It kinda feels like a downgrade to Halo 5…I can’t believe I just said that. -_-
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Im pretty sure that this has been established and it could have been foreseen before release tbh…
I don’t think may people claim that Halo should never look for outside inspiration. People have a problem with blindly adopting mechanics just because some market research team thinks a „modern“ game needs this because game X has it as well…
Which Halo 4 really didn’t do…
To stick to your car analogy: what happened during the 2010s wasn’t adopting a safety feature. It was looking at the most selling car and remodeling your own cars to look exactly like it, obviously they would still retain some of their internal designs but if you want to buy a SUV or any other bigger car that has now been shrunken and redesigned to look like a WV Golf just because it’s the best selling car, you will be upset.
The sprinting in H4 just lets people run away from fights when thery would normally lose them for being worse or putting themselves in a bad spot. Sprinting doesn’t create “faster gameplay” just because you can go somewhere quicker.
Loadouts are bad and have no business in Halo. It’s not Call of Duty or Battlefield and 343 realized that and took them out. Everyone spawning with a plasma pistol and stickies in BTB is definitely not “variety”. I won’t even bother going into how bad people spawning with a Boltshot and Promethean Vision are.
The vehicles in Infinite are worse than H4. The warthog gun can kill faster but the vehicles are made of paper and easily get flipped over.
The hit detection is only good in Halo 4 because it’s so stupidly easy to hit someone. You do not have to try at all to 4 shot someone with a BR. There is too much autoaim and the hitboxes are the sizes of a truck. The beam rifle hitbox for example is so big it’s easier to noscope with it than snipe.
If you want to play Halo 4 that’s fine, but it is definitely not what people wanted in a Halo game and the only reason I would want to go back to it is to not even put any sort of thought into my gameplay.
Bullet Magnetism was cranked up to 11 in that game. I think they turned it down a little in June of 2013 when they did a weapons balancing update.
And without that distinction you always have a fallback to go to incase someone says something not convenient for you.
It’s still a quote.
Doesn’t mean any other “nonsensical” quote is less of a quote. By all sense and purposes, those are still quotes.
Or, you know, people quote each other to answer things, like on this forum. When you literally press a “Quote” button and it copy pastes what’s marked into a code-block conveniently named “Quote”.
Or, just to repeat what someone else said, which is what a quote is, regardless of the intention of the individual doing the quoting.
Nothing to do with quoting.
Context and interpreting a quote has nothing to do with the quote itself.
That has no implication of quoting, or what constitutes a quote.
You say or write something which others find worthy of being quoted.
That’s others quoting you.
Sure, you can quote yourself, as long as you attribute it to yourself, but that is a meaningless endeavour which removes the importance of what you said, to lighting a light on yourself for what you said, how “clever” you’ve been to come up with something. You move focus from what you said to you who said it.
People quote anything for whatever reason they have.
Internal jokes are sometimes completely random quotes which are nonsense to any outsider, but a meaning if you were there to experience it.
There is no actual “golden rule” when it comes to sequels.
Some stuff works, some doesn’t.
Putting together some fancy wording and calling it a day doesn’t cut it.
That’s all there is to it.
Diablo has thrived through and through despite its big differences between each main title.
The Thor trilogy saw a big upswing with Ragnarok, even though it’s radically different from its predecessors.
Then CSGO is there with a few big releases but very small changes, and is one of the biggest games in history.
Adhering to old aspects surely help keep the spirit of whatever you’re doing.
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Stopped reading after the Halo 4 comparison. H4 is a worthless piece of dogsh–. Sorry you don’t have million buttons of useless, worthless animations besides sprint and clamber to make your no skill game “modern” in your eyes.
If that were true, then every sequel that went against my proposed Golden Rule would’ve been heralded as a masterpiece, instead of a point of contention that caused unnecessary divides within the fandom.
The point is when you make a sequel that is so much unlike the source material, it riles people up and we feel cheated out of the experience we were promised.
What if Harry Potter decided to forgo magic wands in the sequels and instead use magic crystals; and depending on which crystal you used you would get certain spells? It is something that changes a core dynamic of the writing material, the world within, and causes a divide in the fans over whether or not wands or crystals would be the proper way the narrative should’ve shifted towards.
Or what if Voldemort was just some minion of an even bigger bad guy that was not mentioned or alluded to for the entirety of seven books, so now we had a whole new threat that has had no buildup and might be over-shadowed by a more fleshed out minion-villain?
Sticking with what works and making minor tweaks is how sequels work.
And that is where Halo 4 failed.
- New Art Style
- New Combat Style
- Loadouts in multiplayer
- New enemy faction out of nowhere
- An antagonist that only talks down to you from afar and you get no real boss-battle out of it.
- Ret-cons made to allow the story to even exist in the first place
- Most of what was set-up would not come back in the next game because the writers focused more on extra media rather than making each entry its own isolated narrative.
Spin-offs are where experimental gameplay shines without causing much discourse among the dedicated fans.
- Halo 3 ODST gave us jazz-noir nights while giving us classic Halo high-intensity combat during the daytime missions. ODSTs were slightly different than Spartans in execution with weaker melees, inability to use equipment, and health-kits.
- Halo Wars was an RTS game made to emulate what it must be like to command the legions of the Covenant or the armies of the UNSC, and unlike most other RTS games at the time; you had to control certain locations rather than build wherever you wanted.
- Halo Reach let us take on the Covenant as Noble Team rather than just being a one-man army, and it let us see some of the darkest realities of the Human-Covenant War. Gameplay gave us Armor Abilities in lieu of equipment. Grittier art-style to match the grim desolation of Reach.
- Spartan Assault and Spartan Strike were fun little mobile games, top down arcade-type shooters.
- Fireteam Raven was an arcade cabinet that told a different perspective of the original game, keeping closer in line to the book of Halo The Flood, and was an on-the-rails shooter.
Spin-Offs are allowed to deviate from the established norm so long as it doesn’t deviate too far from the ideals and values of the main story. In each of these games, we are still fighting The Covenant in uphill battles. Their gameplay styles are vastly different and their story-telling devices are different; but all fit in seamlessly to the main story of Halo.
It is an unessessary risk to dynamicly change a direct sequel into something that hardly resembles the game that came before it. The exception to this rule is when the game before it was a little known title, or was well over a decade old and it took years to make a sequel. A few great examples are -
- Dark Void
- Prey
- Doom
- Half-Life
Change is okay, but if the game before it is still fresh in the minds of the fans, it is best for subtle change instead of drastic ones.
My Golden Rule exists as a guideline to prevent such problems from occurring. It is a rule I developed upon seeing how many franchises decided to bend-over-backwards to re-invent themselves into something else, only to cause more problems that could’ve been avoided with any sort of foresight. Ironic, considering that Prometheus is the Titan of Forethought, and yet the Prometheans of Halo 4 had hardly any forethought in their design.
Another way to put it is -
“If it isn’t broken, don’t break it just so you can fix it and act like you did us a favor. You still broke something of ours and your attempt at fixing it wasn’t exactly a professional job.”
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Oh okay troll. Call of halo is not better than CE, 2, 3, reach, 5, or infinite.
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Overly simplistic? No - especially compared to H4. Have you seen the advanced movement techniques for HI? Sure they aren’t as numerous as in H5 (yet), but compared to H4 it’s a world of difference. I agree that halo infinite has some technical issues that need sorting out (namely server sync, melee collision, and custom game saves). That being said, H4 want perfect either (it was unplayable split screen because of <<30fps, and textures looked really bad in splitscreen too - LOD was messed up).
Purely subjective. I find it far more fun than H4. When H4 released it felt like a downgrade from previous halos. It took away a lot of the for identity of halo - that was the first halo I stopped playing only a couple months in. When H5 came out, I didn’t love it, but I said to myself “thank God they didn’t mess it up like H4”
Define “modern”. I disagree that it is. It cloned a bunch of mechanics that didn’t really fit with halo and completely ruined game flow in the process.
You are being extremely insincere here. People aren’t talking about those mechanics (which aren’t unique to cod), they are talking about features/ mechanics that are unique to COD when they make the comparison.
Namely:
- loadouts with a similar structure to how you design your layout (primary +secondary weapon, grenade, perks) with some perks even mirroring those from COD. At the same time they diluted the weapon sandbox (like cod) where multiple weapons all fill the same role
- kill-streak-like “ordinance drops”, which also added randomization to matches because each player would have different items to choose from.
There are probably a few others but H4 us a distant memory for me at this point.
This statement is subjective. I’ll play Mario kart 64 with 3 friends over H4 any day.
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"Overly simplistic? No - especially compared to H4. "
Halo 4 has way more options available to you at any given moment in combat scenarios. Plus you can change up those options via loadouts. It’s not really debatable. Halo Infinite clearly went for a more simple, slow playstyle.
“Purely subjective.”
Absolutely, it is subjective. Some people will like the slower pace of Halo Infinite and that’s fine. Doesn’t make the faster gameplay of Halo 4 bad. But what most people can agree on is that when you shoot someone in the head and nothing happens, it’s not a good time.
“Define ‘modern’.”
I’m saying it’s a modern game because it adopted modern mechanics (halo 4 did). For example, it highly benefitted games to be able to look up and down at the same time as being able to look left and right. Halo Infinite decided to regress on some mechanics without adding anything new, so it just feels like halo 3.5. Less modern, nothing new, less fun.
“You are being extremely insincere here.”
I am absolutely NOT. You have arbitrarily chosen some game mechanics that CoD has and decided if halo has them it’s too much like CoD. Loadouts are NOT unique to Cod. Kill streaks are NOT unique to CoD. I am NOT being insincere when I say “And no, just because it has a jump mechanic, guns, and a crosshair does not make it CoD” because I am making the same argument you are. You just don’t like it because it shows how dumb that argument is.
I’m gonna tack on some points that I’ve seen other people make that are incorrect.
Halo 4 did NOT have stretched out maps. I know halo 5 had SOME maps that were a bit bigger to accommodate amazing movement options but that wasn’t the case in Halo 4.
There’s some guy who doesn’t want to engage with the subject and keeps quoting himself as an authority figure saying things like "it’s common sense’ without realizing common sense varies between people. Please do not engage with people who are off topic, just report there post if it meets the criteria to do so.
Sprinting in Halo 4 does NOT let you run away from fights, your movement speed gets slowed down drastically when trying to sprint away. It’s as easy to run away as it is in any other Halo. So if you thought people were getting away easier and you complained about that, you’re just biased against halo 4 without knowing anything about it.
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You really need to explain this because there are way more advanced movement techniques available in HI. Especially to get you moving quickly. A faster sprint (halo 4) does not equal faster gameplay.
Loadout changes aren’t “at any given moment” - only after death - and they aren’t balanced. That and they also severely diluted the sandbox in H4. Sandbox - you know, one of the core competencies of halo (up until H4).
It absolutely is, especially since we can enumerate the options available in any given moment. The way I see it, securing a weapon pickup on the map exposes so many more combat scenarios “in the moment” than forcing myself to die, waiting for my respawn timer, and selecting a “different” (but in reality almost the same) weapon because I want to change up my options.
Okay but define “modern”. “a modern game adopts modern mechanics” is not a useful definition - it’s a self referencing definition. You need to define “modern mechanic”.
No. You are overlooking the fact that loadouts and killstreaks are defining characteristics of Cod gameplay. “run jump shoot” are common of almost every single shooter. The fact that Cod was (still is) the most popular shooter, and that H4 shoehorned its most uniquely identifying features is why you are being insincere with the comparison. You are missing the point. Obviously there are some gameplay elements that separate halo 4 from a Cod clone - only the crazies are saying it is a ‘clone’. But halo 4 really makes no effort to hide the fact that is copied core COD gameplay features.
And that is one of the main reasons why it has the lowest playercount of any Halo game to date. Players wanted Halo but didn’t get Halo. We got a perversion of Halo that claimed to be a successor to the games that came before. And when we played it, almost nothing was kept the same.
One of the main reasons I developed my “Golden Rule of Game Design” was observing the failures of choices such as these from multiple studios, with 343 being the first one to make me realize the faults in such design plans.
Halo 4 tried to be something Halo isn’t.
They had a system of combat that fans already adored and then the devs decided to give us Call of Duty instead of Halo. If Halo fans want Halo, then give them HALO. If they wanted Call of Duty, they would buy Call of Duty.
Saying Halo Infinite is just Halo 3.5 is more of a compliment, since Halo 3 had the most players consistently online out of all the Halo games, with Halo 2 and Halo Reach being the runner-ups.
Had Loadouts been something exclusive to Spartan-Ops, this would be a non-issue since that is a PvE experience and not a PvP experience.
I cannot think of a single game other than Halo 4 and every Call of Duty that gives you bonuses for being great at a match, simply because it further causes unbalance to the game.
“Hey we see that you are doing really well at killing the enemy players. You must be really skilled. So here is a better weapon or ability we are going to give you that helps with you getting even more kills.”
Rewarding good players during a match with better items is something that ruins the sandbox of Halo, since the whole point of Halo’s Sandbox is to balance things out.
- The enemy has the Scorpion? Better pick up the SPNKR to try and destroy it.
- You are on a long range map? Best find a sniper rifle and try to keep the upper-hand by keeping the Beam Rifle or other sniping tools out of the enemy’s hands.
- You see a guy running around with a Sword? Welp, go grab the shotgun to keep them in check.
Halo is a Scavenger’s Arena.
Adding in Killstreaks just because you are doing good in a match further unbalances the match in favor of the guys who are already winning just so they can increase the gap between the two teams. And it also broke the weapons sandbox further because I could pick up a shotgun, be low on ammo, and just call in another one with Ordinance Drop; replenishing my ammunition and keeping my power weapon instead of having to drop it in favor of scavenging for something else.
If I am able to call in ordinance to resupply my weapons ammunition instead of having to drop it for a potentially inferior gun, then the enemy team doesn’t really have a chance to catch-up. Especially since in some games, the power-weapons don’t respawn until the one on the field is out of ammo or has fallen off the map. It denies the opportunity for the losing team to fight for a chance to control a power-weapon that has been in your possession for far too long.
In other Halo games when you had to drop a weapon because you ran out of ammo, it gave the enemy team an opportunity to control that weapon. But in Halo 4 you can ordinance drop in the same gun to resupply your ammo, or a more powerful weapon. There is no sword on this map? Well, lemme just drop one in then. I have an Assault Rifle but so does another guy? Well let me just call in my advantage of a Damage Boost, since I got 6 kills and “earned” it.
Pitfall in Halo 4 was a stretched out version of The Pit from Halo 3. Maps had to be stretched to accommodate for the introduction of sprint as a mechanic that Halo 4 has an Halo 3 didn’t.
Map stretching is acceptable in this regard, since without it the matches would be as chaotic and unfun as any match of Hardcore on Call of Duty’s “Shipment” maps.
STRONGLY DISAGREE.
Sprinting is something that offers you the ability to traverse the map more quickly. Lets say I spawn in and my team is on the other side of the arena. I can use sprint to close the gap and ambush the enemy teammates that are currently targeting my friends. Without sprint, I would be likely unable to get there in time to do anything much to help the fight.
Sprinting is also used for a tactical retreat. I just spawned in and there are three enemy Spartans nearby?
Well in Halo Reach I have the Sprint Armor Ability while they might not, allowing me to flee and for them to not really be able to give chase since they have things like Hologram, Drop Shield, or Jet Pack.
And in Halo 4 if I am running the Mobility perk, I can sprint indefinitely whereas if they were running other perks, they would not be able to sprint indefinitely; so again I can out-run them.
Sprinting in Halo 5 and Halo Infinite is set to infinite sprint, so no matter what; you cannot retreat from a fight because the enemy can just keep up with you at all times. In Halo 5 it was worse because as you sprinted, your shields wouldn’t recharge. So if they started shooting at you, then gave chase; you are automatically at a dis-advantage since my shields wouldn’t recharge. If I did manage to regroup with my team, I would be an easy target in the ensuing fight.
Yeah I’m pretty sure COD 4 revolutionized the Kill Streaks and started it all (Which COD4 was absolutely amazing). Not sure why people always complain about sprint… retreating always has and always will be used in war, battles, etc… because sometimes it is smarter to retreat than to stand and fight… and lose lol. I had a golden rule in Halo when I started… don’t chase kills unless you know you’re going to win.
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Guess what, Halo isn’t real life and real life combat principles don’t apply. Sprint is a net negative in all regards for Halo and will forever cause a divide in the community until it is removed.
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Running away is a bad thing. If you make a bad play, you should lose that encounter. You have no reason to improve otherwise.
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“but it’s 2021!!! imagine not sprinting in 2021!!!”
Adding mechanics based on the time the game is made is just stupid.
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“It’s 2007. Resident Evil 4 on Wii NEEDS motion controls!”
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Well, I didn’t say I like Halo 4 or 5. Now it just so happens that I think those games are fine. I enjoyed Halo 5 quite a bit. Infinite though is way more fun in my opinion.
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Halo 4 was nothing more than a failed attempt from 343 to steal cod’s audience losing their core audience in the progress. None is trying to insult anyone grow up kid. Just stating the facts here. Halo 4 died faster than any halo game that came before it. Do your research before commenting.
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Source: Trust me bro