I’ll come straight to the point: Halo 4 looks amazing.
I won’t be playing it though, and neither should you.
We should buy it, absolutely; good games and the companies that make them need to be supported and, as I’ve already said, this game looks pretty damn good. What 343 Industries (343i) has done with Campaign, the multiplayer sandbox, and especially the audio in Halo 4 has blown me away almost every week thus far.
That game disc won’t be going anywhere near my XBox though, and it’s because of something else 343i has done. Something stupid and more than a little unfair.
It’s what they’ve done with Specializations, that something, and it bothers the hell out of me. No matter how many times I turn it over in my head, 343i’s decision to package six of them with the Halo 4: Limited Edition (H4: LE) – leaving the standard edition with a paltry two at launch – doesn’t make sense. They aren’t really anything a collector might be interested in, like the UNSC Infinity Briefing Packet or Forward Unto Dawn DVD, they’re a core end-game mechanic; something players can strive for if they get bored with the grind towards that next Commendations tier. So why rope three-quarters of them off from the $60USD crowd?
Bothering me even further is what 343 Industries plans to do with those six Specializations in the months following Halo 4’s launch. According to the Halo Bulletin posted on August 15th of this year, 343i “will be keeping a close watch on player participation post-launch and will gradually roll out the additional six Specializations when the player base reaches certain milestones.” So, not only will standard edition owners have access to one-fourth of the end-game choices available to owners of the H4: LE for up to half-a-year (potentially), they’ll have to prove to 343i that they’re worthy of such choices.
To top it all off, 343 Industries believes (and wants us to believe) that, because Specializations are classified as end-game content, all arguments regarding how many are available to whom are null and void. As stated in the same August bulletin, “…even if you have ‘access’ to all of [the Specializations] on day one, you will still have to reach level 50 before you can enlist in any Specializations.” Really? The amount of time we’ll all have to spend in Matchmaking before we pick a Specialization makes up for the lack of choices thereof? How do you reckon that?
And yet, despite this mess of backwards logic, I’m excited. If I had more than just a debit card in my wallet, I would repeatedly throw the same fistful of cash at my computer monitor almost every time 343i posted a new Halo Bulletin. I want this game. More than that, I want Halo 4 to be all that it can be, and I feel this debacle with the Specializations is holding it back. When a developer tells you they want their game to foster the idea that you should be able to play it however you want, wouldn’t it bother you if they did something to undermine that idea? More than that, doesn’t this situation strike you as a rather perplexing attempt to extend the life of this title? Like there’s some yet-to-be-discovered feature that 343i thinks will turn players off Halo 4 in such numbers that they needed an incentive powerful enough to lure them back?
It does me, but, thankfully, 343 Industries has provided us with a solution: participation. Not over-zealous or even regular participation, as they’ll have come to expect from such a blockbuster franchise, zero participation. Regular participation would indicate that everything in Halo 4 is sunshine and rainbows and we couldn’t be happier with the work 343i has done over the past two years. Zero participation, on the other hand, would show 343i that it’s very much not okay to ship a limited edition with more of the core game included than in the standard edition, then tell the players who didn’t want to pay $40USD extra for a pretty box and bragging rights to jump through hoops for them over the course of several months to unlock the full experience.
So, on November 6th, when you’ve fulfilled your democratic duty, go ahead and buy Halo 4. Take that bad boy home and then stick it on your media self, preferably somewhere out of sight. Then play one or more of the other games you’ll probably have bought this year: Assassin’s Creed 3 or Dishonored, Minecraft, Torchlight 2, or even Mists of Pandaria. Maybe, after a couple of weeks, 343 Industries will realize it doesn’t just not make sense, it’s not fair either.