Halo 4 is in my opinion a huge downgrade to the series. In terms of multiplayer it is the weakest game in the series by far and here I will explain the reasons why.
Custom Games: The options for custom games have been severely reduced from Halo Reach and 3 to a point of almost crippling them completely. While I could list every single thing that was removed it is best that you look them up, there are many threads and topics dedicated to the cause. Although the big reason that I must mention here is that flood replacing infection effectively elminates the majority of good custom game modes.
Forge: 343 thought it would be a decent idea to have 3 forge maps from the start as opposed to one like Bungie did with Reach. This is inherently a good thing because the main flaw with Reach’s forge was that even though the starting map was good, the pallet became incredibly bland to play on considering all forge maps were the same thing essentially. Now instead of making 3 radically different, large scale, forge worlds they instead make 3 tiny pitiful excuses for forge maps using a slightly reskinnned Reach pallet for every one. the maps are too small to make any good big team maps or remakes on and the mechanics of forge itself have seen no improvement over Reach. Whats worse is that 343 could have came back from this by including forge maps as DLC but nope, we just get generic slayer maps.
Ordnance: Ordnance has more of a hand in ruining matchmaking than anything else in this game. In previous Halo games, weapons spawned at specific points on the map which meant controlling them was essential to winning. Now power weapons spawn everywhere at the complete random giving random people access to random weapons. These weapons also notable disappear after only 10 seconds of being on the ground. How can you fight over power weapons if they’re only there for 10 seconds. Personal ordnance isn’t an inherently bad thing if it were styled as an actual pointstreak, meaning that you would have to get a certain amount of points in one life to get the ordnance. Instead players only have to earn the point(I believe it is either 50 or 70) across multiple lives to get their ordnance. This means practically everyone will get at least one personal ordnance in a game no matter how much less skill you have than anyone else because everyone earns 70 points with ease. These personal ordnance, like the random ones, are also random; one player may receive a needler while another may receive a rocket launcher.
Balancing: The weapons, in particular the starting weapons, are highly unbalanced in Halo 4. While there have been “DMR is OP” threads since before the game came out, I still feel obliged to mention it in here. The DMR is simply the best starting precision weapon in the class with almost no disadvantages versus the other weapons. Compared to the BR, it has a faster fire rate and therefore kill time, is as accurate as a laser, has a better capacity, and seems to have more bullet magnetism. The DMR IS OP, and if you don’t believe go online in Halo 4 and check out the most used weapons of everyone in a lobby. 8/10 will typically be DMR. I i’m going to hear a hundred people say “I use the BR and kill kids with the DMR easy” after saying this but bear in mind: just because you can use the BR doesn’t make the DMR any less overpowered. There are also some issues I have with the armor abilities. Jet pack has, since its inclusion, broken map flow and it is an absolute pain to play a game with a person using the jet pack. It allows you to bypass normal restrictions of the map which essentially breaks the game by giving you a massive advantage over other players. Promethean vision shouldn’t even be in the game, its a wall hack. Any veteran game dev would have seen it as a wall hack and wouldn’t have included it in the game. Other than that they are pretty balanced, except for sentry and thruster which could use a buff. Of course the last one I must mention is the boltshot. 343 patched it once which removed like what 5 feet of range? Either way its still OP and should never be able to kill in one shot. Is say: give it the same stats as a mauler, that would be balanced.
Playlists: The launch playlists in this game were the weakest in the series by far. To their credit 343 has updated the playlists to get them back on track, merging the objective game modes, adding swat and snipers, etc. But there is still a long way to go. We need a set of classic playlists without the freaking ordnance , we need a real FFA gamemode, we need objective modes added to big team, we need forge maps added to flood, and much more. also has anyone noticed how much of a laughable joke the new action sack is compared to the previous ones? I should also mention how Big Team is practically ruined by the fact that you can spawn with plasma grenades, and plasma pistols and that the DMR is such a laser that players are motivated to sit in the back of the map and occasionally pop out to shoot. Absolutely atrocious gameplay especially on Ragnarok.
Magnetism: Its hard to remove skill from Halo, but this damn near does it. Remember how difficult it was to four shot in Halo 2 and 3? It took a lot of skill to do and if the other guy was a good strafer it could be close to impossible at times. In Halo 4 everyone 5 shots with ease. Its absolutely sickening to play this game with people that you know are worse than you yet can still 5 shot you so easily that you are forced to resort to cheap tricks/fancy grenade skills to beat them. Here is a link to a video which shows the shear degree of magnetism in Halo 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWaDwsGb1c0
Spartan Ops: Not much to say about this one. It needs competent scoring, a fix to the lag when playing on line, and more variety in maps if it ever wants to get out of the niche its in now.
Campaign: Once again not much to say, the campaign of Halo 4 was admittedly very good. With a fine story and writing behind it as well as excellent art design this game could have had the best campaign in the series if the gameplay was up to par with the trilogy. Less linearity, more sandbox. 343 did a decent job here but they just need to focus on getting the gameplay up to par with the trilogy for Halo 5. Also, we need meta scoring.
So this is why I think Halo 4 is the worst game in the series at least in terms of multiplayer. There are actually far more issues than that I could address here that people have had problems with like map design and other things but these are my biggest reasons and are of course highly opinionated and subjective.
