Now hold on, don’t fly into a rage just yet. This is just my opinion. I think Warzone is superior to both Spartan Ops and Firefight. It’s not even just because Warzone looks spectacular (it does), it’s because Firefight and Spartan Ops have never really offered anything amazing.
Firefight, in my opinion, is just a gimmick. Halo 3: ODST released in a time where every game started copying Gears of War’s “Horde Mode” and hoping for the same success. ODST was already having problems with justifying it’s $60 price tag and Bungie had to do something. Firefight and the multiplayer disc were their last ditch efforts at making ODST worth $60, which still wasn’t enough content if you ask me. Let’s get on to why Firefight is nothing special. It’s just Horde mode on sections of the campaign. The small amount of players and boring objective made Firefight take the backseat to any other mode. I’m not saying it wasn’t fun at all because it had its moments. But after you played a little while on every map you saw all there was to see and playing by yourself was an absolute snore.
Firefight never felt complete to me and Reach made it further into a joke. It was played to grind XP and commendations and usually people just played Gruntpocalypse to speed things up. Bottom line, it was a gimmick and never earned it’s place in Halo, it was an attempt to satisfy a bullet point on the back of the box to warrant a $60 purchase.
Ok, so now lets look at Spartan Ops.
Spartan Ops was a really good idea on paper. It’s execution, however, was atrocious. I really like Halo 4 for it’s Campaign and was naturally excited to see this mode in action. What we got was a mindless shoot’em up with an in-game story comparable to Destiny, barring the cinematics of course which was the best thing about the whole mode.
Here’s a summary of Spartan Ops: Kill 50,000 enemies with no regard to your personal safety, press a button, kill another 50,000 enemies and then end the mission. Chapters were so short that nothing meaningful ever happened. What’s worse, we did all of this in recycled multiplayer maps and campaign sections. The mode is a mindless grind, with enemies constantly being thrown at you and death has literally no impact. It’s actually the most efficient way to beat a chapter because it refills all your ammo! There’s actually two chapters that you play on the exact same map twice in a row, the only difference is that you fight Prometheans the first time and Covenant the second time. Wow.
So what people want is a mode where we can fight AI, excluding Campaign. In Warzone we have just that. You can contribute to a match by killing bots just as well as your average MLG wannabe does with killing players. In fact, the people who focus on killing players will be thankful that you want to go kill the bots because it’s a really good strategy to win! In Warzone, you feel like you’re a part of something bigger, no matter how you choose to contribute.
I think this just about sums up why I think Warzone is far superior. If you don’t like any PVP at all then I understand, but just try going in with an open mind! You might actually enjoy it.
