While I am relatively new to these forums, my complaints about Halo 4’s gameplay and story… (or perhaps more specifically Spartan Ops plot “issues”) are well known at Spacebattles, but I shall repeat them here in the hopes of reaching a wider audience.
Halo has innovative in only the barest of ways. With the removal of the dual wielding mechanic apparently here to stay, we can now safely say that the only “core” innovations to Halo over the past twelve bloody years has been the addition of the AA’s and an integrated sprint mechanic they’ve been promising us since Halo 2 was in development.
Gameplay wise, it has long since been surprassed by the likes of other FPSs such as F.E.A.R., Timeshift, and the Crysis series. If Halo is to contiue to survive, rather than simply be “Generic Science Fiction Shooter Number Seven Hundred and Eighty Billion” it needs to remember its roots as “Combat Evolved” and take this sucker to the next level.
I want to feel as though I’m playing a super-soldier in a suit of heavily armored, physics defying power armor. I want to be able to do some of the things the Master Chief does in the books (jump 4+ meters vertically, run at over eighty kilometers per hour without breaking a sweat, pick up a four hundred kilogram motor bike and use it as a bloody melee weapon, move so fast that an ordinary human literally cannot follow my movements). I do not, I repeat, not want to feel like a UNSC Marine with a slightly larger health bar.
I want cool, innovative weaponry, not forty flavors of assault rifles and shotguns. Halo 4 was incredibly lazy in this regard. The new Covenant weapons (few that there were) sucked. Exhibit A: The Storm Rifle (so it’s like a plasma rifle, but it’s significantly less accurate, less powerful, overheats faster, and I can’t dual wield it… why in god’s name would I ever pick this gun up?) The Promethean weapons were even worse, as all they are are literally reskinned UNSC guns with glowing orange Tron-Lines and slight tweakings to their mechanics (a sniper rifle that is twice as powerful, but only has two shots instead of four, a battle rifle that becomes a DMR when I zoom in, an M6 pistol without the scope that can function as an extremely poor shotgun in a last ditch emergency situation). Oh yes, and one musn’t forget that despite it being five centuries in the future, the UNSC still uses an obsolete, pump-action shotgun with only 6 rounds. (I really want to go to them, give them an AA-12, and watch minds be blown).
Contrast this, with say, the like of Timeshift’s weaponry. My default weapon is a carbine that not only is accurate and has decent stopping power, but comes with a two-shot underslung grenade launcher. I have a fully automatic shotgun that tears masonry walls apart and reduces people to bloody giblets in moments. I have an assault rifle that has incendiary rounds and a built in flamethrower. Or, heck, F.E.A.R. 1: I’ve got a laser minigun, a pulse rifle that fires a particle beam that turns my enemies into smoldering skeletons, I have a magazine fed automatic rocket launcher. Or Crysis, where I can modify my weapons on the fly as I need to (do I want a shotgun, grenade launcher, or gauss-rifle attachment slung under my SCAR? Do I want to slap a sniper rifle scope on the top of that baby? I can do all of this!)
Better writing: while it is painfully obvious that Halo’s multi-player has been its driving force for a long time, to quote Benjamin “Yahtzee” Crosshaw: “A game with a single player, story driven element must be able to stand on that alone.” This is where Reach completly fell apart. It was obvious that the campaign story wasn’t proofread by anything remotely approaching a competent writer, and it showed with its nonsensical approach, numerous plotholes, and some internal contest among the characters to see who could be the biggest moron in the cast.
Halo 4’s campaign story was an improvement over that, credit where it is due. However, it failed to tie in the expanded universe properly. Those who had never read the Forerunner Trilogy and only known about the Didact through the Halo 3 terminals would have been very, very confused about why the noble, upstanding individual was suddenly so psychotic and wanting to violently murder them, never realizing that there were actually two Didacts, Ur and Iso, and that it was the latter we read about in the terminals, and the former that was doing the impersonation of Darth Vader on us. Likewise with the Storm, it is never made clear that we’re actually fighting a splinter faction of Covenant loyalists that were partially created because of a major ONI screw up post-Covenant-War.
And Spartan Ops… dear, God, Spartan Ops. Clearly this is where Reach’s story writers were sent. A series of moronic wallbangers strung together by more or less utter morons(Palmer, DeMarco, Hoya, etc.) where half the “Drama” is created by everyone having their IQ shifted one decimal point to the left. 343: When there are fanfiction writers (i.e. amateurs not being paid for their work and doing this as a hobby in their spare time) doing a better job with Halo stories than you are, it is a clear sign to you that something has definitely gone wrong somewhere, and your writing team needs to be fired and blacklisted!
In sum: better mechanics and innovative, empowering gameplay (new enemies wouldn’t hurt (and by that I do not mean essentially reskinning an Elite to be a giant, top heavy robot with a single tacked on gimmick)), new and innovative weapons, and a much better story writing team.
Those are just some of the things that Halo desperately needs to do if it wants to get by on anything other than brand recognition and blind fanboyism.