I am pretty much a MP player only. Originally horribly disappointed. I felt it played like a cheap Halo knock off. The physics, sounds, washed out color palette (peach team vs. smurf team?). All of it felt “off”. The maps were very generic and the vehicles felt crappy and weak (could be destroyed by any weapon).
To be fair, I started off playing with a friend on split-screen. The lag and framerate drop was atrocious, borderline unplayable. Then a played MP on one screen and it felt better, still not up to Halo standard but better. Had some fun on some of the BTB maps. I have accepted the sprint, loadout, perks, cheesy yoink assisinations. It is ok I guess but it is nowhere near as addictive as previous versions of the game. You can definitely feel that Bungie did not make this game, not because of the changes (perks, sprint etc.) but it just feels like a different MP game. The online populations reflect this.
Halo 3 launched and 1.5 million players were online in the first few days (don’t say it had no competition because COD 3 was a great MP game and MW came out later that year). Reach also had hundreds of thousands but less likely because people did not like the AA, despite it’s core Halo play being intact for the most part. Halo 4 I believe had at most 400K online and despite some people saying, “wait until Christmas etc.”, I am pretty sure Christmas comes every year but the populations online never surpass the launch week’s. Face it, every kid with a paper route or an allowance is scraping 60 bucks to get these games at launch.
A lot of people are saying, “given it time, it’s only been out 2 weeks” What are people expecting over time in terms of improvement? Hopefully things like lag or weapons tweak can help somewhat, but do you really expect a huge improvement? it took 3 years to make and results are in, do you expect all the sudden massive improvements in the next few weeks/months? I don’t. They made all of their money at launch and at some point it doesn’t help them financially to keep putting in development dollars when it won’t result in new sales (one could argue that they might for Halo 5 but a new Xbox will have a whole new set of expectations). So if you don’t enjoy the game now, chances are you likely may not in the future. I don’t dislike the game, but I have to be honest when I say I am not disappointed.
I tired of COD years ago when they seemed they stopped trying (no vehicles except in 3 and WaW? wtf?) and was disappointed it outsold Halo 4 this year (220MM Halo 4 launch day vs 300MM+ COD on Xbox). I have Blops and it’s the same game as every other year. It’s ironic that Halo 4 is not the same game as previous, yet the changes don’t help save the game because 1) many of them are COD-like 2) the solid core gameplay that Bungie delivered seems to have vanished.
I’ll play it from time to time and have as much fun as possible. I just don’t see the game improving over time post release and somehow don’t see myself staying up until 2 or 3AM unexpectedly like I used to with the franchise.