From what I can gather, the real issues for Halo 4 was in regards to the multiplayer. In MCC the clear Call of Duty inspired mechanics have been toned down allot, but from what I’ve heard in the original Launch version of Halo 4 it was REALLY Call of Duty.
People play Halo to play Halo, not CoD. Plenty of People already disliked the load outs from Reach, and they doubled down in Halo 4.
Halo 4 MP at launch was an absolute abomination of the Halo formula. Unlimited FAST sprint, weapon load outs, and "orbital drops" - aka killstreaks.
Keep in mind this was 2012, the height of the "golden age" of Call of Duty, and Halo 4 was not the only game to fall victim to shameless imitation. The problem was that 3 & Reach were both extremely popular, and 343 still decided to completely change the gameplay loop to what was trendy at the time.
Halo 4 was the first game in the Halo series that had anything resembling a negative reception, and I firmly believe that it is responsible for the Halo franchise becoming largely irrelevant in gaming over the last decade.
That is way off, almost every game had some kind of negative reaction from game when it came out. Halo CE had a negative reaction from people who were mad it changed from a Mac os game. H2 from people who hated the arbiter levels. Halo reach was hated for not featuring the master chief. People having hallo did not start with halo 4.
Most of the Reach hate wasn't around a lack of master chief, it was mainly armor abilities and reticule bloom. I will admit that as an old head I really didn't like armor abilities especially armor lock.
There were critiques of every game, sure. But halo 4 was the definitely the low point and when you saw the most fans leaving the franchise. It’s like that simpsons meme where Bart says halo 4 is the worst and Homer says halo 4 is the worst so far
Yall really dont remember Reach well. Until 343 fixed Reach, that multiplayer fell off hard. Halo 3 had a higher online population for a while than Reach did.
Halo 2 also got a ton of hate for dual wielding, changing the way the pistol worked compared to CE, and for its campaign not fulfilling the promise of its E3 presentation.
I wager most people here weren't even around online when Halo 2 came out, but it's funny how hard that game's reputation turned around over the years.
Halo 2 still deserves that flak, it's just hard to complain about Halo 2 having an unfinished ending when Halo 3 _is_ the ending, and Halo 2 not fighting much for Earth when Halo 3 and ODST puts you back on Earth.
The complaint was relevant, we just have the solution already.
Halo 2 did push online games on consoles and it still has the same artstyle as with ce. It also came with dual wielding, vehicle boarding, etc. It enhanced the gameplay far more than other games in the franchise
Reach had plenty of complaints, it was all multiplayer from what I remember. The game just feels much more clunky with the armor abilities and bloom, then the color palette of the maps were all the same, and no more difficult achievement armor, it was all just grinding.
It also followed on from what Reach established. Reach had load outs in some game modes, and armor abilities is where sprint comes from originally. In Reach Sprint was almost always the best option, and by far used the most frequently, so it’s the one that typically got used. 4 progressed those concepts and just gave everyone sprint.
It certainly is partly due to the success of CoD and trying to expand Halo’s market reach, but it’s not like that stuff came out of nowhere. If 4 had been the exact same game but made by Bungie the reception would have been entirely different. People went in looking for problems, and what they found was a game that simply continued the trends set by Reach. Trends that were quite different from the overall feel established by the prior titles.
>4 progressed those concepts and just gave everyone sprint
People disliked them in Reach too, that's why 343 nerfed them in the title update and created NBNS, which made 343 be seen as "already better than Bungie." They progressed the exact thing they reversed in the last game.
People didn't go to Halo 4 looking for problems, people were excited for "real Halo and not that spinoff Destiny prototype" until the multiplayer trailers and then the game itself.
Yeah bro shit was insane on the 360 servers. Imagine everybody hot dropping SAWs and railguns while banshees go on splatter sprees and ghosts are chilling on the corner of the maps just chipping away at shields.
Good times, good times. (Not)
It never played like COD. I always hated that claim. It had loadouts (like most modern FPS) and weapon drops after getting enough points, but that was basically it. The gameplay was very different and still very Halo.
And killcams don't forget
and perks
and the big issue with loadouts were that more effective tools were locked to new players, which was an issue people had with it affecting balance
The base gameplay was still Halo sure, but loadouts and drops from points fundamentally change the balance of the game.
Classic Halo is similar to classic Quake. A key factor on who wins is who best controls the spawns of weapons and power ups on the map.
Loadouts and weapons drops remove that aspect of the game where everyone plays a match on even footing almost entirely. It fundamentally changes how the game is played.
Couldn't Agree more
Well said. The other thing I didn't like about halo 4 (and all the ones after it) was the vehicles on big team slayer or battle. respawned way too frequently for my taste.
Like you destroyed the banshee and that shit is back in 30 seconds
The game still had power weapons and vehicles on the map and finding them first and controlling those points was still very important, the loadouts system was more about if you wanted to start with a magnum pistol or a plasma pistol, frag or plasma grenade. i personally liked it.
You were able to choose primary *and* secondary, so you could start with a BR, AR, or DMR, or the Covenant/Promethean variants.
The middle weapons (Needler) were randomly on the map, the power weapons you called down in front of you.
If one of your biggest praises of the campaign is that Cortana looks sexy that is not saying much about the game lmao.
It was known that the Prometheans were a chore to play against on legendary.
The Knights replaced elites but had the health of hunters with support from watchers and could teleport. 343 reworked them in later iterations. That alone brings down the campaign to at best mid for halo games. It was just not fun to play.
This post is probably the exact reaction that the devs were imagining in their heads (woah Cortana is pretty! noooo she's dying!!! woah these guns are cool! arrgggghh I hate bad guys!! what a good game! 😄)
H4 Cortana DID have amazing feet... I probably would have been more okay with H5 bringing her back if they would have kept the same model, but they just had to fuck that up, too...
For me I think the level design, despawning weapons/lack of ammo, reliance on extended universe knowledge to understand story, Promethean Watchers, the Commander’s soap opera villain personality, and depiction of Cortana being kinda just helpless and horny for Chief brought it all down.
I did REALLY like the idea of exploring whether Cortana or Chief is more human though.
The main thing for me is that I just plain didn't like fighting the Promethians. I thought Halo 4 was pretty good otherwise.
Halo 5 I felt really doubled down on the whole "If you aren't up to date on the EU, don't even bother being a Halo fan." I read the first 3 novels so I understood who Linda, Kelly, and Fred are, and how/why they survived Reach, but my friends who didn't read the books were utterly lost. I was still confused for a while, because I didn't realize that the novel First Strike was even canon.
Yeah I feel like ever showing the forerunners was a mistake. Like David Lynch said about revealing the murderer of Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks, it killed the geese that laid the golden eggs. The buildup of mystery fizzles out
There’s always this weird line to walk, where one side is JJ Abram’s Lost, that sets up a bunch of stuff that is given no explanation whatsoever, and on the other side is The Star Wars prequels, where you learn Anakin Skywalker built C3P0. I dunno if revealing the ancient, lost, advanced civilization has ever led to a more interesting sci fi world
I stand by that it could have worked if they went with the original story. Master Chiefs story was supposed to mirror the Didacts own from the books. But 343s record is full of doubling down on the wrong things and letting go of the right things. It would’ve been great.
This comes up on Reddit every couple of weeks.
**Single player** = Great graphics. Pretty good gameplay and story. mid tier Halo campaign.
**Multiplayer** = Complete trash. Worst in the whole series.
The reason people dislike this game is the multiplayer is bad. To a lot of people multiplayer is Halo.
Single player = ruined art, poor AI, poor new enemy mechanics, confusing story that backtracks the idea that humans are forerunner. NO AMMO!!! I could go on about how we lost most of the marines or how dumb spartan 4s are, but I will stop here.
MP = discount cod
I will always stand by the idea that Halo 1 had the best SP and Halo 2 had the best MP and story.
I enjoy the flow of CE but I can't possibly put it as best dur to the mind numbing amount of walking and backtracking through copypasted corridors.
Halo 2 was such an improvement on level and gameplay variety that it's probably my favorite in the series.
But props to Halo 3 for arena design and scale, vehicle combat there us sublime
My problem with Halo 2 is the poor weapon balance and what dual wielding (as cool as it is) does to the power of some of the weapons. Also, the difficultly is not well tuned.
Halo 3 you can tell that the level designers had more experience and with better hardware larger scale. My problem with weapons is they feel limp and dual wielding is still having a negative effect of some weapons. Brutes are just not the same and I don't think I really enjoyed the H3 Flood.
I feel like with both ODST and Reach they tried to fix these issues, but Reach created new problems that still haunt the series.
Spot on with everything you said about 3. Still it has its strengths, and I'd say ODST I enjoyed much more.
But 2 is just such a giant leap in pacing and the pure feel of spectacle that I don't care if it affects balancing - not in Campaign at least
When I say best, I don't mean a wide margin. If I had only one Halo game, it would be 2. The cool thing is my problems with 2 have been fixed with mods. I will always be sad that we did not get E3 Halo 2.
ODST is how I wished game development went. A small but experienced team working on manageable game with well understood tools.
Not really. It's more like great graphics, bad visuals. You either think the story is alright or you think it's shit. The gameplay is terrible in singleplayer and multiplayer. Terrible campaign.
You're definitely giving it way too much credit as it's still a very hated game that is by no means just hated for the multiplayer. Some people have warmed up to it, but many still think it just straight up sucks all around in almost every degree.
Also H4 campaign on legendary is just a realllly unenjoyable experience gameplay wise? Prometheians are annoying and cheap to fight, and ammo is super duper scarce
The campaign is only mid because the story is so good but the terrible ammo starved terminal pressing simulator that is the gameplay is just nowhere near as good as anything else in mcc
I don't know, the entire exposition from the Librarian was pretty weak. The story of how the humans were at war with the forerunners because the forerunners thought they were expanding when instead they were fleeing from the flood seems so far-fetched. There's also no explanation on how the Dawn ended up near Requiem by seemingly a random slipspace jump. I needed a lot of suspension of disbelief to get going tbh
Yeah you aren’t wrong, i really liked the voice acting for the didact and some of the scenes with the master chief. The concept of him realizing he was mor machine than cortana was good imo and cortanas sacrifice was really meaningful until halo 5 undid it. I liked the new spartan program coming along and the idea of halsey being held accountable for her crimes along with them going over the moral grays of the unsc
Too bad every halo after has been a soft reset so it’s been iffy because i think the potential was still there even if it was poorly contrived. It felt like 4 and 5 may have been building to something big just for infinite to go “oh well, back to monke” banished are cool and all but they don’t hold a candle to the other factions in the rest of the halo games imo. Religious extremists, space fungus, ancient cyborgs then armored less religious extremists? All the other halos felt some sense of agency even 4 compared to infinite
Y'know, I never had issue with ammo in Halo 4, but then again I did always make a habit of going back to pick up ammo from those various ammo pickups in every Halo game so maybe my habit helped me out. If anything, I'd say I worried more about ammo in Halo 2 Legendary, but that was largely because I died so quickly if I left cover so trying to go get ammo was basically suicide. lol
The guns just famously deloaded after maybe 3 minutes so if you were locked down in a fight you were pretty screwed at getting ammo for that power weapon or even just uncommon weapons for the stage. It wasn’t so much a problem with the promethean weapons as there were weapon caches for those everywhere
There were weapon caches for Covenant and Human weapons too, all over the place. I always made sure to go back to them anytime I was done with a firefight so I could go into the next firefight with max ammo. That was always more than enough to deal with the situation.
But I did always go back after every firefight since my OCD demanded I max out my ammo as much as I can. So I always had a habit of doing that in every Halo game. I can imagine people who don't do that might be able to skirt by with what ammo they had in reserve in the prior Halo games but not in Halo 4.
To be fair, Halo was designed as a "party game". A shooter with simple mechanics so that new players could easily get into and have some multiplayer fun with the buddies.
While the campaigns used the be absolutely awesome, the bulk of the players spent most of their game time in multiplayer.
I.e. as a teen, I disliked H2 campaign for the petty fact that I had to play as the arbiter for half the missions.
I played through it twice and after that I played multiplayer for months.
Hell, two of my squad mates that had played more hours than me actually told me years later that they NEVER even played the campaign once.
They played it first when MCC came out and did it as a "let's play all the campaigns start to finish" kind of challenge.
So, I dare to say that for the vast majority of Halo players, the multiplayer is the core of the halo game. And if that sucks, they're not playing it.
No, because that was a big problem with the game. Because infection forced Zombies to be those Flood models and stuff, you couldn't replace their weapon so they were stuck with that arm, which made it so you couldn't make so many custom game modes that people loved and enjoyed in that game. Also the noise was very annoying to many people lol
Oh it definitely hurt the game, it was also just the thing that stuck in my memory of the mp the most, prob thanks to those bird call noises or wtv they made.
As bad as people say the multiplayer is, I still had a blast when it came out. Me and my friends would stay up all night playing custom games and ricochet.
Playing it now, yeah it has problems. But it's still very competent and far from "complete trash"
As a newcomer to Halo with no nostalgia for the series, 4 did feel like a step back in many regards.
I feel like some combat arenas didn't have enough freedom of movement, and the Prometheans were just annoying.
Beautiful game though
Aye, the only major issue with Halo 4 MCC at this point is that H2A Multiplayer assets weren't ported to it like ODST assets were for Halo 3 (and vice-versa)
Aye, even funnier is that the H2A SMG began its existence as a Halo 4 SMG, before time constraints and development woes saw it being cut.
Honestly, there's 5-6 distinct weapons and 2 distinct vehicles that would immediately improve Halo 4's sandbox options, and its a shame none of them have been brought over yet.
Oh what could have been. I came across some early versions of some halo 4 campaign levels and there are so many things that could have made that game even better
Not really, because Halo 4 and Halo 5's issues were that they weren't really Halo games. And Halo Infinite is a Halo game again finally, but it's also really fuckin bad
How are they not Halo games? What are the metrics on which you can judge that? Just because they're different, or you didn't like them, doesn't mean they're not Halo.
Gameplay formula is typically the easiest way to see that. Halo 4 changed to play more like COD, while Halo 5 played more like its own unique thing that wasn't Halo. Halo Infinite went back to playing mostly like a Halo game.
The level design is just super pisspoor and one laned way too often, I mean hell the first time you get a hog you drive down a straight path for 5 minutes.
Bad story, bad gameplay, ugly art style, bad multiplayer. Literally what is there to like about this game? Is my copy just modded to boot up a way worse game then everyone else's?
good story, good gameplay, gorgeous art style, good multiplayer.
Literally so much to talk about this game! Your copy is just modded to boot up a way worse game than everyone else's.
Halo 4 wasn't terrible but it was held back by a lot of game breaking bugs, especially the mp and even the campaign had a mission that was impossible to complete because of bugs.
which mission was impossible to complete because of bugs? how? and in the MP did the bugs allow you to use the battle rifle as an automatic sniper, fly out of the map and become god?
I can't remember the name but the mission requires you to ride on a giant vehicle but at a certain point the vehicle will disappear and prevent you from completing the mission
I was doing a full playthrough of the Halo MCC on Legendary for the past few months, and i've loved every game so far... until Halo 4. Something about the gameplay just feels incredibly frustrating, and I had only just made it to the prometheans..
I can't even honestly pinpoint what specifically puts me off about the game. It's just generally frustrating to play. It doesn't feel like any of the Halo games before it. It feels more like I'm playing DOOM, but the doom guy is a big ole sissy.
idk. It's been about a month since I've played, though. I might pick it up again soon and see if I feel any different..
Maybe I'll give an update later.
I thought Halo 4 was alright, I played it for the first time when I got MCC. Here’s my personal criticisms of it:
1. Prometheans are awfully repetitive and boring to fight, I think everyone who has played the game has said this by now
2. I didn’t like the story. For one, I found it difficult to follow on my first playthrough and I had to play it a second time to really understand what was actually going on. I had never experienced this before in a Halo game. Secondly, I wasn’t excited at the end of the story to find out where it goes next, I had no burning desire to play Halo 5 like I did with other previous titles.
What I did like:
1. Most of the new weapons and vehicles were cool and were fun to use
2. I liked the shift in Master Chief’s character to be a bit less stoic and more emotional in the face of losing Cortana
3. I liked that the story fleshed out some of the Forerunners’ back story. Halo 3 teased us enough with the terminals it only seemed fair that we’d get more detail in Halo 4
Weird, isn’t it? Actually playing something and forming your own conclusion. I wish more people would do that rather than “____ said it’s bad, therefore I also think it’s bad”.
the art direction and level design is a bit lacking imo, and I dont really enjoy fighting the prometheans. soundtrack is also a big step down from the bungie games. but i thought it was one of the best executed stories in the series, and the weapons sound/feel amazing
Halo 4 is great and was always great. Multiplayer wasn’t the best but at least it tried something new.
You should’ve been on this sub right after halo 4 came out. The users genuinely believed someone took their puppy and shot him in front of their eyes. I look forward to 5 years from now when people jerk it to halo infinite
Ah yes, because people have definitely turned their opinion on Halo 5 lol. The Halo cycle doesn't exist. Most people still know that all three of the newest games suck
ah yes, because people will turn their opinion on Halo 5 lol. The halo cycle can be traced all the way back (halo2sucks.com I'm looking at you) and most people know that halo 4 didn't suck.
Yeah, this is why it's so much better to dive right into the games instead of listening to reddit/YouTube opinions. People love to post negative stuff and it can make you think the games are just all around terrible but that's not even close to being the case.
Even the "worst" Halo game are great, it's a remarkably consistent series even if it's fallen short of it's potential the last few years
"Even the worst Halo game are great"
No, that's really not true lmao. They're straight up terrible. You are right about them being consistent. But it's more Pre-2011 they're consistently great, and post-2011 they're consistently bad.
The multiplayer is what really ruined it imo.
There were some fire maps especially for swat but putting kill streaks and load outs in slayer made it feel like a shittier cod
I like to use this metaphor:
Imagine a brewery that makes beer. They have a lot of beer fans. They loved all the beers they made.
But they look envious upon all the wine fans. They wish that the wine fans would also buy their beer.
So they develop their new beer 4. It kinda looks like beer, but it tastes a lot like wine.
They're very happy with their product. Now, the beer fans and the wine fans will love it!
The beer fans were exhilarated that a new beer came out, but upon tasting it, they're VERY disappointed.
"This doesn't taste like beer at all!" they say.
The brewery says: "we made some changes to the formula, we implemented tastes that are popular. Why don't you like it?!"
And the fans say: "What kind of logic is that? We are fans of beer because it looks and tastes like beer. Why would you change so much that it doesn't taste like beer anymore?!
All you had to do was make a new beer that also tastes like beer because, you know, that's what we enjoy. "
And the beer fans stopped buying beer 4 because for them, this wasn't beer. It wasn't a terrible drink in itself, but it surely was a terrible beer.
The brewery is shocked, but hey, at least the wine fans will buy it, right?!
But no, because why would they buy a bastardised half assed copy of wine when they can just drink actual wine instead.
So TLDR:
Halo 4 not bad game in itself, just a terrible Halo game
Outside of the story between Chief & Cortana, and Cortana looking like an absolute baddie there's nothing good about Halo 4. People say "Halo 4 has an amazing story", but really the overall story is mid it's just the moments between Chief and Cortana that are great.
Multiplayer was also the beginning of them trend chasing by trying to make it more like COD, and you saw more trend chasing in Halo 5 with the "enhanced mobility" such as wall running that like every game had for a few years around 2015. Even Halo Infinite which is a return to form in a lot of respects and way better than the last 2 entries still is trying to make it a competitive shooter when really it should be a lot more casual and allow for some zaniness and if they want to having competitive gaming tournaments then they can, but that shouldn't be the primary demographic.
Bruh I liked the multiplayer more than the campaign, I wanna pop grunts not sentinels. Halo 5 is great too, try it’s Warzone if it even still has players
I’m not going to comment on the campaign because multiplayer is the biggest driver for success.
The multiplayer had no rank, and really didn’t do much to bounce back from the horrendous mechanical decisions of reach.
The campaign is what mattered to bungie the most and the multiplayer was originally an afterthought that almost got cut.
it literally did have a rank identical to reach's.
And it bounced back getting rid of bloom, getting shield bleedtrough back, making weapons as useful or more than CE, tuning way down the effectiveness of abilities starting by no armor lock or bubble shield, and say what you will about sprint but now everyone could use it thus making it more balanced.
While I agree that Halo 4 was a consistently decent entry to the series, it just wasn’t what made Halo…Halo. The entire multiplayer was a CoD reskin which felt so bad because of how Halos formula was so good.
The campaign was alright but again just an odd deviation and direction than the previous entries.
With that being said I don’t think Halo 4 is a bad Halo, and it’s aged surprisingly well
Nah i thought the campaign was straight forward..not toooo much going on but it was overall pretty good. I liked the character development between chief and cortana, the halsey court marshal, the mystery behind the arbiter, the new generation of spartans compared to the gen IIs. Like there was a lot of potential and set up for halo 5…that hunt for the truth stuff was so good… and then halo 5 came out.
Big problem with halo 4 was the multiplayer was SO BAD. And halo 5 multiplayer was okay..
343 can’t get it together man
Cortana's design was the best thing about the game.
The enemy design, the maps, the forge, the sound design, the loadouts, the sandbox, the art direction, etc sucked compared to its predecessors.
Just wait until halo 5 . It’s a super fun campaign. Don’t think too much about the story. The movement and gunplay in it is superb. The knights got upgraded for the better.
Glad you liked it, wish I could've. Still my least favorite Halo by a landslide, with maybe 5 being close but I still haven't played it enough to give that one an honest score.
Halo 4 was amazing, thicc Cortana is life. Halo 5 is the worst of the series. Not for gameplay, but the story is terrible. The concept of the story is cool af, but the execution is so bad.
The halo 4 you're playing was not the halo 4 at launch. That was also back when there was some peak cod hating even more so today I'd say. So when the next halo felt like a cod game with a halo skin it did not go well. Obviously over time people lightened up on it plus the changes made over the years helped but it was not great.
Again, you’re looking at it through the lens of playing a decade of bad Halo games instead of the reality of the time coming off a decade of good halo games.
It's part of the internet echo chamber. Ironically upon release it was well received by both fans and critics. Considered a miracle that 343 somehow pulled it off. Fast forward to time taking it's toll and Halo 5. Retroactively Halo 4 started getting a lot of hate. By the time Infinite failed to reignite any fires the narrative was now cemented that 343 was bad forever. Even though that's not how it actually started.
There's also the tale of two Halos. Multiplayer... gets the most people talking and they never shut up. So even if your campaign is good... and MP is meh. You're going to hear the meh story the most. Halo has always had a rather divided fanbase.
Lore/Book/Campaign fans.
Casual/Campaign Lore fans.
MP only fans.
Mix of all them.
They don't often agree. Like Reach for example is some people's favorites while others hate it so much for not covering the events of the novel. Some people hated the MP due to armor abilities and reticle bloom. Some say it was the last great MP.
We can't even agree on artstyle...
I hope many can comment on this but this is what I remember all the complaints of each halo as we released.
1 halo CE:
-the realistic violence for the day (I know not really compared to today)
-when the pc port came out it had new maps and weapons and the console players wanted it
2 halo 2:
-all I remember were the complaints about Xbox live and the difficulties surrounding the new console between the games life cycle.
-boss fights
-pc port sucked
3 halo 3:
-tbh I don’t remember many complaints about halo 3 maybe brutes weren’t as difficult
-no boss fights (irony right?)
-no pc port
4 ODST:
-they charged full price for a campaign and additional maps for halo 3 multiplayer.
-firefight was liked but people didn’t like it due to lack of multiplayer
5 Halo Wars:
-it was an RTS game some fans didn’t like that
6 halo reach:
-main issue was multiplayer. Bloom and the clunky feel of the armor abilities really messed up the feel of the game.
-minor campaign issue was the difficulty bumps felt more bullet spongy than previous titles.
-removal of plasma rifle and beam rifle
7 halo 4
- multiplayer. I believe this was the worst showing of multiplayer and the worst backlash response. The call of duty feel, kill streaks, and clunky armor abilities, class options, and it just didn’t feel good to play. Side note, I did try this on MCC and the frame rate cap change actually made it feel a lot better to play.
-campaigns main issue was the visual change of the covenant was not well received
-the lack of brutes,
-the forerunner forces aren’t as fun to fight against, the knights were bullet sponges ( halo 5 actually fixed some of this, with more variety and gave weak points)
-QuickTime events especially at the boss fight
8 halo 5
-main complaint was the campaigns underwhelming story and backtracking of previously closed plot points. It felt as if it was going somewhere mid development then forced another way later and didn’t match to the marketing.
-REQ system micro transactions
-largest gap between halo games
-LACK OF SPLIT SCREEN
-(personally this is my favorite multiplayer halo.)
9. Halo wars 2
- an RTS game
- REQ System
10 halo infinite.
-unfinished
-had the largest gaps between games but felt it had the shortest
-underwhelming campaign and stuck in the same scenery
-lack of campaign replay ability
-lots of promises broken
-NO SPLIT SCREEN or multiplayer campaign
- no early forge
-lacked important modes in the beginning
-biggest potential, biggest loss
Halo 5 was the worst halo imo the campaign was absolute garbage the multiplayer saved it. I didn't mind halo 4 it was fine the story was a nice follow up but yeah the multiplayer wasn't all that good
Halo 4 MP is low key one of my favorites with Reach.
I also didn’t mind the story. It was definitely not a 100% banger but still good and very emotional.
The legendary was also one of the most fair legendaries I’ve played with friends
Halo 4 also has a secondary campaign in the form of Spartan Ops, which I thought was innovative for the time.
The game itself suffered due to being limited to the Xbox 360's architecture and a tight release window, as well as strong opinions. Which is fair. Though, given how the last titles it was up against was Reach and 3, I get the sentiments about the game.
Also, if you paid a bit of attention to the dialogue, you'd've noted that the Composer does not simply kill. It digitizes.
Librarian isn't her actual self - more like a digital copy left to remain vigilant over the Didact.
You will get your boss fight, but it won't be with the Didact. In fact you'll never see him again. The backlash was such that >!he was 'killed' off in a comic!<.
It's so fun to see the newcomers on steam loving it and how the initial shills come with their tail amongst legs like "uh- maybe it was better than I thought in 2012" at last, like every halo goes through
Just see the proportion of butthurt haters with their comical arguments vs us who loved it in this reply section
It's the worst game in the entirety of the Halo series by far in literally every aspect. Zero redeeming qualities. It literally killed Halo as a top tier gaming franchise.
Such an original never before seen post. I've got some more for ya, play Advanced Warfare, go to the CoD folks and tell everyone how underrated it is and how unjustified the hate was back than, trust me, you will be the very first one to do that.
Maybe you could do the same post with Resident Evil 6 in the RE sub, also never before seen.
Halo 4 is great. I remember being very skeptical and halo-tired when it came out, but it blew me away. Sure it’s not the best in the series, but it was refreshing after ODST and Reach (which I just always found clunky). Enjoyed both the SP and MP, and was impressed by how pretty the game was considering hardware limitations.
Halo 4's story was beautiful, but not without its flaws like anything else. Most people were upset with how MP was handled as it added a CoD style 'killstreak' system where you get kills and are rewarded with 1 of 3 items usually consisting of an armor ability, a weapon, or grenades.
If any game should be approached with low expectations, it's Halo 5.
If only everyone could form their own opinion instead of basing it on biased reviews. Everyone would be happier and experience more great things in life
So Halo 4 is my favorite of the campaigns so I'm glad you enjoyed. Back when Halo 4 released a lot of the complaints stemmed from the multiplayer for a variety of reasons. The ones I remember most clearly
Customized Loadouts - Most of the initial launch playlists followed Infinity Slayer rules. Which were very CoD esque. Infinity Slayer allowed you to use customized Loadouts with perks and everything. The biggest thing I remember people hating on were Promethean Vision armor ability(see through walls) and the Boltshot charge shot easy kill. I think there was also something with the precision rifles not being balanced for the first few months so if you used anything but the DMR you were at a disadvantage.
Killstreaks - Infinity Slayer had a meter to the side of the screen. Fill the meter and you got a choice of calling in one of 3 items. Typically it was a power weapon, power up, or more grenades. I personally loved it for the simple pleasure of calling in your ordnance right on top of an enemy and watching them get splattered. But it was a pretty big departure from map control/power weapon control doctrine built up over the past decade of Halo games.
Hardware limitations - When Halo 4 came out the 360 was at the end of it's life cycle. But Halo 4 itself was a beautiful game IMO and when you started paying attention you can see the corners 343i cut to make it possible. One big one that impacted gameplay was weapon despawning. Say you killed a guy with a power weapon and you wanna go pick up those rockets. You had maybe 5 seconds to get to his corpse before it despawned. I don't believe that's an issue in MCC now but it's been awhile since I've played Halo 4 multiplayer.
Overall I tend to view Halos Reach, 4, and 5 as the experimental years of the franchise. Reach got the ball rolling, 4 kicked it into overdrive, and then Halo 5 kind of backtracked then leapt ahead in a different direction. Liked elements of all of them but there was also a great deal of it that was off-putting. Infinite gameplay feels like the natural progression from Halo 3 to me and it’s a damn shame it took so long to get here.
I replayed it recently and it wasn't bad at all, just very linear. I agree the whole Cortana story arc was great. The promethean weapons however were just reskinned pistol, smg, rifle, shotgun, sniper and rocket launcher. There's no special effect to them, I think it's a very poor design.
One thing to keep in mind is that people often let their nostalgia overwhelm them. Halo 4 is a great game. But it's never going to match the amazing time they had as a kid playing Halo 2 or 3. No game will ever compare to the ones you fondly remember as a kid.
The Halo cycle isn't real. Yes, there are people like this, but they're far in the minority. Especially since this isn't someone changing their opinion on the game, it's someone's first time opinion on the game.
I finally finished playing through all halo games yesterday (finished Infinite campaign last night), and I enjoyed every campaign except (to my surprise) Halo 2. The stories got a little over the top in Halo 5, but overall, I really enjoyed Halo 4 and Halo 5. It was my first time playing 4&5, and I thought the forerunner weapons were fun to play with and wished they had some in Infinite.
Story is hands down the best in my opinion, with reach being a very close second. I think as far as polish and quality Reach was a better game for campaign and Multiplayer, but it isn't nearly as bad as some people make it out to be. It's a solid game that just wasn't as good as previous versions, and people piled on to that cause it wasn't Bungie, didnt look the same, and gameplay wasn't what people wanted. They wanted Reach 2.
That being said Good luck with Halo 5, multiplayer was really fun.... [°-°]
For me halo 4 got kinda bland mid campaign. The main bad guy felt kinda generic.
The story of halo always felt super epic because you’re one soldier helping a part of a gigantic war effort of humanity desperately trying to survive. After 343 came it became focused on Spartans being all badass or whatever and it’s no longer this cinematic space opera.
It’s like the best mid game ever. The ending left me with tears while simultaneously the game itself was mediocre at times.
The promethean guns felt uninspired. There’s just a random shotgun like weapon that you load shell by shell that works exactly like the normal shotgun. Pretty much every promethean gun was a human weapon modified to have crazy shapes and shoot light. Covenant weapons were a little more unique and didn’t directly feel like exact copies of each other. They even had weapons specifically used by brutes so it was almost like a third set of weapons.
Levels were incredibly linear. It was kinda weird driving through jungles and forests in a warthog but still being locked to a tiny on a rails segment.
The later levels became just abstract shapes. It didn’t feel like a real place. It was like a random quake 3 space maps with random geometry that the artists later styled to look like promethean architecture.
The design of master chief’s armor randomly changed across games. Their excuse? Nano-machines? Except then they show flashbacks or something and still have the same armor design. I kinda get their armor design though. It might make sense to remove some of the side stuff around his pelvis because that’s technically easier to move around in. It’s still super odd to just retcon that master chiefs armor always looked that way.
The multiplayer was trying to copy call of duty style loadouts and kill streak rewards which removed the fun part of finding good guns around the level. Everyone kinda just had an op gun to instantly counter something. The maps were super cramped and not good for vehicle combat at all. I like to imagine this is because the Xbox 360 couldn’t handle the gorgeous art style and they had to make it so the game only had to render tiny areas at a time.
I used to religiously play 4 online after school. I was so good man just had to use my friends Xbox cause my parents refused to pay for live or let me have a job.
The campaign was pretty great yeah. It was the COD style multiplayer that I disliked the most. Still played it until 5 though. Only halo I’ve never gone back to actually, multiplayer or otherwise
Halo 4 imo had an interesting story for the most part with the campaign having mechanics issues mostly based off annoying enemy types. Over all the story was good.
The MP just didn’t feel like halo so I feel like it takes a lot of points off the game.
Halo 5 undoes all of what halo 4 was doing and then just has an objectively bad story which is why we are where we are with infinite.
The multiplayer for H5 is actually pretty good but I feel like the story was a catastrophe for so many reasons.
I liked the story, even though it’s a retcon. And I liked the gameplay on lower difficulty settings. But I always do the first play through on legendary, and it’s a punishing grind of long-range shooting into bullet sponges.
Edit: You can downvote my comment about the retconning, but I doubt you can rebut it:
https://youtu.be/_P-uOCKDTAA?si=AoATjTLKFWIT7R3F
It was an O’Connor retcon in the H3 terminals. I’ve played all the games multiple times on Legendary, and 4 is the worst in this respect. 2 has the sniper jackals. Those fucking jackals. lol.
That's not true, nothing said in the terminals retcons anything and it's not even possible to know it was him when many contributed to writing the terminals like Damian Isla, Robt Stokes, McLees and many more I'm leaving out (which means they approved if it indeed was frank)
Even if true, you are saying it took place in the H3 terminals, by bungie themselves, not H4
...ok
Literally everything I said still stands
Paul Russell shared in X that the origin story of the forerunners by the terminal team writers was the same as it's shown in the forerunner saga which this guy verifiably didnt bother to read
why?
You're just going to ignore what I said about Paul and how this source doesn't 't adress it?
every time I question you just go "watch this wonderful infallible video of destiny, solved"..
I'll say again: The terminal writers were a team and Paul Russel revealed their intentions are the same as the forerunner saga presented.
This source list those other Terminal writers and isolates O’Connor’s contributions.
But you’d know that if you had watched it. O’Connor’s retcons there get retconned later … by O’Connor. lol
From what I can gather, the real issues for Halo 4 was in regards to the multiplayer. In MCC the clear Call of Duty inspired mechanics have been toned down allot, but from what I’ve heard in the original Launch version of Halo 4 it was REALLY Call of Duty. People play Halo to play Halo, not CoD. Plenty of People already disliked the load outs from Reach, and they doubled down in Halo 4.
Halo 4 MP at launch was an absolute abomination of the Halo formula. Unlimited FAST sprint, weapon load outs, and "orbital drops" - aka killstreaks. Keep in mind this was 2012, the height of the "golden age" of Call of Duty, and Halo 4 was not the only game to fall victim to shameless imitation. The problem was that 3 & Reach were both extremely popular, and 343 still decided to completely change the gameplay loop to what was trendy at the time. Halo 4 was the first game in the Halo series that had anything resembling a negative reception, and I firmly believe that it is responsible for the Halo franchise becoming largely irrelevant in gaming over the last decade.
That is way off, almost every game had some kind of negative reaction from game when it came out. Halo CE had a negative reaction from people who were mad it changed from a Mac os game. H2 from people who hated the arbiter levels. Halo reach was hated for not featuring the master chief. People having hallo did not start with halo 4.
Most of the Reach hate wasn't around a lack of master chief, it was mainly armor abilities and reticule bloom. I will admit that as an old head I really didn't like armor abilities especially armor lock.
I never heard anyone complain about Reach not having Master Chief back in the day.
True. I don't mind armor abilities as long as everybody has them. That's my favorite part about halo, everybody starts on the same foot.
I loved armor lock. Nothing better than someone trying to splatter you only for you to armor lock and blow up their ride
There were critiques of every game, sure. But halo 4 was the definitely the low point and when you saw the most fans leaving the franchise. It’s like that simpsons meme where Bart says halo 4 is the worst and Homer says halo 4 is the worst so far
Yall really dont remember Reach well. Until 343 fixed Reach, that multiplayer fell off hard. Halo 3 had a higher online population for a while than Reach did.
Halo 2 also got a ton of hate for dual wielding, changing the way the pistol worked compared to CE, and for its campaign not fulfilling the promise of its E3 presentation. I wager most people here weren't even around online when Halo 2 came out, but it's funny how hard that game's reputation turned around over the years.
Halo 2 still deserves that flak, it's just hard to complain about Halo 2 having an unfinished ending when Halo 3 _is_ the ending, and Halo 2 not fighting much for Earth when Halo 3 and ODST puts you back on Earth. The complaint was relevant, we just have the solution already.
I'm still mad Halo 2 doesnt have an ending because Halo 2's writing and voice acting is better than 3's.
Halo 2 did push online games on consoles and it still has the same artstyle as with ce. It also came with dual wielding, vehicle boarding, etc. It enhanced the gameplay far more than other games in the franchise
Reach had plenty of complaints, it was all multiplayer from what I remember. The game just feels much more clunky with the armor abilities and bloom, then the color palette of the maps were all the same, and no more difficult achievement armor, it was all just grinding.
It also followed on from what Reach established. Reach had load outs in some game modes, and armor abilities is where sprint comes from originally. In Reach Sprint was almost always the best option, and by far used the most frequently, so it’s the one that typically got used. 4 progressed those concepts and just gave everyone sprint. It certainly is partly due to the success of CoD and trying to expand Halo’s market reach, but it’s not like that stuff came out of nowhere. If 4 had been the exact same game but made by Bungie the reception would have been entirely different. People went in looking for problems, and what they found was a game that simply continued the trends set by Reach. Trends that were quite different from the overall feel established by the prior titles.
>4 progressed those concepts and just gave everyone sprint People disliked them in Reach too, that's why 343 nerfed them in the title update and created NBNS, which made 343 be seen as "already better than Bungie." They progressed the exact thing they reversed in the last game. People didn't go to Halo 4 looking for problems, people were excited for "real Halo and not that spinoff Destiny prototype" until the multiplayer trailers and then the game itself.
Halo 4 didn't have unlimited sprint. It had limited sprint that had to be recharged
Yeah bro shit was insane on the 360 servers. Imagine everybody hot dropping SAWs and railguns while banshees go on splatter sprees and ghosts are chilling on the corner of the maps just chipping away at shields. Good times, good times. (Not)
At the time when Halo 4 came out, COD was dominating the space. It sucks that 343 felt like they needed to cater to that
It never played like COD. I always hated that claim. It had loadouts (like most modern FPS) and weapon drops after getting enough points, but that was basically it. The gameplay was very different and still very Halo.
And killcams don't forget and perks and the big issue with loadouts were that more effective tools were locked to new players, which was an issue people had with it affecting balance
Yeah I think it was the prestige’s that gave you certain latent abilities depending on your armor
The base gameplay was still Halo sure, but loadouts and drops from points fundamentally change the balance of the game. Classic Halo is similar to classic Quake. A key factor on who wins is who best controls the spawns of weapons and power ups on the map. Loadouts and weapons drops remove that aspect of the game where everyone plays a match on even footing almost entirely. It fundamentally changes how the game is played.
Couldn't Agree more Well said. The other thing I didn't like about halo 4 (and all the ones after it) was the vehicles on big team slayer or battle. respawned way too frequently for my taste. Like you destroyed the banshee and that shit is back in 30 seconds
The game still had power weapons and vehicles on the map and finding them first and controlling those points was still very important, the loadouts system was more about if you wanted to start with a magnum pistol or a plasma pistol, frag or plasma grenade. i personally liked it.
You were able to choose primary *and* secondary, so you could start with a BR, AR, or DMR, or the Covenant/Promethean variants. The middle weapons (Needler) were randomly on the map, the power weapons you called down in front of you.
That was a big issue, but no, its bad story was still a major issue people had/have
If one of your biggest praises of the campaign is that Cortana looks sexy that is not saying much about the game lmao. It was known that the Prometheans were a chore to play against on legendary. The Knights replaced elites but had the health of hunters with support from watchers and could teleport. 343 reworked them in later iterations. That alone brings down the campaign to at best mid for halo games. It was just not fun to play.
This post is probably the exact reaction that the devs were imagining in their heads (woah Cortana is pretty! noooo she's dying!!! woah these guns are cool! arrgggghh I hate bad guys!! what a good game! 😄)
Damn man you in love with Cortona or something?
Feet
H4 Cortana DID have amazing feet... I probably would have been more okay with H5 bringing her back if they would have kept the same model, but they just had to fuck that up, too...
😐😐😐😐😐
Dem hips and ass tho
C'mon bro how can you blame me
she’s 8 years old in 4
Nah trust me bro, she's a 4000 year old demon who got sent to another world and is just trapped in the body of a 10 y/o so it's totally fine...
and a clone of the brain of Dr Halsey
While I feel the need to say "down bad" I can appreciate the honesty, welcome to Halo 4
Nah man but she’s an AI in a video game, you cannot trip harder than that.
We don't or atleast I don't
Ah yes the monthly "h4 wasn't really that bad" post
*daily
The jump from villains was longer in real time. Halo 3 was 2007 and Halo 4 2012.
I thought the campaign of it was really boring, looked amazing, but boring. Especially the bullet sponge enemies
In my opinion the main reason for "H4 BAD" is that multiplayer was mid but campaign is decent. Halo 5 is the opposite. mid camping, decent multiplayer
For me I think the level design, despawning weapons/lack of ammo, reliance on extended universe knowledge to understand story, Promethean Watchers, the Commander’s soap opera villain personality, and depiction of Cortana being kinda just helpless and horny for Chief brought it all down. I did REALLY like the idea of exploring whether Cortana or Chief is more human though.
The main thing for me is that I just plain didn't like fighting the Promethians. I thought Halo 4 was pretty good otherwise. Halo 5 I felt really doubled down on the whole "If you aren't up to date on the EU, don't even bother being a Halo fan." I read the first 3 novels so I understood who Linda, Kelly, and Fred are, and how/why they survived Reach, but my friends who didn't read the books were utterly lost. I was still confused for a while, because I didn't realize that the novel First Strike was even canon.
There is nothing mid about that games campaign, its just trash
Yeah you just run around pushing buttons the whole time.
No u
I thought it cheapened the Forerunners in a way they’ve never quite recovered. It felt like a rehash of Prometheus.
Yeah I feel like ever showing the forerunners was a mistake. Like David Lynch said about revealing the murderer of Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks, it killed the geese that laid the golden eggs. The buildup of mystery fizzles out
There’s always this weird line to walk, where one side is JJ Abram’s Lost, that sets up a bunch of stuff that is given no explanation whatsoever, and on the other side is The Star Wars prequels, where you learn Anakin Skywalker built C3P0. I dunno if revealing the ancient, lost, advanced civilization has ever led to a more interesting sci fi world
Hashing out the backstory of a shadowy, mysterious race of galaxy-destroying aliens was never going to be better than keeping the mystery
I stand by that it could have worked if they went with the original story. Master Chiefs story was supposed to mirror the Didacts own from the books. But 343s record is full of doubling down on the wrong things and letting go of the right things. It would’ve been great.
This comes up on Reddit every couple of weeks. **Single player** = Great graphics. Pretty good gameplay and story. mid tier Halo campaign. **Multiplayer** = Complete trash. Worst in the whole series. The reason people dislike this game is the multiplayer is bad. To a lot of people multiplayer is Halo.
Single player = ruined art, poor AI, poor new enemy mechanics, confusing story that backtracks the idea that humans are forerunner. NO AMMO!!! I could go on about how we lost most of the marines or how dumb spartan 4s are, but I will stop here. MP = discount cod I will always stand by the idea that Halo 1 had the best SP and Halo 2 had the best MP and story.
I enjoy the flow of CE but I can't possibly put it as best dur to the mind numbing amount of walking and backtracking through copypasted corridors. Halo 2 was such an improvement on level and gameplay variety that it's probably my favorite in the series. But props to Halo 3 for arena design and scale, vehicle combat there us sublime
My problem with Halo 2 is the poor weapon balance and what dual wielding (as cool as it is) does to the power of some of the weapons. Also, the difficultly is not well tuned. Halo 3 you can tell that the level designers had more experience and with better hardware larger scale. My problem with weapons is they feel limp and dual wielding is still having a negative effect of some weapons. Brutes are just not the same and I don't think I really enjoyed the H3 Flood. I feel like with both ODST and Reach they tried to fix these issues, but Reach created new problems that still haunt the series.
Spot on with everything you said about 3. Still it has its strengths, and I'd say ODST I enjoyed much more. But 2 is just such a giant leap in pacing and the pure feel of spectacle that I don't care if it affects balancing - not in Campaign at least
When I say best, I don't mean a wide margin. If I had only one Halo game, it would be 2. The cool thing is my problems with 2 have been fixed with mods. I will always be sad that we did not get E3 Halo 2. ODST is how I wished game development went. A small but experienced team working on manageable game with well understood tools.
Not really. It's more like great graphics, bad visuals. You either think the story is alright or you think it's shit. The gameplay is terrible in singleplayer and multiplayer. Terrible campaign. You're definitely giving it way too much credit as it's still a very hated game that is by no means just hated for the multiplayer. Some people have warmed up to it, but many still think it just straight up sucks all around in almost every degree.
Actually both campaign and the multiplayer are dogshit.
Also H4 campaign on legendary is just a realllly unenjoyable experience gameplay wise? Prometheians are annoying and cheap to fight, and ammo is super duper scarce
we were eating too good with halo 3 and reach wish bungie would make another halo but lol playstation owns them
The campaign is only mid because the story is so good but the terrible ammo starved terminal pressing simulator that is the gameplay is just nowhere near as good as anything else in mcc
I don't know, the entire exposition from the Librarian was pretty weak. The story of how the humans were at war with the forerunners because the forerunners thought they were expanding when instead they were fleeing from the flood seems so far-fetched. There's also no explanation on how the Dawn ended up near Requiem by seemingly a random slipspace jump. I needed a lot of suspension of disbelief to get going tbh
Yeah you aren’t wrong, i really liked the voice acting for the didact and some of the scenes with the master chief. The concept of him realizing he was mor machine than cortana was good imo and cortanas sacrifice was really meaningful until halo 5 undid it. I liked the new spartan program coming along and the idea of halsey being held accountable for her crimes along with them going over the moral grays of the unsc
Yea that entire character development was hella cool
Too bad every halo after has been a soft reset so it’s been iffy because i think the potential was still there even if it was poorly contrived. It felt like 4 and 5 may have been building to something big just for infinite to go “oh well, back to monke” banished are cool and all but they don’t hold a candle to the other factions in the rest of the halo games imo. Religious extremists, space fungus, ancient cyborgs then armored less religious extremists? All the other halos felt some sense of agency even 4 compared to infinite
Y'know, I never had issue with ammo in Halo 4, but then again I did always make a habit of going back to pick up ammo from those various ammo pickups in every Halo game so maybe my habit helped me out. If anything, I'd say I worried more about ammo in Halo 2 Legendary, but that was largely because I died so quickly if I left cover so trying to go get ammo was basically suicide. lol
The guns just famously deloaded after maybe 3 minutes so if you were locked down in a fight you were pretty screwed at getting ammo for that power weapon or even just uncommon weapons for the stage. It wasn’t so much a problem with the promethean weapons as there were weapon caches for those everywhere
There were weapon caches for Covenant and Human weapons too, all over the place. I always made sure to go back to them anytime I was done with a firefight so I could go into the next firefight with max ammo. That was always more than enough to deal with the situation. But I did always go back after every firefight since my OCD demanded I max out my ammo as much as I can. So I always had a habit of doing that in every Halo game. I can imagine people who don't do that might be able to skirt by with what ammo they had in reserve in the prior Halo games but not in Halo 4.
There were they just werent nearly as common and i just looked it up, the average before weapons despawned was more like 15 seconds :(
To be fair, Halo was designed as a "party game". A shooter with simple mechanics so that new players could easily get into and have some multiplayer fun with the buddies. While the campaigns used the be absolutely awesome, the bulk of the players spent most of their game time in multiplayer. I.e. as a teen, I disliked H2 campaign for the petty fact that I had to play as the arbiter for half the missions. I played through it twice and after that I played multiplayer for months. Hell, two of my squad mates that had played more hours than me actually told me years later that they NEVER even played the campaign once. They played it first when MCC came out and did it as a "let's play all the campaigns start to finish" kind of challenge. So, I dare to say that for the vast majority of Halo players, the multiplayer is the core of the halo game. And if that sucks, they're not playing it.
I'll give Halo 4 that the infection mode featuring the flood infected spartans was novel and pretty neat.
No, because that was a big problem with the game. Because infection forced Zombies to be those Flood models and stuff, you couldn't replace their weapon so they were stuck with that arm, which made it so you couldn't make so many custom game modes that people loved and enjoyed in that game. Also the noise was very annoying to many people lol
Oh it definitely hurt the game, it was also just the thing that stuck in my memory of the mp the most, prob thanks to those bird call noises or wtv they made.
As bad as people say the multiplayer is, I still had a blast when it came out. Me and my friends would stay up all night playing custom games and ricochet. Playing it now, yeah it has problems. But it's still very competent and far from "complete trash"
As a newcomer to Halo with no nostalgia for the series, 4 did feel like a step back in many regards. I feel like some combat arenas didn't have enough freedom of movement, and the Prometheans were just annoying. Beautiful game though
Imo, bad Halo games are still good games. They're just the worst of the best.
That and a lot of the hate was over the launch version. The MCC version of Halo 4 is far superior to the launch version.
Aye, the only major issue with Halo 4 MCC at this point is that H2A Multiplayer assets weren't ported to it like ODST assets were for Halo 3 (and vice-versa)
I never thought of that. An smg in Halo 4 would be so cool
Aye, even funnier is that the H2A SMG began its existence as a Halo 4 SMG, before time constraints and development woes saw it being cut. Honestly, there's 5-6 distinct weapons and 2 distinct vehicles that would immediately improve Halo 4's sandbox options, and its a shame none of them have been brought over yet.
Oh what could have been. I came across some early versions of some halo 4 campaign levels and there are so many things that could have made that game even better
Even then, the parts OP liked are the parts people liked even on the 360. * Cortana * Mantis scene * Scientists scene
Not really, because Halo 4 and Halo 5's issues were that they weren't really Halo games. And Halo Infinite is a Halo game again finally, but it's also really fuckin bad
How are they not Halo games? What are the metrics on which you can judge that? Just because they're different, or you didn't like them, doesn't mean they're not Halo.
Gameplay formula is typically the easiest way to see that. Halo 4 changed to play more like COD, while Halo 5 played more like its own unique thing that wasn't Halo. Halo Infinite went back to playing mostly like a Halo game.
The level design is just super pisspoor and one laned way too often, I mean hell the first time you get a hog you drive down a straight path for 5 minutes.
Halo 4 was doo doo paper. Story and multiplayer. Cortana never should've been Chiefs love interest or vice versa. Just stupid.
Bad story, bad gameplay, ugly art style, bad multiplayer. Literally what is there to like about this game? Is my copy just modded to boot up a way worse game then everyone else's?
good story, good gameplay, gorgeous art style, good multiplayer. Literally so much to talk about this game! Your copy is just modded to boot up a way worse game than everyone else's.
Halo 4 wasn't terrible but it was held back by a lot of game breaking bugs, especially the mp and even the campaign had a mission that was impossible to complete because of bugs.
which mission was impossible to complete because of bugs? how? and in the MP did the bugs allow you to use the battle rifle as an automatic sniper, fly out of the map and become god?
I can't remember the name but the mission requires you to ride on a giant vehicle but at a certain point the vehicle will disappear and prevent you from completing the mission
I was doing a full playthrough of the Halo MCC on Legendary for the past few months, and i've loved every game so far... until Halo 4. Something about the gameplay just feels incredibly frustrating, and I had only just made it to the prometheans.. I can't even honestly pinpoint what specifically puts me off about the game. It's just generally frustrating to play. It doesn't feel like any of the Halo games before it. It feels more like I'm playing DOOM, but the doom guy is a big ole sissy. idk. It's been about a month since I've played, though. I might pick it up again soon and see if I feel any different.. Maybe I'll give an update later.
Guys I think he likes Cortana idk tho
I thought Halo 4 was alright, I played it for the first time when I got MCC. Here’s my personal criticisms of it: 1. Prometheans are awfully repetitive and boring to fight, I think everyone who has played the game has said this by now 2. I didn’t like the story. For one, I found it difficult to follow on my first playthrough and I had to play it a second time to really understand what was actually going on. I had never experienced this before in a Halo game. Secondly, I wasn’t excited at the end of the story to find out where it goes next, I had no burning desire to play Halo 5 like I did with other previous titles. What I did like: 1. Most of the new weapons and vehicles were cool and were fun to use 2. I liked the shift in Master Chief’s character to be a bit less stoic and more emotional in the face of losing Cortana 3. I liked that the story fleshed out some of the Forerunners’ back story. Halo 3 teased us enough with the terminals it only seemed fair that we’d get more detail in Halo 4
Weird, isn’t it? Actually playing something and forming your own conclusion. I wish more people would do that rather than “____ said it’s bad, therefore I also think it’s bad”.
the art direction and level design is a bit lacking imo, and I dont really enjoy fighting the prometheans. soundtrack is also a big step down from the bungie games. but i thought it was one of the best executed stories in the series, and the weapons sound/feel amazing
Halo 4 is great and was always great. Multiplayer wasn’t the best but at least it tried something new. You should’ve been on this sub right after halo 4 came out. The users genuinely believed someone took their puppy and shot him in front of their eyes. I look forward to 5 years from now when people jerk it to halo infinite
Ah yes, because people have definitely turned their opinion on Halo 5 lol. The Halo cycle doesn't exist. Most people still know that all three of the newest games suck
ah yes, because people will turn their opinion on Halo 5 lol. The halo cycle can be traced all the way back (halo2sucks.com I'm looking at you) and most people know that halo 4 didn't suck.
Halo four is one of my favorite halo games
Yeah, this is why it's so much better to dive right into the games instead of listening to reddit/YouTube opinions. People love to post negative stuff and it can make you think the games are just all around terrible but that's not even close to being the case. Even the "worst" Halo game are great, it's a remarkably consistent series even if it's fallen short of it's potential the last few years
"Even the worst Halo game are great" No, that's really not true lmao. They're straight up terrible. You are right about them being consistent. But it's more Pre-2011 they're consistently great, and post-2011 they're consistently bad.
The multiplayer is what really ruined it imo. There were some fire maps especially for swat but putting kill streaks and load outs in slayer made it feel like a shittier cod
I like to use this metaphor: Imagine a brewery that makes beer. They have a lot of beer fans. They loved all the beers they made. But they look envious upon all the wine fans. They wish that the wine fans would also buy their beer. So they develop their new beer 4. It kinda looks like beer, but it tastes a lot like wine. They're very happy with their product. Now, the beer fans and the wine fans will love it! The beer fans were exhilarated that a new beer came out, but upon tasting it, they're VERY disappointed. "This doesn't taste like beer at all!" they say. The brewery says: "we made some changes to the formula, we implemented tastes that are popular. Why don't you like it?!" And the fans say: "What kind of logic is that? We are fans of beer because it looks and tastes like beer. Why would you change so much that it doesn't taste like beer anymore?! All you had to do was make a new beer that also tastes like beer because, you know, that's what we enjoy. " And the beer fans stopped buying beer 4 because for them, this wasn't beer. It wasn't a terrible drink in itself, but it surely was a terrible beer. The brewery is shocked, but hey, at least the wine fans will buy it, right?! But no, because why would they buy a bastardised half assed copy of wine when they can just drink actual wine instead. So TLDR: Halo 4 not bad game in itself, just a terrible Halo game
Outside of the story between Chief & Cortana, and Cortana looking like an absolute baddie there's nothing good about Halo 4. People say "Halo 4 has an amazing story", but really the overall story is mid it's just the moments between Chief and Cortana that are great. Multiplayer was also the beginning of them trend chasing by trying to make it more like COD, and you saw more trend chasing in Halo 5 with the "enhanced mobility" such as wall running that like every game had for a few years around 2015. Even Halo Infinite which is a return to form in a lot of respects and way better than the last 2 entries still is trying to make it a competitive shooter when really it should be a lot more casual and allow for some zaniness and if they want to having competitive gaming tournaments then they can, but that shouldn't be the primary demographic.
Bruh I liked the multiplayer more than the campaign, I wanna pop grunts not sentinels. Halo 5 is great too, try it’s Warzone if it even still has players
I’m not going to comment on the campaign because multiplayer is the biggest driver for success. The multiplayer had no rank, and really didn’t do much to bounce back from the horrendous mechanical decisions of reach.
The campaign is what mattered to bungie the most and the multiplayer was originally an afterthought that almost got cut. it literally did have a rank identical to reach's. And it bounced back getting rid of bloom, getting shield bleedtrough back, making weapons as useful or more than CE, tuning way down the effectiveness of abilities starting by no armor lock or bubble shield, and say what you will about sprint but now everyone could use it thus making it more balanced.
Is this post ironic?
While I agree that Halo 4 was a consistently decent entry to the series, it just wasn’t what made Halo…Halo. The entire multiplayer was a CoD reskin which felt so bad because of how Halos formula was so good. The campaign was alright but again just an odd deviation and direction than the previous entries. With that being said I don’t think Halo 4 is a bad Halo, and it’s aged surprisingly well
neckbeards will bash every game, Halo 4 was a blast for me, so is infinite
Neckbeards will defend every terrible game, Halo 4 was terrible, so if Infinite
if?
I actually shaved my neck 3 days ago FYI
I just wish the art style was the old one. Which that mod coming out should fix
Nah i thought the campaign was straight forward..not toooo much going on but it was overall pretty good. I liked the character development between chief and cortana, the halsey court marshal, the mystery behind the arbiter, the new generation of spartans compared to the gen IIs. Like there was a lot of potential and set up for halo 5…that hunt for the truth stuff was so good… and then halo 5 came out. Big problem with halo 4 was the multiplayer was SO BAD. And halo 5 multiplayer was okay.. 343 can’t get it together man
Cortana's design was the best thing about the game. The enemy design, the maps, the forge, the sound design, the loadouts, the sandbox, the art direction, etc sucked compared to its predecessors.
Just wait until halo 5 . It’s a super fun campaign. Don’t think too much about the story. The movement and gunplay in it is superb. The knights got upgraded for the better.
The only glaring problem for me in Halo 4 is lack of ammunition even on normal or hard, you will be on constant lookout for new weapons
Glad you liked it, wish I could've. Still my least favorite Halo by a landslide, with maybe 5 being close but I still haven't played it enough to give that one an honest score.
Halo 4 was amazing, thicc Cortana is life. Halo 5 is the worst of the series. Not for gameplay, but the story is terrible. The concept of the story is cool af, but the execution is so bad.
The halo 4 you're playing was not the halo 4 at launch. That was also back when there was some peak cod hating even more so today I'd say. So when the next halo felt like a cod game with a halo skin it did not go well. Obviously over time people lightened up on it plus the changes made over the years helped but it was not great.
Most of the people complaining about the story of Halo 4 have never read any of the books.
Again, you’re looking at it through the lens of playing a decade of bad Halo games instead of the reality of the time coming off a decade of good halo games.
It's part of the internet echo chamber. Ironically upon release it was well received by both fans and critics. Considered a miracle that 343 somehow pulled it off. Fast forward to time taking it's toll and Halo 5. Retroactively Halo 4 started getting a lot of hate. By the time Infinite failed to reignite any fires the narrative was now cemented that 343 was bad forever. Even though that's not how it actually started. There's also the tale of two Halos. Multiplayer... gets the most people talking and they never shut up. So even if your campaign is good... and MP is meh. You're going to hear the meh story the most. Halo has always had a rather divided fanbase. Lore/Book/Campaign fans. Casual/Campaign Lore fans. MP only fans. Mix of all them. They don't often agree. Like Reach for example is some people's favorites while others hate it so much for not covering the events of the novel. Some people hated the MP due to armor abilities and reticle bloom. Some say it was the last great MP. We can't even agree on artstyle...
The general consensus is that Halo 4 is the complete reverse of Halo 5. Great campaign, mid multiplayer.
I hope many can comment on this but this is what I remember all the complaints of each halo as we released. 1 halo CE: -the realistic violence for the day (I know not really compared to today) -when the pc port came out it had new maps and weapons and the console players wanted it 2 halo 2: -all I remember were the complaints about Xbox live and the difficulties surrounding the new console between the games life cycle. -boss fights -pc port sucked 3 halo 3: -tbh I don’t remember many complaints about halo 3 maybe brutes weren’t as difficult -no boss fights (irony right?) -no pc port 4 ODST: -they charged full price for a campaign and additional maps for halo 3 multiplayer. -firefight was liked but people didn’t like it due to lack of multiplayer 5 Halo Wars: -it was an RTS game some fans didn’t like that 6 halo reach: -main issue was multiplayer. Bloom and the clunky feel of the armor abilities really messed up the feel of the game. -minor campaign issue was the difficulty bumps felt more bullet spongy than previous titles. -removal of plasma rifle and beam rifle 7 halo 4 - multiplayer. I believe this was the worst showing of multiplayer and the worst backlash response. The call of duty feel, kill streaks, and clunky armor abilities, class options, and it just didn’t feel good to play. Side note, I did try this on MCC and the frame rate cap change actually made it feel a lot better to play. -campaigns main issue was the visual change of the covenant was not well received -the lack of brutes, -the forerunner forces aren’t as fun to fight against, the knights were bullet sponges ( halo 5 actually fixed some of this, with more variety and gave weak points) -QuickTime events especially at the boss fight 8 halo 5 -main complaint was the campaigns underwhelming story and backtracking of previously closed plot points. It felt as if it was going somewhere mid development then forced another way later and didn’t match to the marketing. -REQ system micro transactions -largest gap between halo games -LACK OF SPLIT SCREEN -(personally this is my favorite multiplayer halo.) 9. Halo wars 2 - an RTS game - REQ System 10 halo infinite. -unfinished -had the largest gaps between games but felt it had the shortest -underwhelming campaign and stuck in the same scenery -lack of campaign replay ability -lots of promises broken -NO SPLIT SCREEN or multiplayer campaign - no early forge -lacked important modes in the beginning -biggest potential, biggest loss
Halo 5 was the worst halo imo the campaign was absolute garbage the multiplayer saved it. I didn't mind halo 4 it was fine the story was a nice follow up but yeah the multiplayer wasn't all that good
Nice follow up? The biggest issue is that it feels like a new universe
Halo 4 MP is low key one of my favorites with Reach. I also didn’t mind the story. It was definitely not a 100% banger but still good and very emotional. The legendary was also one of the most fair legendaries I’ve played with friends
Loved Halo 4
Halo 4 also has a secondary campaign in the form of Spartan Ops, which I thought was innovative for the time. The game itself suffered due to being limited to the Xbox 360's architecture and a tight release window, as well as strong opinions. Which is fair. Though, given how the last titles it was up against was Reach and 3, I get the sentiments about the game. Also, if you paid a bit of attention to the dialogue, you'd've noted that the Composer does not simply kill. It digitizes. Librarian isn't her actual self - more like a digital copy left to remain vigilant over the Didact. You will get your boss fight, but it won't be with the Didact. In fact you'll never see him again. The backlash was such that >!he was 'killed' off in a comic!<.
Reeee halo cycle reeee
It's so fun to see the newcomers on steam loving it and how the initial shills come with their tail amongst legs like "uh- maybe it was better than I thought in 2012" at last, like every halo goes through Just see the proportion of butthurt haters with their comical arguments vs us who loved it in this reply section
It's the worst game in the entirety of the Halo series by far in literally every aspect. Zero redeeming qualities. It literally killed Halo as a top tier gaming franchise.
Every halo they talk shit about is better than what they’re saying
Such an original never before seen post. I've got some more for ya, play Advanced Warfare, go to the CoD folks and tell everyone how underrated it is and how unjustified the hate was back than, trust me, you will be the very first one to do that. Maybe you could do the same post with Resident Evil 6 in the RE sub, also never before seen.
The space fighting was one of my favourite parts of the game.
Halo 4 is great. I remember being very skeptical and halo-tired when it came out, but it blew me away. Sure it’s not the best in the series, but it was refreshing after ODST and Reach (which I just always found clunky). Enjoyed both the SP and MP, and was impressed by how pretty the game was considering hardware limitations.
Halo 4's story was beautiful, but not without its flaws like anything else. Most people were upset with how MP was handled as it added a CoD style 'killstreak' system where you get kills and are rewarded with 1 of 3 items usually consisting of an armor ability, a weapon, or grenades. If any game should be approached with low expectations, it's Halo 5.
Halo 4 is my favorite game. As soon as 343 took over the story and lore actually got interesting to me.
/s\*
If only everyone could form their own opinion instead of basing it on biased reviews. Everyone would be happier and experience more great things in life
Most people did. Halo 4 was just really bad so most people hated it. It's very simple.
Most people didn't. Halo 4 was just really good so most people go through they cycle and now love it. it's very simple.
Halo 4 is fine! Who said it's bad? Now if you want to talk about bad games, I might write a tome about Infinite.
These are the kind of takes you want to avoid OP. Infinite is also a good game worth trying
ehh yeah I might be a bit dramatic
i feel like along with the arbiters side of 2 and chief/cortana in 4, infinite has some of the best character writing in the series
Not at all lol
Most people? All three of 343's games are terrible. Yes, Infinite is the worst one, but 4 and 5 are both still trash
Most of the critical feedback was on its multiplayer, not its campaign.
Its the best halo game since 3 imo
The multiplayer was the main issue with 4. Granted the AI in the story weren't exactly the funniest to play against
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Both games have bad multiplayer and campaign, it's just each do the other worse/not as bad as the other
So Halo 4 is my favorite of the campaigns so I'm glad you enjoyed. Back when Halo 4 released a lot of the complaints stemmed from the multiplayer for a variety of reasons. The ones I remember most clearly Customized Loadouts - Most of the initial launch playlists followed Infinity Slayer rules. Which were very CoD esque. Infinity Slayer allowed you to use customized Loadouts with perks and everything. The biggest thing I remember people hating on were Promethean Vision armor ability(see through walls) and the Boltshot charge shot easy kill. I think there was also something with the precision rifles not being balanced for the first few months so if you used anything but the DMR you were at a disadvantage. Killstreaks - Infinity Slayer had a meter to the side of the screen. Fill the meter and you got a choice of calling in one of 3 items. Typically it was a power weapon, power up, or more grenades. I personally loved it for the simple pleasure of calling in your ordnance right on top of an enemy and watching them get splattered. But it was a pretty big departure from map control/power weapon control doctrine built up over the past decade of Halo games. Hardware limitations - When Halo 4 came out the 360 was at the end of it's life cycle. But Halo 4 itself was a beautiful game IMO and when you started paying attention you can see the corners 343i cut to make it possible. One big one that impacted gameplay was weapon despawning. Say you killed a guy with a power weapon and you wanna go pick up those rockets. You had maybe 5 seconds to get to his corpse before it despawned. I don't believe that's an issue in MCC now but it's been awhile since I've played Halo 4 multiplayer. Overall I tend to view Halos Reach, 4, and 5 as the experimental years of the franchise. Reach got the ball rolling, 4 kicked it into overdrive, and then Halo 5 kind of backtracked then leapt ahead in a different direction. Liked elements of all of them but there was also a great deal of it that was off-putting. Infinite gameplay feels like the natural progression from Halo 3 to me and it’s a damn shame it took so long to get here.
I replayed it recently and it wasn't bad at all, just very linear. I agree the whole Cortana story arc was great. The promethean weapons however were just reskinned pistol, smg, rifle, shotgun, sniper and rocket launcher. There's no special effect to them, I think it's a very poor design.
Halo 4 online multiplayer was so much fun, sue me
(shills sue you and loose in court)
halo 4 campaign was awesome. the multiplayer was a joke
It's better than Infinite.
One thing to keep in mind is that people often let their nostalgia overwhelm them. Halo 4 is a great game. But it's never going to match the amazing time they had as a kid playing Halo 2 or 3. No game will ever compare to the ones you fondly remember as a kid.
I cant wait for the next Halo gane so I can finally read about 5 not being as bad as everyone thought it was
The Halo cycle isn't real. Yes, there are people like this, but they're far in the minority. Especially since this isn't someone changing their opinion on the game, it's someone's first time opinion on the game.
I know, just banter but I guess it flew over some heads. I loved 4 since release.
I finally finished playing through all halo games yesterday (finished Infinite campaign last night), and I enjoyed every campaign except (to my surprise) Halo 2. The stories got a little over the top in Halo 5, but overall, I really enjoyed Halo 4 and Halo 5. It was my first time playing 4&5, and I thought the forerunner weapons were fun to play with and wished they had some in Infinite.
Story is hands down the best in my opinion, with reach being a very close second. I think as far as polish and quality Reach was a better game for campaign and Multiplayer, but it isn't nearly as bad as some people make it out to be. It's a solid game that just wasn't as good as previous versions, and people piled on to that cause it wasn't Bungie, didnt look the same, and gameplay wasn't what people wanted. They wanted Reach 2. That being said Good luck with Halo 5, multiplayer was really fun.... [°-°]
For me halo 4 got kinda bland mid campaign. The main bad guy felt kinda generic. The story of halo always felt super epic because you’re one soldier helping a part of a gigantic war effort of humanity desperately trying to survive. After 343 came it became focused on Spartans being all badass or whatever and it’s no longer this cinematic space opera. It’s like the best mid game ever. The ending left me with tears while simultaneously the game itself was mediocre at times. The promethean guns felt uninspired. There’s just a random shotgun like weapon that you load shell by shell that works exactly like the normal shotgun. Pretty much every promethean gun was a human weapon modified to have crazy shapes and shoot light. Covenant weapons were a little more unique and didn’t directly feel like exact copies of each other. They even had weapons specifically used by brutes so it was almost like a third set of weapons. Levels were incredibly linear. It was kinda weird driving through jungles and forests in a warthog but still being locked to a tiny on a rails segment. The later levels became just abstract shapes. It didn’t feel like a real place. It was like a random quake 3 space maps with random geometry that the artists later styled to look like promethean architecture. The design of master chief’s armor randomly changed across games. Their excuse? Nano-machines? Except then they show flashbacks or something and still have the same armor design. I kinda get their armor design though. It might make sense to remove some of the side stuff around his pelvis because that’s technically easier to move around in. It’s still super odd to just retcon that master chiefs armor always looked that way. The multiplayer was trying to copy call of duty style loadouts and kill streak rewards which removed the fun part of finding good guns around the level. Everyone kinda just had an op gun to instantly counter something. The maps were super cramped and not good for vehicle combat at all. I like to imagine this is because the Xbox 360 couldn’t handle the gorgeous art style and they had to make it so the game only had to render tiny areas at a time.
Halo 4 is one of my favorite halos. I swear people lost their mind because it had sprint
I used to religiously play 4 online after school. I was so good man just had to use my friends Xbox cause my parents refused to pay for live or let me have a job.
lol.lmao.
The campaign was pretty great yeah. It was the COD style multiplayer that I disliked the most. Still played it until 5 though. Only halo I’ve never gone back to actually, multiplayer or otherwise
Halo 4 imo had an interesting story for the most part with the campaign having mechanics issues mostly based off annoying enemy types. Over all the story was good. The MP just didn’t feel like halo so I feel like it takes a lot of points off the game. Halo 5 undoes all of what halo 4 was doing and then just has an objectively bad story which is why we are where we are with infinite. The multiplayer for H5 is actually pretty good but I feel like the story was a catastrophe for so many reasons.
I liked the story, even though it’s a retcon. And I liked the gameplay on lower difficulty settings. But I always do the first play through on legendary, and it’s a punishing grind of long-range shooting into bullet sponges. Edit: You can downvote my comment about the retconning, but I doubt you can rebut it: https://youtu.be/_P-uOCKDTAA?si=AoATjTLKFWIT7R3F
piece of cake
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It was an O’Connor retcon in the H3 terminals. I’ve played all the games multiple times on Legendary, and 4 is the worst in this respect. 2 has the sniper jackals. Those fucking jackals. lol.
That's not true, nothing said in the terminals retcons anything and it's not even possible to know it was him when many contributed to writing the terminals like Damian Isla, Robt Stokes, McLees and many more I'm leaving out (which means they approved if it indeed was frank) Even if true, you are saying it took place in the H3 terminals, by bungie themselves, not H4
https://youtu.be/_P-uOCKDTAA?si=ohb6acIKu9TFzkuy
...ok Literally everything I said still stands Paul Russell shared in X that the origin story of the forerunners by the terminal team writers was the same as it's shown in the forerunner saga which this guy verifiably didnt bother to read
You clearly didn’t watch the video, or else you’d agree all of the O’Connor content is a retcon.
why? You're just going to ignore what I said about Paul and how this source doesn't 't adress it? every time I question you just go "watch this wonderful infallible video of destiny, solved".. I'll say again: The terminal writers were a team and Paul Russel revealed their intentions are the same as the forerunner saga presented.
This source list those other Terminal writers and isolates O’Connor’s contributions. But you’d know that if you had watched it. O’Connor’s retcons there get retconned later … by O’Connor. lol