> Halo 4 seems to get A LOT of internet hate, and for the life of me, I simply cannot understand why.
>
> It is just because it’s different?
Nope, I do sincerely believe that it is simply existing at a point in time when the collective sociological baggage of Halo has put the franchise in an easily unlikable position. Take Halo as it was in 2001 and you have a wondrously new title flinging itself onto a -Yoink!- market, the console FPS. In 2004 that titan spawned a successor but beyond the mechanics, the themes, the gameplay, you have to keep in mind that the individual in aligning himself/herself with the franchise experiences certain social benefits and costs. Back then, when Halo was “on the rise”, when it was apparently pushing forward into new video game territory, when the mob was quite visibly behind it, liking its gameplay was a good personal move (at least as far as the internet was concerned) as it aligned them with a much larger social community.
Opinion, as much as the internet may mistake it otherwise, is plastic, malleable, easily bent by the forces of mob psychology. In many cases its not primarily based on facts or reason (which generally offer an almost infinite degree of latitude through the selective process of argumentation) but instead on optimum social orientation. That may be a bit much to digest but the long and the short of it is that Halo became more popular (through Halo 2 and 3) because it was already popular, the initial push of innovative gameplay lead to a tidal-wave of self-reinforcing fandom that to Bungie’s credit was allowed to find greater expression through what features they did add in Halo 2 and 3 and through the internet side of the franchise.
However within that, as always in groups, you have individual vying for position within the mob and using whatever facts may be on hand to achieve their automatic agenda. Even at the height you had whiners and whiners making the same points as you have now on these forums. It’s not about what the game is or isn’t, but instead on what saying that means to the apparent status of the individual within the nebulous hierarchy of the internet forum. It’s just jockeying for position (a successful strategy in human evolutionary history) but it at least builds in a framework of perception (ex. Halo becoming too casual) that people buy into simply as it comments on group social orientation (Halo being more about them than us).
That factor exists always in gaming, especially. However with Halo, a franchise that lost its explicit mob appeal for becoming something other than the only FPS, it achieved much greater relative prominence over the last few games (Reach and Halo 4) and with the stakes of the game once being the largest FPS in video game history (circa 2004 at the very latest) the power play of contrasting opinion became simply overpowering. Where you once had a few whiners within a popular movement, now you have a lot of people looking back without the benefit of the mob they once comprised but still listing to voices trying to shout above it. You ease social pressure here, but don’t relax it there, and you have a game that “the internet hates.” Simple as that.
What people nit pick stands simply as those bits of reasoning people select in order to justify an opinion born from larger factors both generated by this franchise and by the environment it operates within. For 343 to have released a popular game they needed to cater specifically to these social impulses, in order to undermine the dead-weight of unsavory sociology and let an individualistic appreciation for the mechanical aspects of gameplay take hold. Without that appeal to the mob, any mechanical alteration would have easily fallen flat with Halo. For example, loadouts and JIP. Both standard features but here, and now, they’re contentious. There are of course issues with implementation, but what of it? You can say the same for every game. The point is in why we feel it necessary to make an exception with Halo, for why the finer details of implementation somehow matter here a hell of a lot more than in, say, Skryim, Portal, or Titfanall which all miss the mark of perfection by exactly the same amount.
We are looking in reality for some justification for an opinion that is at least modified by social impulses. We are dissatisfied with the game because, ultimately, we do not understand how we work.
