Halo 4 was the very 1st Halo game that I went out and bought myself on its launch day back in 2012 (I had already played Halo 3, Combat Evolved Anniversary, Wars, & Reach before then, btw). I was 14-years old, I was in 8th grade, and I had been saving up my allowance money for nearly six weeks in advance of the game’s launch. I was so excited the night before the game’s official midnight launch that I did nothing more than just lay in my bed at night, fantasizing my bad@$$ experience with it after I drove out to my local Gamestop with my mom early in the morning. When that day finally came after what felt like years of waiting, I got out of bed, took a nice warm shower, dried off, got dressed & nagged my mom at 8:00AM to please drive me to the store! And so, after minutes of heavy, childish begging & persuation, my mother finally got up out of bed, got dressed & drove me downtown so I could finally get my hands on the game that I thought would change my life! I waited in the giant Halo 4 pre-order line for what felt like a century until I finally was handed the receipt that had my pre-order bonus codes printed, as well as the physical two-disk Standard Edition of “Halo 4”. Never had I been so excited to play a videogame in my entire life at that point in time! When I finally got back home, I turned on my Xbox 360 console, downloaded the necessary patch using the second Installation disk, & started up the game…AND I WAS MIND-BLOWN!!! Never had I had so much fun playing multiplayer with the friends that had bought the game because of my constant baggering, battling it out in Big Team Slayer, customizing our Spartans, & playing the Legendary Co-op Campaign just to unlock the Mark VI armor for War games…but these experiences were short-lived! After beating the Legendary campaign, beating each weekly Spartan Ops mission, & reaching SR Rank 70, something happened. I wasn’t enticed to come back & play the game after I had gotten to that point, and instead spent the rest of my allowance on Black Ops 2, shooting up zombies in Transit & destroying other noobs in multiplayer. The very game that had spawned an unseen excitement within me no longer interested me. I tried and tried again, but to no avail…and so, on the first day of winter, 2014, I sold my copy of Halo 4 & Combat Evolved Anniversary for store credit at Game stop to buy TMCC after I got my Xbox One on Christmas…
And with all of this being said, here we are now, nearly three years after the Halo 4 launch, filled with the same hope and excitement that I had for the game back in 2012. But instead of Halo 4, I’m waiting for Halo 5: Guardians, hoping that the game can keep hold of my overall enjoyment of the game in an ever-so-tight proverbial grip…but will it deliver? That’s still not for me to decide, although I did have a lot of fun with the beta back in January…but then again, it was just a beta. 
And thus, the original “Why Did Halo 4 Fall Short of What we Expected???” Forum post was born, and was used as a means of channeling my frusteration for the game’s outcome. Perhaps redoing it, in a way, and getting to see other people’s opinions on this topic could do me some good, I guess.
