One of the most distinguishing features of Halo as an FPS was how balanced it was. Look at Halo 2 and 3. Players always spawned with the same weapons meaning everyone started on an equal footing.
Now in Reach this changed because you had a selection of load-outs. This wasn’t really a problem because everyone had the same selection and so it was still balanced.
However in Halo 4 you can pick your load-outs before the game starts. Now this wouldn’t be so much of a problem if every player had the same choice, but every player DOESN’T have the same choice since it depends on your rank. So the more you play, the better load-outs you can get. This is unfair for players who aren’t high ranks.
Another admirable feature of Halo was that game-play was partly designed around map flow and the battle for map control. Now in Halo 2,3 and Reach weapons spawned on the map which forced the player to keep moving and try to control certain regions of the map.
In Halo 4 weapons don’t really spawn on the map. They may spawn at the start and every now and then in random locations but that doesn’t do much for map control when players have weapons dropped right in front of them. This means the player can just pick a nice location and stay there for the whole game. Map control was a very important skill in previous Halo games, whereas now it is absolutely useless
Halo was also known for the fact that killing an opponent was not as easy as it is for other FPS games. If you remember back to Halo 3, players had to really battle it out to kill each other with the battle rifle by employing skills like strafing. In Reach there was bloom so it was all about timing your shots.
Now you look at Halo 4 and see that players can kill an opponent very quickly because the firing rate and power has been increased and bloom reduced. This means killing someone is a lot easier.
The ranking system is another problem but that started from Reach. The game just rewards players who play a lot of multiplayer and not the skilled players. You may argue back by saying that the better you play the more cR you get, but realistically the difference in the amount of cR a good player gets in comparison to a bad player really doesn’t make must difference. You can still reach the highest rank if your aweful by just playing a lot.
Now you may say that less skilled players deserve to rank up too, but then what about the skilled players? To them rank doesn’t demonstrate how good they are at all.
Anyway, these are just a few of the problems in Halo 4. Don’t get me wrong, there are improvements to the game as well and change is inevitable and necessary. However the changes made in Halo 4 are so fundamentally different from what Halo was before that it suits CoD players more. This is not what Halo should be.
I would just like to add a couple of things. 343 had 4 years to make this game and they couldn’t even make a proper Theatre mode. In some respects the game really is going backwards, because Halo 3’s Theatre was better then Reach’s which is better than Halo 4’s.
The campaign is also somewhat disappointing. Firstly the campaign is only 8 missions long and it has nothing spectacular to it. It does not give you the amazing impression Halo CE did and the story isn’t epic like the previous games were. The Didact just looks like an ugly mummified human with enlarge teeth, and this really ruins the mysteriousness that forerunners structures created in the previous games.
All previous Halo games have had epic final missions whereas this one was just kill some crawlers and knock the Didact of a bridge.
So I will finish up by saying that multiplayer in Halo 4 is much more suited to the casual non-skilled gamer, and that the only improved mode in Halo 4 is forge, but that means very little since Multiplayer is not what it use to be.