the core of Halo, and how it needs its roots to Thrive

Remember when video games were only campaign-based? Its only been til recently when video games became centered around multi-player, and it seemed to engulf the whole gaming industry. Now dont get me wrong, theres a reason multi-player games have been successful. They are fun! Thats what gaming is all about! There is, however, a line that needs to be drawn.

10 years ago, most games were campaign only. If you wanted to play with friends, you bring over your computer or console and hook it up on a LAN line, and go co-op. When multi-player started to develop, game types were a way to expand the gaming experience, and it was great! But what made the true gaming experience unique, successful, and outstanding was the campaign.

Most modern day gaming franchises were originaly campaign based. As they grew in popularity with growing technology, the more games the industries created, the greater and better the multi-player. But is this really what we, the gaming community, want?

Popular multiplayer games like Call of Duty, BattleField, Halo, and much more all started as a campaign game. But these games are loosing what is so important, Campaign! The reviews for these games are slowly going down as the multi-player gets more involved. If you compare multi-player based games to those that are only campaign, you can see how these games are better, more balanced, and better put together. And most importantly, in my opinion, more fun! Can you honestly say you would choose multi-player over campaign, in Halo?

My point, and in correlation to Halo 4, is 343 Industries need to stop worrying about the multi-player, trying to please everyone’s complaints, but tell an incredible story!!!

Master Chief is iconic, and if the campaign is as short and dull as Halo Reach, it isn’t worth it. My biggest problem with Reach was how short and dull its campaign is. Im not asking for a Skyrim here, but i think the community can agree that campaign is what makes halo great! If its good, you cant go wrong. Multi-player should expand Halo’s story, not be a separate game!

Discuss.

Thoughts?

Opinions?

343i seems to be catering to the campaign gamer as well as the multiplayer gamer. The Spartan Ops mode in particular should appease anyone looking for extended story content. I look forward to playing all the different modes and playlists :slight_smile:

Well looking back at Halo 1-3 campaign and seeing the hugely successful Skyrim single player I don’t disagree with you.

However the development team at 343i is split into a few core teams, campaign, mutliplayer, spartan ops, testing, marketing etc.

I wouldn’t worry mate, campaign is sounding awesome and I’m so happy with the direction this is heading in the Halo lore.

The only reason you don’t see campaign now is it has to be played close to the chest and kept under wraps. Also they’ll reveal some ViDocs or trailers for campaign closer to the game launch for marketing impact.

I feel like the campaign will be pretty good. they said the game would be more cinematic, and on top of that, better graphics. I think the campaign for halo 1 2 and 3 were amazing, 343 has some good examples to base their game off of.
matchmaking is what im worried about… I do pray it will be good like halo 1 2 and 3… but from the looks of things we’re about to be playing reach: 2

Here’s my response to you post. sorry its long.

The campaign of a game is obviously the main focal point, specially in a game like halo and we already know that they have spent plenty of time planing out the campaign of this game so id be willing to bet its going to be pretty epic. after all they didn’t just announce halo 4, they announced a whole new trilogy. that means that the story line is almost guaranteed to be awesome. so most people are not really too worried about the details/direction of the story, they are more worried about how the gameplay will actually play.
Because in reality how many times are you really going to play through the campaign? 5-6 times at the most? and if the campaign takes lets say 12 hours to complete on legendary (that’s how long Reach took me on the night of its release) that’s about 72 hours of fun. I am obviously not the average halo player and i am not trying to brag or anything, i am just stating the numbers i put in on halo 3 (I had a very unique situation that aloud me play so much back then, this is not at all true today) considering i played Halo 3’s campaign probably 50 times and halo 3 was about 10 hours long (all missions) that’s about 500 hours spent on campaign over the 3 years i played the game (almost everyday) so the time spent on campaign is nothing compared to the time spent in multiplayer. on all my accounts i logged about 35,000 games of halo 3 over its life time. that’s over 8750+ hours of my time spent playing multiplayer. (15min game average not including time spent in lobby/searching for matches) I am only stating this stuff to prove my point, campaign is important and should be the first thing they look at when designing the game, but from a designer stand point you want the game to have good a “shelf life” you want people to keep playing and buy your DLC and so on, if the multiplayer is crap people wont play the game very long, probably wont buy the DLC, and this ultimately dictates the budget the game developer will have to make their next game.
So really multiplayer is more important in the long run, campaign is the main course but multiplayer is what keeps them coming back for seconds… and thirds.