I’ve been a Halo player since day-one on the first xbox. It was a blast and I loved multiplayer so much that I kept playing it in split-screen and LAN for years with my friends. Then Halo 2, I loved it. Multiplayer wasn’t really worthy until the TU but I wasn’t a xbox live kid yet. Customs split-screen and LAN parties were my thing. Then Halo 3 came out and I started playing on xbox live more seriously (i know it’s a game but whoever played ranked knows what I’m talking about. That number going down… :@). I read the books because the story was so amazing, the whole universe was so well-crafted and with so many details that the sense of discovering was incredible. Sure there where retcons but the storytelling was stunning. Then we had Reach. I won’t talk much about it but I played it, it sucked i know but I actually played it online for a while (until i got pissed of bloom and AL) and for years in LAN. I forged, I had fun with my friends as I used to with every past Halo. I don’t post much in any community but I follow them and their creations, them being custom made halo armors, fan-fic or in-game contents. What it was didn’t really matter if it was halo related I loved it. Bungie interacted with the communities, and they were huge. Bungie made us feel like Halo wasn’t just a game, it was our game. I won’t go “oh so dramatic” in this post, I will share my Halo Reach/4 experience. And Reach plays an important role here.
As much as I hated Reach I played it a lot, Halo 3 was still there so why playing an inferior game? Customization. As I said before I’m mostly a LAN player and Reach possibilities are amazing. I know we had little to no-support post game but Reach offers us so many gamemodes and options that it just doesn’t get old. Now how is this important? It is because of Halo 4. Following the development of the game, watching ViDocs, pre-release gameplays, interviews and everything looked so bright. When I saw the footage showing a br batter with strafe and halo3-like jumps I was excited. Then we had “The core gameplay” and “Feels like Halo” how could I not trust them…?
Then the game came out. I played and finished the campaign day-one on legendary with my friend and we enjoyed it but there was something that didn’t feel right I had to go through it solo to understand that it was that bad “fan-fiction” feeling (for those readers out there). 343i decided to give a face to that part of the Halo universe that Bungie chose to keep in in the dark. We knew little about forerunners and precursors and it was mainly from the books. With Halo 4 (and all the books that sorround the game) we’re thrown in this part of the halo universe that was mysterious before. They gave us so many informations about it that I just didn’t feel the discovering feeling I had with the past titles/books. I don’t understand why leaving us clueless about why we still fight the covenant (the storm now), and giving us no manual in the box with what ever kind of explanations about classes or background story. They changed the appearance of grunts, jackals and elites making them look like a mix between reptiles and sharks. No big deal, but the Halo universe is made of details (Bestiarium being an example), and some of them got lost because of changing.
I could live with the changes. The Chief is back, the campaign is graphically stunning and it’s far better that Reach. Everyone at 343i was all like “we want to give Halo our own mark” and I understand that, it’s not easy to take such a huge (declining) franchise and bring it back to the top. Halo 4 is their first game as a team and I didn’t expect the transaction to be smooth or painless. But I did expect them to ship a Halo game.
This was just campaign and the fictional universe then I played multiplayer. I won’t share my first-impressions, I’ll talk about what I think now that I played every playlist for a while.
I’m not a mlg fanatic, never liked the idea of playing a stripped down game (but I like watching those crazy skills in tournaments), but I am a Halo player. And there are things that made Halo Halo. We got a game with huge asymmetrical and chaotic maps, no fixed weapons spawning, classes, flinching, huge radar radius, perks, indicators of any kind, ordnance drops, no red Xs, Boltshot, Camo AA, underpowered precision weapons, super aim assist, overpowered automatic weapons and overall balancing issues.
We got 15 seconds weapons despawning after being killed and yellow Xs on the radar. I’ll talk about those together because they’re caused from the same gameplay flaw IMO. With personal drops we have so many power weapons going around that after someone dies they disappear in seconds. Of course you can still say to your teammates “shotgun on my X” but what if the fight finishes after 20 more seconds, what if there are more than one X on the radar (of course there is no reference to whom the X belongs, they could add the service tag of the died person above the yellow X and that would be a step forward). But there’s no more “sniper on my X” because snipers don’t go around with teammates. So they don’t appear on radar. Red Xs and the arrow above the head of teammates appearing on screen and changing colors if they where shooting or being shoot was an important part of gameplay for me. Now the color changing is so subtle I barely notice it.
I was skeptical when they unveiled this rogue perk that kept you scoped in when shoot. Just like perks in general it promotes the philosophy that like if you played more than you got better stuff compared to a newcomer. Halo to me was about who’s better not about who has the best things. In the final cut we got descoping removed anyway. We got flinching. Flinching alone made me understand that what was Halo for me isn’t what is Halo for 343i. That is probably my problem with the game, they kept saying that it feels like Halo, very clever use of words because it does feel like Halo but it isn’t really.
I can understand 343i adding ordnance, personal weapon drops and a -Yoink–ton of indicators to help people that don’t want to count the spawning time of every power weapon or learn weapons placing. Personal weapon drops promotes static gameplay because you have no need of moving, weapons will literally come from the sky at will. It could have been fine because that should have been just Infinity Slayer. A mode for people new to the franchise, maybe coming from CoD, who want XP progression system, perks and ordnance. I thought we were going to have a Slayer mode with more than a Halo feeling, I wanted a true Halo slayer.
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