The Halo 4 you play now is quite a bit different from how it was on launch.
To put things into perspective, they basically did a huge balance patch 1 year post launch for that game, before BR wasn’t 4 shot kill for example. So I would argue it wasn’t finished until 1 year later, not to mention it was just a cheap cash grab in CoD clothing.
Not to mention that game also had microtransactions (it was far less IIRC) so it was the beginning of that.
Halo 4 is a fun game if you play BTB, but its Infection mode was trash, all of its launch maps (except for Mercy I believe it was called) were trash, had no real identity whatsoever, Spartan Ops was just a flop objectively speaking, Campaign had good story but extremely lackluster level design and enemy design.
a clearly unfinished Infinite is superior to Halo 4 in my opinion, I don’t know if that’s more of a compliment to Infinite or an insult to Halo 4. People play the good version of a game years later (the one that has had all its DLC/updates) and often forget how bad the game was on launch. People forget that Halo 4 was right after Reach, so the game (frankly) had far higher expectations placed on it compared to 5/Infinite I’d argue. They would’ve made probably 5x the money they made if they were simply less stupid and/or arrogant and just did a Halo 3 clone but that’s speculation so whatever.
Going back to my original point here, Halo 4 had a 50% decline in population two weeks post launch… I highly highly doubt Infinite will go through that. It’ll start off with relatively low numbers (because it is a barren wasteland of content and we’re all thirsty af
) but it’ll slowly uptick over the months/years sort of like how Sea of Thieves did but probably moreso because its F2P so no reason not to give it another chance.
I think that 343i really screwed up with Infinite, but I blame god awful management (Joseph Staten backpacking that company, I said it) low expectations from Microsoft (“hey guys, could you just like, make a Halo game within X years? and it’ll be F2P with a bunch of microtransactions? yeah, cool. What’s that? you are somehow not able to make a game with 10 maps in 5 years? ok that’s cool. We’ll send someone over that isn’t stupid and he’ll get the job done”) and a 343i that were never actually challenged to do much of anything.
Like bruh could you imagine if Infinite actually released as a full Halo title? Like these people are only half as skilled as Bungie were, they could’ve gotten 10 years and it wouldn’t have mattered because these hapless idiots are too busy twiddling their thumbs instead of getting stuff done.
Summary: Infinite will be drastically superior to Halo 4/5 within 1 year, but the wait is loooong and boring.