This is a list of reasons why I complain when I play a game of Halo 4,and honestly if I, or anyone else, spends more time complaining when they play the game, that right there is problem. Halo 4 has the widest variety of problems of any Halo in the franchise, usually I have the odd complaint in a game of Halo 2, 3, or Reach (more reach than the latter two), but when it gets to the point that almost every time you die there was something you could legitimately call bulls–t, then the game itself is obviously flawed.
Now I’ll start by saying I’m an above average player, nowhere near pro-level though. I’ve been playing Halo since 2005, and have had a fair enough share of good and bad days to know the difference between a bad stroke of luck, getting beaten by legitimately better players, or a sensible set of deaths, and obvious game flaws that plainly and simply drop the skill gap, as well as overly chaotic game problems that let nooby players slip away with easy wins. I will also note when an issue has been recurring in certain Halo games.
So here’s my list of big time Halo no-no’s in Halo 4.
- Instant Respawn
This is honestly so obvious it almost makes you wonder how whoever first came up with the idea wasn’t laughed out of the office or fired. In Halo, you have Energy Shields, your shields take (depending on the game) in between 5 and 7 seconds to regenerate. What made the 5 second respawn timer so important, was that it prevented the player you just killed from having ANY WAY to re-engage you while you were still weak from your last fight with him.
Do you want to know what’s ridiculous? One game on Skyline very recently, I killed a player near the middle of the map. That player then respawned in a base, sprinted to my location, and melee’d me before my shields even STARTED regenerating. Instant Respawn in a game with a slowly regenerating health system is a horrid mechanic, it simply can’t return.
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Charging Weapons Not Charging
This is more a coding issue than anything, but most weapons that require a charge up time have a very bad problem with animations, by which I mean if you perform a weapon swap, melee, reload, overheat, or grenade animation, and then start holding the RT too soon, you’ll sit there looking like a dumb -Yoink- while your weapon does nothing, losing precious seconds, and possibly the engagement. This can be fixed pretty easily, by, you know, programming the weapon to charge up no matter when you started holding the trigger. -
Power Weapons Have Too Much Ammo, And Are Too Frequent
Again another obvious one. It’s really sad when you’re doing really well, the enemy team is down, and then guess what? They all happen to get SAWs, those SAWs last them long enough to get a new Ordinance, and low and behold! More ammo for their SAWs!
Ok, this is more an issue with Ordinance than power weapons themselves, but seriously it’s a HUGE issue when most of the battle is fought with heavy one-hit-kill weapons and very little is actual Utility weapon play.
- Certain AA’s
Now most of the time, AA’s don’t actually have a huge impact on the game for me, but even in Reach they certainly had enough of an impact to instantly drop my “fun level” while I played. When I feel relatively safe engaging a lone player, and all of a sudden some random Jetpacks in? Well that’s just not fair or cool. When I sprint across a little open terrain after scouting and seeing noone that could take me out, only to find that 2-3 guys were cloaked half way across the map and I’m dead before I make it half way there? That’s a problem. When I’m trying to kill a player, and he busts out that good ole regen near a corner and becomes near invincible, reducing my choice to disengage or die? I mean come on now that’s plain ridiculous.
We should NEVER lose a kill, or die because someone used one of many possible infinitely recharging superpowers that we had no way of predicting or expecting that player to have at that exact time.
- 'Dem Sticks
Ok, so this has been a recurring issue since good old Halo CE. Plasma Grenades have one fatal balancing flaw - Close Quarters. It wasn’t a huge issue back when they were relatively rare map pickups, but as time progressed they slowly became more, and more common, with shorter, and shorter respawn times until now. Now you can spawn with them, giving players ridiculously easy kills, especially with their blast radii now so low you’re not punished if the other player decides to give you a hug.
I’m not saying scrap them from the loadout system altogether, but I think it’s time now they were reworked to actually balance with the frag, and it’s not too hard to do. Just make the game slightly more realistic. Think about it, if a stick becomes sticky the instant you press the activation button, it would never leave your hand. So instead, the stick shouldn’t start out sticky, it should have to fly some small distance out of your hand before the blue flare kicks on and it can land it’s classic one hit stick kill. Now, to make it slightly deadlier this way it could gain the added bonus of sticking to anyone who steps on it, I mean that’d be hilarious. But noone should ever be griefed by a point-blank stick in the face again.
- The Chase Is On! (Sprint)
God I hate people who run away. Especially when you know you can’t finish them off before they round the corner and you know the only option you have is to give chase… Guess what you’re NOT doing while you get into a sprint chase? You aren’t shooting! Seriously WHY! You can almost sprint long enough to get your shields back, that’s just wrong. We’ve all been there, we’ve all had some pansy drop the ball, sprint away like crazy, get back his shields, and then catch us with some kind of cheezy kill (be it a stick in the face, a boltshot in the face, or the guy just ran to get help and now there’s two of them).
If you’re gonna keep Sprint at least let us shoot each other in the back during a chase… Or better yet, just don’t keep sprint.
- I got good at sniping when Halo 4 came out!
Sniper Aim Assist. I probably don’t even need to mention it… I’ve gotten so many snapshots now it’s not even funny. The game plays itself when you have a Sniper or a Beam Rifle, of course we all know it’s worse for the Beam but the Snipers pretty bad too. You shouldn’t make bad players feel good with these weapons, these weapons exist for the purpose of long range, and that’s the only scenario bad players should be even capable of using them in. If you practice long and hard, you deserve to be a no-scoping beast! Halo 4’s Sniper is the easiest one to use in the entire franchise, and that’s saying something considering Halo 2’s and Reach’s.
That said Aim Assist across the board needs a drop, but this is the only place where it’s particularly frustrating.
And that’s it. Those are the biggest issues I have with the game, pretty much everything else is ok, but these are simple technical problems, these are things that simply don’t work the way they are now and need to be given at least some level of attention while developing future titles, or title updates.