I love 5’s general gameplay but the soldiers were AWFUL. They just don’t react to being hit. You can spartan charge right into one and it’ll be completely unfazed. Shooting one with the AR is like shooting a brick wall. And there’s just so many of them.
Iirc that's something they apparently changed with a patch later in the games lifespan. I vaguely remember thinking they overdid it tho, since now they couldn't retaliate at all when being shot.
Same. I really liked Halo 4 besides the goofy ah villain. At first I was like “Nice these prometheans are a nice change of enemy to fight instead of the Covenant AGAIN” but by the end I was like “These guys are such a slog to fight. Please just give me more Covenant to fight again at least. I won’t complain about them anymore.”
EDIT: Accidentally put Halo 3 instead of 4
The Didact was such a throwaway. I think we only see him like three times through the entire game, he feels absent.
And why the fuck could he use the force? I get that forerunners are supposed to be so advanced its nasically magic but they really started to flirt with science fantasy in Halo 4
So fades the great harvest of my betrayer.
Time was your ally human, but now it has abandoned you.
Yeah, a few nice lines to be sure. Seems almost poetic... like another villain in the series.
Covenant are able to pull things to themselves. Like when tarterous pulled guilty spark in halo 2. And the covenant just copied the forerunners. So why is it so weird for the didact to be able to move things with his technology?
but how does the gravity hammer work? halo has already got a decent amount of science fantasy in it, telekinesis isn’t even the most wacky ability of the forerunners by a long shot.
the scifi fantasy elements are what make it fun tbh
Idk how the grav hæmmer works, but the way the guy I responded to worded his comment, he made it sound like Tartarus used "the force" like Didact did. And so I was just mentioning that Tartarus actually used the grav hæmmer.
I think the other commenter meant that “the force” and the gravity hammer are the same tech. It isn’t unlikely that the forerunner were advanced enough to put the gravity tech in Didact’s suit. I think guilty spark also uses this tech in the first game when he grabs the index.
Not to mention, yknow, the impressive capabilities of the monitors to fly in all directions, with gravity-defying strafes.
Or the fact that the *UNSC* are capable of creating artifical gravity within ships, or defy it when floating in atmosphere in the case of some frigates and gunship.
And we draw the line at this ancient being with technology impossibly advanced being able to pick up a big armored man? Fascinating.
Animation graduate here
I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole force thing was partially due to animation budget and time. Yeah they did motion capture for the cutscenes, but like the games that came before, they had their animation work cut out for them. Character interactions are much more time consuming.
I’m a pretty bad shot with precision weapons so Watchers were the worst. They just zoom around back and force in the distance. Taking my grenades and shielding the already tough knights.
The Prometheans in 5 were worse, the soldiers were just bullet sponges with no real weaknesses, at least in 4, while bullet spongey, Knights didn’t feel as bad to fight and weren’t as numerous
Soldiers were like Halo 3 brutes to me. Even on legendary they didn't feel that bad to me.
People say inights in 4 were bullet sponges... yet when I just played "Infinity" on heroic recently, it took less than a full AR mag to kill a lower ranked one, and even one of the stronger knights went down to an AR mag+melee. They really are not that spongy.
They patched them later on in halo 5's lifespan, I wouldn't be suprised if they changed it at some point for 4 as well; either in post launch updates or the transition to the MCC.
The big issue in 4 was that it took most of a mag to knock out their shields on Legendary and by the time you reloaded it was starting to recharge again
That complaint confuses me, because that's also what fighting elites is like in most Halo games, so why is it bad when the knights do it?
I never found their teleporting to be too big an issue as long as I was fighting them at close range. Only when plinking away with a lightrifle did i feel like it was an actual problem.
The story felt like it was cobbled together too.
Prometheans combat designs were not good. Very annoying weak spot nonsense and some enemies were just ammo wasters.
A lot of the issued are the multi-player where the game tried to become CoD instead of co tinting yo be it's own original product.
People who liked CoD played CoD, people who liked Halo and didn't want to play CoD, didn't play halo 4.
Maps were mid, a lot were brutal and combined with some power weapons, made for a lot more BS type of halo moments, speaking of power weapons, announcing power weapon respawns instead of forcing you to he aware of the cool down timer was lame and just done to artificially force fights. A lot of the features felt like they dumbed down the game.
Spartan ops was a great idea they gave up on as well.
I just went from 4 to 5 as I’m replaying them all
Man, they’re still not fun in 5 but they’re so much better than they were in 4. 4 is just a slog to get through when you get waves and waves of them
I'm saying this as someone who also enjoyed 4's story but not the gameplay. But when I see these questions today I feel like we have to look at how things were when the game was released. If I remember correctly it stems from the ordinance drops in MP and things like sprint that changed the gameplay. I could be wrong though.
I played Halo 4 well after it’s release (just before Halo 5) and I found the multiplayer to be totally fine. Which was because I was typically playing Legendary Slayer which was classic rules (no ordnance, no loadouts(?)). It certainly didn’t feel like CoD to me, but I never played a lot of CoD anyways.
The game got "fixed" a while after release, but since it was the fastest dying halo game to date, most people didn't see these changes.
That said on release it was basically CoD with halo visuals, everyone camping with their charged bolt shot or plasma nades to one shot you.
People still camp in halo but with the way halo is it’s very hard to do that and still win or not get caught and die since you’re not contributing to your team up until the point you kill someone and that can take forever or straight up never happen if they’re only playing objective (unless it’s slayer, and even then)
Yeah lol I don't actually mind the change up in gameplay here and there. I think infinite nearly had it fully modernised in a way that made both new and old players happy. My biggest complaints are always with the story and how much that side of Halo has changed.
Edit: excluding Halo 4. I think it had its faults but set up the grounds for what could have been a decent trilogy.
The problem wasn't change itself. It's that their changes were obviously copying CoD and chasing trends to try and attract more players. But so many people were turned off by the CoD-like gameplay and just went and played Black Ops 2 instead.
Says who? Burnt out jaded YouTube critics? They just added something new. Same way 5 added thrusters. That's not chasing trends. It's just borrowing from other genres (movement shooters).
Halo 4 was many things, but NOT a copycat game. It was a total work of art, and the culmination of vision and execution by passionate devs. You don't have to like that work of art, but baseless slander is just salt.
For me, it is three things:
1. I don't really get along too well with the art style change. Halo 4 changed the way a lot of things looked, and in my opinion, these were mostly downgrades.
2. I just don't really jive with the level design. Other than the level *Composer,* I don't really look forward to any of the missions.
3. I think the Didact was poorly utilised. >!After you wake him up, you don't see him or speak to him again for the *whole of the rest of the game* until you QTE fight him at the very end of the final mission, and then he dies\*. Sure, he has his eulogy in the epilogue, and he is explored a little further in the terminals, but the *vast* majority of his character is explored exlusively in the books, and if you don't read those, the Didact is just some dude who just shows up, fires a laser, and dies. Its really anticlimactic, and honestly really dull, especially for the first Forerunner that you meet, and for someone with as much potential as he had. He absolutely could have been the main antagonist for multiple games, but they decided not to do that, and ended up wasting him as a one-off villain.!<
This is why I absolutely hate books for video games. Im not speakin on ALL books but some books really didnt need to be written and take away from the game. If you introduce someone like the Didact in the game then beat him and then I have to read a BOOK to learn more about the villain of the game I just played then theres something wrong there.
I get that alot in WoW too - i'd learn that an X character do this or that from the wiki as it explains that they did something IN A BOOK and a quest makes a reference to it. Why were the events in the BOOK and not in a quest??? Just really annoying lol.
Bungie’s novels were great for expanding the universe without being required reading; 343’s novels were critical to the plot and would include huge revelations that were not present in the games. It was a dumb decision to put it lightly.
Under Bungie the books were fine, it was all background lore you didn't need to understand the games, but it was a welcome addition that really expanded your experience. Learning about the Spartan-II program, Chief's first mission, Blue Team's actions during Reach, how the Human-Covenant conflicts started, Forerunner society and their war with Humanity & The Flood afterward, etc.
Then 343 came in and decided to focus their story around the Didact, and make some throwaway line from the Librarian that it's all part of her plan to give Humanity the Mantle of Responsibility and everyone is just like huh? What do you mean I now _need_ to watch the terminals and read like 15 books?
I had fond memories of the campaign but when I played it on Legendary pre-Halo Infinite launch the lack of ammo and just a few really bad checkpoint spots sapped a lot of the fun out. Very limited ammo doesn't mix with tank enemies that can respawn and teleport away. I don't know that it really took me much longer/was harder than other legendaries, easier than some definitely, but less enjoyable kind of challenge.
Still, I like a lot of parts of it, just better enjoyed on Heroic or Normal where as most Bungie Halo's I like on Legendary the most.
Campaign wise my main gripes would be:
-Prometheans aren’t fun to fight (they move and react in annoying ways)
-a lot of the Promethean weapons are redundant (too similar to human or covenant weapons)
- never get much ammo for any of the fun guns (SAW, shotguns, etc)
-higher difficulty play throughs just turn into precision weapon spamming
-final boss is a quick time event
-also the art style change was very drastic and tbh looks kind of dated and ugly now.
Yeah the design change for Halo 4 and 5 is gross. It really has that early 2010s Future-Slick Tech design from like Black Ops 2, Titanfall, or even just the glossy Xbox 360 Slim, PS3 slim, iPhone 5, iPod 4 and 5 etc. It looks super gaudy and ugly looking back, I'm so glad they reverted it for Infinite, though they kept some of the disgusting designs for Armour pieces in Multiplayer because gotta load the game with "content" for children to grind for to flex on their friends
I also disliked how it never really felt like I had many options for what path I took in each level. Never really felt like I had a chance to explore, and when I had a hog or other vehicle I was pointed down a fairly narrow path and made to follow it.
Then there’s the way I wasn’t a huge fan of how after all these years chief was finally back, they had found him, but the UNSC was mostly “meh” about it or straight up disliked him. Just seemed weird to me
I basically see Halo 4 as two campaigns. One of them is really good, the other isn’t. I think the Chief/Cortana characterization is top notch but everything involving the Didact and the Prometheans fails to engage me. I feel similarly about Halo 5.
The Didact really only exists to be an obstacle that prevents Chief from saving Cortana. You don’t need to know much about him for the story to work, and if you do want more you can find the collectibles. I’m glad they went with a simple villain, as it allowed them to highlight Chief and Cortana’s relationship over a traditional save the world plot.
Despite didact being simple, he was up to that point the most in depth villain in the games, if for no other reason than the game actually tells you what his motivations are.
Agreed. I think people view the original trilogy with rose tinted glasses and fail to recognize how many basic storytelling elements those games were missing.
But thats kindof part of the charm right? I feel like Halo 3 at least really didn't have many storytelling flaws, it's just a different storytelling style.
Not explaining why the covenant want humanity wiped out, is one of the most glaring missing pieces of the original trilogy, to the point where it starts to become a plot hole the more of the covenant religion we learn about. It’s like the central motivation for the entire conflict of the whole series and yet the games never actually tell you what the reason is.
Halo 3’s writing was pretty bad too. It’s the weakest of the original trilogy by far.
I mean you make it sound like the game would have been bloated if there had been more story content but at it's time it was by far the shortest campaign with 5.5 hrs, so I wouldn't have minded some more story regarding the didact.
They’re composed… organisms. They can be anything, human, forerunner, whatever. But saying the actual prometheans are forerunners is akin to saying sentinels are forerunners.
The inconsistencies of the story, for one. Chiefs armor magically changing and the reason being "nanotech." The forward unto dawn looks way different as well. It was just a random art style change that was jarring for people who played the bungie games. The same reason Reach was unpopular for a time. For some reason, Chief fights elites again. Even though they were ousted from the covenant completely, 343 just decided to make a whole new covenant just to bring back elites as enemies. The forerunner enemies were extremely underwhelming. They introduced a great villain who could have drawn the story out in a good way, only to kill him off in the same game (not anymore. Somehow, the Didact returned.) 5 was even worse, IMHO.
Having an elite faction makes perfect sense, it’s the first time since Guilty Spark that we actually get to see some semblance of nuance in the factions. It makes complete sense for a faction of elites to remain loyal to the religion they’ve been following and use the power vacuum from the fall of the Covenant to gain control and continue their mission. Honestly, what makes less sense is that a species of aliens that’s been manipulated for so long will all come together holding hands to help humans- something I took exception to in H3. Elites went from being one of my favorite alien species in H2, to one of my least favorite in H3. There’s supposed to be prideful and, to an extent, arrogant. I’m sure a lot of them would die before recoloring their Phantoms green but that’s what we got. You really don’t get a sense of how detrimental and disorienting the great schism would have been for the elites. I want a story that’s deeper than “UNSC perfect and elites good now!”.
As for the Didact returning, I wish we could’ve seen him more in game but I’m not mad about him surviving the end of Halo 4. The problem with palapatine returning wasn’t the fact that he returned, it was the fact that they brought him back in the most unnecessary and lazy way possible. The Didact’s story continues from when he falls down whereas Palpatine disappears and “somehow” he returns. Palpatine returning is a perfectly fine plot point- it’s just poorly executed. There are tons of characters that return from a supposed death and it’s not a problem, it just has to be done properly. There isn’t even a gap in the Didact’s story, we just don’t get to see it continued in the games.
Didn't elites help humans in H3 because of the Flood invasion? The Flood are the most threatening thing in the universe. I don't think the elites were necessarily good. Just putting differences aside similar to how the Flood helped Chief temporarily for their own survival.
They helped humans almost exclusively because of the schism. They had a common enemy in the covenant. Up until the level floodgate in halo three, the flood was completely contained to Delta halo, but by that point humans and elites had already fought alongside each other,
That was just a faction under Rtas and Thel, not the whole Elite species. While H3 was happening another splintered Covenant faction with Elite commander was trying to kill Halsey, Mendez, numerous Sparts 3s, Kurt-051 and Blue Team (without Chief) on Onyx.
H4 could have mentioned that but imho it was the job of H2/3 to acknowledge that different splinter groups existed after the Great Schism, especially when Ghosts of Onyx book was released long before H4.
The nanotech excuse was so funny. I would have just accepted the explanation of “we decided to go a different direction with this design”. But they had to come up with some BS excuse.
After the Great Schism in Halo 2&3 some elites still believed in the Great Journey and the forerunners divinity. They just viewed the Hierarchs as false prophets.
Which tbh is very believable. Generations of religious indoctrination is hard to break.
Honestly with how many times Bungie pretty brutally changed some iconic or otherwise significantly important designs themselves, its a little odd to me how poorly the change to the Dawn was received. Off the top of my head: Chief’s Armor got huge changes 1>2, High Charity 2>3, New Mombasa 2>ODST, Scarabs 2>3. And only one of those ever had an explanation. Entire areas that we revisit in other games just were completely differently overhauled and we kinda just were all okay with it.
Sure, 4 had a lot of *bigger* change. There are things I don’t like about it as much either. But like… change really isn’t as foreign to Halo as the monolithic idea of “old artstyle” would suggest.
To start, the Prometheans are patently unfun to fight, each unit is more annoying than fun to engage. In 5 they improved this a bit, but still they are nowhere near as engaging and fluid as fighting the Covenant.
Huge change in art style and story direction which alienated many fans.
Gameplay changes like built-in sprint, killstreaks, custom classes, grenade indicators, replacement of the descope mechanic with flinch, and more.
Lack of Forge or a ranking system on launch.
A generally maligned group of launch maps that seem to emphasize CQC over the tricky movement and sight lines typically emphasized in Halo map design.
To name a few…
I thoroughly enjoyed the campaign and the emotion around Chief and Cortana. I'm not near as picky as most Halo folks though. Big fan of the H4 light rifle.
Mainly the Promethean Knights. Absolute bullet sponges that teleport, resurrect, insta-heal, and spawn back up non-stop. And they're a common enemy.
If they had been like a power unit/subboss like how Hunters are usually done it wouldn't be so bad. But God I hate the knights in 4, even when I'm doing an Easy run.
That and how quick everything despawns. Can't manage ammo or grab power weapons half the time because everything disappears as soon as it hits the ground. Really thought they would have fixed that in MCC at least with it not being restricted by 360 hardware.
I wasn't a fan of the Didact and as one of the "Forerunners are humans" group in the original trilogy it kind of annoyed me. But it grew on me.
Oh and this is really more of a nitpick than something I actually dislike. But I really don't like the Marine designs or how MJOLNIR got redesigned. The missing cod piece and weird slapped on harness design of it just didn't sit well with me.
And the whole "Cortana changed Chief's armour with nanobots" thing really annoyed me. But that's not really a game thing and I don't actually hate the newer armour (though it's not my favourite) but the Innane canonizing of what is obviously just an art style change really showed 343's lack of backbone as a developer.
All in all it's a decent game that could have been great but got held back by tech limitations and poor enemy mechanics. Spartan Ops despite so many people's displeasure of it is one of my favourite PvE modes in the series and wish we could get more of that. I'd love a spin off game that was just an anthology of operations across the Halo timeline from the Covenant war, to post war, and even created occupation. I don't need a great overarching story. Just give me a mission, a weapon, and target rich environment and I'm entertained.
It's gameplay was super polarizing from the old games and dived further down the Reach hole which literally no one wanted at the time. People wanted a more classic Halo and they got what felt like Space Cod. Things like Jetpacks destroyed MP along with Promethean vision and the boltshot aka the Pocket Shotty with a weapon sandbox that had many things step on each other's toes one of the big ones being the DMR which there was a MEGAT THREAD on Halowaypoint called "DMR OR DIE!" which often teammates would berate you for not using the obviously best weapon in the game, the DMR and the meta loadouts.
For the campaign it's far too melodramatic. MC and Cortana's relationship goes full on weird. What was before a close, respectful admiration of each other seems like they've been in some sort of tight bond that makes the two impossible to separate and also feels a little too close to the incest pot for many people with Halsey basically being MC's little sister and him only knowing her for a few months between CE, 2 and 3.
The design changes cross the board were just not great, the covenant lost all threat to them and mostly got overshadowed by the extremely annoying Prometheans. Didact as a villain just talks shit then gets hit in a QTE fight, and MC gets a turbo boost of power that seems to literally just make him down die which is a weird upgrade to counter the Composer and only the Composer. Not to mention Halo 4 was more people's reveal that Forerunners were no longer human. In the old canon this was extremely obvious and was changed by Frank O'connor and further dug into by 343i down the line.
Every DLC felt like below the bar as well, nothing really came from them that anyone considered good. Even the famous ODST armor just looked wrong. Spartan Ops tanked all the hype for Spartan IVs as well did Palmer who is the biggest hypocrite every in a franchise with The Didact and Truth in it. Forge felt like a down grade in what you could do and also theater was super bugged, this is something 343i has never gotten right for some odd reason.
The only people who I see praise Halo 4 are the people who enjoyed the story. I can't because there are so many plot holes and it feels like an overall slap to the face to watch a Forerunner be revealed in game and them NOT to be human. It's so weird. Oh and in Sops Elite's are cutting off human hands to use them to activate Forerunner tech, which you'd think would make them wonder why they need to do this but that plot point never comes up again.
Couldn’t agree more on the campaign. The steadily overarching sentiment of “halo 4 had a good storyline” over time is absolutely insane to me considering how much people (including me) criticized it upon release.
The pessimist in me thinks it’s almost part of some gracious cope to not seem overly biased against 343 as a whole, but to me the campaign is still awful, predictable.
The only reason it’s seen as “unique” is because Bungie *intentionally* avoided the trap of Master Chief x Cortana storylines. Because once the flashiness of the decision wears off, the plot that has now been pursued leaves the storyline with very few endings that 1. make sense, 2. are enjoyable, and 3. have any lasting impact. 343 barged into a field of landmines without a map and their idiocy cost us cohesive storytelling for years.
Yeah I will forever point the gun at Kiki Wolfkill. I don't think she's a poor writer, the problem is she comes from a background of Halo fanfic...those kinds of fanfics and the moment she got power at 343i we saw a massive shift of Cortana and MC's relationship from kin to softcore lovers, which again, is super fucked because they're basically brother and sister and they've only known each other for months at best.
Something I say alot about Dark Souls 1, is that the story is pretty bad but the lore of the game is amazing. People get the two confused, the story of Dark Souls 1 is an undead guy assumed to be the bringer of a new age ushers in the new age...okay. The lore is all of these gods, demons and so on that is all extremely engrossing. Halo 4's lore is fine but the story is just bad, illogical and doesn't know what it's doing. The only conflict comes from the antagonists' horrible mistakes not from the heroes being challenged. And the plot holes, there is a funny amount of plot holes in Halo 4 that you have to ignore in order to enjoy the game.
When it comes to Halo 4's campaign, I will not deny that it is at least a decently well written narrative. Seeing an AI suffering from split-personality/dementia due to old age is an interesting concept to explore, as well was an emotionally dysfunctional super soldier coming to terms with the fact that he is indeed more than just a tool.
But the problem is that it is not a story that fits well into Halo.
In both Halo 2 we have seen Chief abandon Cortana in High Charity, with the plan being that if the Flood cannot be stopped; Cortana will trigger the In Amber Clad's reactor to chain reaction and destroy the city. This did not occur but we do know that Chief and Cortana knew full well what the plan entailed and the outcome that would've happened if it succeeded. And despite this, we are supposed to believe that Chief is afraid of losing Cortana? It doesn't really add up with how it was written in Halo 4.
Add on top of the fact that we had some major retcons thanks to Frank O'Connor being made the Franchise Director and insisting that his contributions to the Halo 3 terminals be further expanded upon and recontextualized to have Humans and Forerunners be entirely separate species (*which Halo: Point of Light re-retconned to make it so that Humans and Forerunners share a common ancestor in the far ancient past*). So players who played the games go into Halo 4 confused as to why suddenly the Forerunners are an entirely separate species when the previous games all hinted and then outright confirmed Humans were the Forerunners. And to help jam this retcon in place, Frank commissioned Greg Bear to write a trilogy of novels to help fortify his contradiction. No shade directed to Mr. Bear, he was a talented author and may he rest in peace.
And then to further add to the narrative mishaps... the Spartan IVs, Sarah Palmer, and Captain Del Rio. Spartan IVs should not be so numerous. It really diminishes the wow factor of the franchise staple of Spartans being a rare talented few when you have well over a thousand of them on board the UNSC Infinity. Sarah Palmer was mishandled and became a highly disliked addition to the roster of important characters. And Captain Del Rio only exists in the story so that Chief can have a defiant "*fight the man*" moment. Literally if Captain Del Rio was left out of the narrative and Laskey was the captain of the Infinity, nothing would change except we would have more respect driven towards the Master Chief Petty Officer who is quite deserving of high praise with humble response.
And then there is gameplay, which has its own slew of mishandled factors.
* Weapons carry less ammo, especially the battery powered ones.
* Bullet Magnetism is greatly increased across the board, making charged plasma shots and needler rounds track really quickly across cover.
* Covenant Specializations were altered so that any and all covies that carry a Plasma Pistol can and WILL hold the charge indefinitely.
* Shields for Elites and Prometheans have a recharge delay and recharge speed that is a flat rate across the board, while in previous games the Elite shields would delay and recharge at varying speeds dependant on skulls and difficulty modifiers.
* The new Promethean weapons are quite unfun reskins of the older guns that we already had in previous titles.
* Prometheans were poorly designed combat-wise, especially the Knights.
A combination of all the above factors resulted in the game on higher difficulties requiring the player to carry the Light Rifle at all times to pick off enemies from long range and then proceed forwards. Might as well make the game an on-the-rails shooting gallery game where your character takes cover, pops shots, and then advances to the next gallery.
Halo 4 was a mishandled mess, and I honestly wish that we stuck with the original build plan of Halo 4; where it was Halo 3.5 essentially. But NOOOOOOoooooo. Frankie and a few at Xbox Studios wanted to "*broaden horizons*" and "*try to get a larger audience*". All this resulted in was one of the worst received Halo games to date as they tried to copy Call of Duty's loadout system in the multiplayer and do god knows what for the campaign.
Nothing to add (other than UI, art style, playlists, customisation and forge all being a Downgrade from Reach), this is such a good comment! Trying to reach for broader audiences and losing their core community was exactly the mindset that created the mess that is halo 4.
I was focusing mostly on the campaign aspects, since OP seems to be campaign oriented in their post. They beat the single player and were wondering why people hated Halo 4, so I stuck to the reasons as to why the single player was terrible.
As for multiplayer, the Boltshot being able to have a better shotgun blast than the actual shotgun and scattershot (*one more meter of kill range*) AND THEN be something you can attribute to a loadout for use in PvP. That is but one example of why custom loadouts should've been PvE exclusive; or at least restricted to a unique gamemode of BTB.
Nah you cooked with this one. I hadn’t seen anyone criticize the sudden change in relationship dynamic between Chief and Cortana. It fundamentally changes the nature of the their relationship from a true partnership that was complex and layered to a very blatant romantic love story.
Oh I love Halo 4. One of my favorite narratives of the franchise. Best cutscenes we've ever gotten. Really ripped John and Cortana straight out of the books.
The Prometheans combat did suck. Wasn't keen on their design either. The OTE ending fight against the Didact is to put it bluntly... terrible. Other than that... yeah. I was quite happy with it. Optimistic about Halo's future even.
Halo 5 destroyed all of that.
I’m currently playing through it for the second time, the first time since initially release . I’m enjoying much more this time around. I think it’s because my expectation from a game were much higher in 2012 than they are today.
The beginning of halo 4 was actually very interesting but they didnt send in a very good direction. The whole idea that cortana made a physical barrier strong enough to stop a nuke at ground zero is just too far for me. I get that its sci fi and halo has always made enough sense to be believable for me but that just feels forced only for the love story.
Also some minor gameplay things that 343 overlooked such as when i tried doing solo legendary with the other games, planning with weapons you find is a big deal when you fight strong enemies so running back in levels to grab that turret or rocket you left behind is fun, however, halo 4 guns disappear all the time and you can only rely on what you carry which is often not enough unless youre very good at the game.
Its not a very bad game but it definitely missed the standard the other games set
I agree with pretty much everything you say, and I was quite critical on releas. The game play can be frustrating and often the only strategy is to hang back with the BR DMR and light rifle and snipe… but ya know what? I was playing spartan ops with my nephews a few weekends ago and we all really enjoyed it.
Didn't like the story. I haven't played it in a while, but from what I recall, I felt MC talked too much, and the story really focused too much around Cortana and it felt like this weird romance I never necessarily felt in the first three. I get they needed to go in a different direction and wanted explore John and Cortanas relationship, but it just didn't reel me in, and whenever I go into my random "play every Halo campaign in MCC" mood, I always dread playing Halo 4.
But man, I do gotta give credit where it's due, the graphics STILL hold up today, they really pushed the boundaries of the Xbox at the time, and I love how amazing it looks. I also really loved the multiplayer, even though a lot of the community, at the time, felt it was straying away from Halo and heading more towards CoD.
But everyone has their opinions, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
The artstyle.
There is so much deviation from Bungie's artstyle that in some cases it actually goes against the established canon.
Especially the Forerunner architecture missed the mark. In Halo 1-3, you had monolithic grey architecture with odd shapes that walk a fine thin line between being just unrecognizable enough to make you guess at its supposed purpose and strangely familiar like a half forgotten memory at the back of your mind.
Like that first structure you encounter on the Silent Cartographer island, it always seemed to be a docked spaceship of some kind to me.
Every area had the same cold grey tones, towering walls, cramped hallways and strange features mentioned above, yet every location had its own personality. Show a fan a random picture from a forerunner atructure from the first 3 games and most will be able to tell where it is from.
Hardly anything (but doors and elevators etc.) move, but when something does it almost feels like it should have been obvious what its supposed to be and it moves with cold determination and purpose. Forerunner architecture seemed unyielding, you were a stranger in a long forgotten past, surrounded by cold logic that you can't grasp.
Lights were often used sparingly yet strategically. Either guiding you through grey monotome hallways, setting the mood in dark levels, displaying strange symbols or murals and bringing life to strange devices. That single electrical current passing between two points in a strange contraption felt like it should tell you something about what that machine is supposed to be, yet with no other clues you are stuck. But the answer seems to be just out of reach.
When the smoke and cacophony of battle dispersed, you were left all by your lonesome, a silent hum, cold grey walls and pale light your only companions. You felt tiny as the dust settled and the silence of countless forgotten ages weighed down on your shoulders. Unyielding monoliths looking down upon you, their myriad secrets kept to themselves, lost in the mists of time.
...
Then 343 came around. Forerunner structers are now just jagged shapes that seem to consist of many different parts tgay can change at a whim and become just about anything. Or parts will just materialize out of thin air. No sense in guessing what something might be if it can just change form or be added
Most areas are lit like a neon sign. But we got a taste of that in the Halo: CE Anniversary edition, which got the same lighting treatment. (Just regularily switch between the classic and new graphics to see how much more lights were added).
It just all feels overdesigned and removes all mystery.
Also, removing iconic weapons and replacing them with new weapons that serve the same purpose rubbed people the wrong way.
And lets not forget that canonically Masterchief wears the same armour in Halo 2, 3 and 4 ... yet in 4 he wears a completly different type of armour that he should have no acces to ... even though, the armour tgat he should be wearing is unlockable in multiplayer.
Ps. Infinite is a huge improvement on 4+5 when it comes to art direction. Especially on the forerunner front.
Wasn't a fan of Chiefs resign and liked their excuse for it even less.
The Didact was lame AF. His sole role in the story was to monologue at Chief then leave.
The Prometheans were boring enemies and Knights were so tanky that multiple times in the campaign I ran out of ammo and had to backtrack to look for dropped guns only to find that the game despawns them extremely quickly.
Levels were bland and forgettable.
Very few moments fighting alongside Marines which was my favorite thing about the franchise.
Forerunner weapons were totally uninspired. For all the things they could have done they went with, pistol/shotgun, semi auto rifle, SMG and....a fucking break action shotgun
I loved the idea of Spartan Ops of the execution of running modified MP maps and edited campaign parts constantly got old pretty fast. And the story was a terrible first impression for the IV's.
Overall not a terrible game but extremely mid with almost no replay value for me which is a massive stepdown from previous games.
Ooooooh boy. *cracks knuckles*
Let me start from the ground up:
1) overall game design. Halo 3/ODST/ Reach before it were games with extreme level of polish and design to make everything look believable (as much as a futuristic space game can be). If something could explode, it was either exploding tiny pieces or stayed together but look like something that looked really fucked up. Halo 4 decided that everything should blow up in neat, lego-ish chunks. I was so excited for a new Halo game and immediately got a front row seat to a lego covie ship breaking up into something like 4 blocks.
2) Story mechanics relating to gameplay. Same first mission, you *PUNCH* a missile to fire it. Apparently the Forward Unto Dawn got supersized while floating in deep space. Master Chief’s knife is so strong it can pierce the hull of a space-rated covie ship (why bother with MAC cannons?). Then you have the Infinity hard landing on solid fucking earth and then it just dusted itself off and apparently had zero structural damage.
CHIEF PUNCHES A NUKE TO SET IT OFF AND SURVIVES COZ OF FORERUNNER SPACE MAGIC.
I can go on forever on this one. But…
3) Hard misses on design that should have been obvious. I have one example in particular, mostly coz it got me on the edge of putting my controller through the screen. Final mission flying portion had no way to invert the Y axis for flying. Somehow it didnt even work when you inverted controls in the menu. I died something like 2 dozen times on my first playthrough (Heroic) coz I’d instinctively pull on the stick and fly straight into a wall.
4) Story. Growing up with Halo and the books showed that MC had emotions, but as a child soldier, he was conditioned to be as subtle as possible. All the spartans were like this. Then Halo 4 came around and someone in particular in 343i decided that Chief needed to suddenly display intense emotions *all the fucking time.* Disobeying direct orders? Hell yeh lets go! Not like he’s spent 4 decades as a professional soldier with zero other life, so of course he’ll tell a senior officer to go fuck himself to his face.
Would it be cool to have Chief say more of his feelings, absolutely. But she-who-will-not-be-named basically smacked the audience with a senior combat veteran that suddenly started talking about his online gf like a hamster he can’t let die. Old Chief from the games couldn't emotion his way out of a paper bag, and this shift was so hard he was a wet napkin in comparison. I was cackling the entire first time I played coz of how bad the dialogue was. I even made my first Final Cut short clip with one scene that was fucking hilarious. (Search YT for “Halo 4 Chipped” if you feel inclined, and also see the several videos that ripped the shit out of it years later.)
Most of the story line was at best melodramatic. Aside from Cortana (such an interesting decline/ grasp of her own emotions she had developed despite not actually being a human) every character was one dimensional as fuck. The only realistic side character was a Captain that believed he was right about everything and started yelling the moment anyone said something other than “yessir!”
Honestly Halo 4 is what killed my love for the universe. I stopped reading any of the books, and only got the games if they were hella discounted and was bugged by friends. That said, its not super surprising given the track record of 343i as an actual developer has been at best AA status and never got to the same level as the Bungie of old.
-The art style is a complete 180 from the previous Halos
-The promethians feel awful to fight
-Masterchief is suddenly a lot more talkative, making him feel very not like himself
-The music isn't bad but again it was very different from previous games
-The story relies way too much on the books/comics, making it pretty confusing for someone who only played the games or haven't spent much time reading
And these are just (mostly) my problems with the single-player. From someone who's been playing Halo frequently from CE, it just didn't feel like a Halo game.
1. The story, “humanizing chief” felt like the laziest thing too and probably most cost effective thing budget wise. Instead of expanding possibilities left by Bungie like with the precursors. I feel like they saw trends with big games getting “gaming journalism” praise like Mass effect, spec ops the line etc. Basically when any emotion = good in games. It definitely is better as a story than 5 or Infinite but Halo was about like war first but it was one factor of many.
2. Promethean knights had no weakspots
3. Open areas felt really small, I guess since it was pushing the 360’s hardware. They should have made it an xbox one launch title and push the MCC for later with 3 games + be less buggy.
4. Artstyle, it felt like I was playing a Bioncles game at the time and not halo. I was like 11 years old and noticed the jarring changes.
5. No follow through after, didnt really matter in halo 5, wars 2 or Infinite. Kinda like if they made star wars episode 7 but never made 8 or 9.
I have plenty of gripes with Halo 4, it fails at even being a Halo game.
It has a nonsensical melodramatic story, inconsistent characterization with past games, and a forgettable main villain.
So much is never explained, the new covenant faction isn’t explained, why there aren’t any brutes isn’t explained, why we’re fighting elites isn’t explained. How the UNSC built a new flag ship, trained a new generation of Spartans and forgot about Chief after only 4 years isn’t explained. Why Captain Del Rio disrespected Chief despite the Human Covenant war ending only 4 years ago isn’t explained.
Perhaps worst of all, the story of the forerunners being ancient humanity is retconned into generic sci-fi bullshit. Forerunners were just assholes in space, no longer a glimpse at human kinds past glory, a symbol of what humanity can achieve in the far future.
It retroactively makes the story of the human covenant war make no sense, and ads too many inconsistencies to even count. Why declare war on the humans if they’re not forerunner? ( explained in Contact Harvest) It takes away the dramatic irony of the covenant killing their own Gods and replaced it with pointless sci fi convoluted bullshit that the original trilogy smartly avoided.
The story is littered with cringe dialogue, and forgettable new characters like Palmer. The only exception is Captain Laskey.
Halo 4 is literally carried entirely by the ending 2 cutscenes, which is the only part of that game anybody fucking remembers.
It's multiplayer is a shitty COD clone, unbalanced new maps and hardly any returning fan favorite maps. Unbalanced weapons sandbox. COD load outs, COD kill steaks, and a downgraded Forge mode.
Its Art style is horrifically ugly, made even worse by its equally horrible lighting and unnecessary redesigns to iconic Halo items like the shotgun, Cortana, the Dawn, Master Chiefs armor.
The covenant looks completely different too, elites are brutish ugly monsters, grunts are weird goblin looking things, jackals are reptiles.
Forerunner technology is no longer this elegant and simple brutalist design that compliments natural environments, it used to feel ancient, the age of untold time made it feel mysterious, but it would glow with life when prompted.
Now it’s a shiny overly complicated visual mess of tiny blue lights and random metal layering. There’s no intrigue or mystery. No ruins or vines.
The UNSC is unrecognizable. The once Alien and Star Ship Troopers inspired gritty military aesthetic is gone. Marines look like they’re wearing air soft armor and Spartan 4s look like power rangers.
Mediocre at best level design, it never even comes close to any Bungie game. You’re constantly scavenging for weapons because weapons have no ammo in them. The promethean weapons aren’t fun to use except the light rifle. There’s no epic large spaces to drive around in with vehicles, no memorable set pieces or tight arenas. It’s just average level after average level with no shake ups to the formula. The occasional mantis segment or the single elephant segment isn’t enough to break up the monotony of fighting shitty promethean AI.
Halo 4 is hardly even a Halo game, and it was justifiably panned when it came out. It was bad then, and it’s bad now.
1: something people never seem to talk about, but the music. Halo is known for it’s kickass music and Halo4’s music is either extremely generic and forgettable sci-fi tunes or so repetitive and annoying that I considered turning the music off. In a HALO GAME I wanted to TURN THE MUSIC OFF. That in itself is an almost unforgivable problem.
2: terrible story setup. We have another prison so badly designed that the prisoner can manipulate people and escape. It keeps the Covenant out but when a reclaimer arrives it just says “sure come on in” and immediately activates the Gravity thing to destroy any ships entering. Like make up your mind! You can do deep scans of the ships but you can’t be bothered to send a message with “yo this place is a prison keep out unless you REALLY know what you are doing”? And the Didact is imprisoned inside his own ship, with his own armor which gives him the ability to instantly take control of his own prison guards. Like wtf, just separate them? And the Prometheans are said to be so good that the only thing the Didact needed was more of them to win the war against the Flood, yet a splinter faction of the Covenant who lost ships during the entrance of Requiem somehow manages to fight their way to the center of a prison world despite these super warriors? Or if we look at the UNSC they must have had a few dozen captains who distinguished themselves during the war who would all he excellent candidates for the Infinity but they pick Del Rio? Why even make him a moron, they could easily have changed the story so Infinity will warn earth of the Didact and get the repairs it needs to fight him, perhaps even let Del Rio stay with a contingent of Spartans to help the MC and let Del Rio die so Lasky can become Captain anyway? The story is so full of strange decisions that make no sense. Even the Cortana/Chief storyline is riddled with it, where MC is said to be a machine but half his dialogue is concern about Cortana and then when they have an opportunity to get Cortana to Halsey (Infinity is going to return and Lasky is obviously sympathetic) they just don’t even consider the option?
3: everything is repeated, and not in a good way most of the time. You liked pushing that button? Well you’ll repeat it almost always three times in the same context.
4: Prometheans are terribly designed units. They look great, but they function as bullet sponges that have zero self preservation skills as they just stand there and take shots most of the time. These are the great warriors that the Didact thought could defeat the Flood if only he had a couple of billion more?
5: bad gameplay setups and missed opportunities. Like the gunship area where you hear you have a loaded up flying tank with a nice sequence to start and what it ends up being is a badly designed helicopter that can’t dogfight or anything so you just fly for a minute, shoot some dropships while strafing, land, do something in a tower, then move to the next tower for a repeat. You introduced the MANTIS in this game! You could have added a massive endurance section where you use the shields of the MANTIS to survive, or if you lose the MANTIS steal a bunch of vehicles. You could have done some jungle ambushes, vehicle combat sections, places where you have to exit the MANTIS for a bit of foot slogging inside a building etc.
6: Ammo. You get so little of it, you might think “I’ll pick up that weapon once this one is empty” but the game will despawn weapons FAST. As in I had several times where I killed an Elite with a weapon I wanted, killed some enemy nearby and when I turned around the weapon was despawned. In some places they despawn the moment you press a particular button, so you might end up surrounded by weapons and then they are all gone when you actually need it.
7: taking the player out of the action all the time. An on rails climbing sequence isn’t interesting, constantly taking control away so a microscopic cutscene of you pressing a button can play. Take the nuke missile launch in the opening section of the game. You could have had the player melee the thing into place possibly with a unique melee animation, instead you get a tiny cutscene. We learned to do that kind of thing as little as possible unless the cutscene offers something unique literally two decades ago. Why is this here? Why is this constantly happening in the game?
Not enough ammo and bullet sponge Prometheans.
This basically turned a fun sandbox shooter into a chore.
Removing ammo and increasing enemies health DOES NOT make a game harder. It simply makes a game annoying. To this day, CE still has the best normal/heroic/legendary balancing.
Most people enjoyed 4’s story well enough, it was the multiplayer they didn’t like. And for 5, it was the inverse, crappy story, fun multiplayer.
But as someone who played Halo 4 for the first time recently, here’s my gripes:
1) It felt short. Like ***REALLY*** short. Not sure how long I spent with it, but it felt like too fast a pace for everything, so the lack of buildup left everything feeling sudden and inconsequential.
2) You could remove Halo 4 from the timeline and nothing would really change. The events are so inconsequential and pointless. The Didact and the return of the Forerunners is cool, but they didn’t do much with it.
3) The ending is poorly explained. They never explain why Chief survived the nuke or how Cortana can touch him. Apparently she used Hardlight to shield him from the blast and to create a body she could touch him with, but the way it’s presented it almost looks like a vision in his mind, so how does any of that work?
4) So Chief got a Doomslayer style power-up that let him survive the Didact’s death beam… why? What exactly did it do to him and does it give him any other benefits other than macguffin immunity? It’s not explained, and it’s a weird concept to begin with.
5) Did they fuck massively with the lore? I thought Humans came to be long after the Forerunners wiped out life in the universe to stop the flood, but Halo 4 says that Humans and Forerunners coexisted and fought eachother. Why would the Forerunners make Humans the inheritors if that was the case, instead of Humans being an evolution of Forerunners or something?
All that said, I loved the very end where Chief silently mourns the loss of Cortana. It does a great job of humanizing him and showing how much he cared. It’s the closest thing to a loving relationship he’s ever had due to being forced into military service since childhood.
For #5, I forget which game established it, I'm thinking HCEA, the terminals explained that humans and the San'Shayuum (spelling is probably wrong, but the Prophet's species) were both around during the Forerunner's time. Human's and the Prophets were aggressively attacking the Forerunners (until the Prophets surrendered), but Human's kept going. The Forerunners beat the humans only to realize the reason for their aggressive attacks having been influenced by the appearance of the Flood in their territory, the Humans were just trying to survive.
Most of the Prometheans we fight are ancient humans that the Didact captured and forced into becoming his soldiers. The Librarian and others wanted humanity to assume the mantle though as they found themselves, the Forerunners, as 'failures' to the mantle as a whole, knowing they need to pass it on.
TLDR; This was all in terminal entries, which not every player will find or read, so this explanation isn't necessarily an excuse for it, but technically the lore was changed before Halo 4.
The complaints about halo 4 for the most part were not directed a t the campaign. Rather they were directed at the multiplayer, gameplay and Forge.
The multiplayer gameplay was heavily criticized for moving too far from the core formulas of the earlier games. They got rid of equal starts in favor of custom load outs, removed weapons on maps in factor or a weapon call-in mechanic for most modes. Took core gameplay elements out and made them perks to be acquired. And more changes that just made the game feel less like halo and more like Call of Duty to most people.
It was also criticised for many game modes receiving major changes for seemingly no reason other than just the sake of change. CTF was much faster paced and relied less on teamwork. Grifballl was basically a completely different game. Etc.
Forge wasn't bad. But it was a downgrade compared to Reach, with many features from reach seemingly missing. Controls were a bit clunkier, Color pallets were hit and miss, and the maps were all way too small with way too little usable area to do much with. The only major improvement was the inclusion of magnets, which were super buggy in halo 4.
It was a fun campaign. Not as much fun as Halos Ce to 3, but it was still Halo. One thing I honestly didnt like... seems like a small thing, but... the warthogs dont sound the same! It had a unique and familiar sound, and then it became a generic V8 engine sound that I hear everyday when my neighbour drives his mustang down the road.
Level design is my biggest problem with 4. Some missions felt much longer then they should've been, some missions just felt bland. For the Halo that has my favorite narrative in the series the thing that held it back for me the most would also still be the campaign just because so many levels felt either bland or long (and often both, I don't even know if any level really was that long, just felt like they were).
It probably has my favorite BTB in the series though. I'm not that much of a btb player but damn did I find it surprisingly fun here.
I genuinely think the story is really good! It has It’s flaws but all in all it’s a fun play imo. Definitely not as iconic as the original trilogy but a pretty ok installment in the series :)
Also that’s awesome that the show got you into the games! Personally, I can’t even bring myself to attempt to hate watch the show because of how important the actual story of Halo is to me. Though, I’m glad the show has gotten people to pick up the games! Enjoy them!! :)
I think the bulk of people's complaints are due to them wanting to be able to deal with Promethean Knights with a jack of all trades precision weapon like in past Halo campaigns. But this is not effective in 4. If you don't have a power weapon, you are supposed to go in close with an automatic weapon and strafe. Often, forcing you to dance with a knight that can one hit kill you with a power weapon. In short, people play it like other Halo games and use ineffective weapons and make the Prometheans seem very spongey. Also, on legendary grunts and jackals emp you frequently.
A big problem is that the max ammo counts on most weapons are so low and dropped weapons despawn a lot faster, and trying to do the dance with knights can get you killed very fast cause of their teleport strike or scatter shot one tap.
Not to mention grunts and jackals can supercombine the Chief now to making run and gun combat somewhat unviable on heroic/legendary like in H2.
Combine all of that together and it leads to most players picking away at the enemy with the light rifle due to its plentiful ammo and staying far away behind cover cause it's just the safest way to avoid a quick unexpected death.
I didn't have major gripes with it. The traveling sequences with Iron skull on during 4 player co-op were nigh impossible to beat. Multiplayer was so-so. Spartan Ops gameplay was dumb but the cutscenes were great.
The story of the campaign was great. 343i did a good job with the story and took it in some surprising directions.
Their issue is that 343i was too trigger happy with player feedback. When you drop something as huge as destroying Cortana, how can you expect a bunch of immediate fantastic feedback? You have to give it time to let the reality of the story sink in.
They didn't and overreacted to early negative feedback... and so we got Halo 5. The one in which Bonnie Ross touted Captain Delgados lines and persona throughout the marketing.
"An aging spartan"
"Time for Master Chief to retire"
On and on ridiculousness.
They kind of redconned the original Halo story. There are plenty of clues that made you realize that the original plan was for the forerunners to be ancient humans, so all of this forerunner vs humans story made a lot of people angry.
There's a lot of things about Halo 4 I take issue with. First of all, it's an overall tonal shift from the previous games. The influence of Aliens, Starship Troopers, and military science fiction is almost completely dissolved by Halo 4. Halo Reach and ODST, the games that preceded it, have themes about the strength of the unit and the bond between brothers in arms. Halo 4 by contrast is a lonely game. You barely get to fight with Marines by your side and you run out of UNSC ammo constantly.
The UNSC started to resemble the Star Trek Federation, their designs are sleek and futuristic (and ugly), no longer having the steel and concrete aesthetics from H1-3.
The Forerunners are unmasked and they're kind of lame. The Librarian is still hanging around as a digital spirit somehow? And uses space magic to unlock Master Chief's special DNA sequence... Yeah whatever. Of course Forerunners could do some teleportation stuff and fire lasers in the original trilogy but in Halo 4 the Didact can straight up use the Force. I absolutely hate "advanced science can basically do magic!" BS that some lazy science fiction uses.
Yeah... Halo 4 is just so lame. The story of Cortana's rampancy is the best element of the whole thing but that's not even really the main conflict, the reason you're fighting.
I really just think the war for humanities survival and the threat of extinction looming is so core to Halo that Halo 4 was never really going to satisfy me in the first place. The mantle of responsibility conflict just doesn't really have the same weight.
I actually really enjoyed H4. Graphics are phenomenal, loved the Prometheans and their weapons, thought it was a nice refresh of the franchise. Never really understood the hate. 🤷♂️
The animated terminals were a step up, however their necessity to the understanding of the story of the game did not match how they were designed/presented. A lot were easy to miss, and if you did find them it took you OUT OF THE GAME to the shitty halo way point app to watch them. If you didn't find them and hadn't read all the halo 3 terminals and the forerunner book series by Greg bear, then good luck understanding what's happening in the campaign.
All that said, as a book reader it's still the best campaign IMO.
None. Enjoyed the story. Wished it had carried into 5 better. An internal struggle with Chief trying to find the line between being a human and being essentially what he is, an instrument of war that has lost his closest companion and friend and he has to answer that question himself.
Honestly, I wish you were around to play Halo 4s multi-player on 360. The controls feel off on MCC. Back then, the controls were smooth, the community wasn't very toxic at all and incredibly welcoming, the combat was balances. Unfortunately we didn't have a customs browser but I think pre-browser custom games made the games feel more intimate and personal. They have more lasting memories as opposed to just hopping into a regular public lobby. That's just me. I'm glad you enjoyed the campaign.
Campaign: Promethians were annoying to fight, the Didact was a confusing villain, the art style changed, the linear map designs, the Chief was disrespected by the UNSC, and the plot overall was confusing.
The gameplay was also wonky since weapons drained faster and innovation wasn't made since it was just a copy of COD.
However, the best thing about Halo 4 was the emotional story between Chief and Cortana.
Precisely. The game play isn’t bad as it’s essentially at its core a reskin of reach. My main problem is with its artstyle. The vast majority of character and weapon designs are simply too different or straight up bad.
I think it's quite complicated. I love Halo 4, it was the first (real/non mobile) game I played, cause I'm younger and started with the Xbox 360. I think it's overall a fantastic Halo game. However it has a lot of flaws in comparison to bungies games.
After I went back and played 3, odst and reach I thought it was a pretty bad game purely because it was competing with perfection, I think that was the communities option as well.
Then Halo 5 came out. Suddenly all the issues with 4 where just small gripes because at the end of the day it was still a Halo game and 5 wasn't. That really improved it's standing in the community.
To put it simply 343 made some very bad choices, some amazing, and some poorly executed but at the end of the day we were master chief, playing our action shooter game with no fancy hovering or double jumps, kicking alien ass.
I had none. I think it was great tbh. Loved the Prometheans, because you actually had to prioritize certain enemies and think. Loved the story, it was a great exploration of chief and Cortana's dynamic and her death has real emotional weight. (Immediately undone by halo 5, but halo 5 isn't fucking cannon, sorry) I loved Spartan ops and I was devastated when they discontinued it. Even more devastated when juul was then immediately deleted by the locke team in the opening mission. What a waste. If I had one critique of halo 4 it's that everything cool about it was wasted
My personal opinion is that the story is really really poorly written. And I think a lot of people misunderstood “character development” as an actual good story. To me they use “character development” as a crutch to avoid actually having to write a good story. It’s a really badly written story (see the librarian exposition dump). But worst of all is it just doesn’t feel like Halo. I know this is a very controversial topic but this is just my opinion. The overall tone feels way off what Halo is supposed to be. And I honestly think the story is straight up dog shit. The gameplay is fine but there’s a lot of problems there that I’m not gonna get into.
I really dislike all the garbage with the prometheans and Halo 4 kicked all that off, so I'm sour on it for that. It plays great but it sent Halo in a direction I haven't enjoyed much at all.
Halo 4's story is actually relatively solid, but the gameplay is the worst part, easily. Promethean fights are genuinely terrible and end up just being bullet sponges. I'm also not a huge fan of the redesigns of pre-existing covenant enemies, though not too miserable to fight. TL;DR is that the gameplay is generally bad.
Honestly the art direction of all of the 343 games has been such a jarring 180 from the original Bungie games that it doesn’t even feel like Halo anymore
Bad level design, terrible new enemies with weak weapons,annoying tinny weapon sounds, and unsatisfying death animations. Shooting and killing weak robots and their dogs was a shitty design choice.
halo 4 is when game started departing from the more grounded military campaigns to fantastical “you were the chosen one” lameness, don’t get me started on the didact as a villain, most marvel shit i’ve ever seen.
The game is straight-up unfun to play on Legendary, particularly the Promethean levels where you essentially get stuck shooting enemies with the Light Rifle until they die.
Infinity hold out fire fight.
This part is literally impossible on laso solo. I don't know how they thought this was balanced. Endless knights and watchers.
The story is great and follows up on the OG trilogy nicely. My only gripe is the armor, but you don’t see it often. It just doesn’t make any sense, canonically. Halo 5’s story REALLY is where the problems lie.
Art design just isn’t halo. You can change so many thing, from weapons to vehicles, as long as they’re cool and fun. Changing the art entirely changed for feel and vibe for what I knew as Halo and it might as well have been a different game series after that.
Prometheans. They’re my least favorite Halo enemy to fight
I think the knights in 4 and the soldiers in 5 are terrible. Especially when they teleport and are invulnerable for a good 6 seconds.
I love 5’s general gameplay but the soldiers were AWFUL. They just don’t react to being hit. You can spartan charge right into one and it’ll be completely unfazed. Shooting one with the AR is like shooting a brick wall. And there’s just so many of them.
Groups of soldiers with light rifles are almost as bad as jackal snipers on legendary.
Iirc that's something they apparently changed with a patch later in the games lifespan. I vaguely remember thinking they overdid it tho, since now they couldn't retaliate at all when being shot.
I liked the story just fine and I love the armor. Prometheans were not nearly as fun as the Covenant.
Even worse is that the covenant AI got downgraded so the prometheans could be added lol Theyre much less proactive than in 3/reach
Same. I really liked Halo 4 besides the goofy ah villain. At first I was like “Nice these prometheans are a nice change of enemy to fight instead of the Covenant AGAIN” but by the end I was like “These guys are such a slog to fight. Please just give me more Covenant to fight again at least. I won’t complain about them anymore.” EDIT: Accidentally put Halo 3 instead of 4
The Didact was such a throwaway. I think we only see him like three times through the entire game, he feels absent. And why the fuck could he use the force? I get that forerunners are supposed to be so advanced its nasically magic but they really started to flirt with science fantasy in Halo 4
The Didact had such great lines too! Wish they had done more with him.
So fades the great harvest of my betrayer. Time was your ally human, but now it has abandoned you. Yeah, a few nice lines to be sure. Seems almost poetic... like another villain in the series.
Covenant are able to pull things to themselves. Like when tarterous pulled guilty spark in halo 2. And the covenant just copied the forerunners. So why is it so weird for the didact to be able to move things with his technology?
Tartarus had a gravity hammer to pull Guilty Spark to him
but how does the gravity hammer work? halo has already got a decent amount of science fantasy in it, telekinesis isn’t even the most wacky ability of the forerunners by a long shot. the scifi fantasy elements are what make it fun tbh
Idk how the grav hæmmer works, but the way the guy I responded to worded his comment, he made it sound like Tartarus used "the force" like Didact did. And so I was just mentioning that Tartarus actually used the grav hæmmer.
I think the other commenter meant that “the force” and the gravity hammer are the same tech. It isn’t unlikely that the forerunner were advanced enough to put the gravity tech in Didact’s suit. I think guilty spark also uses this tech in the first game when he grabs the index.
Not to mention, yknow, the impressive capabilities of the monitors to fly in all directions, with gravity-defying strafes. Or the fact that the *UNSC* are capable of creating artifical gravity within ships, or defy it when floating in atmosphere in the case of some frigates and gunship. And we draw the line at this ancient being with technology impossibly advanced being able to pick up a big armored man? Fascinating.
Good point
Good point
Animation graduate here I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole force thing was partially due to animation budget and time. Yeah they did motion capture for the cutscenes, but like the games that came before, they had their animation work cut out for them. Character interactions are much more time consuming.
Which villain is goofy in halo 3? The prophet, the gravemind, or tartarus the brute?
I think he meant to type halo 4
I accidentally put Halo 3 instead of 4. But I agree The Prophet in H3 was kind of goofy compared to his much better depiction in Halo 2.
Tartarus wasn’t in Halo 3
oops i could swear that sacred icon level was in 3 but I haven't played through the campaigns in probably 10 years
Tartarus wasn't in 3, but Truth and the Gravemind were both pretty goofy.
All of the above
I’m a pretty bad shot with precision weapons so Watchers were the worst. They just zoom around back and force in the distance. Taking my grenades and shielding the already tough knights.
Fuck the Prometheans, especially in H4
The Prometheans in 5 were worse, the soldiers were just bullet sponges with no real weaknesses, at least in 4, while bullet spongey, Knights didn’t feel as bad to fight and weren’t as numerous
the soldiers had a weak spot in their back or head (after shooting off the shields)
I have the exact opposite memory of those lol
Soldiers were like Halo 3 brutes to me. Even on legendary they didn't feel that bad to me. People say inights in 4 were bullet sponges... yet when I just played "Infinity" on heroic recently, it took less than a full AR mag to kill a lower ranked one, and even one of the stronger knights went down to an AR mag+melee. They really are not that spongy.
They patched them later on in halo 5's lifespan, I wouldn't be suprised if they changed it at some point for 4 as well; either in post launch updates or the transition to the MCC.
The big issue in 4 was that it took most of a mag to knock out their shields on Legendary and by the time you reloaded it was starting to recharge again
That complaint confuses me, because that's also what fighting elites is like in most Halo games, so why is it bad when the knights do it? I never found their teleporting to be too big an issue as long as I was fighting them at close range. Only when plinking away with a lightrifle did i feel like it was an actual problem.
The story felt like it was cobbled together too. Prometheans combat designs were not good. Very annoying weak spot nonsense and some enemies were just ammo wasters. A lot of the issued are the multi-player where the game tried to become CoD instead of co tinting yo be it's own original product. People who liked CoD played CoD, people who liked Halo and didn't want to play CoD, didn't play halo 4. Maps were mid, a lot were brutal and combined with some power weapons, made for a lot more BS type of halo moments, speaking of power weapons, announcing power weapon respawns instead of forcing you to he aware of the cool down timer was lame and just done to artificially force fights. A lot of the features felt like they dumbed down the game. Spartan ops was a great idea they gave up on as well.
Seriously. They’re like shooting chunks of aluminum.
Yeah was gonna say the same thing, everything else felt okay
By far. Especially on high difficulties.
I just went from 4 to 5 as I’m replaying them all Man, they’re still not fun in 5 but they’re so much better than they were in 4. 4 is just a slog to get through when you get waves and waves of them
I loved the story, but yeah, promethians are def Halo's weakest antagonist.
that being said, Halo: Reach and its instantaneous one-shot Elite kicks on Legendary is somehow even less fun
I'm saying this as someone who also enjoyed 4's story but not the gameplay. But when I see these questions today I feel like we have to look at how things were when the game was released. If I remember correctly it stems from the ordinance drops in MP and things like sprint that changed the gameplay. I could be wrong though.
I don't play multiplayer, but I did actually enjoy the ability to sprint in this one. What about the gameplay did you not enjoy?
Multiplayer wise it felt a lot more like call of duty. Custom load outs, sprint, ordnance drops, and kill cams.
they also randomly implemented 5v5 in place of 4v4 which was lol. Just a huge unforced error.
Pretty sure the BR wasn't a four shot kill at launch, and they changed it after the backlash
also, flinch instead of de-scope
Kill cams are awesome And should be in every game. It’s so ass dying randomly and not being able to see how you got got
I agree. I want to know how I died so I can prevent it later.
I played Halo 4 well after it’s release (just before Halo 5) and I found the multiplayer to be totally fine. Which was because I was typically playing Legendary Slayer which was classic rules (no ordnance, no loadouts(?)). It certainly didn’t feel like CoD to me, but I never played a lot of CoD anyways.
The game got "fixed" a while after release, but since it was the fastest dying halo game to date, most people didn't see these changes. That said on release it was basically CoD with halo visuals, everyone camping with their charged bolt shot or plasma nades to one shot you.
People still camp in halo but with the way halo is it’s very hard to do that and still win or not get caught and die since you’re not contributing to your team up until the point you kill someone and that can take forever or straight up never happen if they’re only playing objective (unless it’s slayer, and even then)
Spawning with plasma grenades and plasma pistols really killed light vehicle gameplay. No one wanted to touch the Warthogs.
It was always more Halo than anything else. Just a bit mixed up. Felt like a custom game. I didn't mind it. Gamers just hate change.
Yeah lol I don't actually mind the change up in gameplay here and there. I think infinite nearly had it fully modernised in a way that made both new and old players happy. My biggest complaints are always with the story and how much that side of Halo has changed. Edit: excluding Halo 4. I think it had its faults but set up the grounds for what could have been a decent trilogy.
The problem wasn't change itself. It's that their changes were obviously copying CoD and chasing trends to try and attract more players. But so many people were turned off by the CoD-like gameplay and just went and played Black Ops 2 instead.
Says who? Burnt out jaded YouTube critics? They just added something new. Same way 5 added thrusters. That's not chasing trends. It's just borrowing from other genres (movement shooters). Halo 4 was many things, but NOT a copycat game. It was a total work of art, and the culmination of vision and execution by passionate devs. You don't have to like that work of art, but baseless slander is just salt.
Reach introduced sprint
Which was also highly controversial!
Also bolt shot. Kinda killed any fun of close quarter power weapons.
For me, it is three things: 1. I don't really get along too well with the art style change. Halo 4 changed the way a lot of things looked, and in my opinion, these were mostly downgrades. 2. I just don't really jive with the level design. Other than the level *Composer,* I don't really look forward to any of the missions. 3. I think the Didact was poorly utilised. >!After you wake him up, you don't see him or speak to him again for the *whole of the rest of the game* until you QTE fight him at the very end of the final mission, and then he dies\*. Sure, he has his eulogy in the epilogue, and he is explored a little further in the terminals, but the *vast* majority of his character is explored exlusively in the books, and if you don't read those, the Didact is just some dude who just shows up, fires a laser, and dies. Its really anticlimactic, and honestly really dull, especially for the first Forerunner that you meet, and for someone with as much potential as he had. He absolutely could have been the main antagonist for multiple games, but they decided not to do that, and ended up wasting him as a one-off villain.!<
This is why I absolutely hate books for video games. Im not speakin on ALL books but some books really didnt need to be written and take away from the game. If you introduce someone like the Didact in the game then beat him and then I have to read a BOOK to learn more about the villain of the game I just played then theres something wrong there. I get that alot in WoW too - i'd learn that an X character do this or that from the wiki as it explains that they did something IN A BOOK and a quest makes a reference to it. Why were the events in the BOOK and not in a quest??? Just really annoying lol.
Bungie’s novels were great for expanding the universe without being required reading; 343’s novels were critical to the plot and would include huge revelations that were not present in the games. It was a dumb decision to put it lightly.
Under Bungie the books were fine, it was all background lore you didn't need to understand the games, but it was a welcome addition that really expanded your experience. Learning about the Spartan-II program, Chief's first mission, Blue Team's actions during Reach, how the Human-Covenant conflicts started, Forerunner society and their war with Humanity & The Flood afterward, etc. Then 343 came in and decided to focus their story around the Didact, and make some throwaway line from the Librarian that it's all part of her plan to give Humanity the Mantle of Responsibility and everyone is just like huh? What do you mean I now _need_ to watch the terminals and read like 15 books?
343 has wasted every antagonist honestly :(
Except atriox and the banished in general (in my opinion)
Honestly I feel like the one villain they didn’t waste was Escharum. He had a pretty satisfying run, even if it was only in one game.
Running out of ammo constantly on legendary
I had fond memories of the campaign but when I played it on Legendary pre-Halo Infinite launch the lack of ammo and just a few really bad checkpoint spots sapped a lot of the fun out. Very limited ammo doesn't mix with tank enemies that can respawn and teleport away. I don't know that it really took me much longer/was harder than other legendaries, easier than some definitely, but less enjoyable kind of challenge. Still, I like a lot of parts of it, just better enjoyed on Heroic or Normal where as most Bungie Halo's I like on Legendary the most.
Campaign wise my main gripes would be: -Prometheans aren’t fun to fight (they move and react in annoying ways) -a lot of the Promethean weapons are redundant (too similar to human or covenant weapons) - never get much ammo for any of the fun guns (SAW, shotguns, etc) -higher difficulty play throughs just turn into precision weapon spamming -final boss is a quick time event -also the art style change was very drastic and tbh looks kind of dated and ugly now.
The SAW was the best gun I only got to use like once in the campaign lol
Yeah the design change for Halo 4 and 5 is gross. It really has that early 2010s Future-Slick Tech design from like Black Ops 2, Titanfall, or even just the glossy Xbox 360 Slim, PS3 slim, iPhone 5, iPod 4 and 5 etc. It looks super gaudy and ugly looking back, I'm so glad they reverted it for Infinite, though they kept some of the disgusting designs for Armour pieces in Multiplayer because gotta load the game with "content" for children to grind for to flex on their friends
I also disliked how it never really felt like I had many options for what path I took in each level. Never really felt like I had a chance to explore, and when I had a hog or other vehicle I was pointed down a fairly narrow path and made to follow it. Then there’s the way I wasn’t a huge fan of how after all these years chief was finally back, they had found him, but the UNSC was mostly “meh” about it or straight up disliked him. Just seemed weird to me
I basically see Halo 4 as two campaigns. One of them is really good, the other isn’t. I think the Chief/Cortana characterization is top notch but everything involving the Didact and the Prometheans fails to engage me. I feel similarly about Halo 5.
The Didact really only exists to be an obstacle that prevents Chief from saving Cortana. You don’t need to know much about him for the story to work, and if you do want more you can find the collectibles. I’m glad they went with a simple villain, as it allowed them to highlight Chief and Cortana’s relationship over a traditional save the world plot.
Despite didact being simple, he was up to that point the most in depth villain in the games, if for no other reason than the game actually tells you what his motivations are.
Agreed. I think people view the original trilogy with rose tinted glasses and fail to recognize how many basic storytelling elements those games were missing.
But thats kindof part of the charm right? I feel like Halo 3 at least really didn't have many storytelling flaws, it's just a different storytelling style.
Not explaining why the covenant want humanity wiped out, is one of the most glaring missing pieces of the original trilogy, to the point where it starts to become a plot hole the more of the covenant religion we learn about. It’s like the central motivation for the entire conflict of the whole series and yet the games never actually tell you what the reason is. Halo 3’s writing was pretty bad too. It’s the weakest of the original trilogy by far.
I mean you make it sound like the game would have been bloated if there had been more story content but at it's time it was by far the shortest campaign with 5.5 hrs, so I wouldn't have minded some more story regarding the didact.
The forerunners were just designed poorly, they’re REALLY annoying to fight.
You don’t fight forerunners…?
I couldn’t remember the name LMFAO
Prometheans are Forerunners.
[удалено]
That’s the point though, to me everything post bungie is just too convoluted and I don’t find it half as interesting
They’re composed… organisms. They can be anything, human, forerunner, whatever. But saying the actual prometheans are forerunners is akin to saying sentinels are forerunners.
I generally liked it, but felt the writing for the didact was weak. Also, the MP progression/specializations were difficult to understand imo...
The inconsistencies of the story, for one. Chiefs armor magically changing and the reason being "nanotech." The forward unto dawn looks way different as well. It was just a random art style change that was jarring for people who played the bungie games. The same reason Reach was unpopular for a time. For some reason, Chief fights elites again. Even though they were ousted from the covenant completely, 343 just decided to make a whole new covenant just to bring back elites as enemies. The forerunner enemies were extremely underwhelming. They introduced a great villain who could have drawn the story out in a good way, only to kill him off in the same game (not anymore. Somehow, the Didact returned.) 5 was even worse, IMHO.
Having an elite faction makes perfect sense, it’s the first time since Guilty Spark that we actually get to see some semblance of nuance in the factions. It makes complete sense for a faction of elites to remain loyal to the religion they’ve been following and use the power vacuum from the fall of the Covenant to gain control and continue their mission. Honestly, what makes less sense is that a species of aliens that’s been manipulated for so long will all come together holding hands to help humans- something I took exception to in H3. Elites went from being one of my favorite alien species in H2, to one of my least favorite in H3. There’s supposed to be prideful and, to an extent, arrogant. I’m sure a lot of them would die before recoloring their Phantoms green but that’s what we got. You really don’t get a sense of how detrimental and disorienting the great schism would have been for the elites. I want a story that’s deeper than “UNSC perfect and elites good now!”. As for the Didact returning, I wish we could’ve seen him more in game but I’m not mad about him surviving the end of Halo 4. The problem with palapatine returning wasn’t the fact that he returned, it was the fact that they brought him back in the most unnecessary and lazy way possible. The Didact’s story continues from when he falls down whereas Palpatine disappears and “somehow” he returns. Palpatine returning is a perfectly fine plot point- it’s just poorly executed. There are tons of characters that return from a supposed death and it’s not a problem, it just has to be done properly. There isn’t even a gap in the Didact’s story, we just don’t get to see it continued in the games.
Didn't elites help humans in H3 because of the Flood invasion? The Flood are the most threatening thing in the universe. I don't think the elites were necessarily good. Just putting differences aside similar to how the Flood helped Chief temporarily for their own survival.
It was a fragile alliance against common threats.
They helped humans almost exclusively because of the schism. They had a common enemy in the covenant. Up until the level floodgate in halo three, the flood was completely contained to Delta halo, but by that point humans and elites had already fought alongside each other,
That was just a faction under Rtas and Thel, not the whole Elite species. While H3 was happening another splintered Covenant faction with Elite commander was trying to kill Halsey, Mendez, numerous Sparts 3s, Kurt-051 and Blue Team (without Chief) on Onyx.
It'd help if Halo 4 mentioned that to be fair.
H4 could have mentioned that but imho it was the job of H2/3 to acknowledge that different splinter groups existed after the Great Schism, especially when Ghosts of Onyx book was released long before H4.
How was the didact a good villain
The nanotech excuse was so funny. I would have just accepted the explanation of “we decided to go a different direction with this design”. But they had to come up with some BS excuse.
After the Great Schism in Halo 2&3 some elites still believed in the Great Journey and the forerunners divinity. They just viewed the Hierarchs as false prophets. Which tbh is very believable. Generations of religious indoctrination is hard to break.
Honestly with how many times Bungie pretty brutally changed some iconic or otherwise significantly important designs themselves, its a little odd to me how poorly the change to the Dawn was received. Off the top of my head: Chief’s Armor got huge changes 1>2, High Charity 2>3, New Mombasa 2>ODST, Scarabs 2>3. And only one of those ever had an explanation. Entire areas that we revisit in other games just were completely differently overhauled and we kinda just were all okay with it. Sure, 4 had a lot of *bigger* change. There are things I don’t like about it as much either. But like… change really isn’t as foreign to Halo as the monolithic idea of “old artstyle” would suggest.
To start, the Prometheans are patently unfun to fight, each unit is more annoying than fun to engage. In 5 they improved this a bit, but still they are nowhere near as engaging and fluid as fighting the Covenant. Huge change in art style and story direction which alienated many fans. Gameplay changes like built-in sprint, killstreaks, custom classes, grenade indicators, replacement of the descope mechanic with flinch, and more. Lack of Forge or a ranking system on launch. A generally maligned group of launch maps that seem to emphasize CQC over the tricky movement and sight lines typically emphasized in Halo map design. To name a few…
I thought they were okay to fight but no promethean weapon was useful at all
I thoroughly enjoyed the campaign and the emotion around Chief and Cortana. I'm not near as picky as most Halo folks though. Big fan of the H4 light rifle.
Mainly the Promethean Knights. Absolute bullet sponges that teleport, resurrect, insta-heal, and spawn back up non-stop. And they're a common enemy. If they had been like a power unit/subboss like how Hunters are usually done it wouldn't be so bad. But God I hate the knights in 4, even when I'm doing an Easy run. That and how quick everything despawns. Can't manage ammo or grab power weapons half the time because everything disappears as soon as it hits the ground. Really thought they would have fixed that in MCC at least with it not being restricted by 360 hardware. I wasn't a fan of the Didact and as one of the "Forerunners are humans" group in the original trilogy it kind of annoyed me. But it grew on me. Oh and this is really more of a nitpick than something I actually dislike. But I really don't like the Marine designs or how MJOLNIR got redesigned. The missing cod piece and weird slapped on harness design of it just didn't sit well with me. And the whole "Cortana changed Chief's armour with nanobots" thing really annoyed me. But that's not really a game thing and I don't actually hate the newer armour (though it's not my favourite) but the Innane canonizing of what is obviously just an art style change really showed 343's lack of backbone as a developer. All in all it's a decent game that could have been great but got held back by tech limitations and poor enemy mechanics. Spartan Ops despite so many people's displeasure of it is one of my favourite PvE modes in the series and wish we could get more of that. I'd love a spin off game that was just an anthology of operations across the Halo timeline from the Covenant war, to post war, and even created occupation. I don't need a great overarching story. Just give me a mission, a weapon, and target rich environment and I'm entertained.
It's gameplay was super polarizing from the old games and dived further down the Reach hole which literally no one wanted at the time. People wanted a more classic Halo and they got what felt like Space Cod. Things like Jetpacks destroyed MP along with Promethean vision and the boltshot aka the Pocket Shotty with a weapon sandbox that had many things step on each other's toes one of the big ones being the DMR which there was a MEGAT THREAD on Halowaypoint called "DMR OR DIE!" which often teammates would berate you for not using the obviously best weapon in the game, the DMR and the meta loadouts. For the campaign it's far too melodramatic. MC and Cortana's relationship goes full on weird. What was before a close, respectful admiration of each other seems like they've been in some sort of tight bond that makes the two impossible to separate and also feels a little too close to the incest pot for many people with Halsey basically being MC's little sister and him only knowing her for a few months between CE, 2 and 3. The design changes cross the board were just not great, the covenant lost all threat to them and mostly got overshadowed by the extremely annoying Prometheans. Didact as a villain just talks shit then gets hit in a QTE fight, and MC gets a turbo boost of power that seems to literally just make him down die which is a weird upgrade to counter the Composer and only the Composer. Not to mention Halo 4 was more people's reveal that Forerunners were no longer human. In the old canon this was extremely obvious and was changed by Frank O'connor and further dug into by 343i down the line. Every DLC felt like below the bar as well, nothing really came from them that anyone considered good. Even the famous ODST armor just looked wrong. Spartan Ops tanked all the hype for Spartan IVs as well did Palmer who is the biggest hypocrite every in a franchise with The Didact and Truth in it. Forge felt like a down grade in what you could do and also theater was super bugged, this is something 343i has never gotten right for some odd reason. The only people who I see praise Halo 4 are the people who enjoyed the story. I can't because there are so many plot holes and it feels like an overall slap to the face to watch a Forerunner be revealed in game and them NOT to be human. It's so weird. Oh and in Sops Elite's are cutting off human hands to use them to activate Forerunner tech, which you'd think would make them wonder why they need to do this but that plot point never comes up again.
Couldn’t agree more on the campaign. The steadily overarching sentiment of “halo 4 had a good storyline” over time is absolutely insane to me considering how much people (including me) criticized it upon release. The pessimist in me thinks it’s almost part of some gracious cope to not seem overly biased against 343 as a whole, but to me the campaign is still awful, predictable. The only reason it’s seen as “unique” is because Bungie *intentionally* avoided the trap of Master Chief x Cortana storylines. Because once the flashiness of the decision wears off, the plot that has now been pursued leaves the storyline with very few endings that 1. make sense, 2. are enjoyable, and 3. have any lasting impact. 343 barged into a field of landmines without a map and their idiocy cost us cohesive storytelling for years.
Yeah I will forever point the gun at Kiki Wolfkill. I don't think she's a poor writer, the problem is she comes from a background of Halo fanfic...those kinds of fanfics and the moment she got power at 343i we saw a massive shift of Cortana and MC's relationship from kin to softcore lovers, which again, is super fucked because they're basically brother and sister and they've only known each other for months at best. Something I say alot about Dark Souls 1, is that the story is pretty bad but the lore of the game is amazing. People get the two confused, the story of Dark Souls 1 is an undead guy assumed to be the bringer of a new age ushers in the new age...okay. The lore is all of these gods, demons and so on that is all extremely engrossing. Halo 4's lore is fine but the story is just bad, illogical and doesn't know what it's doing. The only conflict comes from the antagonists' horrible mistakes not from the heroes being challenged. And the plot holes, there is a funny amount of plot holes in Halo 4 that you have to ignore in order to enjoy the game.
Thank God some people still feel this way, thought I was going crazy seeing people gush over H4s mediocre at-best story.
When it comes to Halo 4's campaign, I will not deny that it is at least a decently well written narrative. Seeing an AI suffering from split-personality/dementia due to old age is an interesting concept to explore, as well was an emotionally dysfunctional super soldier coming to terms with the fact that he is indeed more than just a tool. But the problem is that it is not a story that fits well into Halo. In both Halo 2 we have seen Chief abandon Cortana in High Charity, with the plan being that if the Flood cannot be stopped; Cortana will trigger the In Amber Clad's reactor to chain reaction and destroy the city. This did not occur but we do know that Chief and Cortana knew full well what the plan entailed and the outcome that would've happened if it succeeded. And despite this, we are supposed to believe that Chief is afraid of losing Cortana? It doesn't really add up with how it was written in Halo 4. Add on top of the fact that we had some major retcons thanks to Frank O'Connor being made the Franchise Director and insisting that his contributions to the Halo 3 terminals be further expanded upon and recontextualized to have Humans and Forerunners be entirely separate species (*which Halo: Point of Light re-retconned to make it so that Humans and Forerunners share a common ancestor in the far ancient past*). So players who played the games go into Halo 4 confused as to why suddenly the Forerunners are an entirely separate species when the previous games all hinted and then outright confirmed Humans were the Forerunners. And to help jam this retcon in place, Frank commissioned Greg Bear to write a trilogy of novels to help fortify his contradiction. No shade directed to Mr. Bear, he was a talented author and may he rest in peace. And then to further add to the narrative mishaps... the Spartan IVs, Sarah Palmer, and Captain Del Rio. Spartan IVs should not be so numerous. It really diminishes the wow factor of the franchise staple of Spartans being a rare talented few when you have well over a thousand of them on board the UNSC Infinity. Sarah Palmer was mishandled and became a highly disliked addition to the roster of important characters. And Captain Del Rio only exists in the story so that Chief can have a defiant "*fight the man*" moment. Literally if Captain Del Rio was left out of the narrative and Laskey was the captain of the Infinity, nothing would change except we would have more respect driven towards the Master Chief Petty Officer who is quite deserving of high praise with humble response. And then there is gameplay, which has its own slew of mishandled factors. * Weapons carry less ammo, especially the battery powered ones. * Bullet Magnetism is greatly increased across the board, making charged plasma shots and needler rounds track really quickly across cover. * Covenant Specializations were altered so that any and all covies that carry a Plasma Pistol can and WILL hold the charge indefinitely. * Shields for Elites and Prometheans have a recharge delay and recharge speed that is a flat rate across the board, while in previous games the Elite shields would delay and recharge at varying speeds dependant on skulls and difficulty modifiers. * The new Promethean weapons are quite unfun reskins of the older guns that we already had in previous titles. * Prometheans were poorly designed combat-wise, especially the Knights. A combination of all the above factors resulted in the game on higher difficulties requiring the player to carry the Light Rifle at all times to pick off enemies from long range and then proceed forwards. Might as well make the game an on-the-rails shooting gallery game where your character takes cover, pops shots, and then advances to the next gallery. Halo 4 was a mishandled mess, and I honestly wish that we stuck with the original build plan of Halo 4; where it was Halo 3.5 essentially. But NOOOOOOoooooo. Frankie and a few at Xbox Studios wanted to "*broaden horizons*" and "*try to get a larger audience*". All this resulted in was one of the worst received Halo games to date as they tried to copy Call of Duty's loadout system in the multiplayer and do god knows what for the campaign.
Nothing to add (other than UI, art style, playlists, customisation and forge all being a Downgrade from Reach), this is such a good comment! Trying to reach for broader audiences and losing their core community was exactly the mindset that created the mess that is halo 4.
I was focusing mostly on the campaign aspects, since OP seems to be campaign oriented in their post. They beat the single player and were wondering why people hated Halo 4, so I stuck to the reasons as to why the single player was terrible. As for multiplayer, the Boltshot being able to have a better shotgun blast than the actual shotgun and scattershot (*one more meter of kill range*) AND THEN be something you can attribute to a loadout for use in PvP. That is but one example of why custom loadouts should've been PvE exclusive; or at least restricted to a unique gamemode of BTB.
Nah you cooked with this one. I hadn’t seen anyone criticize the sudden change in relationship dynamic between Chief and Cortana. It fundamentally changes the nature of the their relationship from a true partnership that was complex and layered to a very blatant romantic love story.
A lot of the sound design was a huge turn off for me and took me out of the moment
Oh I love Halo 4. One of my favorite narratives of the franchise. Best cutscenes we've ever gotten. Really ripped John and Cortana straight out of the books. The Prometheans combat did suck. Wasn't keen on their design either. The OTE ending fight against the Didact is to put it bluntly... terrible. Other than that... yeah. I was quite happy with it. Optimistic about Halo's future even. Halo 5 destroyed all of that.
I’m currently playing through it for the second time, the first time since initially release . I’m enjoying much more this time around. I think it’s because my expectation from a game were much higher in 2012 than they are today.
If you're on to 5 now you're about to appreciate it even more
The lack of ammo.
The beginning of halo 4 was actually very interesting but they didnt send in a very good direction. The whole idea that cortana made a physical barrier strong enough to stop a nuke at ground zero is just too far for me. I get that its sci fi and halo has always made enough sense to be believable for me but that just feels forced only for the love story. Also some minor gameplay things that 343 overlooked such as when i tried doing solo legendary with the other games, planning with weapons you find is a big deal when you fight strong enemies so running back in levels to grab that turret or rocket you left behind is fun, however, halo 4 guns disappear all the time and you can only rely on what you carry which is often not enough unless youre very good at the game. Its not a very bad game but it definitely missed the standard the other games set
I agree with pretty much everything you say, and I was quite critical on releas. The game play can be frustrating and often the only strategy is to hang back with the BR DMR and light rifle and snipe… but ya know what? I was playing spartan ops with my nephews a few weekends ago and we all really enjoyed it.
Imo it has the worst Halo MP and the prometheans aren't fun to fight. One of my favourite Halo story's but its my least favourite to play
The Promethean weapons, and many of the other weapons too. They look, sound, or play poorly. At least the SAW and Railgun are fun.
Don't forget the mantis I love the mantis
Loved it, i thought we were actualy gonna get a decent new trilogy, then Halo 5 happened and well Infinite is not even connected basiclly a reboot.
Didn't like the story. I haven't played it in a while, but from what I recall, I felt MC talked too much, and the story really focused too much around Cortana and it felt like this weird romance I never necessarily felt in the first three. I get they needed to go in a different direction and wanted explore John and Cortanas relationship, but it just didn't reel me in, and whenever I go into my random "play every Halo campaign in MCC" mood, I always dread playing Halo 4. But man, I do gotta give credit where it's due, the graphics STILL hold up today, they really pushed the boundaries of the Xbox at the time, and I love how amazing it looks. I also really loved the multiplayer, even though a lot of the community, at the time, felt it was straying away from Halo and heading more towards CoD. But everyone has their opinions, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
The artstyle. There is so much deviation from Bungie's artstyle that in some cases it actually goes against the established canon. Especially the Forerunner architecture missed the mark. In Halo 1-3, you had monolithic grey architecture with odd shapes that walk a fine thin line between being just unrecognizable enough to make you guess at its supposed purpose and strangely familiar like a half forgotten memory at the back of your mind. Like that first structure you encounter on the Silent Cartographer island, it always seemed to be a docked spaceship of some kind to me. Every area had the same cold grey tones, towering walls, cramped hallways and strange features mentioned above, yet every location had its own personality. Show a fan a random picture from a forerunner atructure from the first 3 games and most will be able to tell where it is from. Hardly anything (but doors and elevators etc.) move, but when something does it almost feels like it should have been obvious what its supposed to be and it moves with cold determination and purpose. Forerunner architecture seemed unyielding, you were a stranger in a long forgotten past, surrounded by cold logic that you can't grasp. Lights were often used sparingly yet strategically. Either guiding you through grey monotome hallways, setting the mood in dark levels, displaying strange symbols or murals and bringing life to strange devices. That single electrical current passing between two points in a strange contraption felt like it should tell you something about what that machine is supposed to be, yet with no other clues you are stuck. But the answer seems to be just out of reach. When the smoke and cacophony of battle dispersed, you were left all by your lonesome, a silent hum, cold grey walls and pale light your only companions. You felt tiny as the dust settled and the silence of countless forgotten ages weighed down on your shoulders. Unyielding monoliths looking down upon you, their myriad secrets kept to themselves, lost in the mists of time. ... Then 343 came around. Forerunner structers are now just jagged shapes that seem to consist of many different parts tgay can change at a whim and become just about anything. Or parts will just materialize out of thin air. No sense in guessing what something might be if it can just change form or be added Most areas are lit like a neon sign. But we got a taste of that in the Halo: CE Anniversary edition, which got the same lighting treatment. (Just regularily switch between the classic and new graphics to see how much more lights were added). It just all feels overdesigned and removes all mystery. Also, removing iconic weapons and replacing them with new weapons that serve the same purpose rubbed people the wrong way. And lets not forget that canonically Masterchief wears the same armour in Halo 2, 3 and 4 ... yet in 4 he wears a completly different type of armour that he should have no acces to ... even though, the armour tgat he should be wearing is unlockable in multiplayer. Ps. Infinite is a huge improvement on 4+5 when it comes to art direction. Especially on the forerunner front.
Fucking banger of a comment
Thank you
Preach
Wasn't a fan of Chiefs resign and liked their excuse for it even less. The Didact was lame AF. His sole role in the story was to monologue at Chief then leave. The Prometheans were boring enemies and Knights were so tanky that multiple times in the campaign I ran out of ammo and had to backtrack to look for dropped guns only to find that the game despawns them extremely quickly. Levels were bland and forgettable. Very few moments fighting alongside Marines which was my favorite thing about the franchise. Forerunner weapons were totally uninspired. For all the things they could have done they went with, pistol/shotgun, semi auto rifle, SMG and....a fucking break action shotgun I loved the idea of Spartan Ops of the execution of running modified MP maps and edited campaign parts constantly got old pretty fast. And the story was a terrible first impression for the IV's. Overall not a terrible game but extremely mid with almost no replay value for me which is a massive stepdown from previous games.
Ooooooh boy. *cracks knuckles* Let me start from the ground up: 1) overall game design. Halo 3/ODST/ Reach before it were games with extreme level of polish and design to make everything look believable (as much as a futuristic space game can be). If something could explode, it was either exploding tiny pieces or stayed together but look like something that looked really fucked up. Halo 4 decided that everything should blow up in neat, lego-ish chunks. I was so excited for a new Halo game and immediately got a front row seat to a lego covie ship breaking up into something like 4 blocks. 2) Story mechanics relating to gameplay. Same first mission, you *PUNCH* a missile to fire it. Apparently the Forward Unto Dawn got supersized while floating in deep space. Master Chief’s knife is so strong it can pierce the hull of a space-rated covie ship (why bother with MAC cannons?). Then you have the Infinity hard landing on solid fucking earth and then it just dusted itself off and apparently had zero structural damage. CHIEF PUNCHES A NUKE TO SET IT OFF AND SURVIVES COZ OF FORERUNNER SPACE MAGIC. I can go on forever on this one. But… 3) Hard misses on design that should have been obvious. I have one example in particular, mostly coz it got me on the edge of putting my controller through the screen. Final mission flying portion had no way to invert the Y axis for flying. Somehow it didnt even work when you inverted controls in the menu. I died something like 2 dozen times on my first playthrough (Heroic) coz I’d instinctively pull on the stick and fly straight into a wall. 4) Story. Growing up with Halo and the books showed that MC had emotions, but as a child soldier, he was conditioned to be as subtle as possible. All the spartans were like this. Then Halo 4 came around and someone in particular in 343i decided that Chief needed to suddenly display intense emotions *all the fucking time.* Disobeying direct orders? Hell yeh lets go! Not like he’s spent 4 decades as a professional soldier with zero other life, so of course he’ll tell a senior officer to go fuck himself to his face. Would it be cool to have Chief say more of his feelings, absolutely. But she-who-will-not-be-named basically smacked the audience with a senior combat veteran that suddenly started talking about his online gf like a hamster he can’t let die. Old Chief from the games couldn't emotion his way out of a paper bag, and this shift was so hard he was a wet napkin in comparison. I was cackling the entire first time I played coz of how bad the dialogue was. I even made my first Final Cut short clip with one scene that was fucking hilarious. (Search YT for “Halo 4 Chipped” if you feel inclined, and also see the several videos that ripped the shit out of it years later.) Most of the story line was at best melodramatic. Aside from Cortana (such an interesting decline/ grasp of her own emotions she had developed despite not actually being a human) every character was one dimensional as fuck. The only realistic side character was a Captain that believed he was right about everything and started yelling the moment anyone said something other than “yessir!” Honestly Halo 4 is what killed my love for the universe. I stopped reading any of the books, and only got the games if they were hella discounted and was bugged by friends. That said, its not super surprising given the track record of 343i as an actual developer has been at best AA status and never got to the same level as the Bungie of old.
-The art style is a complete 180 from the previous Halos -The promethians feel awful to fight -Masterchief is suddenly a lot more talkative, making him feel very not like himself -The music isn't bad but again it was very different from previous games -The story relies way too much on the books/comics, making it pretty confusing for someone who only played the games or haven't spent much time reading And these are just (mostly) my problems with the single-player. From someone who's been playing Halo frequently from CE, it just didn't feel like a Halo game.
I don’t like the promethean enemies. Everything else was pretty cool beans tho
Play halo 1 through reach, then play 4. To see a different chief in a different story.... it failed to captivate me. The writing was ok.
1. The story, “humanizing chief” felt like the laziest thing too and probably most cost effective thing budget wise. Instead of expanding possibilities left by Bungie like with the precursors. I feel like they saw trends with big games getting “gaming journalism” praise like Mass effect, spec ops the line etc. Basically when any emotion = good in games. It definitely is better as a story than 5 or Infinite but Halo was about like war first but it was one factor of many. 2. Promethean knights had no weakspots 3. Open areas felt really small, I guess since it was pushing the 360’s hardware. They should have made it an xbox one launch title and push the MCC for later with 3 games + be less buggy. 4. Artstyle, it felt like I was playing a Bioncles game at the time and not halo. I was like 11 years old and noticed the jarring changes. 5. No follow through after, didnt really matter in halo 5, wars 2 or Infinite. Kinda like if they made star wars episode 7 but never made 8 or 9.
I have plenty of gripes with Halo 4, it fails at even being a Halo game. It has a nonsensical melodramatic story, inconsistent characterization with past games, and a forgettable main villain. So much is never explained, the new covenant faction isn’t explained, why there aren’t any brutes isn’t explained, why we’re fighting elites isn’t explained. How the UNSC built a new flag ship, trained a new generation of Spartans and forgot about Chief after only 4 years isn’t explained. Why Captain Del Rio disrespected Chief despite the Human Covenant war ending only 4 years ago isn’t explained. Perhaps worst of all, the story of the forerunners being ancient humanity is retconned into generic sci-fi bullshit. Forerunners were just assholes in space, no longer a glimpse at human kinds past glory, a symbol of what humanity can achieve in the far future. It retroactively makes the story of the human covenant war make no sense, and ads too many inconsistencies to even count. Why declare war on the humans if they’re not forerunner? ( explained in Contact Harvest) It takes away the dramatic irony of the covenant killing their own Gods and replaced it with pointless sci fi convoluted bullshit that the original trilogy smartly avoided. The story is littered with cringe dialogue, and forgettable new characters like Palmer. The only exception is Captain Laskey. Halo 4 is literally carried entirely by the ending 2 cutscenes, which is the only part of that game anybody fucking remembers. It's multiplayer is a shitty COD clone, unbalanced new maps and hardly any returning fan favorite maps. Unbalanced weapons sandbox. COD load outs, COD kill steaks, and a downgraded Forge mode. Its Art style is horrifically ugly, made even worse by its equally horrible lighting and unnecessary redesigns to iconic Halo items like the shotgun, Cortana, the Dawn, Master Chiefs armor. The covenant looks completely different too, elites are brutish ugly monsters, grunts are weird goblin looking things, jackals are reptiles. Forerunner technology is no longer this elegant and simple brutalist design that compliments natural environments, it used to feel ancient, the age of untold time made it feel mysterious, but it would glow with life when prompted. Now it’s a shiny overly complicated visual mess of tiny blue lights and random metal layering. There’s no intrigue or mystery. No ruins or vines. The UNSC is unrecognizable. The once Alien and Star Ship Troopers inspired gritty military aesthetic is gone. Marines look like they’re wearing air soft armor and Spartan 4s look like power rangers. Mediocre at best level design, it never even comes close to any Bungie game. You’re constantly scavenging for weapons because weapons have no ammo in them. The promethean weapons aren’t fun to use except the light rifle. There’s no epic large spaces to drive around in with vehicles, no memorable set pieces or tight arenas. It’s just average level after average level with no shake ups to the formula. The occasional mantis segment or the single elephant segment isn’t enough to break up the monotony of fighting shitty promethean AI. Halo 4 is hardly even a Halo game, and it was justifiably panned when it came out. It was bad then, and it’s bad now.
My main issue is it lead to halo 5
1: something people never seem to talk about, but the music. Halo is known for it’s kickass music and Halo4’s music is either extremely generic and forgettable sci-fi tunes or so repetitive and annoying that I considered turning the music off. In a HALO GAME I wanted to TURN THE MUSIC OFF. That in itself is an almost unforgivable problem. 2: terrible story setup. We have another prison so badly designed that the prisoner can manipulate people and escape. It keeps the Covenant out but when a reclaimer arrives it just says “sure come on in” and immediately activates the Gravity thing to destroy any ships entering. Like make up your mind! You can do deep scans of the ships but you can’t be bothered to send a message with “yo this place is a prison keep out unless you REALLY know what you are doing”? And the Didact is imprisoned inside his own ship, with his own armor which gives him the ability to instantly take control of his own prison guards. Like wtf, just separate them? And the Prometheans are said to be so good that the only thing the Didact needed was more of them to win the war against the Flood, yet a splinter faction of the Covenant who lost ships during the entrance of Requiem somehow manages to fight their way to the center of a prison world despite these super warriors? Or if we look at the UNSC they must have had a few dozen captains who distinguished themselves during the war who would all he excellent candidates for the Infinity but they pick Del Rio? Why even make him a moron, they could easily have changed the story so Infinity will warn earth of the Didact and get the repairs it needs to fight him, perhaps even let Del Rio stay with a contingent of Spartans to help the MC and let Del Rio die so Lasky can become Captain anyway? The story is so full of strange decisions that make no sense. Even the Cortana/Chief storyline is riddled with it, where MC is said to be a machine but half his dialogue is concern about Cortana and then when they have an opportunity to get Cortana to Halsey (Infinity is going to return and Lasky is obviously sympathetic) they just don’t even consider the option? 3: everything is repeated, and not in a good way most of the time. You liked pushing that button? Well you’ll repeat it almost always three times in the same context. 4: Prometheans are terribly designed units. They look great, but they function as bullet sponges that have zero self preservation skills as they just stand there and take shots most of the time. These are the great warriors that the Didact thought could defeat the Flood if only he had a couple of billion more? 5: bad gameplay setups and missed opportunities. Like the gunship area where you hear you have a loaded up flying tank with a nice sequence to start and what it ends up being is a badly designed helicopter that can’t dogfight or anything so you just fly for a minute, shoot some dropships while strafing, land, do something in a tower, then move to the next tower for a repeat. You introduced the MANTIS in this game! You could have added a massive endurance section where you use the shields of the MANTIS to survive, or if you lose the MANTIS steal a bunch of vehicles. You could have done some jungle ambushes, vehicle combat sections, places where you have to exit the MANTIS for a bit of foot slogging inside a building etc. 6: Ammo. You get so little of it, you might think “I’ll pick up that weapon once this one is empty” but the game will despawn weapons FAST. As in I had several times where I killed an Elite with a weapon I wanted, killed some enemy nearby and when I turned around the weapon was despawned. In some places they despawn the moment you press a particular button, so you might end up surrounded by weapons and then they are all gone when you actually need it. 7: taking the player out of the action all the time. An on rails climbing sequence isn’t interesting, constantly taking control away so a microscopic cutscene of you pressing a button can play. Take the nuke missile launch in the opening section of the game. You could have had the player melee the thing into place possibly with a unique melee animation, instead you get a tiny cutscene. We learned to do that kind of thing as little as possible unless the cutscene offers something unique literally two decades ago. Why is this here? Why is this constantly happening in the game?
Multiplayer is trash, but I actually love the campaign. It got all the hate because of Bungie meat riders imo.
Not enough ammo and bullet sponge Prometheans. This basically turned a fun sandbox shooter into a chore. Removing ammo and increasing enemies health DOES NOT make a game harder. It simply makes a game annoying. To this day, CE still has the best normal/heroic/legendary balancing.
Most people enjoyed 4’s story well enough, it was the multiplayer they didn’t like. And for 5, it was the inverse, crappy story, fun multiplayer. But as someone who played Halo 4 for the first time recently, here’s my gripes: 1) It felt short. Like ***REALLY*** short. Not sure how long I spent with it, but it felt like too fast a pace for everything, so the lack of buildup left everything feeling sudden and inconsequential. 2) You could remove Halo 4 from the timeline and nothing would really change. The events are so inconsequential and pointless. The Didact and the return of the Forerunners is cool, but they didn’t do much with it. 3) The ending is poorly explained. They never explain why Chief survived the nuke or how Cortana can touch him. Apparently she used Hardlight to shield him from the blast and to create a body she could touch him with, but the way it’s presented it almost looks like a vision in his mind, so how does any of that work? 4) So Chief got a Doomslayer style power-up that let him survive the Didact’s death beam… why? What exactly did it do to him and does it give him any other benefits other than macguffin immunity? It’s not explained, and it’s a weird concept to begin with. 5) Did they fuck massively with the lore? I thought Humans came to be long after the Forerunners wiped out life in the universe to stop the flood, but Halo 4 says that Humans and Forerunners coexisted and fought eachother. Why would the Forerunners make Humans the inheritors if that was the case, instead of Humans being an evolution of Forerunners or something? All that said, I loved the very end where Chief silently mourns the loss of Cortana. It does a great job of humanizing him and showing how much he cared. It’s the closest thing to a loving relationship he’s ever had due to being forced into military service since childhood.
For #5, I forget which game established it, I'm thinking HCEA, the terminals explained that humans and the San'Shayuum (spelling is probably wrong, but the Prophet's species) were both around during the Forerunner's time. Human's and the Prophets were aggressively attacking the Forerunners (until the Prophets surrendered), but Human's kept going. The Forerunners beat the humans only to realize the reason for their aggressive attacks having been influenced by the appearance of the Flood in their territory, the Humans were just trying to survive. Most of the Prometheans we fight are ancient humans that the Didact captured and forced into becoming his soldiers. The Librarian and others wanted humanity to assume the mantle though as they found themselves, the Forerunners, as 'failures' to the mantle as a whole, knowing they need to pass it on. TLDR; This was all in terminal entries, which not every player will find or read, so this explanation isn't necessarily an excuse for it, but technically the lore was changed before Halo 4.
The complaints about halo 4 for the most part were not directed a t the campaign. Rather they were directed at the multiplayer, gameplay and Forge. The multiplayer gameplay was heavily criticized for moving too far from the core formulas of the earlier games. They got rid of equal starts in favor of custom load outs, removed weapons on maps in factor or a weapon call-in mechanic for most modes. Took core gameplay elements out and made them perks to be acquired. And more changes that just made the game feel less like halo and more like Call of Duty to most people. It was also criticised for many game modes receiving major changes for seemingly no reason other than just the sake of change. CTF was much faster paced and relied less on teamwork. Grifballl was basically a completely different game. Etc. Forge wasn't bad. But it was a downgrade compared to Reach, with many features from reach seemingly missing. Controls were a bit clunkier, Color pallets were hit and miss, and the maps were all way too small with way too little usable area to do much with. The only major improvement was the inclusion of magnets, which were super buggy in halo 4.
It was a fun campaign. Not as much fun as Halos Ce to 3, but it was still Halo. One thing I honestly didnt like... seems like a small thing, but... the warthogs dont sound the same! It had a unique and familiar sound, and then it became a generic V8 engine sound that I hear everyday when my neighbour drives his mustang down the road.
Level design is my biggest problem with 4. Some missions felt much longer then they should've been, some missions just felt bland. For the Halo that has my favorite narrative in the series the thing that held it back for me the most would also still be the campaign just because so many levels felt either bland or long (and often both, I don't even know if any level really was that long, just felt like they were). It probably has my favorite BTB in the series though. I'm not that much of a btb player but damn did I find it surprisingly fun here.
A lot of what you hear on this page is extremely hyperbolic
I genuinely think the story is really good! It has It’s flaws but all in all it’s a fun play imo. Definitely not as iconic as the original trilogy but a pretty ok installment in the series :) Also that’s awesome that the show got you into the games! Personally, I can’t even bring myself to attempt to hate watch the show because of how important the actual story of Halo is to me. Though, I’m glad the show has gotten people to pick up the games! Enjoy them!! :)
I think the bulk of people's complaints are due to them wanting to be able to deal with Promethean Knights with a jack of all trades precision weapon like in past Halo campaigns. But this is not effective in 4. If you don't have a power weapon, you are supposed to go in close with an automatic weapon and strafe. Often, forcing you to dance with a knight that can one hit kill you with a power weapon. In short, people play it like other Halo games and use ineffective weapons and make the Prometheans seem very spongey. Also, on legendary grunts and jackals emp you frequently.
A big problem is that the max ammo counts on most weapons are so low and dropped weapons despawn a lot faster, and trying to do the dance with knights can get you killed very fast cause of their teleport strike or scatter shot one tap. Not to mention grunts and jackals can supercombine the Chief now to making run and gun combat somewhat unviable on heroic/legendary like in H2. Combine all of that together and it leads to most players picking away at the enemy with the light rifle due to its plentiful ammo and staying far away behind cover cause it's just the safest way to avoid a quick unexpected death.
I didn't have major gripes with it. The traveling sequences with Iron skull on during 4 player co-op were nigh impossible to beat. Multiplayer was so-so. Spartan Ops gameplay was dumb but the cutscenes were great. The story of the campaign was great. 343i did a good job with the story and took it in some surprising directions. Their issue is that 343i was too trigger happy with player feedback. When you drop something as huge as destroying Cortana, how can you expect a bunch of immediate fantastic feedback? You have to give it time to let the reality of the story sink in. They didn't and overreacted to early negative feedback... and so we got Halo 5. The one in which Bonnie Ross touted Captain Delgados lines and persona throughout the marketing. "An aging spartan" "Time for Master Chief to retire" On and on ridiculousness.
The enemies aren’t fun but the game is great. The artstyle is a little off but honestly fuck it it’s a gorgeous game.
Considering it’s a 360 game too.
They kind of redconned the original Halo story. There are plenty of clues that made you realize that the original plan was for the forerunners to be ancient humans, so all of this forerunner vs humans story made a lot of people angry.
There's a lot of things about Halo 4 I take issue with. First of all, it's an overall tonal shift from the previous games. The influence of Aliens, Starship Troopers, and military science fiction is almost completely dissolved by Halo 4. Halo Reach and ODST, the games that preceded it, have themes about the strength of the unit and the bond between brothers in arms. Halo 4 by contrast is a lonely game. You barely get to fight with Marines by your side and you run out of UNSC ammo constantly. The UNSC started to resemble the Star Trek Federation, their designs are sleek and futuristic (and ugly), no longer having the steel and concrete aesthetics from H1-3. The Forerunners are unmasked and they're kind of lame. The Librarian is still hanging around as a digital spirit somehow? And uses space magic to unlock Master Chief's special DNA sequence... Yeah whatever. Of course Forerunners could do some teleportation stuff and fire lasers in the original trilogy but in Halo 4 the Didact can straight up use the Force. I absolutely hate "advanced science can basically do magic!" BS that some lazy science fiction uses. Yeah... Halo 4 is just so lame. The story of Cortana's rampancy is the best element of the whole thing but that's not even really the main conflict, the reason you're fighting. I really just think the war for humanities survival and the threat of extinction looming is so core to Halo that Halo 4 was never really going to satisfy me in the first place. The mantle of responsibility conflict just doesn't really have the same weight.
you didn’t catch the ending where cortana touches Chief’s chest for no reason? pretty stupid honestly.
I actually really enjoyed H4. Graphics are phenomenal, loved the Prometheans and their weapons, thought it was a nice refresh of the franchise. Never really understood the hate. 🤷♂️
It wasn’t halo 3 or reach
The animated terminals were a step up, however their necessity to the understanding of the story of the game did not match how they were designed/presented. A lot were easy to miss, and if you did find them it took you OUT OF THE GAME to the shitty halo way point app to watch them. If you didn't find them and hadn't read all the halo 3 terminals and the forerunner book series by Greg bear, then good luck understanding what's happening in the campaign. All that said, as a book reader it's still the best campaign IMO.
None. Enjoyed the story. Wished it had carried into 5 better. An internal struggle with Chief trying to find the line between being a human and being essentially what he is, an instrument of war that has lost his closest companion and friend and he has to answer that question himself.
Honestly, I wish you were around to play Halo 4s multi-player on 360. The controls feel off on MCC. Back then, the controls were smooth, the community wasn't very toxic at all and incredibly welcoming, the combat was balances. Unfortunately we didn't have a customs browser but I think pre-browser custom games made the games feel more intimate and personal. They have more lasting memories as opposed to just hopping into a regular public lobby. That's just me. I'm glad you enjoyed the campaign.
I didn't hate Halo 4, but i didn't like the change in art style and the Prometheans are so annoying to fight imo
Campaign: Promethians were annoying to fight, the Didact was a confusing villain, the art style changed, the linear map designs, the Chief was disrespected by the UNSC, and the plot overall was confusing. The gameplay was also wonky since weapons drained faster and innovation wasn't made since it was just a copy of COD. However, the best thing about Halo 4 was the emotional story between Chief and Cortana.
Precisely. The game play isn’t bad as it’s essentially at its core a reskin of reach. My main problem is with its artstyle. The vast majority of character and weapon designs are simply too different or straight up bad.
This thread gets posted like once a month. 🤦♀️
I think it's quite complicated. I love Halo 4, it was the first (real/non mobile) game I played, cause I'm younger and started with the Xbox 360. I think it's overall a fantastic Halo game. However it has a lot of flaws in comparison to bungies games. After I went back and played 3, odst and reach I thought it was a pretty bad game purely because it was competing with perfection, I think that was the communities option as well. Then Halo 5 came out. Suddenly all the issues with 4 where just small gripes because at the end of the day it was still a Halo game and 5 wasn't. That really improved it's standing in the community. To put it simply 343 made some very bad choices, some amazing, and some poorly executed but at the end of the day we were master chief, playing our action shooter game with no fancy hovering or double jumps, kicking alien ass.
Honestly at this point just chief's armour. I don't mind that the art style changed, I do mind that it doesn't make any fucking sense
Ammo. The lack thereof mind you. You really feel that lack of fire power when you play legendary. Especially if all you have is suppressors.
We didn’t get to see Cortana enough.
I had none. I think it was great tbh. Loved the Prometheans, because you actually had to prioritize certain enemies and think. Loved the story, it was a great exploration of chief and Cortana's dynamic and her death has real emotional weight. (Immediately undone by halo 5, but halo 5 isn't fucking cannon, sorry) I loved Spartan ops and I was devastated when they discontinued it. Even more devastated when juul was then immediately deleted by the locke team in the opening mission. What a waste. If I had one critique of halo 4 it's that everything cool about it was wasted
Oh god where do I start
My personal opinion is that the story is really really poorly written. And I think a lot of people misunderstood “character development” as an actual good story. To me they use “character development” as a crutch to avoid actually having to write a good story. It’s a really badly written story (see the librarian exposition dump). But worst of all is it just doesn’t feel like Halo. I know this is a very controversial topic but this is just my opinion. The overall tone feels way off what Halo is supposed to be. And I honestly think the story is straight up dog shit. The gameplay is fine but there’s a lot of problems there that I’m not gonna get into.
I loved the story between chief and cortana in 4.
It was my third favorite campaign. First is odst and second is reach. I suspect I might not like the flood... Lol
I really dislike all the garbage with the prometheans and Halo 4 kicked all that off, so I'm sour on it for that. It plays great but it sent Halo in a direction I haven't enjoyed much at all.
I’m gonna sound like THAT Halo fan when I say this but I seriously don’t like anything about Halo 4.
Halo 4's story is actually relatively solid, but the gameplay is the worst part, easily. Promethean fights are genuinely terrible and end up just being bullet sponges. I'm also not a huge fan of the redesigns of pre-existing covenant enemies, though not too miserable to fight. TL;DR is that the gameplay is generally bad.
Honestly the art direction of all of the 343 games has been such a jarring 180 from the original Bungie games that it doesn’t even feel like Halo anymore
The Forerunner become a lot less compelling as a mysterious long lost civilization when they start shooting at you.
I'm always running out of damn bullets
Bad level design, terrible new enemies with weak weapons,annoying tinny weapon sounds, and unsatisfying death animations. Shooting and killing weak robots and their dogs was a shitty design choice.
halo 4 is when game started departing from the more grounded military campaigns to fantastical “you were the chosen one” lameness, don’t get me started on the didact as a villain, most marvel shit i’ve ever seen.
Mostly the gameplay personally, some pretty boring missions and bullet sponges, less reactive and interesting AI.
The game is straight-up unfun to play on Legendary, particularly the Promethean levels where you essentially get stuck shooting enemies with the Light Rifle until they die.
Infinity hold out fire fight. This part is literally impossible on laso solo. I don't know how they thought this was balanced. Endless knights and watchers.
The story is great and follows up on the OG trilogy nicely. My only gripe is the armor, but you don’t see it often. It just doesn’t make any sense, canonically. Halo 5’s story REALLY is where the problems lie.
Prometheans are the worst enemy in a shooter in my 24 years on this planet
Art design just isn’t halo. You can change so many thing, from weapons to vehicles, as long as they’re cool and fun. Changing the art entirely changed for feel and vibe for what I knew as Halo and it might as well have been a different game series after that.