hardly popular at all.