DISCLAIMER: THIS IS NOT ANOTHER “HALO 4 SUCKS” COMPLAINT THREAD. JUST BEAR WITH ME.
My best friend is a Call of Duty player. I’ve been asking him to play Halo 4 with me ever since it came out. I really thought he might like it since 343 integrated many aspects of Call of Duty. Anyway, we just got around to playing Halo 4 yesterday. We play a few matches in matchmaking where he barely manages to get a single kill. Then we play a game of spartan ops where I get 115 kills and he gets 23. That’s when I decide to play a few 1v1 custom games with him. We start off with 5 flag CTF on Longbow. I go for my rockets and sniper right away and make a rush for his flag. He tries to shoot me with whatever he spawns with, in this case the battle rifle. He doesn’t go for the power weapons at all, and I am able to score his flag easily over and over, even outshooting him with the flagnum vs his battle rifle.
So then I say “ok, let’s play king of the hill. 300 points to win, no time limit on Relay.” This is where it gets ridiculous. He can’t score a single kill on me. So I switch to melees only. He still can’t get a kill. So I vow not to kill him for the rest of the match, and only go for the objective. This was downright painful to watch. Half the time he doesn’t have any idea where I am, and I’m able to dodge his kill attempts simply by jumping. I end up winning by a lot, sadly.
That’s when it hit me. my friend is actually able to get kills and do moderately well in Black Ops 2. 343 obviously made Halo 4 for the wrong group of people. See, there are two groups of people. There are the Black Ops players who like to run and gun, spawn with assault rifles and just shoot the first thing they see and kill it. Then there are the tactical Halo players. The players that understand 4 shot shield pop headshot, dead. The players that understand that combat isn’t just emptying your assault rifle clip. The players that understand power weapon control, and awareness of your surroundings.
See, 343 was trying to appeal to the COD players by throwing in classes, loadouts, dominion, kill cams, etc. But at the end of the day, it is still a Halo game, and COD players are going to hate it. In fact, they are not going to excel at it at all. They are going to play the game a few times, give up and go back to COD, where running and gunning has no consequence.
So where does this leave the Halo players? It leaves us with a mediocre Halo/COD hybrid that nobody really loves, and has its share of flaws. And what do we learn from all this? You can’t attempt to please two completely different groups of players. It just won’t work. Everyone will end up hating the game, and the population will rapidly drop, as we have already seen. Keep Halo as an arena shooter as it always has been. I’m not saying there can’t be innovations, but blatantly trying to rip off a rival game will not work. Hopefully 343 will realize this and make Halo 5 for the Halo fans. We’re the people who made the game what it is, and I guarantee that it will be more profitable to have our support than just greedily trying to grab as many players from COD as possible. If you lose our support, the entire franchise will die. We’re the people that promote Halo and make it as big as it is.