> I swear when i get on here sometimes and read posts about campiagn, it’s irrational, it’s like peoples hatred of certain aspects of this game are growing to poison the whole experience.
> If you guys don’t consider CE to be part of the “Halo feel” then no, Halo 4 no longer has the “halo feel”.
>
> *You come out of cyro to discover a Covenant fleet is bearing down on you, check.
>
> *Your ship crashs on an enormous construct filled with lush, beautiful environs and unknown mechanical structures, check.
>
> *You rescue your allies, and discover the “world” you’ve been walking around on is host to an ancient horror, and capable of untold amounts of destruction, check.
>
> *You race agianst time to stop ancient horror and terrifying superweapon, check.
>
> the only real diffence in atmosphere is Cortana dying is the driving narrative tension, not the threat of galactic annihilation at the hands of the flood/halo/covies.
>
> Halo 4 has a lot of problems, but story telling and atmosphere aren’t really among them.
Exact same thing as in Halo CE except in a much less interesting way. There are interesting bits here and there but it’s basically a cheap copy of Halo CE. Some environments are definitely cool but a lot of them are just plain boring.
Dawn is a boring Cairo Station, Requiem is a ‘‘nice’’ Halo/Tsavo Highway hybrid, Forerunner is a boring Sacred Icon/Quarantine Zone, half of infinity is like a less cool Sierra 117. Reclaimer is probably one of the best of the game because of the Elephant but the environment is nothing new. Shutdown feels like a mish-mash of New Alexandria, Regret and others, Composer is actually pretty nice and Midnight is fun only for the Broadsword bit. And it doesn’t help that the new enemies are pretty boring and don’t add any interesting gameplay mechanic. People disliked the flood but I thought they were great, you didn’t fight them like the Covenant and in Halo 3 they added interesting twists to them.
But besides all this, that it’s still more of the same, all the environments in Halo CE felt NEW. Nothing feels really new in Halo 4, it’s all recycled environments. Brown rocky desert, check. Greenish mountainside open-terrain, check. Jungle, check. Etc… Some of these environments were present more than once in past Halo games, but at least they were not already repeated ad nauseam and they had a certain nice twist. Well here you got the Elephant. In Halo 4 all this just feels pedestrian and tired. Like an old franchise clinging to it when it’s starting to fall apart.
They try to much to be the same but add things, adding things doesn’t change the core experience. Personally, Halo needs NEW environments, new gameplay mechanics (while still retaining the core one), rethought level design. Changing the level design is probably the most important one because it dictates how you play the game. If you refuse to change the level design, to expand it, all the games will play the same, and they do. The scarabs in Halo 3 are probably THE THING Bungie tried that made the game play differently for once. And where Halo needs to go, is HUGE maps. Real open-world maps, sandbox type unlike they said Reach was like. That means you can approach a situation in various ways and make vehicles more interesting again, not just copy-paste warthog rides along a predefined path or the same vehicle combat sections.
Change that -Yoink- engine too. Bungie kept saying they wanted big open environments and naval battles, we never got either. In fact, the level design consistently felt more restricted with better graphics. Halo 3 got some nice sandboxy bits, but they were always cut by incredibly linear bits. And that’s how almost every Halo game play (CE felt that way much less though, the linear bits felt actually natural because they had a meaning in the environment).
It’s not because they copies Halo CE that it still has the same feeling. It’s HOW it’s done.
