It’s obvious that a lot of time, effort, talent, and money went into the making of this game. Nobody disputes that. And I don’t doubt that some of the best industry professionals work at 343.
The campaign is awesome, Spartan Ops is a better alternative to Firefight (IMO), and Forge is still awesome. But there aren’t words that can describe how I feel about multiplayer. The best way for me to put it is, I just don’t get it.
I don’t expect it to resemble the previous games in the franchise down to the last detail, but I was hoping for at least a little familiarity. There is so much happening at once in multiplayer that I have no clue what’s going on, and my matchmaking stats for Halo 4 are evidence that I can’t grasp the game’s mechanics. For some reason, I am incapable of really “getting” this game, and every time I see a red dot on my radar, deep down inside, I know that he will defeat me in combat. People seem to get the drop on my current position pretty much all the time, and everybody and their grandma seems to have either an energy sword or a SAW.
Please understand that I am not blaming any part of the game for my lack of skill, I’m simply saying that, I really don’t understand how to improve at the game, nor do I have the drive to. It is so much different than what I consider to be “Halo” that I don’t even know where to begin playing; it’s all thrown at you all at once, and there are so many changes to the formula that you’d be hard-pressed to find similarities between Halo 4 and the previous ones, besides the fact that you play as Master Chief.
I find myself wondering what the purpose of all this extra “stuff” is - ordnance drops are something that I still don’t completely understand. When you start a match, are the initial drops the same for that map every time? Are the ones mid-game randomly spawned? What determines the 3 weapon drops I choose from when I get a certain number of kills? The game doesn’t even come with a manual, so it’s not like I could have discovered answers to these questions like that. And they aren’t self-explanatory.
I always forget that I even have sprint, and I don’t know how to tell how much sprint you have left, because as far as I can tell, there’s no meter for it anywhere. I also don’t know why kills are swapped for points in Infinity Slayer if every kill is worth 10 points - why can’t you just reach “60 kills” instead of “600 points?” Isn’t it less confusing that way?
There’s so much I would have to change about my playstyle to even enjoy this game’s multiplayer, let alone get better at it, and I am honestly amazed by people who can excel at this game. How do you do it? I keep seeing on the forums that Halo 4 is too easy, and I honestly wish I could say the same, but I can’t, because I clearly suck at it. And the best part is, I don’t know why I suck, because there are so many different factors that I don’t know what to do first. This game’s multiplayer really alienated me.
I would like to reiterate the fact that it’s obvious that 343 worked hard on the game. Visually, it’s amazing. The same with the game’s audio. And voice-acting, and overall campaign. As well as the Forerunner weapons. You nailed it. I’m not going to play the blame game and say “343 screwed up multiplayer,” but will instead ask a question - were all these fundamental changes really that important to keep Halo fresh? It was a lot to add in just one game, and I kept getting so confused in between matches that, helplessly, I tried to constantly change my loadout to see which one worked best for me, and I couldn’t really find one. And I’m not even new to Halo, I’ve been playing since Combat Evolved.
As I saw the upgrades you can choose for your loadout, I started wondering just how many people had certain ones - did I play against people that had the explosive-radius-increase upgrade? Did some people’s shields recharge faster? Did some people have the promethean vision armor ability, and is that why they knew where I was? There’s so much going on, as I said earlier, that it just doesn’t feel like something that I care to learn more about.
So that’s basically it. I didn’t intend this post to be this long, and I don’t intend this to bash 343 or their work. The game is very high-quality, and I don’t think anybody would deny that. In a nutshell, Halo 4 multiplayer caught me off-guard, and since I’m looking for ways to play the “older” playstyle of Halo, I keep getting annihilated by people who were able to keep up with the changes made to the game mechanics. Does anybody else feel the same way, or am I the only one that really REALLY doesn’t get multiplayer?