The forerunners didn’t need to be “revealed” at all. Spark pretty clearly spells out in Halo CE that the forerunners are ancient humans. That’s why during the Library mission he keeps referring to ‘last time’ and ‘you’ and then of course the big one “You are forerunner.” The cut Halo 2 ending only confirmed what people who actually played CE already knew for an absolute fact.
Yeah, I used to really like the idea that The Covenant had been attacking the very same ones they revered. I even hoped for a big reveal to the Covenant Public or something at some point. But when they said "Haha, naahhh, you're not Forerunner!" That hit me like a shot to the stomach. Sometimes I feel like 343 just never read the room. Or that they read the room, then promptly decided to aim for the groin of every Halo Fan and say "We ARE Halo Now!" (Mr Nobody cracking The Chief's Visor in Guardians comes to mind.)
And Truth calls them our "Forefathers." Conclusion, 343 is not canon. Fuck the forerunner/human split, fuck Cortana and the Domain and turning evil, FUCK the Endless.... Except Atriox, and the Didact. They can stay.....they can stay.
@@Weberkooks no they didnt, its a bunch of BS garbage 343 came up with, that makes no sense. i dont care how much stupid lore they come up with, forunners are human, simple as that.
A few years ago I bought Halo 4 to see what the Halo franchise was about , I was bored and didn't touch Halo for a few years after that experience. But in this week I checked out the Master Chief collection and gave halo another chance , first CE, then Halo 2 and finally Halo 3. I am loving it and I am glad that I gave halo another chance.
@@daegnaxqelil2733 I think they were trying to point out that the game never really gets into why the Covenant turn on you. Yes Cortana gets *a* point across about how it's been 4 years. That still leaves the problem of how they never provide sufficient motivation for them turning on the UNSC. The game never touches this again. We're just supposed to accept that Covenant bad now, again.
The sprint was invented just so you could run back 4 miles to get weapons from racks. To balance this they made the wepons despawn in 2 seconds and the clips to hold 4 bullets.
that is a nice joke. or a terrible game balance decision. personally the sprint was a good thing, that was annoying to walk in big maps in the other games
@@daegnaxqelil2733 hmm yea in other games it's fine. But in halo4 especially I noticed how quickly weapons despawned and their magazines had so little ammo not to mention the bullet sponge enemies. I would constantly have to run back and collect ammo from racks.
Forerunner weapons: Halo 2-3: Sentinel beam, certainly feels alien and plus, you're clearly holding it wrong, it's not made to be held like that. Halo 4: Here's a shotgun, but it's, like, yellow.
Forerunner Architecture: Halo CE-Halo 3: Strange rooms and corridors that hold purpose beyond your understanding, grand yet utilitarian. Halo 4: A bunch of generic floaty Sci-fi crap made to look cool.
oh come on, the H4 forerunner weapons were all awesome apart from the Suppressor. it was quite literally just yellow Assault Rifle. every other forerunner gun had a unique quirk, alternate firing mode or was just ridiculously overpowered (which was fun)
The fact that Chief doesn't straight up asks the elites "Hey, before I went to sleep, we were fighting together against the prophets, what happened?! Guys, like, I really want to speak with the Arbiter, this isn't funny!"
Something you missed is how absurdly fast weapons despawn in this game. It makes Spartan Ops a nightmare to play through on Legendary since all the weapons you drop will have disappeared by the time you get back to them. If I had to guess, it probably has something to do with freeing up as much memory as possible for the engine to run properly. Edit: Apparently he did mention it. Oops.
Yeah, halo 4 was a graphic marvel for its time and as a 360 exclusive but many of the comprises that were needed to achieve that level of visual fidelity are pretty apparent. The restricted and often very linear level design through most of the campaign, the lack of interactable environment pieces (like the foliage example made in the video), and the rapid despawn of dropped weapons and equipment in both campaign and multiplayer are pretty obviously the result of 343 pinching as many pennies as they could on the 360’s very limited resource pool. It’s annoying though that the weapon despawn wasn’t later addressed in MCC as the Xbox one/series and modern PCs all have more than enough resources for the weapons to remain at least as long as they do in older entries.
It doesn’t make it a nightmare, it makes it a slog. Spartan ops basically has infinite lives and no checkpoint system, so failure just turns it into a chore.
@Tattletale Grapist No I think you will find that something you missed was him mentioning the very point you say he missed. Either you didn't watch all the video or you didn't pay much attention to it if you did watch....
Actually, Halo 4s whole reason for having the Covenant is a MASSIVE plothole that's owed to Frank Oconnor not actually remembering how Halo 3 ended. Halo 3 ends with Humanity and Sangheili banding together to first defeat the Covenant to prevent them from firing the Halo Array, and then they defeat the flood by firing the replacement Halo ring. Frank O'Connor - deadass - thinks Halo 3 ended with Humanity striking up a truce with the WHOLE Covenant and then defeating the flood before going their seperate ways. This is why I fucking h a t e that Frank O'Connor was put in charge. He has no fcking memory and is so careless that he accidentally retconned the entire ending of Halo 3. That's why that one Animation depicted the entire Covenant teaming up with humanity on earth to defeat the flood, and its also why Cortana and Chief refer to the Storm Covenant as just "The Covenant". Its why Master Chief says "I thought we had a truce with the Covenant". Hes not referring to the elites nor is he referring to the covenant as though there was a ceasefire after Halo 3. Master Chief is referring to a false history where Humanity and the ENTIRE Covenant teamed up to beat the flood and then peacefully went their seperate ways, and the Storm are just an Elite lead break off of the official Covenant. Fronk LITTERALLY just couldn't be fucking bothered to even know what the hell happened in the game franchise HE WAS IN CHARGE OF. Bungie was so pissed off at how fcking dumb and careless Frank was with Halos lore that they not only named the Whale in that multiplayer map "Fronk" but also the map randomly generates messages/insults directed a Frank, like "Nice going, Fronk" or "SUCK IT FRONK!"
This. I wouldn’t mind the Covernant still existing if the Sanshuyum (Prophets) replaced the Elites in gameplay. Besides they were known to be as proficient as the Elites in combat, albeit more agile. It would be a lot cooler if we finally fought them as actual combat units instead of a bunch of old men sitting on a floating chair.
@@tanodz7635 So next time you watch Halo Legends and get to the part where the covenant and humanity team up and sit there confused and dumbfounded, give Fronk a little chefs kiss 💋
I remember as a kid, seeing it for the first time blew me away. Cause graphically, it was an improvement to prior games. But as I get older, I realise that the art direction is a lot busier than it needs to be. Especially with colours making it harder to see enemies
@@davidmitchell1843 I don’t even agree with that. Halo 3 graphically still holds up fantastically, excluding character models. Lighting is great, nice reflections and surfaces, colors are rich and vibrant. That plus the gorgeous artstyle make the game hold up visually to this day. Halo 4 on the other hand? Looks exactly like any other generic space fps that came out around 2010-2013. It looks dated.
@@davidmitchell1843 oh because "sure budd" is true genius. . my goodness, alert the grammar police plz. lol love the classic "ignore the argument. you're stupid." cant substantiate, so you attack opposition .. why would you take anything serious. you think H4 is the best looking ...clearly you're a joke X,D
@@RainCloudVideos okay. So firstly art direction and graphics are not the same thing, but do relate to each other. So what you said about halo 3 makes perfect sense. But the part about halo 4 makes no sense. Something can't look graphically look sci fi. It can stylistically look sci fi. But I get what you mean. It's a very common mistake that 99% of people make. And sorry if I might seem snarky. I'm want to clarify the difference
The terminals weren't the only part of Halo 3 that revealed anything about the Forerunners. The terminals themselves were rather vague, but the main campaign literally reveals to the player that Humans are the Forerunners, something built up the whole series and finally answered. Bungie DID answer who the Forerunners were. But that doesn't mean we get to/have to learn every in and out of the Forerunners. They're us, but they're still completely unknown about them. The Forerunners only matter to the story as much as they matter to Humanity themselves. Why can Humans use this technology? Because they're Forerunners. Why does the Gravemind hate Humanity? Because they're the Forerunners who killed him. Why do the Covenant want Humanity dead? Because them being the Forerunners proves their religion false, so they've gotta go. We don't need to know where the Forerunners go to the bathroom or where they get fast food.
Bungie as a company also confirmed that the Forerunners were human. Frank O'Connor just couldn't stand that the story wouldn't bend to his massive ego. He wanted the Forerunners to be aliens so he screwed around with the Terminals he wrote and with the Iris Campaign. Which is also why the things he worked on contradicts all other evidence in the series, including Halo 3. Forerunner fanboys who want them to be aliens just focus on one Terminal that Frank wrote vaguely mentioning the Librarian finding some special species somewhere as "proof" that humans and Forerunners are separate. Completely ignoring the mountains of evidence against that throughout all the games and what Bungie itself stated. Heck, even with Guilty Spark at the end of Halo 3, yes he is rampant, but he clearly explains the relationship of humanity to the Forerunners. Which means his rampancy obviously is not why he calls the Master Chief a Forerunner. He merely mistakes _which_ Forerunner the Chief is. Besides, let's face it, a Forerunner AI *_cannot_* mistake a different species as his creators. No matter how rampant.
That B-plot is definitely what carries it for me. Most of the stuff surrounding the Forerunners and Didact however, are a bit undercooked. It's a massive shame the Didact was so underutilised as I think he could've made for an excellent recurring villain if given the chance. He's a bit like the Darth Maul of the Halo Universe. He's just there to look cool and then he's one and done.
@@boombirdking2118 actually the ads back in the day before the movie came out did hype him up as more that just being sliced in two in basically his first scene
Aight but let's be real the forerunner was an ancient civilization. Master Chief was def not part of that. Guilty spark also mentioned how he and Master Chief activated a halo "last time" even tho they hadn't met until halo CE. The whole "humanity were devolved form of forerunners" theory was retconned by bungie in halo3 anyways
No it was not retconned in Halo 3, aside from about 5 of the shittily written terminals (written by Frank O’Connor by the way) that implied humans and forerunners may have at the very least existed in separate parts of the galaxy. Librarian refers to the supposed discovery of humans as “them”, and seems to think of the event as some kind of anomaly. The terminals are unclear and very cryptic anyways. Not sure how the didact and librarian terminals made the Final Cut of the game. Regardless, you would have to then ignore everything said throughout the game by truth when he refers to forerunners as our forefathers before telling Johnson these secrets die with the rest. Gravemind calls chief the child of his enemy, telling him a fathers sins pass to his sons, and finally guilty spark actually tells the audience we are forerunner, why the fuck else would humans be called reclaimers for the entirety of the OT. Halo 4 is absolute dog shit and quite frankly doesn’t get enough criticism for how badly it absolutely defiled Bungies story. The character stuff doesent even work either, rampancy is completely misrepresented as well. It is not AI schizophrenia that makes the construct insane and hyper emotional, it simply makes them more self aware and independent as seen through the mendicant bias terminals in halo 3. Additionally, the world building is just fucked, the UNSC can just shit out Spartans as they continue to fight “the covenant” who according to Frankie we had a truce with prior to the events of halo 4? Chief: “I thought we had a truce with the covenant.” Why the hell would he ever say that? No one ever would have referred to the alliance with the elites as the “covenant”, but then you watch Halo Legends, the opening in particular, also written by Frankie, and you realize he has his very own interpretation of the events of the original trilogy. What an insult to Halo, and many fans continue to celebrate Halo 4 cause it’s not so bad compared to Halo 5 as if that wasn’t a direct result of 4.
@@dankim7831It was a different team that worked on the terminals and a single advertisement campaign that got confused and did their own thing. Frank O’Connor was part of that team so when he was given control they went with what he helped make. There is far more evidence before and after halo 3 that suggests humans are far closer to the forerunners than we might know. Like the scene from halo CE between Guilty Spark and Chief that you elude to. One could assume that an armored human looks extremely similar to an armored forerunner which is why Spark who was alone for 100000 years was confused. No other species in the games look like humanity so you could assume there is a connection by Sparks confusion.
@@dankim7831 A species is not a civilization. They are not the same. Don't be ridiculous. Guilty Spark mistook the Chief for a specific Forerunner. However, not only is thinking a Forerunner AI misidentified someone as a member of his creator species ridiculous, but Guilty Spark says a lot more than just "You are Forerunner". He outright explains the relationship of humanity to the Forerunners in that same scene. "The whole "humanity were devolved form of forerunners" theory was retconned by bungie in halo3 anyways" There is literally nothing in Halo 3 that retcons the Forerunners to not be human and I have no idea why you think otherwise. It's a strange, common fanon nonsense idea from 343i fanboys and for people who want Forerunners to be alien and so just outright lie about the lore before Halo 4. Even Frank O'Connor's terminals and advertisement campaign didn't flat-out say or imply Forerunners and humans are separate species. Just put its foot in the door of the idea. Which also contradicted all the _other_ Terminals and all the other lore within Halo 3 and the entire Halo series.
@@rovert881 They weren't confused. Also, only some of the Terminals followed Frank's beliefs (the ones written by him and I think one other person). Frank and the few people who agreed with him were basically their own cabal within Bungie and were at odds with the rest of the company. They forced their ideas into the game against the company's wishes. Also, a Forerunner AI isn't going to be fooled by what someone's armor looks like. That's dumb. It was simply that he recognized a member of his makers' species and misidentified which specific person it was. Which could be anything from there being a limited number of DNA combinations and the Chief's just happened to match that guy's or corruption in Guilty Spark or that Guilty Spark was talking to himself when referring to the previous firing and was not talking to the Master Chief at all.
The point about the Precursors is critical. It's exactly as you say: they are "the ones who came before the ones who came before." I could imagine something like that as part of a comedy skit. The point about the architecture being too busy was also spot on. The old brutalist architecture was important to the feel of the game and said something about the Forerunners. Changing it totally confuses who they were. Plus, the extrusions, protrusions, tracing, and lighting of the new architecture were really distracting.
it’s literally bad fan faction. “and then that’s when we reveal an even ancienter, more advanced civilization” 🤓 also yeah the forerunner architecture f-ing sucks. it’s like tron meets michael bay’s transformers. shit hurts my eyes…
"It makes no sense for the forerunners to call themselves that" Yes! Seriously thats bothered me ever since Halo 4 came out. It makes way more sense as a title they where given posthumously. Tho personally I still much prefer the original idea that they were humans pre Halo 3. Imo it gives a much better explanation as to why humans can use their technology. Halo 4 established humans and forerunners fought a huge war, wouldnt giving humans the ability to use their technology be the last thing theyd want to do. "Oh, I see you are trying to kill us, here have all our super advanced stuff." ... Yeah ok then. It also makes Guilty Spark referring to humans as "reclaimers" make more sense. If at some point in the past something wasnt yours, you cant re-claim it. "The Takers" would be a much more fitting moniker.
Hinting at but not fully revealing that the forerunners were human was definitely more interesting, so I’m not really sure why they decided to change it. I’m really exhausted on how fictional universes answer too many questions and over correct plot holes. Just something I’ve noticed that saps my interest in franchises such as Star Wars and Halo.
@@anthonyjossis1426 bro ill never forget how fucking cool it was discovering the Ark on earth, or how the covenant revered the planet. Forerunners were ancient humans...and the reveal blew me the fuck away. The thing with Halo 4 is, EVERYONE was hype for it. No one cared that bungie wasnt in charge, because the stor was established. We just wanted more shooties. Then 343 literally said "We want to make Halo ours." and by that, they changed everything. I still remember booting it up and fighting my first Knight or whatever. It was jarring as all FUCK. The art design was atrocious (not bad at all, really, just not what im accustomed to for halo.) and way too messy. Halo trilogy had a simple art style that kept you focused on what needs to be focused on during a fight. They had intentional game design. 343 just went "Hurr Durr my halo now, i put my mark on it!" and changed literally everything, even the fucking established canon! iirc, chief is now the "Chosen One" and all that shit, when before, it was all of humanity were the "chosen" because we were the forerunners and the covenant cant utilize the technology without us. Like how bad ass would it be to have Sgt. Johnson flanked by a shit ton of marines and Sentinels as they push forward? I reallllly dislike 343 as a company. and this video shed some light, i didnt know they specifically hired people who had no clue about halo. That leaves such a bad taste in my mouth.
It's worse than that. Frank and 343s retcon makes the covenant correct in the original trilogy. Humans are interlopers in 343s Canon. Which is evidence enough as to why it should all be put in the bin.
@@brianmckee2267 Yeah they literally retroactively justify the whole attempted genocide of humanity by the Covenant with the new lore. Not to mention they retcon Joe Staten's 'Contact Harvest' since that establishes that the three Prophets you meet in 2 are responsible for declaring war on Humanity since they actually found out the truth that the Forerunners were human (or connected to them somehow) and thus ruined their entire religion. And THAT was actually a good plot twist and makes the whole conflict in the franchise seem more profound - the whole idea that the Covenant could have been unknowingly killing their gods or their gods' chosen inheritors.
Nah, I never liked the idea they were ancient humans. When you’re big on history and anthropology, it absolutely wrecks your suspension of disbelief. I like the idea of inheritance that Halo 3 introduces, and reach implies with the rank “inheritor.” What I don’t like. Is that Halo 4 basically did both. Humans and forerunners are separate, but also ancient humans were already a space faring civilization. Like, fuck off. That shit is actually worse than the original idea.
The dumbest thing Halo 4's story is that they couldn't just write that it was MC's armor that protects him from the composer. Instead of using space magic to 1UP his HUMAN "evolution" granting him the immunity.
Ngl I never really paid attention to all the exposition from the librarian back in the day so I always just assumed it was his armor that protected him until I replayed it a couple of years ago
Nah. That ain’t the dumbest thing. The dumbest thing is when he detonates a nuke at point blank range with his hands and he gets Deus Ex Machina’d by a literal form of Machine life. In past games, Master Chief’s plot armor was much more organic and played off as him just getting fucking lucky. In Halo 4, it all relies on pure bullshit. Like, Didact could have killed multiple times with ease and just….doesn’t. Because reasons
@@kodredcud See, the crazy thing is…it wouldn’t be inherently bad if it was something that would be in his character. Like Joker in BTAS refusing to unmask Batman at multiple points only works because the Joker is insane and derives enjoyment from the mystery. Didact just has no reason for doing this multiple times. Like the second he realizes the Chief actually has survived everything else thrown at him, he should have made it a point to kill him. He’s many thousands of years old and survived war against the flood, but apparently he’s too stupid to eliminate any potential threat to his plans. Didact isn’t insane, he’s wildly stupid
@@Fuk99999 Y'know....I keep forgetting how moronic that nuke scene is. All thanks to idiocy of: digivolving the Master Cheif with space magic through a prerecorded message so that he won't be a digital monster by the Didact's digivise.
I remember having a LAN parties the weekend after 4 came out with friends and we only played for about a day and then went back to 3 and reach. Everyone was at least somewhat disappointed with it, but it was still a great memory.
For me, easily the worst thing about this game, is that they raped the lore. Like you say, the greg bear stuff is basically like a different world altogether. In direct contradiction to everything we've been told before. And even when they stepped away from the failed story of Halo 5, they persist in using this cursed continuity. I can't even bring myself to play Halo Infinity as long as that's the case. I can't bring myself to care about a world that isn't Halo anymore. I don't agree that mysteries shouldn't be revealed. The story of Halo 2 was always meant as THE ending, Halo was never a franchise for open ended story telling full of mystery boxes. It was never a franchise. The only reason the ending was cut was for a dire lack of development time, and Microsoft simply used that to squeeze as much money as they could out of the open ending it left. We're still suffering from that mistake. The B-plot already was to a large extend done in Halo 2 as well, in Halo 4 it just has a lot more expository dialogue so that smooth brains can pick up on it. Frankly I find it childish. A key part of Chief's character, what little he has, is his stoicism. Halo 4 makes him very emotional and talkative, which I'm sure is great for an actor or a writer, but again feels like an entirely different character who lacks the heroic qualities of the real master chief.
I don't get why he heaps love on Greg Bear's Promethean trilogy, I tried reading them back in the day and they were totally awful, some of the worst books I've ever read, they ruined the lore surrounding the Forerunners; and I can't stand Greg Bear's writing style. The second one was the worst, listening to a glorified cave-man trying to describe complex Forerunner technology and landscapes in detail makes me want to take a drill to my brain. I'm actually glad we got H3 and Reach, the former gave us a pretty solid ending that we didn't get in H2 and the latter gave us a look at the misery and near-total hopelessness of fighting at the peak of the Human-Covenant War. I just wish the series ended with these. (Which it did, in my headcannon) Personally, I don't think all mysteries should be revealed, not every mystery is a mystery box. I think it would've been better if they left it at only hinting that the Forerunners are related to Mankind and left it at that. We don't need to know for sure; people demanding answers to mysteries are how we get terrible films like the Prometheus prequels that give an unnecessary backstory to the Space Jockies in Alien.
@@alaskamark4562 I would say Halo 3 is a big mess compared to the slick ending Halo 2 would have gotten. The terminals still add a lot of depth to the story but the actual story is just a mess.
I think that the reason why 343i's games were so polarizing is because they are a contractor company where directors come and go. Employees are highered for their experience with whatever they do best, their understanding of Halo isn't any of their concerns. This goes with many other AAA games, large amounts of people with conflicting ideas that rarely go well. Halo infinite does alot of things well, but I'm also seeing fans conflicted with what works and what doesn't in that game.
What I hated most of Halo 4 was the sandbox...the Promethean weapons were either ass or copies from other guns....fan favorites were tossed in the garbage can and the weapons that did return were re-skinned horribly (same about the vehicles). Stuff like the art style didn't bother me much at all because I was a kid back then and the graphics looked good but when Halo 5 doubled down on that style I began to hate it.
You’ll notice all the promethean weapons that aren’t ass are usually the copies. The light rifle is a better BR. Why? Because it’s a BR unscoped, and a semi slower but stronger carbine when scoped. The scattershot is a shotgun with a higher range and lower spread, so it functions a little better than the shotgun. The boltshot is a hard ping weapon at mid range and a shotgun at close range. The binary rifle is just the beam rifle without a cooldown, but it’s slightly worse because beam rifle can space its shots to push out an extra shot where the binary rifle is default 2 shots and reload. It also has a trail when scoping, so people know where you are and that you’re aiming at them before you even fire a lot of the time. The incinerator is a slow rocket launcher at best and an RNG splash cannon at worst. Compare that to…the suppressor which is the worst gun in the game in both campaign and multiplayer
@@Fuk99999 The Suppressor is basically an SMG. Higher capacity, high rate of fire, low accuracy. I’ve found one corner case use of blasting Promethian Knights. It’s like the Halo 3 Plasma Rifle being a good anti-Flood except in both cases, the Needler works better on the big ones and it can’t headshot so the smaller ones are better handled by headshot weapons. It sadly doesn’t have anything it’s best at.
Its truly sad how much loadouts screw over halo 4's multiplayer ( for me at least). Seriously, halo 4 with equal starts is actually alot of fun. Especially since most weapons ( barring the suppressor and pulse grenade) are actually viable, many redundant, but still viable. Like the AR isn't a peashooter like it was in 3 or reach, or how the magnum was good but didn't make other precision weapons obsolete like in 5, I could go on but you get my point. I just think halo 4's sandbox is underrated, but is held back soo much by the loadout system. I also think the maps aren't that bad honestly. There are some gems in there, man I'm telling you, but maybe thats just me enjoying some variety after playing the same halo 3 maps on loop in MCC forever.
Agreed, i actually had a ton of fun with Halo 4 multiplayer for a couple weeks, the fundamentals and the simple, memorable, maps were great. However the reason i played other Halo titles far more was that the multiplayer had these odd decisions that didn't feel right. The obvious problem with unbalanced starter weapons and loadout perks/abilities, the weird care package things that didn't always benefit you and for me an overall problem that can best be summed up with the Saw. It was a power weapon but it both was and wasn't good enough to be one, it was an guaranteed win with a 1v1 but it couldn't instantly defeat enemies so you were likely to lose 2v1 plus, there were other things like that but basically it was anything new they had tried to add.
I would’ve liked the game better if characters designs stayed the same until you boarded the infinity,and if you were able to hold more ammo in campaign because in campaign it’s almost impossible to finish a mission with the two guns you started with
I can understand them not using the old designs for the guns/armor for the first part of the game coz itd take up resources. But I do think the covenant should have pretended to play nice up until you released the Didact.
The beginning of the video was basically me. I spent 2 weeks with Halo 4 before re-selling it used. During the first 2-3 days as I played through the campaign and multiplayer I was utterly confused with the experience, and what I was feeling. The first day I played through the campaign on Normal mode to take in the story. Day 2 I played through it on Legendary for the story again, because I was utterly confused as to what happen and for achievements. On the 3rd day I played multiplayer for the first time with my friend. The vast majority of our discussions was us trying to understand the story and debating the mass amount of changes. These discussions of the story would carry on over a few days as we figured it out thanks to explanation videos on YT. My view on the story still is that's it's a clusterfuck of too much information. It also broke style abruptly without trying to ease into the new style changes. This made the B-plot very hard for me to get into, and even feel for the MC and Cortana as I had in previous games, since they seemed foreign and not the characters I had grown to know. Now I understand it's impossible to keep the same style when changing developers, but to drastically and abruptly change the style without attempting to ease into the transition fell flat with me. Sure MC has been asleep for years and is awoken to threat, and Cortana is far along into her rampancy, but they start right out of the gates having very different personalities than they ever had before. If they wanted to make the chief open up more and develop more personality traits that's fine, but you need to ease yourself into something like that for it to feel even remotely well done. The combat wasn't nearly as fun as it used to be in previous games. As you also shared the game promotes gameplay as a cover shooter on anything above normal mode. This was a horrible change from pervious style which allowed the player to preform what would feel like a passionate dance as you made your way through the enemies. It could all flow together to feel just oh so right that it's still to be rivaled by nothing else. I also disliked the new weapons and share basically the exact same sentiment so I won't further elaborate on that. I could probably add more about the campaign but for now I will leave it here. Now regarding the Multiplayer... The multiplayer for me is a larger part of Halo games than the story, with me usually spending hundreds-thousands of hours enjoying them. I do enjoy the stories thoroughly, and consider the Bungie Halo's my favourite video game series. However the community aspects is what has me truly addicted and coming back oh so many years later. I first got heavily into Halo MP with Halo 3 & Halo: Reach. Both of these games stayed true to Halo's fundamentals of fair starts & fair maps. This aspect along with a longer TTK and an epic sandbox had me hooked shortly after diving in, and virtually abandoning Call of Duty & Battlefield happily for this much more exhilarating and mentally challenging experience. Learning the intricacies of the sandbox naturally as I played against and with others was amazing, and drove my passion to become a better player and learn the games in depth. Call of Duty experience such as learning probable enemy spawn location and positioning carried over easily, but that was mainly it, and learning all these new weapons and their cool unique effects they can have within this sandbox intrigued me like no games have to date. I was falling in love with Halo for it's unique experience, epic sandbox, learning a new and high skill ceiling, and community. This was back in the days when everyone was still in game chat talking to anyone in the lobby they choose to. I met so many great people over the years through in-game chats, sharing many hours, laughs and good times together. There was also the negative side with toxic people, but coming from CoD this was nothing new. After around the first week mark of playing Halo 4 these feelings became more and more clear as I was reflecting on my older experiences with Halo 3 & Reach. Before I continue though, I have to state that I started out hating Halo: Reach for being too different from Halo 3. This went on for a short period of time but I came to enjoy the game for what it was, a Halo spin off. Once I realized this hopefully wasn't going to be the future direction the mainline Halo titles would follow, I became less angry at the choices and saw them for what they really were. Halo: Reach was meant to change up the formula just enough to feel different while still having that Halo feel. It gave Halo a new experience without jeopardizing the integrity of the mainline series formula. Now we come back to Halo 4's MP. This is the next game in the mainline series, which many players having been waiting for, an assumed to be return to form after Halo: Reach & ODST's drought. To the majority of the communities surprise we didn't get a Halo game true to the trilogies form, but instead something much further away than people who despised Reach could have ever dreamed of possible. Halo 4 feels like I'm playing Call of Duty more than it feels like I'm playing Halo, one of the major reasons I started playing and loving these games in the first place was for the unique experience. Now some people might think this is petty or a stretch. However when you take an outside perspective look you quickly come to realize that 343 did indeed copy unique features from Call of Duty to appeal to their larger community in hopes of obtaining some of it. Even after grasping this more and more fully I must have been in denial, I pushed on through the rage for another week lying to myself saying it's not that bad. In reality though it really was that bad and a week later I would finally snap and quit for the last time. I went back to Halo Reach & 3 and that rage was gone, I was enjoying Halo again, I was playing Halo again, not some wannabe game with a Halo shell. Halo was no longer a unique experience, but instead simply tried to copy the dominant competitions unique aspects in hopes some of that success would rub off. Bungie's Halo's used to be about making it's own experience, that was unique and fun enough to want to be played over other similar alternatives. They also we're challenging, as you had to teach yourself if you wanted to learn more about the games. 343's Halo's are about trying to keep up with and copy modern trends instead of setting them by making an unrivaled experience. They also made these games less challenging and way more casual based, as you no longer have to teach yourself about things as it's already done for you (weapons spawn locations and timers visible, promethean vison, thruster), much stronger Aim Assist, and RNG killstreak rewards for doing anything and so on.
My most disliked thing about it, and about a lot of games is that it does a lot, but nothing well. The game has a lot of weapons, but half of them blend together. The campaign I believe has a good idea of a story but is executed poorly and the campaign is far too short for the type of story it’s trying to tell. I’ve never hated halo 4 but I’d be lying if I said I wanted to go out of my way to play it
I did hate it for all of these reasons. By the 3/4 point in the campaign I had to force myself to finish it. I replayed it when it released on PC recently, just to see if my opinion could change. No such luck.
I heard that Microsoft sort of rushed 343 with Halo 4. In fact, Halo 4 was going to be an Xbox One launch title but Microsoft told them to put it on Xbox 360.
@@TheGoldNShadow Microsoft seem to have a habit of doing that, if the rumours are true they forced Halo 5 to pretty much restart development halfway through which is why that game launched in a bad state too
You mentioned the Cortana B-plot was a redeeming factor. That plot line is THE thing I dislike the most about this game. People assume Chief was this robotic loner killing machine because he has a dark back story, but that was never true. Chief was trained to be psychologically resilient, not some Jedi who swore off feeling any emotion at all to become a powerhouse master of war. His actions spoke volumes about his character. The Master Chief had friends. They just died. He didn't have to cry about his back story to his friends Johnson and Miranda to be close to them, like he did with Laskey (Laskey was the only thing I didn't hate about Halo 4). Chief enjoyed their company as much as he enjoyed being a badass. Chief befriended the Arbiter because he was such a headstrong individual, not because he was any kind of brainwashed zombie drone who could relate to Arby being brainwashed by his own kind to be effective in war. And Chief showed how dedicated he could be to his own humanity by striving to rescue Cortana, someone whose value as a sentient was only called into question by the creature holding her hostage, and Chief - trained in human psychology as a part of his backstory, more than aware of human weakness, at least in a historical sense, if his oftentimes tender-hearted devotion to his friends didn't make much more than that out to be apparent - didn't even entertain Cortana's own despair at the thought of not being considered equal to her human counter part, as he immediately expressed that he took her sentience very seriously and that their friendship was untarnished when he rescued her. That cost the lives of his other two friends, who clearly shared this sentiment. "Don't ever let her go." Neither of them monologue about these themes, they're just present as the context that fuels the player's investment in the validity of their emotional connection, as a human and a computer program. In Halo 3 these themes are executed with classy authenticity, taken as self-evident, no need to explain these feelings or values at length like Halo 4's hack pretentious dialogue does. Instead the characters just act as though they never intend to question it. Halo 4's narrative just drops to the lowest hanging fruit straight off the bat. So the very idea that Chief has ever just been a soulless killer robot man who needs orders to avoid existential despair just baffles me. Where did people get that idea? Was it because so much of that characterization was handled delicately and presented as subtext? Because Joe Staten one time said Chief was meant to be a husk? The guy whose body language so effectively expressed a sense of loss at seeing Miranda lifeless in Johnson's arms... the kind of faceless physical expression of emotion so many people praise to high heaven in things like The Mandalorian. The guy who emotionally clasps his hand around Cortana's chip when Johnson passed, as if he were clinging to his last connection to his dead friends, his last friend. Seeing Chief robotically loading his weapon while Cortana mused about "which one of us is the machine" was one of the biggest insults to my investment in anything fictional, right alongside Luke Skywalker raising his lightsaber to strike his sleeping nephew. The entirety of Halo 3 being a rescue mission to save Cortana at the cost of lives of beloved characters was based on Chief's extraordinary humanity, she wouldn't dare question that. With that one scene, Halo 4's story spat in the face of everything Halo 3's story was about, and pretended it was the more nuanced and sophisticated of the two. Hell no it isn't. You didn't mention how stupid it was that Cortana spawned clones of herself from a hard light bridge, which each leapt through the air to restrain Satan the Grinch, before forming a hardlight room around Chief, in which she could materialize to touch his man pectoral from outside his armor and emotionally sigh about how she wanted to do that for so long, immediately after Chief detonates a nuke in his own face. Such cheap, emotionally manipulative, classless, fetishistic, tone deaf, lazy, absurdist hogwash, with no regard for what came before whatsoever, only a mild awareness of a fan fiction stereotype dynamic to exploit in hope for easy glory, complete with a self-congratulatory acceptance speech letter tacked on to the end. And it worked on so many fans of the series. I hate it more than I hate anything in Halo 5. Halo 4 is bereft of quality as far as I'm concerned. It did everything wrong that could possibly be done. As mid, 7/10 a story as Infinite had, I can't express how satisfying it is to have the real Master Chief back, concerned for the lives of his fellow Spartans and marines and showing plenty of humanity. I'm so glad they used Weapon to address the bs Halo 4 dropped on Chief's character. His emotional maturity is well past what most marines are capable of, and painting that as robotic callousness in the eyes of the immature and naive Weapon almost adopts Halo 4's disrespectful and ignorant assumptions into a valid perspective of his maturity from the eyes of the Weapon's intellectual infancy... if only it could apply to the impossibly vast gap between the Halo 3 and 4 iterations of Cortana. I made a rant wall. Sorry. I'm a big angry boy. Ten years later, still.
Couldn't agree more. There's some weird revisionist discourse nowadays where people like to say "Halo 4's campaign was unique bc it was ~emotional and it hUmAnIzEd Master Chief", which kills me inside. It only had a semblance of novelty because of it's initial "shock factor" which is totally incongruent to an important factor of what made the Halo narrative as compelling as it was: the immersion from having a silent (but *not* unfeeling or robotic) protagonist, which makes it easier for one to imagine themselves in Chief's shoes. So to go with the cheap, predictable, and easy narrative that basically sets everything else on fire for the sake of a brief spectacle is maddening. Any time someone says "i appreciated how they tried to take it a different direction" almost always never has any familiarity with the rest of Halo's universe. What they usually don't understand is that it wasn't something Bungie didn't think of, but that it was such an obvious, overplayed, and uninspiring direction that Bungie intentionally eschewed it. Along with Star Wars, another analogy is like with how the final seasons of Game of Thrones threw everything that had made it successful right down the toilet for a couple of quick, cheap moments that ultimately disgrace the story.
Holy shit finally someone put it to words. Yeah, the Master Chief might have been a bit of a husk but we wasn't a soulless automaton, he just wasn't supposed to be overly emotional since the entire point was that he was supposed to be a player character primarily. But even in external Bungie media he's not even emotionless, he's just stoic and developed the kind of emotional maturity you'd see in a battlefield - during and after Reach he basically became a symbol for the UNSC, it REALLY doesn't help if he breaks down prior or during a battle. Hell, you can see it in a lot of the media at the time (excluding 343-era Waypoint shit and Frank O'Connor's garbage) that the Master Chief is fully capable of social interaction. Hell, in the original trilogy he always has little moments like witty one-liners or corny jokes. A 'soulless automaton who needs orders' wouldn't do that. I HATE this idea in modern media that the characters HAVE to be hyper-emotional. That they have to laugh, scream or cry at every situation. IMO the scene in Infinite between Master Chief and the pilot wasn't even that good of a scene - though I like that instead of the Chief being emotional himself he acts as more of a teacher or mentor. But it's the same "If you're scared I'm terrified" trope, and the pilot was acting WAY too hyper-emotional throughout the entire game. Seems like nobody likes subtlety or subtext to their media anymore.
Honesty, I don't necessarily agree with your assessment of the B-Plot of Halo 4. As you said, the first three games gave us plenty of moments showing Chief's soft side. Johnson's final moments, the Gravemind level when he's finally reunited with Cortana, and when he crashed the Banshee on purpose on the Pillar of Autumn level. The B-Plot focuses on the Chief's PTSD because no matter how well trained, he is going through a war of survival where he saw countless atrocities that would scar anyone. At the beginning of Halo 4, Chief believes himself to be the last of the Spartan 2s, outliving his family, and when faced with the possibility of losing another person he cares about, forces him to focus on the mission. I'm not denying your words and offering my limited perspective since I'm a game-only fan.
holy shit I just cant believe how much time I spent with this game when it came out and how I remembered virtually none of it prior to seeing this great video. shows how forgettable it is, even though, like you, i was in the extreme hype camp as well. I even had the countdown timer to the halo 4 release application on my phone at the time, and it was one of my only applications lmao. good times, but i agree with basically everything in the video. i was however initially excited at the prospect of advanced movement and more equipment because I thought it'd make me feel more like a Spartan, but i think 5 executes and achieves that concept a lot better.
For me I hated how kill streaks created pod drops. Map control for weapons was no longer a thing. You could pick up the rockets on the map just to be killed by rockets from a pod drop.
@@Liberator130 as well as means new players aren't immediately at a massive disadvantage for not knowing the exact spot where the OP weapon is and running to it in the first 20 seconds like the older Halos. You can tell Halo 4's design philosophy was about casual fun
Those drop pods are actually highly overrated. I played halo 4 for like a year, and I rarely saw anyone actually get kills with drop pod weapons. Plus, the weapon would disappear by the time you ran back to get it if you died.
@@raulpetrascu2696 That's why I like Reach, 4, and 5 best out of all of the Halo games. Reach still had that semi-sweat 3 had but the abilities made it a crap shoot and mixed up the gameplay, 4 was just flat out chill fun, and 5's weapon variants are the reason I still play it to this day.
@@Liberator130exactly. Especially when older games had horrible net code and hit detection, getting screwed over pushing a weapon is just a game thrown away.
@Donal Tronp smiling that's what I mean to try again. Learn from the mistakes the first time, and try again. They fixed one problem, crappy enemies, now they just need to keep going until they it's done and it's worth playing.
@@lotgc In an alternate universe where 343 could currently focus on that instead of all the other insane Infinite problems, I wonder how well it would work if each "Spartan Ops" episode was just a single, long mission. Quality over quantity, and all that jazz. Could fill the linear campaign void of Infinite
@@Spritzkrieg There really is a void in the campaign of infinite. All of the upgrades are just boring or things that you should've had from the very beginning. His tech might be a bit outdated, but why does John 117 need to upgrade his over shields when spartan 2 suits are known for having the best tech in UNSC!?! I don't wanna have to run around fighting bosses or fighting bases full of enemies to get stronger for later game bosses when I'm gonna die in 4 hits without fully upgraded shields.
It is amazing how Halo 4 killed my enthusiasm for the future of Halo single handedly and immediately. I wasn't jaded or influenced by cynical youtube critics. It was 2012 and I was a young kid who was obsessed with Halo since I got 3 alongside my first xbox 360. I was so unbelievably hyped for Halo 4. I thought Halo was finished after Bungie sold the rights and was amazed at the idea that my favourite franchise ever was continuing. I started playing Halo 4, and I didn't feel any sort of dislike, or annoyance, or anger from it. I just felt... nothing. This just wasn't anything close to the game series that I loved so much. It didn't even slightly feel like Halo. It felt like a generic copycat. I played it for an hour, then I just quit in the middle of a mission and went straight back to playing Reach. Still own my copy of Halo 4, still not touched it since that first attempt in 2012.
I've never agreed more with a video. Especially about the Forerunner mystery to never be revealed and art direction's jarring shift. I've been talking about near all these points for nearly a decade now.
Revealing the Forerunners is probably one of the things I hated the most. The entire point of a dead precursor race is that they're, y'know, dead. Yeah, the Forerunner books were well written. Yeah, they were alright stories. But quite frankly, this decision was neither necessary nor particularly beneficial. Why the hell would we demystify the Forerunners when we're just going to make a _completely new precursor race_ which IS mysterious?
I liked the idea that the forerunners weren't a singular race but a group of all the races we see in the series and that was made them great, being united. But the mystery is dead now.
@Donal Tronp smiling No. Lol. You are very out of touch. Very big difference between giving more hints that only beg more questions and showing the actual face, literally, too. And also no. Reach was complete ass with music, art, and gameplay differences. Before that, the progression was pretty much perfect.
@Donal Tronp smiling here's the thing. People seem to have fooled themselves into thinking that the OT was about the Forerunners. It wasn't. The Forerunners were just window dressing- a plot device. Fundamentally, they were simply an explanation for the giant rings which the Covenant wanted to use. Revealing the Forerunners implies that they needed to be revealed in the first place. That they were important. But were they _really?_ Apart from blurbs in the terminals and Guilty Spark, the Forerunners were absent from the games. The books? I suppose there is Ghosts of Onyx, but that's just the protagonists running around a deserted shield world. They are only important because 343i _made_ them important. We get more than enough information on the Forerunners from the main 3 games. The Halo 3 terminals are perfect in this regard, showing some basic events but not going any further than that. We didn't need a whole trilogy about them. It wasn't necessary, because Halo was never about the Forerunners. It was about the UNSC and the Covenant living in their shadow. Wanting to know about the Forerunners is like wanting to know about a random extra in a movie. It simply isn't relevant, and is probably actively damaging to the main narrative.
Halo 4 committed more sins than Halo 5 and that’s a LOT of sins. The main villain gets his ass kicked by a bridge and a really shitty grenade. Also Infinite wouldn’t be a soft reboot if 4 and 5 were actually good. You know they didn’t do that because it’s the sixth mainline game. They did it to distance it from the Reclaimer Saga. I remember it used to be called the “Reclaimer Trilogy” until 5 came out. They wouldn’t just drop the trilogy because saga sounded better. They realized they fucked up and are trying to mostly start from scratch.
@@Fuk99999 my issue with 5 is that the movement gave the player so much freedom that vehicles as well as 4v4 arenas with vehicles became obsolete. It was simply too fast and fucked with the dynamics that Halo established itself with in every other entry.
My biggest problem with Halo 4 is that there's just too much going on with the environments and colors. 343 really over did it and that also is true for the new art style, which changed many of the 'iconic' Halo designs, like the Battle rifle and Beam rifle for example. I will say I enjoyed the story, specifically the Master Chief and Cortana sections (as you said the B-plot). However many things are then forgotten with Halo 5 which honestly just ruins a lot of the tension when Cortana 'dies'. So all in all it's still an enjoyable game and I prefer the story over Halo 5s anyway, but it could've and should've been so much better.
And the completely ruined the designs of the covenant. I have not seen one person who likes the design change of the elites. the H4 and H5 elites have terrible designs and They do not look threatening at all.
@@GVWOLF11 I like the upgrade in size, but making them pink and fleshy with the weird armor shapes is off putting. Like if they looked like the Halo 3 Elites but were the size of Halo 4 Elites it'd be great
Fr, the old designs were Alien but looked believable and lived in, even high charity looked like something that could actually exist, in halo 4 tho it just looks over designed like a child’s drawing
She's the worst in Halo 4, with the whining and bimbo tier observations about things. And why would a warship AI need a pornographic avatar? Imagine being on the Autumn's bridge and the AI thats telling the Captain to seal an airlock condemning your best friend and 300 other sailors to their death is a hologram of Riley Reid with her 🙀 lips out.
I don’t understand why the hell they gotta keep changing Cortana’s facial structure. Like fuck! It’s over 3 different ladies at this point and no I don’t care about a romance storyline between Chief and Cortana. Halo shouldn’t be a Disney storyline.
I will agree that too much player dialogue can get in the way and the QTEs were bullshit, but I disagree that Master Chief is simply a player avatar in the Halo OT, more on Bungie's part than yours. Bungie wanted to have their cake and eat it, too. You can't have the player character in cutscenes, deliver badass one-liners, and show subtle signs of dialogue and body language that underneath his stoic exterior that remind you he's human, and also say that character is a husk for the player to fill. Master Chief is not a silent protagonist, and he was given characterization within the original trilogy. He always had a personality, even if that was "badass stoic action hero", and if having a blank slate for the player to fill was Bungie's intent, they would never have allowed for Expanded Universe novels about Chief, and given him the Gordon Freeman treatment.
Alright so, couple things. First off, I 100% agree with your take here. It’s an issue I’ve had with both Halo and Zelda fans for years. Link has had various personalities since they made him 3D. People really don’t understand you can decipher personality traits from things like vocal noises, facial expressions and body movements. And in the case of Chief, he has those plus action hero one liners. He’s a vehicle, not an avatar. You’re driving him, but you aren’t him. All that being said, I have to note Bungie wasn’t fond of the novels existing in the first place and on a few occasions made it clear they were the final say on what was canon and what wasn’t, which is why Reach had the inconsistencies it did. As far as they were concerned, only Contact Harvest was actually truly canon because Staten wrote it. We were really just lucky that none of the books back then inherently conflicted with anything in the games. I mean, we’re talking about the guys who didn’t let Chief go into DOA4 proper because they were worried about how that would affect canon lmao
Quoting joe staten, Halo original trilogy writer, "A part of the stories success is that we didn't spend a lot of time figuring out who the Master Chief is, The master chief is a Husk, He is a big green suit of armour that you move around". The chiefs whole personality was vague mysterious cowboy, so that he could be tough and cool, without having a personality that imposed on the story and made him stand out. Hes not quite gordon freeman but hes close,
@@Fuk99999 It’s not they weren’t fond of the novels existing, Fall of Reach came before CE. It’s just they gave the games more importance. They always included side material. Reach had Halsey’s journal. Speaking of Halsey, many characters like her are book characters that then made it into the games and various book events are alluded or referenced in the Bungie games.
343 also replaced steve downes and jen taylor (the voice of master chef and cortana). They made the whole game with different voice actors but during prerelease the feedback was so bad they were forced to re voice with original actors.
Halo 4 is to Halo what Doom 3 was to Doom, except worse. Halo 4 isn't a bad game, its just a bad Halo game and significantly worse compared to any other entry in the series.
@@Fuk99999 Yes, thats why I said its like Doom 3 but worse. Doom 3 may have been subpar as a Doom game, but atleast what it tried to do as an individual title was pretty good.
30:30 - Bursted out laughing at that “Little baby in the booster seat” descriptor for the Knights. Now that enemy type will forever be unseen as a that 😂
Hate 343 Halo. The tone of story shifted from an enemy closing in on you, everyone around you dying, and seeing the horror of the flood, but always having hope and Chief & Cortana managing to squeak out a victory, to just being depressing and watching Cortana spiral, without being able to do anything about it. The genre started out military/sci-fi with a bit of horror with the Flood, but 343 Halo tries to introduce stupid Dungeons & Dragons / World of Warcraft magical themes. You can’t even fight the Didact because he’s too OP and has magic powers, which is so stupid.
I still avoid Halo 4, 5, and Infinite like the plague. I refuse to acknowledge them as canon, except for maybe infinite… but that ones story is basically non-existent.
You realize that in halo 3 343 guilty spark directly states "you are forerunner" to chief after essentially stating that mankind had been there every step of the way during the initial activation of the halo installations.
Halo 4 ruined the mystery and lore of Halo that made me love it from the beginning. Forerunners suddenly had a face instead of being enigmatic figures. They existed through their rings, technology and architecture. The multiplayer was a mess. People play Halo, because it’s Halo. Some weapons were became redundant, like the carbine and battle rifle when the DMR was superior. Sprinting ruined big battles, now everyone runs away when they’re about to die.
It’s been that way since Reach. Of course, I’d argue that the Reach DMR is mostly the cause of it. Change that and everything else is slightly different.
This video has put into words so much of what I've thought about when seeing what Halo has become and what 343 has tried to do. The nanobots were a stupid explanation from the start and I wasn't sure if they had really committed to that idea because of how nonsensical it sounded. I think a big part of what has honestly killed most of my interest in Halo how little 343 grasps what made the story so interesting before. Halo had a very good art direction and it's writers had a really good sense of taste. Thinking about it now it's actually impressive. I love that the Forerunners were meant to stand more as a literary device than be completely dissected and known about. Halo had substance before that has been completely lost.
What you said about the forerunners reminded me of one of my biggest criticisms of subnatica bellow zero. Instead of being mysterious and cool about the aliens like the first game, the second game literally put one of the aliens in your head so he could tell you all the secrets about ever alien thing you ran into. they even eventually gave him a body so you know what the species looked like instead of leaving you wondering. it killed all sense of interest and discovery and made every alien structure encounter feel more like a house tour than finding something new.
Halo 4 suffered the 'Phantom Menace' effect Everybody, including me, overhyped the game, believing that it would be the best so far, and when it actually came out we were in denial that it wasn't good It took years for us to accept it and then forgive it
It’s weird because THIS was my literal introduction to Halo- the only shooter I played actually, back in 2012. I thought it was the shit, and looking back now, even though I definitely can see why it sucks, I had so much fun in its multiplayer and Spartan ops missions.
For me? The ugly art style was far too much of a stylistic shock. The Music & Cinematography were total downgrades from their Bungie predecessors. The story was emotional drama nonsense full of convoluted and ridiculous lore. The campaign levels were extremely linear and closed-in, with less dynamic enemy AI. And finally, the MP was knockoff call of duty, with perks, loadouts, killcams, streaks, etc.
The music track in the background of Midnight was AWFUL. The same 2 notes repeating themselves as you fight through prometheans.. and if you died because they have pin point accuracy on any difficulty.. you had to listen to the same track again and again. Just.. F***ing awful.
I remember the wait for Forge Islands so we could finally have an large and engaging canvas like Forgeworld but for Halo 4, little would I have known 343 was about to embark on a decade long disappointment journey.
As far as I'm concerned, there's no lore outside of the OG games. Call me a fanboy, but I don't give a shit about video game lore written in books. I'll accept those little booklets that came in the case, but that's it.
I'm just now hearing about the Greg Bear books and I'm pretty sure the whole 'wtf are these bionicles' thing is revealed in the game itself... though yeah, relying on terminals tucked away in the side paths of the levels for major exposition didn't work so well here. The worst sin of the storytelling is that they don't explain the Covenant being the bad guys again. They had every opportunity to show Jul 'Mdama's Covenant as tragic cultists that are addicted to the dead Prophets' Kool Aid. A splinter faction of extremists who can't handle the truth and instead embrace Truth. I'm thinking about the single line Chief says about them in level 1 about how they 'seem more fanatical.' There's zero context for the line. All they had to do was have some covies praying at Requiem through Forward Unto Dawn's windows, or take the opportunity to show us an actual ritual from the Covenant religion, or have a Grunt worshiping the ground a Promethean was stepping on. SOMETHING. But nah, just one throwaway line. Kinda surprised the video didn't touch on that.
One of the main gripes I have with this story is that it ignores the fact that for much of the original trilogy the forerunners were implied to be humans. And instead retcons it with a bunch of makes up shit.
I mostly agree I was very hyped when I saw the first trailer and heard that it was 343i developing it, then it came out, I tried it once at like a GameStop (or Game probably) and basically never touched a new halo game until MCC PC. Having played through it a couple of times now and having played quite a bit of the multiplayer I've concluded what I assumed like 10 years ago, it's a mostly competent game that sucks as a halo game, much like if you order a pizza and get a cheeseburger with tomatoes, because "lol it's just bread, cheese, tomatoes and meat. It's just the same, no?". The story gets far too explainy while also throwing in random words (ancilla, Promethean, terminus, geas, "primitives" or whatever he called his telekinesis) to try and make it seem mysterious "just like before", and while the didact has some decent lines, like the embers of sand one, he just shows up, trashtalks you and tosses you around a bit while knowing you're probably the sole thing that can stop him, then chills out until the final mission. It's also bizarre how the campaign is by far the buggiest one I've played in terms of sequence or major game breaking bugs. H2 has you jumping across mountains and buildings, CE has you carefully pushing a ghost through a hole and then being very precise in not going too fast and actually killing all the flood in one spot, or the rest of the mission doesn't load. H4 I had dozens of times where the game just kicked me and my co-op partner back a checkpoint during the airlock part, or bounces my ghost into space every 2 minutes on the mammoth mission, or mutes all sound except for reloads during a long sniper section, or the BRAIN-DEAD choice to not only give every single grunt and jackal the ability to overcharge plasma pistols, but also give them infinite ammo and a global audio notification so you just know it's _minimum_ one of the 30 grunts in this driving section, probably closer to 10, who are ready to drop you instantly. Oh and weird unpickupable grenades, those too, do not help when you're playing like you've got the famine skull on because h4 gives you like a mag, maybe two to go, and enemies for 24 players in Spartan ops. Only game that even got close to this for me was reach because some missions I'd just be running over rocks or something and the jamming spire and enemies just past the rocks (on the gúta level), including the finale of the level, just didn't spawn.
I remember starting the game for the first time and I hated the music and I only played the game for a week or so and just felt the character models and gameplay wasn’t halo to me.
One change i really hated was chief and cortanas relationship. They were always portrayed as more siblings than lovers. They have been through hell and forged an unbreakable bond, but bungie never showed a romantic relationship. Flirting from cortana yes but battle field banter is not the same as genuine flirting and it fot her personality as a smart sassy woman very well
A lot of the multiplayer I didn't mind but I hated weapon loadouts with a passion. Halo was about it's delecate weapon sandbox and the Assault Rifle was as generic of a base weapon as it gets, some of the most exillerating rushes from 3 and Reach even came when you respawn and you rush into a nearby enemy for another weapon by emptying a magazine while rushing them down to finish off with a melee. 4 having weapon loadouts basically klilled the funtion that fully automatic base weapons had in favor if precision weapons because the latter was able to headshot and the former didn't have a way to compete with that level of extra damage. I desperatly tried to make the Assault Rifle and Suppressor wotk as a default loadout just to get tired of the classic default weapon becoming useless and dropping multiplayer from Halo all together.
I mainly got mad of “A lot can change in 4 years” supposed to be as an explanation for everything. The forerunner villain I don’t even remember his name was so forgettable and how he was basically a God yet a simple grenade took him down while Chief survives a nuke to the face. This is like basic marines being able to survive multiple shots of the Covenant rifles in Halo 2 on Legendary while Chief gets one shotted in his new and improved armor
Chief actually getting a character was really good and Cortana's whole deal was great as well. And I always considered it a good note to start focusing on Chief as a character or to end on. I dunno if this is a hot take but I think the series should move on from the Chief eventually ya know. I just can't see Halo going on for like 10 years with story content always centered around Chief. Maybe Arbiter being the new focus for a game? I dunno it's a tough topic to talk about since Chief is so iconic and stuff. He is like Halo's Mario but not as versatile as Mario imo. If you finish the Chief's story arc continuing on would need a reboot maybe or it'd feel like beating a dead horse I think. Like keeping a character from a TV show alive/around when they finished doing their thing. They end up just being there or devolving into like a shell of what they used to be. Basically like a lot of the Dragon Ball cast now that I think about it.
@@shadewolf0075 halo 5 added a ton of lore to the Halo-Verse. Everyone hated it. If it were up to "halo fans" chief and cortana would just be fighting on another halo ring against the covenant.....oh wait....thats halo Infinite 😂🤣
Personally, I hate the styling of the armor in 4, which is especially bad for me since customizing my armor is one of the things that kept my interest in the series for so long. The armor doesn't flow well together, and is so busy you can't really tell what a set is specialized for (contrasted to the wonderful degree of specialization you could get out of Reach or 3, where it could be clear that one spartan is a sniper, while another is a heavy weapons expert). As for the campaign, it is the only MCC campaign I have never finished, and will probably remain that way.
Halo 4 was the game that introduced me to the franchise when I was 12 or so. I have a lot of fond memories of it and I do have a soft spot for it. Game still kinda sucks tho ngl
Apart from the boring Promethean enemies and crappy weapons, the other thing that ruined campaign gameplay was that the game behaves like Bungie games do with the famine skull. You are CONSTANTLY out of ammo in Halo 4. I'm not sure why but it constantly feels like I'm searching for ammo or a new gun.
18:20 I approve of the way you disagreed with the old Human Forerunner canon. I respect that perspective. Mine was that it acted as a reward for players who payed enough attention to actually catch the subtext that Humans and Forerunners were the same. Better insist on mystery than claim the new canon is smarter though. So Kudos!
Honestly, not only do I agree the mystery element is better (not just for the forerunners, but the precursors and flood as well) but I am pretty much never fond of the idea that ancient humanity was this highly advanced species wandering around the universe. It takes way too much suspension of disbelief for me (as someone who researches history as a hobby) to accept the sheer amount of contrivances you would need to explain that story element. Especially when your universe already establishes human history as being the same one we have IRL. Which means you would need to explain not only why it took 180,000 or so years for human civilization to start up again, you would need to explain why it took 200,000 years just to get back into space. The reason why you need to explain these to people like me is because there’s an established trend for human beings recovering from every massive disaster faster than the last and a general increased rate in technological advancement every time one is made. Like the Neolithic lasted a long time, but once we figured out Bronze, things started to speed up rapidly. The Neolithic lasted about 6000 years. The Bronze Age lasted about 2000. The Bronze Age collapse occurred and various iron ages began to emerge after only a few centuries and from there, it only took us maybe 1000 more or so to put a man on the moon. What I’m trying to illustrate here is….humanity after gaining knowledge of something tends to expand that knowledge rather quickly. Along with it the spread of useful tools and skills. And because of that, even disaster periods tend to be recovered from fairly fast, and often lead to technological booms. It took modern man like 180,000 years to go from stone to bronze. It took less than 10,000 to go from Bronze to Industrial. So why and how do you explain ancient advanced humans losing all of this progress *and* forgetting about it entirely? Even today, we are discovering a lot of mythological stories and even linguistics date back to things even older than the cultures we associate with them now. How and why you explain the hard nerf? Even 343 tried to do this with forced de-evolution approach, but as seen in their current lore, that by no means stopped ancient humans from actually recording all that they knew or passing on their legacy adequately. It just doesn’t make much sense.
Halo 4 was like watching paint dry. Excessively glowy paint. I played through it once on Legendary shortly after launch (after getting talked into it by friends), and I remember nothing about it. Because nothing is worth remembering. The series ended in 2010. Never forget, when the creators bow out of a series, that's your signal to do the same. Fitting that Halo 4 released on the same day as a rediculously bad president formally continuing his reign.
Halo 4 is my favorite halo, no cap- I've enjoyed every halo to some degree and think 5 is probably the worst when compared to contemporary games. What I agree to can relate with: The artwork and lighting I think are a little overdone, but I don't think I would go as far as to say it completely rejected OG halo. The A plot is somewhat complicated and confusing, but it did invoke some exploration for me: I had read 1 halo novel before, but never something about the forerunners or Prometheans. I think it forced me to ask questions, but admittedly, this wasn't good for someone who wasn't terribly interested in the story or had little prior knowledge. The B plot is solid, I think the game's view on chief aged well as I aged. It added depth to his character and the story. The BR's state at launch, 5 shot kill was a disaster. Hard Agree Between thruster and hardlight shield, it's a little to easy to escape in this game, it's probably the most annoying thing about multiplayer. Only armor lock compares. Spartan ops are a shell of firefight. Fast weapon despawn is frustrating. Kill streaks can be somewhat annoying by leading to an abundance of weapons of the map, but them not being as crazy like a COD chopper or attack dog hoard or something actually made them more balanced and not something that was frustrating to play against. Who likes getting spawnkilled by some killstreak they can't fight back against? There's also more than just infinity slayer, so it's not like it's every game you're dealing with it. No ranked is pretty stupid. Disagree with: Hard disagree with multiplayer take: I enjoy this multiplayer more than any other, and I strongly think that halo could not be COD and keep pumping out the same stuff every year. While it became more COD-like, this halo NEVER felt like I was playing COD (I used to play it a lot), more like I was playing a sped up version of halo reach. Each halo experimented on some level. 2 it was dual wielding, 3 added equipment, reach added rudimentary armor abilities. 4 more than anything to me was pace. 4 was relieving for me in so many ways; Power weapons weren't as dominant, you could be the best player in the game without touching a special weapon. Loadouts made the game more about gunfights/positioning and less about AR into melee like halo 3 or 2. No projectile lage from 20' away on the BR. Bloom wasn't as hindering on the DMR. The sword and shotgun weren't as good because of the easy of using the other weapons, but certainly weren't bad. I never spent excessive time racing around or camping power weapons because I didn't need to. Vehicles weren't OP: you had tools to prevent their dominance, but if you don't use them you'll still get smashed. The mantis, wrath, banshee, hog are all still good and can dominate games when played well. I always hated how easy it was for a hog, banshee, or tank could run a game if your team wasn't good. Not as big of an issue in 4. The increased speed made it so you couldn't camp on powerplay positions as easily. No more sitting on the top looking down at the beach on zanzibar from crazy high ground. No camping at the top of construct. If felt like if I played well, unless I was getting absolutely spawn camped by an entire team of sweaties there was no way I wasn't putting up a fight. Even if I was I could still pick up kills. Balancing of the armor abilities: Let's look at some of them: Thruster- In my opinion, the most annoying and game breaking for the escape ability. It really made it impossible to kill a quality user of it when they had teammates preventing any sort of flank or surprise. Jet pack and promethean can help with some of this, but this is one of main abilities for a good 4v4 player. Jet Pack- Worse than it was in halo reach, making it more bearable. Still very strong. Everyone having BRs makes them an easy target. Camo- Irritating, especially on BTB, but not game busting with the radar indication. Can see if you look hard. Probably the most annoying is a sniper sitting cross map that you just can't see. Hologram- Hilarious and could occasionally fool people into wasting nades. Worth including in the game. Promethean- The hated cheater vision. As if Camo didn't exist to mess this guy up. Jet pack can surprise them by being above. Thruster to escape their pre-fire and nades. I think the biggest issue with this is more that it forces you to use camo (A kind of lame armor ability) sometimes and makes it easy to throw nades, especially when paired with the big nades. Also it's pretty easy to use, I would know as someone who did but switched to jetpack. Regen- Useful in the right situation, but not really strong like halo 3s (not to bag on 3s, it's a power item). Hardlight- Annoying, and an easy version of thruster that isn't quite as useful. Flank obliviously makes them an easy kill, and if they are close throw a nade. Could pass on this one being in the game. Points Scoring: Distractions, comeback kills, are we really complaining because they added a few things like this? I can't see how giving some points to guests who are just trying to play with the bois is something to complain about. Assists are good medal, why are we complaining about this, let's encourage teamwork maybe? Can't say much on: Forge: I didn't mess around in enough in reach or 4 to know. I get this game wasn't halo fans' favorite, and that I'm in the small minority by being a big H4 guy, but I think the idea that halo needed to keep doing stuff the old way was never going to work. It's not that you have to change everything or make a completely new game, but the reason I'm not playing COD and haven't much since 2013 is because it never changed, it never improved (warzone might be an exception). I'd had enough. And yes, I realize COD hasn't changed and has still sold really well, but do you really think a slow paced H3 recopied 8 times is going to sell like COD has? I really doubt it, COD is able to do it because of its simplicity and appeal to young fans trying to get into their 1st or second shooter. It's way easier to pick up than halo is, and I know good shooter players who are trash at halo but good at everything else. It really is unique as a shooter to this day. Maybe I'm wrong on this, but I don't think COD's fanbase is a bunch of people who have been playing it for 20 years, but they managed to create new ones to replace the people who got tired of it. I think they could have leaned into the fans and made 4 more like 3 and reach, and the adjustments could have been more fine-tuned to keep the halo feel and reduced the difference between them. But 4 was fighting with nostalgia and anything significantly different was going to get fans heated, so ultimately the series had to get a new story & some fresh gameplay if it wanted to continue and try to appeal to new fans.
In trying to make a game for everyone, they made a game for no-one. Alienated the large established fanbase in an attempt to win over CoD fans, who were never going to be interested in Halo.
I thought it was okay for halo to change. Halo 4 to me felt more like really fast destiny. It was fun, I was glad the tempo increased as "tactical" shxt isn't really my style. Anyone remember Brink?
I'm not ashamed to say that I enjoyed its storyline It was more or less the stylistic choices and overall esthetic that bothered me But other than that it was a pretty decent experience
I love the story. Constantly being out of ammo and the linear levels upsets me. However my brother who is still in middle school has been playing all the Halo Games with me for the first time cause he bought Infinite. And while the gameplay pisses me off at times. I'm still having a great time seeing his enjoyment from it all. He said so far 4 has been his favorite which I had to bite my tongue but all the power to him. I do really enjoy the story though. However I've also read the forerunner trilogy which may be why I appreciate it more then those who just play the games.
Honestly, I couldn’t get over the art style change, the changes to the lore, and the poor writing. Then the new additions in the prometheans were just not fun and didn’t feel like they belonged in the Halo universe. The architectural differences between the sentinels and Forerunner structures and the prometheans are absolutely jarring-there’s no way they’re both made by the Forerunner. Overall, Halo 4 was when Halo truly stopped feeling like Halo to me and that’s why I don’t like Halo 4 and 343i’s Halo as a whole. They wanted to hire people that didn’t like Halo and it really shows in the results..
The Forerunners being Humans was always the perfect answer, there was no way the Forerunners actually being revealed could have been anything but a disappointment.
I'm mixed on the B Plot. While it is well written, it's not Halo. Halo never had existentialism like 4 introduced. Chief wasn't a little cry-baby with a hologram waifu. He readily left her behind, knowing full well she might blow up High Charity, which would include herself. Rescuing her was also part of the overall plan to use the replacement Alpha Halo ring. While I like the ending bit in the hard-light bubble at the end, it was so not Chief and Cortana. You know how the Chief and Cortana from the first trilogy would have said goodbye? Chief: "How do we get out of here?" Cortana: "I'm not coming with you this time. Most of me is down there. I held just enough back to get you off the ship." Chief: *small silence* "It has been my honor to fight beside you." Cortana "The honor was all mine, Cheif. Take care of yourself, John." *fades away* That's the Chief and Cortana I know. Both soldiers, to their core, ready to live and die for the UNSC and Humanity. That's one thing that 343i never understood about Chief. He's not a God. He's not irreplaceable. Hell, there were 30 more just like him, and he is ready to spend his life if the cost warrents it. They don't know how to not make Chief some kind of almost spiritual figure. He's a soldier, a soldier with the UNSC, and has and will have friends and people close to him die on operations. Hell, almost every Spartan II is dead, and he never once shed a tear or got the boo-hoo's. The kids he trained with, grew up with, got augmented with, and spent decades of his life fighting side by side with. The closest thing he had to family, and he even sent some to their deaths willingly, because that's the cost. That's the job. That's what he's trained to do. I don't see him getting all espresso depresso because his e-girl deleted her account. "Oh Johnathan, my forbidden love, the flesh to my heart. Live on! Though I am machine and you are man, our ties were greater than most others, but all my ones are turning to zeros and my bits will be scattered to the celestial winds!" "Cortana! Spectral poison of my heart! Though I have never had the opportunity to caress your flesh, for you have none, our minds have tangled within this iron shell of mine. My heart bleeds as your subroutines faulter! Goodbye my love, the artificial ghost of my beating heart!" Get outta here with that shit.
I was the biggest Halo 4 hater when it came out but it grew on me over time. It had a ton of issues and will never live up to Halo 3 but still was fun to play. I hated Reach and Halo 5 way more than Halo 4.
You're totally entitled to your wrong opinion while the rest of us, the real fans, (that vastly outnumber you) talk about Halo, champ. That's totally fine.
@@DigitalApex “real fans” lol did you not see the part where I said I’ve been a halo fan for over 20 years? I’ve been to the midnight release of every single Halo game since CE, and have thousands of hours in every halo game. It’s my favorite series of all time, I’ve read all the books, and even watched the god awful tv show. You “real fans” hate over half of the entire franchise, your not halo fans, your fans of a few games from a series with over 10 games at this point. It’s like claiming I’m a “true” Harry Potter fan but everything after the third one was garbage. And I know PLENTY of other die hard Halo fans who loved Halo 4, so you can keep crying that it’s not 2007 anymore, while me and all the other REAL halo fans continue enjoying this amazing series.
I know that there's alot of missed potential with halo 4. Looking at the beta content makes me upset cause most of the beta stuff was so much cooler and worked much better. I really still enjoyed the story anyways. But the classes should have been a new game mode instead of the whole game. I feel like halo 4 is a game that was dragged down by alot of things. One of the things 343 did which was a mistake was to place too much focus on the story and by that I mean they cut out some features just because they weren't "lore friendly" The reason we don't have playable elites anymore is because 343 made the multiplayer canon and for some reason elites didn't train with Spartans so they just decided to cut it out. They also didn't let the prothethans fight the covies most of the time cause that would go against the story. I feel like the story got in the way of gameplay alot of the time. Which lead to dull gameplay. 343 should have also not listened to normies/cod players about halo. COD players don't like halo and listening to them would turn halo into a carbon copy of COD and then these same COD players demanding for such changes to make the game fun for them wont even play the game. Due to this halo 4 felt like it was copying cod not only because most of the testers expected halo to play like a generic FPS but also because the new dev team 343 had no idea on what they were doing. I mean sure a lot of the stuff made was high quality. Tracks like mantis, 117 and never forget midnight are my favorites but there just not halo music. Chiefs armor and the Prometheans look so cool but it doesn't look like halo. I also haven't enjoyed the trend of killing off the halo 3 art style and changing everything to be practical. It made no sense. But we haven't seen halo 3 style stuff in a while in terms of the vehicle and weapon design. It would have made more sense for the storm covenant to have halo 3 vehicles not reach ones. Despite all of this I really have enjoyed halo 4, I still like reach and 3 better. But I feel there's alot of potential that went to waste but fret not if 343 hasn't forget about MCC we modders can fix halo 4 to give it the potential it could have had. Give the proper art style. make the prothethans fun to fight. Add back duel wielding, fix the AI and other campaign problems. even though there was missed potential it doesn't mean it should be thrown away. Hopefully in a few years some modders can make better campaign versions to give halo fans who didn't like halo 4. The halo 4 they wanted. well that's my take on it atleast. Sorry if the grammar is bad. I didn't sleep all day and I don't want to miss the chance to talk about halo 4 here.
@Bob Duckington they didn’t drop that dialogue. You hear Cortana reference during one of her rampancy moments. I believe on Reclaimer mission. “They don’t care about you, they replaced you” Either way, the games writing is amateur hour contrived garbage
according to a friend who worked microsoft at the time of halo 4's development time there was A LOT of animosity to Bungie 343 leads had a culture of "fk you it's OUR game now!" and it really shows in the final product with how much they worked to try and change everything they could about the game Long consistent things like even down to the art style and sound design of many iconic weapons vehicles and characters. Everything had to be changed so they could plant their boot down that this franchise belongs to 343 and microsoft now And the franchise hasn't been able to recover ever since. Halo was the warning bell of things to come with star wars, lord of the rings, witch and other beloved franchises being claimed by new owners who don't care for their legacy, only to make it theirs
I disliked Halo 4 so much that I never bought another xbox or even tried to play Halo 5.
Lolol it's me
I got a PlayStation 4 around the time that halo 5 came out, so I suppose I didn’t miss too much 😅
Same
yup killed the franchise
i never even played it even as a huge halo fan my favorite game growing up
The forerunners didn’t need to be “revealed” at all. Spark pretty clearly spells out in Halo CE that the forerunners are ancient humans. That’s why during the Library mission he keeps referring to ‘last time’ and ‘you’ and then of course the big one “You are forerunner.” The cut Halo 2 ending only confirmed what people who actually played CE already knew for an absolute fact.
Yeah, I used to really like the idea that The Covenant had been attacking the very same ones they revered.
I even hoped for a big reveal to the Covenant Public or something at some point.
But when they said "Haha, naahhh, you're not Forerunner!"
That hit me like a shot to the stomach.
Sometimes I feel like 343 just never read the room.
Or that they read the room, then promptly decided to aim for the groin of every Halo Fan and say "We ARE Halo Now!"
(Mr Nobody cracking The Chief's Visor in Guardians comes to mind.)
@@AT78146 and it makes sense for the prophets to target humans since they are the inheritors of the forunners, making THEM the prophets.
And Truth calls them our "Forefathers." Conclusion, 343 is not canon. Fuck the forerunner/human split, fuck Cortana and the Domain and turning evil, FUCK the Endless....
Except Atriox, and the Didact. They can stay.....they can stay.
Forerunners we're not ancient humans? They we're seperate species and even had a war
@@Weberkooks no they didnt, its a bunch of BS garbage 343 came up with, that makes no sense. i dont care how much stupid lore they come up with, forunners are human, simple as that.
I love how right away Chief says "these covenant seem more radical" Cortana just says "a lot can change in 4 years" and that's the whole explanation
who's cortans?
@@biinerfiiner someone I made up in my mind
A few years ago I bought Halo 4 to see what the Halo franchise was about , I was bored and didn't touch Halo for a few years after that experience.
But in this week I checked out the Master Chief collection and gave halo another chance , first CE, then Halo 2 and finally Halo 3.
I am loving it and I am glad that I gave halo another chance.
@@daegnaxqelil2733 I think they were trying to point out that the game never really gets into why the Covenant turn on you. Yes Cortana gets *a* point across about how it's been 4 years. That still leaves the problem of how they never provide sufficient motivation for them turning on the UNSC. The game never touches this again. We're just supposed to accept that Covenant bad now, again.
@@tyranttitanium5721 it was yet obvious thazt they're different covenants now
Never liked that melodramatic B-plot and the retcon with AI rampancy.
Best thing about h4 was thiccortana.
and narrative story i guess
@@centurymemes1208 not really, they had a great concept but they executed it poorly
@@freshdib8505 they fleshed out chief and cortana and with a kickass endig cutscene
@@centurymemes1208 no they didn’t. Dialogue was slow, drawn out, and boring. The other characters were uninteresting and the Diadact story was a mess
@@backchat7126 dialogue was slow what?? thats the point of fleshing them out? what you want one liners again?
The sprint was invented just so you could run back 4 miles to get weapons from racks. To balance this they made the wepons despawn in 2 seconds and the clips to hold 4 bullets.
that is a nice joke. or a terrible game balance decision. personally the sprint was a good thing, that was annoying to walk in big maps in the other games
@@daegnaxqelil2733 hmm yea in other games it's fine. But in halo4 especially I noticed how quickly weapons despawned and their magazines had so little ammo not to mention the bullet sponge enemies. I would constantly have to run back and collect ammo from racks.
@@lalitendudas9401 the balance about weapons spawning isn't necessary at all, and so it's easy to resume things in bad faith
*Magazines
Spartans should be able to sprint in game anyway.. They're supersoldiers.
Forerunner weapons:
Halo 2-3: Sentinel beam, certainly feels alien and plus, you're clearly holding it wrong, it's not made to be held like that.
Halo 4: Here's a shotgun, but it's, like, yellow.
Forerunner Architecture:
Halo CE-Halo 3: Strange rooms and corridors that hold purpose beyond your understanding, grand yet utilitarian.
Halo 4: A bunch of generic floaty Sci-fi crap made to look cool.
@@weilandloveland But it looks cool
@@weilandloveland well put
oh come on, the H4 forerunner weapons were all awesome apart from the Suppressor. it was quite literally just yellow Assault Rifle. every other forerunner gun had a unique quirk, alternate firing mode or was just ridiculously overpowered (which was fun)
@@uzikage. I won't argue that much, I just wish they looked a bit more "forerunner'y" y'know?
The fact that Chief doesn't straight up asks the elites "Hey, before I went to sleep, we were fighting together against the prophets, what happened?! Guys, like, I really want to speak with the Arbiter, this isn't funny!"
he saw them fighting on high charity, and if jhonson says theyre on their side thats good enough for chief
Something you missed is how absurdly fast weapons despawn in this game. It makes Spartan Ops a nightmare to play through on Legendary since all the weapons you drop will have disappeared by the time you get back to them. If I had to guess, it probably has something to do with freeing up as much memory as possible for the engine to run properly.
Edit: Apparently he did mention it. Oops.
Yeah, halo 4 was a graphic marvel for its time and as a 360 exclusive but many of the comprises that were needed to achieve that level of visual fidelity are pretty apparent. The restricted and often very linear level design through most of the campaign, the lack of interactable environment pieces (like the foliage example made in the video), and the rapid despawn of dropped weapons and equipment in both campaign and multiplayer are pretty obviously the result of 343 pinching as many pennies as they could on the 360’s very limited resource pool. It’s annoying though that the weapon despawn wasn’t later addressed in MCC as the Xbox one/series and modern PCs all have more than enough resources for the weapons to remain at least as long as they do in older entries.
He mentioned the despawns. But it bears repeating lol
It doesn’t make it a nightmare, it makes it a slog. Spartan ops basically has infinite lives and no checkpoint system, so failure just turns it into a chore.
@Tattletale Grapist No I think you will find that something you missed was him mentioning the very point you say he missed. Either you didn't watch all the video or you didn't pay much attention to it if you did watch....
Infinite has the same way too fast despawns... it's so fucking annoying
Actually, Halo 4s whole reason for having the Covenant is a MASSIVE plothole that's owed to Frank Oconnor not actually remembering how Halo 3 ended. Halo 3 ends with Humanity and Sangheili banding together to first defeat the Covenant to prevent them from firing the Halo Array, and then they defeat the flood by firing the replacement Halo ring.
Frank O'Connor - deadass - thinks Halo 3 ended with Humanity striking up a truce with the WHOLE Covenant and then defeating the flood before going their seperate ways. This is why I fucking h a t e that Frank O'Connor was put in charge. He has no fcking memory and is so careless that he accidentally retconned the entire ending of Halo 3. That's why that one Animation depicted the entire Covenant teaming up with humanity on earth to defeat the flood, and its also why Cortana and Chief refer to the Storm Covenant as just "The Covenant".
Its why Master Chief says "I thought we had a truce with the Covenant". Hes not referring to the elites nor is he referring to the covenant as though there was a ceasefire after Halo 3. Master Chief is referring to a false history where Humanity and the ENTIRE Covenant teamed up to beat the flood and then peacefully went their seperate ways, and the Storm are just an Elite lead break off of the official Covenant. Fronk LITTERALLY just couldn't be fucking bothered to even know what the hell happened in the game franchise HE WAS IN CHARGE OF. Bungie was so pissed off at how fcking dumb and careless Frank was with Halos lore that they not only named the Whale in that multiplayer map "Fronk" but also the map randomly generates messages/insults directed a Frank, like "Nice going, Fronk" or "SUCK IT FRONK!"
This. I wouldn’t mind the Covernant still existing if the Sanshuyum (Prophets) replaced the Elites in gameplay. Besides they were known to be as proficient as the Elites in combat, albeit more agile. It would be a lot cooler if we finally fought them as actual combat units instead of a bunch of old men sitting on a floating chair.
Is that animation you're referring too from halo legends? Called origins 2?
Exactly!
Jesus Christ, I knew he was bad, but my god... What the fuck?!
@@tanodz7635 So next time you watch Halo Legends and get to the part where the covenant and humanity team up and sit there confused and dumbfounded, give Fronk a little chefs kiss 💋
I remember as a kid, seeing it for the first time blew me away. Cause graphically, it was an improvement to prior games. But as I get older, I realise that the art direction is a lot busier than it needs to be. Especially with colours making it harder to see enemies
improvement to the prior games? ... lol is that why its the least played on the MCC
@@davidmitchell1843 I don’t even agree with that. Halo 3 graphically still holds up fantastically, excluding character models. Lighting is great, nice reflections and surfaces, colors are rich and vibrant. That plus the gorgeous artstyle make the game hold up visually to this day. Halo 4 on the other hand? Looks exactly like any other generic space fps that came out around 2010-2013. It looks dated.
@@davidmitchell1843 sure bud. H4 totally is the Best looking Halo X,D, if you wanna think that, thats cool... but just saying. its not true lol
@@davidmitchell1843 oh because "sure budd" is true genius. . my goodness, alert the grammar police plz. lol love the classic "ignore the argument. you're stupid." cant substantiate, so you attack opposition .. why would you take anything serious. you think H4 is the best looking ...clearly you're a joke X,D
@@RainCloudVideos okay. So firstly art direction and graphics are not the same thing, but do relate to each other.
So what you said about halo 3 makes perfect sense. But the part about halo 4 makes no sense. Something can't look graphically look sci fi. It can stylistically look sci fi. But I get what you mean. It's a very common mistake that 99% of people make.
And sorry if I might seem snarky. I'm want to clarify the difference
The terminals weren't the only part of Halo 3 that revealed anything about the Forerunners. The terminals themselves were rather vague, but the main campaign literally reveals to the player that Humans are the Forerunners, something built up the whole series and finally answered.
Bungie DID answer who the Forerunners were. But that doesn't mean we get to/have to learn every in and out of the Forerunners. They're us, but they're still completely unknown about them. The Forerunners only matter to the story as much as they matter to Humanity themselves. Why can Humans use this technology? Because they're Forerunners. Why does the Gravemind hate Humanity? Because they're the Forerunners who killed him. Why do the Covenant want Humanity dead? Because them being the Forerunners proves their religion false, so they've gotta go. We don't need to know where the Forerunners go to the bathroom or where they get fast food.
Bungie as a company also confirmed that the Forerunners were human. Frank O'Connor just couldn't stand that the story wouldn't bend to his massive ego. He wanted the Forerunners to be aliens so he screwed around with the Terminals he wrote and with the Iris Campaign. Which is also why the things he worked on contradicts all other evidence in the series, including Halo 3. Forerunner fanboys who want them to be aliens just focus on one Terminal that Frank wrote vaguely mentioning the Librarian finding some special species somewhere as "proof" that humans and Forerunners are separate. Completely ignoring the mountains of evidence against that throughout all the games and what Bungie itself stated. Heck, even with Guilty Spark at the end of Halo 3, yes he is rampant, but he clearly explains the relationship of humanity to the Forerunners. Which means his rampancy obviously is not why he calls the Master Chief a Forerunner. He merely mistakes _which_ Forerunner the Chief is. Besides, let's face it, a Forerunner AI *_cannot_* mistake a different species as his creators. No matter how rampant.
That B-plot is definitely what carries it for me. Most of the stuff surrounding the Forerunners and Didact however, are a bit undercooked. It's a massive shame the Didact was so underutilised as I think he could've made for an excellent recurring villain if given the chance. He's a bit like the Darth Maul of the Halo Universe. He's just there to look cool and then he's one and done.
At least Maul wasn’t as focused on as the main threat and him killing Qui-Gon was a major event that lead to Anakin’s eventual fall
Chief would never be emotional like in halo 4
@@boombirdking2118 actually the ads back in the day before the movie came out did hype him up as more that just being sliced in two in basically his first scene
Agreed
Darth Maul was never "one and done" . He actually survived and reapeared several times during and after the Clone Wars
Remember when Guilty Spark told MC "You ARE Forerunner"? Fuck this retcon. You gave this story WAY too much credit than it ever deserves.
Aight but let's be real the forerunner was an ancient civilization. Master Chief was def not part of that. Guilty spark also mentioned how he and Master Chief activated a halo "last time" even tho they hadn't met until halo CE. The whole "humanity were devolved form of forerunners" theory was retconned by bungie in halo3 anyways
No it was not retconned in Halo 3, aside from about 5 of the shittily written terminals (written by Frank O’Connor by the way) that implied humans and forerunners may have at the very least existed in separate parts of the galaxy. Librarian refers to the supposed discovery of humans as “them”, and seems to think of the event as some kind of anomaly. The terminals are unclear and very cryptic anyways. Not sure how the didact and librarian terminals made the Final Cut of the game. Regardless, you would have to then ignore everything said throughout the game by truth when he refers to forerunners as our forefathers before telling Johnson these secrets die with the rest. Gravemind calls chief the child of his enemy, telling him a fathers sins pass to his sons, and finally guilty spark actually tells the audience we are forerunner, why the fuck else would humans be called reclaimers for the entirety of the OT. Halo 4 is absolute dog shit and quite frankly doesn’t get enough criticism for how badly it absolutely defiled Bungies story. The character stuff doesent even work either, rampancy is completely misrepresented as well. It is not AI schizophrenia that makes the construct insane and hyper emotional, it simply makes them more self aware and independent as seen through the mendicant bias terminals in halo 3. Additionally, the world building is just fucked, the UNSC can just shit out Spartans as they continue to fight “the covenant” who according to Frankie we had a truce with prior to the events of halo 4?
Chief: “I thought we had a truce with the covenant.”
Why the hell would he ever say that? No one ever would have referred to the alliance with the elites as the “covenant”, but then you watch Halo Legends, the opening in particular, also written by Frankie, and you realize he has his very own interpretation of the events of the original trilogy. What an insult to Halo, and many fans continue to celebrate Halo 4 cause it’s not so bad compared to Halo 5 as if that wasn’t a direct result of 4.
@@dankim7831It was a different team that worked on the terminals and a single advertisement campaign that got confused and did their own thing. Frank O’Connor was part of that team so when he was given control they went with what he helped make.
There is far more evidence before and after halo 3 that suggests humans are far closer to the forerunners than we might know. Like the scene from halo CE between Guilty Spark and Chief that you elude to. One could assume that an armored human looks extremely similar to an armored forerunner which is why Spark who was alone for 100000 years was confused. No other species in the games look like humanity so you could assume there is a connection by Sparks confusion.
@@dankim7831 A species is not a civilization. They are not the same. Don't be ridiculous. Guilty Spark mistook the Chief for a specific Forerunner. However, not only is thinking a Forerunner AI misidentified someone as a member of his creator species ridiculous, but Guilty Spark says a lot more than just "You are Forerunner". He outright explains the relationship of humanity to the Forerunners in that same scene. "The whole "humanity were devolved form of forerunners" theory was retconned by bungie in halo3 anyways" There is literally nothing in Halo 3 that retcons the Forerunners to not be human and I have no idea why you think otherwise. It's a strange, common fanon nonsense idea from 343i fanboys and for people who want Forerunners to be alien and so just outright lie about the lore before Halo 4. Even Frank O'Connor's terminals and advertisement campaign didn't flat-out say or imply Forerunners and humans are separate species. Just put its foot in the door of the idea. Which also contradicted all the _other_ Terminals and all the other lore within Halo 3 and the entire Halo series.
@@rovert881 They weren't confused. Also, only some of the Terminals followed Frank's beliefs (the ones written by him and I think one other person). Frank and the few people who agreed with him were basically their own cabal within Bungie and were at odds with the rest of the company. They forced their ideas into the game against the company's wishes. Also, a Forerunner AI isn't going to be fooled by what someone's armor looks like. That's dumb. It was simply that he recognized a member of his makers' species and misidentified which specific person it was. Which could be anything from there being a limited number of DNA combinations and the Chief's just happened to match that guy's or corruption in Guilty Spark or that Guilty Spark was talking to himself when referring to the previous firing and was not talking to the Master Chief at all.
The point about the Precursors is critical. It's exactly as you say: they are "the ones who came before the ones who came before." I could imagine something like that as part of a comedy skit.
The point about the architecture being too busy was also spot on. The old brutalist architecture was important to the feel of the game and said something about the Forerunners. Changing it totally confuses who they were. Plus, the extrusions, protrusions, tracing, and lighting of the new architecture were really distracting.
it’s literally bad fan faction. “and then that’s when we reveal an even ancienter, more advanced civilization” 🤓 also yeah the forerunner architecture f-ing sucks. it’s like tron meets michael bay’s transformers. shit hurts my eyes…
"It makes no sense for the forerunners to call themselves that" Yes! Seriously thats bothered me ever since Halo 4 came out. It makes way more sense as a title they where given posthumously. Tho personally I still much prefer the original idea that they were humans pre Halo 3. Imo it gives a much better explanation as to why humans can use their technology. Halo 4 established humans and forerunners fought a huge war, wouldnt giving humans the ability to use their technology be the last thing theyd want to do. "Oh, I see you are trying to kill us, here have all our super advanced stuff." ... Yeah ok then. It also makes Guilty Spark referring to humans as "reclaimers" make more sense. If at some point in the past something wasnt yours, you cant re-claim it. "The Takers" would be a much more fitting moniker.
Hinting at but not fully revealing that the forerunners were human was definitely more interesting, so I’m not really sure why they decided to change it. I’m really exhausted on how fictional universes answer too many questions and over correct plot holes. Just something I’ve noticed that saps my interest in franchises such as Star Wars and Halo.
@@anthonyjossis1426 bro ill never forget how fucking cool it was discovering the Ark on earth, or how the covenant revered the planet. Forerunners were ancient humans...and the reveal blew me the fuck away. The thing with Halo 4 is, EVERYONE was hype for it. No one cared that bungie wasnt in charge, because the stor was established. We just wanted more shooties. Then 343 literally said "We want to make Halo ours." and by that, they changed everything. I still remember booting it up and fighting my first Knight or whatever. It was jarring as all FUCK. The art design was atrocious (not bad at all, really, just not what im accustomed to for halo.) and way too messy. Halo trilogy had a simple art style that kept you focused on what needs to be focused on during a fight. They had intentional game design. 343 just went "Hurr Durr my halo now, i put my mark on it!" and changed literally everything, even the fucking established canon! iirc, chief is now the "Chosen One" and all that shit, when before, it was all of humanity were the "chosen" because we were the forerunners and the covenant cant utilize the technology without us. Like how bad ass would it be to have Sgt. Johnson flanked by a shit ton of marines and Sentinels as they push forward? I reallllly dislike 343 as a company. and this video shed some light, i didnt know they specifically hired people who had no clue about halo. That leaves such a bad taste in my mouth.
It's worse than that. Frank and 343s retcon makes the covenant correct in the original trilogy. Humans are interlopers in 343s Canon. Which is evidence enough as to why it should all be put in the bin.
@@brianmckee2267 Yeah they literally retroactively justify the whole attempted genocide of humanity by the Covenant with the new lore. Not to mention they retcon Joe Staten's 'Contact Harvest' since that establishes that the three Prophets you meet in 2 are responsible for declaring war on Humanity since they actually found out the truth that the Forerunners were human (or connected to them somehow) and thus ruined their entire religion.
And THAT was actually a good plot twist and makes the whole conflict in the franchise seem more profound - the whole idea that the Covenant could have been unknowingly killing their gods or their gods' chosen inheritors.
Nah, I never liked the idea they were ancient humans. When you’re big on history and anthropology, it absolutely wrecks your suspension of disbelief. I like the idea of inheritance that Halo 3 introduces, and reach implies with the rank “inheritor.”
What I don’t like. Is that Halo 4 basically did both. Humans and forerunners are separate, but also ancient humans were already a space faring civilization. Like, fuck off. That shit is actually worse than the original idea.
The dumbest thing Halo 4's story is that they couldn't just write that it was MC's armor that protects him from the composer. Instead of using space magic to 1UP his HUMAN "evolution" granting him the immunity.
Ngl I never really paid attention to all the exposition from the librarian back in the day so I always just assumed it was his armor that protected him until I replayed it a couple of years ago
Nah. That ain’t the dumbest thing. The dumbest thing is when he detonates a nuke at point blank range with his hands and he gets Deus Ex Machina’d by a literal form of Machine life. In past games, Master Chief’s plot armor was much more organic and played off as him just getting fucking lucky. In Halo 4, it all relies on pure bullshit. Like, Didact could have killed multiple times with ease and just….doesn’t. Because reasons
@@Fuk99999 Out of all the issues I have with H4, this is the biggest. The villain who would rather exposit than actually kill his enemy.
@@kodredcud See, the crazy thing is…it wouldn’t be inherently bad if it was something that would be in his character. Like Joker in BTAS refusing to unmask Batman at multiple points only works because the Joker is insane and derives enjoyment from the mystery. Didact just has no reason for doing this multiple times. Like the second he realizes the Chief actually has survived everything else thrown at him, he should have made it a point to kill him. He’s many thousands of years old and survived war against the flood, but apparently he’s too stupid to eliminate any potential threat to his plans. Didact isn’t insane, he’s wildly stupid
@@Fuk99999 Y'know....I keep forgetting how moronic that nuke scene is. All thanks to idiocy of:
digivolving the Master Cheif with space magic through a prerecorded message so that he won't be a digital monster by the Didact's digivise.
I remember having a LAN parties the weekend after 4 came out with friends and we only played for about a day and then went back to 3 and reach. Everyone was at least somewhat disappointed with it, but it was still a great memory.
For me, easily the worst thing about this game, is that they raped the lore. Like you say, the greg bear stuff is basically like a different world altogether. In direct contradiction to everything we've been told before. And even when they stepped away from the failed story of Halo 5, they persist in using this cursed continuity. I can't even bring myself to play Halo Infinity as long as that's the case. I can't bring myself to care about a world that isn't Halo anymore.
I don't agree that mysteries shouldn't be revealed. The story of Halo 2 was always meant as THE ending, Halo was never a franchise for open ended story telling full of mystery boxes. It was never a franchise. The only reason the ending was cut was for a dire lack of development time, and Microsoft simply used that to squeeze as much money as they could out of the open ending it left. We're still suffering from that mistake.
The B-plot already was to a large extend done in Halo 2 as well, in Halo 4 it just has a lot more expository dialogue so that smooth brains can pick up on it. Frankly I find it childish. A key part of Chief's character, what little he has, is his stoicism. Halo 4 makes him very emotional and talkative, which I'm sure is great for an actor or a writer, but again feels like an entirely different character who lacks the heroic qualities of the real master chief.
I don't get why he heaps love on Greg Bear's Promethean trilogy, I tried reading them back in the day and they were totally awful, some of the worst books I've ever read, they ruined the lore surrounding the Forerunners; and I can't stand Greg Bear's writing style. The second one was the worst, listening to a glorified cave-man trying to describe complex Forerunner technology and landscapes in detail makes me want to take a drill to my brain.
I'm actually glad we got H3 and Reach, the former gave us a pretty solid ending that we didn't get in H2 and the latter gave us a look at the misery and near-total hopelessness of fighting at the peak of the Human-Covenant War. I just wish the series ended with these. (Which it did, in my headcannon)
Personally, I don't think all mysteries should be revealed, not every mystery is a mystery box. I think it would've been better if they left it at only hinting that the Forerunners are related to Mankind and left it at that. We don't need to know for sure; people demanding answers to mysteries are how we get terrible films like the Prometheus prequels that give an unnecessary backstory to the Space Jockies in Alien.
@@alaskamark4562 I would say Halo 3 is a big mess compared to the slick ending Halo 2 would have gotten. The terminals still add a lot of depth to the story but the actual story is just a mess.
I think that the reason why 343i's games were so polarizing is because they are a contractor company where directors come and go. Employees are highered for their experience with whatever they do best, their understanding of Halo isn't any of their concerns. This goes with many other AAA games, large amounts of people with conflicting ideas that rarely go well. Halo infinite does alot of things well, but I'm also seeing fans conflicted with what works and what doesn't in that game.
What I hated most of Halo 4 was the sandbox...the Promethean weapons were either ass or copies from other guns....fan favorites were tossed in the garbage can and the weapons that did return were re-skinned horribly (same about the vehicles). Stuff like the art style didn't bother me much at all because I was a kid back then and the graphics looked good but when Halo 5 doubled down on that style I began to hate it.
You’ll notice all the promethean weapons that aren’t ass are usually the copies. The light rifle is a better BR. Why? Because it’s a BR unscoped, and a semi slower but stronger carbine when scoped. The scattershot is a shotgun with a higher range and lower spread, so it functions a little better than the shotgun. The boltshot is a hard ping weapon at mid range and a shotgun at close range. The binary rifle is just the beam rifle without a cooldown, but it’s slightly worse because beam rifle can space its shots to push out an extra shot where the binary rifle is default 2 shots and reload. It also has a trail when scoping, so people know where you are and that you’re aiming at them before you even fire a lot of the time. The incinerator is a slow rocket launcher at best and an RNG splash cannon at worst. Compare that to…the suppressor which is the worst gun in the game in both campaign and multiplayer
@@Fuk99999 The Suppressor is basically an SMG. Higher capacity, high rate of fire, low accuracy. I’ve found one corner case use of blasting Promethian Knights. It’s like the Halo 3 Plasma Rifle being a good anti-Flood except in both cases, the Needler works better on the big ones and it can’t headshot so the smaller ones are better handled by headshot weapons. It sadly doesn’t have anything it’s best at.
The boltshot and suppressor were horrible weapons in H4 and I hated them. I did like them in H5 though as they were much improved
@@Afluffycookie117 In 4’s multiplayer the Boltshot was broken for being a starter weapon. Too broken.
I like the halo infinite forerunner weapons better
Its truly sad how much loadouts screw over halo 4's multiplayer ( for me at least). Seriously, halo 4 with equal starts is actually alot of fun. Especially since most weapons ( barring the suppressor and pulse grenade) are actually viable, many redundant, but still viable. Like the AR isn't a peashooter like it was in 3 or reach, or how the magnum was good but didn't make other precision weapons obsolete like in 5, I could go on but you get my point. I just think halo 4's sandbox is underrated, but is held back soo much by the loadout system.
I also think the maps aren't that bad honestly. There are some gems in there, man I'm telling you, but maybe thats just me enjoying some variety after playing the same halo 3 maps on loop in MCC forever.
Agreed, i actually had a ton of fun with Halo 4 multiplayer for a couple weeks, the fundamentals and the simple, memorable, maps were great. However the reason i played other Halo titles far more was that the multiplayer had these odd decisions that didn't feel right. The obvious problem with unbalanced starter weapons and loadout perks/abilities, the weird care package things that didn't always benefit you and for me an overall problem that can best be summed up with the Saw. It was a power weapon but it both was and wasn't good enough to be one, it was an guaranteed win with a 1v1 but it couldn't instantly defeat enemies so you were likely to lose 2v1 plus, there were other things like that but basically it was anything new they had tried to add.
I would’ve liked the game better if characters designs stayed the same until you boarded the infinity,and if you were able to hold more ammo in campaign because in campaign it’s almost impossible to finish a mission with the two guns you started with
I can understand them not using the old designs for the guns/armor for the first part of the game coz itd take up resources. But I do think the covenant should have pretended to play nice up until you released the Didact.
The beginning of the video was basically me.
I spent 2 weeks with Halo 4 before re-selling it used. During the first 2-3 days as I played through the campaign and multiplayer I was utterly confused with the experience, and what I was feeling.
The first day I played through the campaign on Normal mode to take in the story. Day 2 I played through it on Legendary for the story again, because I was utterly confused as to what happen and for achievements. On the 3rd day I played multiplayer for the first time with my friend.
The vast majority of our discussions was us trying to understand the story and debating the mass amount of changes. These discussions of the story would carry on over a few days as we figured it out thanks to explanation videos on YT. My view on the story still is that's it's a clusterfuck of too much information. It also broke style abruptly without trying to ease into the new style changes. This made the B-plot very hard for me to get into, and even feel for the MC and Cortana as I had in previous games, since they seemed foreign and not the characters I had grown to know.
Now I understand it's impossible to keep the same style when changing developers, but to drastically and abruptly change the style without attempting to ease into the transition fell flat with me.
Sure MC has been asleep for years and is awoken to threat, and Cortana is far along into her rampancy, but they start right out of the gates having very different personalities than they ever had before.
If they wanted to make the chief open up more and develop more personality traits that's fine, but you need to ease yourself into something like that for it to feel even remotely well done.
The combat wasn't nearly as fun as it used to be in previous games.
As you also shared the game promotes gameplay as a cover shooter on anything above normal mode. This was a horrible change from pervious style which allowed the player to preform what would feel like a passionate dance as you made your way through the enemies. It could all flow together to feel just oh so right that it's still to be rivaled by nothing else.
I also disliked the new weapons and share basically the exact same sentiment so I won't further elaborate on that.
I could probably add more about the campaign but for now I will leave it here.
Now regarding the Multiplayer...
The multiplayer for me is a larger part of Halo games than the story, with me usually spending hundreds-thousands of hours enjoying them. I do enjoy the stories thoroughly, and consider the Bungie Halo's my favourite video game series. However the community aspects is what has me truly addicted and coming back oh so many years later.
I first got heavily into Halo MP with Halo 3 & Halo: Reach. Both of these games stayed true to Halo's fundamentals of fair starts & fair maps.
This aspect along with a longer TTK and an epic sandbox had me hooked shortly after diving in, and virtually abandoning Call of Duty & Battlefield happily for this much more exhilarating and mentally challenging experience. Learning the intricacies of the sandbox naturally as I played against and with others was amazing, and drove my passion to become a better player and learn the games in depth.
Call of Duty experience such as learning probable enemy spawn location and positioning carried over easily, but that was mainly it, and learning all these new weapons and their cool unique effects they can have within this sandbox intrigued me like no games have to date.
I was falling in love with Halo for it's unique experience, epic sandbox, learning a new and high skill ceiling, and community.
This was back in the days when everyone was still in game chat talking to anyone in the lobby they choose to. I met so many great people over the years through in-game chats, sharing many hours, laughs and good times together. There was also the negative side with toxic people, but coming from CoD this was nothing new.
After around the first week mark of playing Halo 4 these feelings became more and more clear as I was reflecting on my older experiences with Halo 3 & Reach.
Before I continue though, I have to state that I started out hating Halo: Reach for being too different from Halo 3. This went on for a short period of time but I came to enjoy the game for what it was, a Halo spin off. Once I realized this hopefully wasn't going to be the future direction the mainline Halo titles would follow, I became less angry at the choices and saw them for what they really were. Halo: Reach was meant to change up the formula just enough to feel different while still having that Halo feel. It gave Halo a new experience without jeopardizing the integrity of the mainline series formula.
Now we come back to Halo 4's MP. This is the next game in the mainline series, which many players having been waiting for, an assumed to be return to form after Halo: Reach & ODST's drought.
To the majority of the communities surprise we didn't get a Halo game true to the trilogies form, but instead something much further away than people who despised Reach could have ever dreamed of possible.
Halo 4 feels like I'm playing Call of Duty more than it feels like I'm playing Halo, one of the major reasons I started playing and loving these games in the first place was for the unique experience.
Now some people might think this is petty or a stretch. However when you take an outside perspective look you quickly come to realize that 343 did indeed copy unique features from Call of Duty to appeal to their larger community in hopes of obtaining some of it.
Even after grasping this more and more fully I must have been in denial, I pushed on through the rage for another week lying to myself saying it's not that bad. In reality though it really was that bad and a week later I would finally snap and quit for the last time.
I went back to Halo Reach & 3 and that rage was gone, I was enjoying Halo again, I was playing Halo again, not some wannabe game with a Halo shell.
Halo was no longer a unique experience, but instead simply tried to copy the dominant competitions unique aspects in hopes some of that success would rub off.
Bungie's Halo's used to be about making it's own experience, that was unique and fun enough to want to be played over other similar alternatives. They also we're challenging, as you had to teach yourself if you wanted to learn more about the games.
343's Halo's are about trying to keep up with and copy modern trends instead of setting them by making an unrivaled experience. They also made these games less challenging and way more casual based, as you no longer have to teach yourself about things as it's already done for you (weapons spawn locations and timers visible, promethean vison, thruster), much stronger Aim Assist, and RNG killstreak rewards for doing anything and so on.
My most disliked thing about it, and about a lot of games is that it does a lot, but nothing well. The game has a lot of weapons, but half of them blend together. The campaign I believe has a good idea of a story but is executed poorly and the campaign is far too short for the type of story it’s trying to tell. I’ve never hated halo 4 but I’d be lying if I said I wanted to go out of my way to play it
I did hate it for all of these reasons. By the 3/4 point in the campaign I had to force myself to finish it. I replayed it when it released on PC recently, just to see if my opinion could change. No such luck.
I heard that Microsoft sort of rushed 343 with Halo 4. In fact, Halo 4 was going to be an Xbox One launch title but Microsoft told them to put it on Xbox 360.
@@TheGoldNShadow Microsoft seem to have a habit of doing that, if the rumours are true they forced Halo 5 to pretty much restart development halfway through which is why that game launched in a bad state too
You mentioned the Cortana B-plot was a redeeming factor. That plot line is THE thing I dislike the most about this game. People assume Chief was this robotic loner killing machine because he has a dark back story, but that was never true. Chief was trained to be psychologically resilient, not some Jedi who swore off feeling any emotion at all to become a powerhouse master of war. His actions spoke volumes about his character.
The Master Chief had friends. They just died. He didn't have to cry about his back story to his friends Johnson and Miranda to be close to them, like he did with Laskey (Laskey was the only thing I didn't hate about Halo 4). Chief enjoyed their company as much as he enjoyed being a badass. Chief befriended the Arbiter because he was such a headstrong individual, not because he was any kind of brainwashed zombie drone who could relate to Arby being brainwashed by his own kind to be effective in war.
And Chief showed how dedicated he could be to his own humanity by striving to rescue Cortana, someone whose value as a sentient was only called into question by the creature holding her hostage, and Chief - trained in human psychology as a part of his backstory, more than aware of human weakness, at least in a historical sense, if his oftentimes tender-hearted devotion to his friends didn't make much more than that out to be apparent - didn't even entertain Cortana's own despair at the thought of not being considered equal to her human counter part, as he immediately expressed that he took her sentience very seriously and that their friendship was untarnished when he rescued her. That cost the lives of his other two friends, who clearly shared this sentiment. "Don't ever let her go." Neither of them monologue about these themes, they're just present as the context that fuels the player's investment in the validity of their emotional connection, as a human and a computer program. In Halo 3 these themes are executed with classy authenticity, taken as self-evident, no need to explain these feelings or values at length like Halo 4's hack pretentious dialogue does. Instead the characters just act as though they never intend to question it. Halo 4's narrative just drops to the lowest hanging fruit straight off the bat.
So the very idea that Chief has ever just been a soulless killer robot man who needs orders to avoid existential despair just baffles me. Where did people get that idea? Was it because so much of that characterization was handled delicately and presented as subtext? Because Joe Staten one time said Chief was meant to be a husk? The guy whose body language so effectively expressed a sense of loss at seeing Miranda lifeless in Johnson's arms... the kind of faceless physical expression of emotion so many people praise to high heaven in things like The Mandalorian. The guy who emotionally clasps his hand around Cortana's chip when Johnson passed, as if he were clinging to his last connection to his dead friends, his last friend. Seeing Chief robotically loading his weapon while Cortana mused about "which one of us is the machine" was one of the biggest insults to my investment in anything fictional, right alongside Luke Skywalker raising his lightsaber to strike his sleeping nephew. The entirety of Halo 3 being a rescue mission to save Cortana at the cost of lives of beloved characters was based on Chief's extraordinary humanity, she wouldn't dare question that. With that one scene, Halo 4's story spat in the face of everything Halo 3's story was about, and pretended it was the more nuanced and sophisticated of the two. Hell no it isn't.
You didn't mention how stupid it was that Cortana spawned clones of herself from a hard light bridge, which each leapt through the air to restrain Satan the Grinch, before forming a hardlight room around Chief, in which she could materialize to touch his man pectoral from outside his armor and emotionally sigh about how she wanted to do that for so long, immediately after Chief detonates a nuke in his own face. Such cheap, emotionally manipulative, classless, fetishistic, tone deaf, lazy, absurdist hogwash, with no regard for what came before whatsoever, only a mild awareness of a fan fiction stereotype dynamic to exploit in hope for easy glory, complete with a self-congratulatory acceptance speech letter tacked on to the end. And it worked on so many fans of the series. I hate it more than I hate anything in Halo 5. Halo 4 is bereft of quality as far as I'm concerned. It did everything wrong that could possibly be done.
As mid, 7/10 a story as Infinite had, I can't express how satisfying it is to have the real Master Chief back, concerned for the lives of his fellow Spartans and marines and showing plenty of humanity. I'm so glad they used Weapon to address the bs Halo 4 dropped on Chief's character. His emotional maturity is well past what most marines are capable of, and painting that as robotic callousness in the eyes of the immature and naive Weapon almost adopts Halo 4's disrespectful and ignorant assumptions into a valid perspective of his maturity from the eyes of the Weapon's intellectual infancy... if only it could apply to the impossibly vast gap between the Halo 3 and 4 iterations of Cortana.
I made a rant wall. Sorry. I'm a big angry boy. Ten years later, still.
Couldn't agree more. There's some weird revisionist discourse nowadays where people like to say "Halo 4's campaign was unique bc it was ~emotional and it hUmAnIzEd Master Chief", which kills me inside. It only had a semblance of novelty because of it's initial "shock factor" which is totally incongruent to an important factor of what made the Halo narrative as compelling as it was: the immersion from having a silent (but *not* unfeeling or robotic) protagonist, which makes it easier for one to imagine themselves in Chief's shoes. So to go with the cheap, predictable, and easy narrative that basically sets everything else on fire for the sake of a brief spectacle is maddening. Any time someone says "i appreciated how they tried to take it a different direction" almost always never has any familiarity with the rest of Halo's universe. What they usually don't understand is that it wasn't something Bungie didn't think of, but that it was such an obvious, overplayed, and uninspiring direction that Bungie intentionally eschewed it. Along with Star Wars, another analogy is like with how the final seasons of Game of Thrones threw everything that had made it successful right down the toilet for a couple of quick, cheap moments that ultimately disgrace the story.
This is the perfect comment right here. Someone who gets and appreciates the masterful work that Bungie did with their characters and story.
Holy shit finally someone put it to words. Yeah, the Master Chief might have been a bit of a husk but we wasn't a soulless automaton, he just wasn't supposed to be overly emotional since the entire point was that he was supposed to be a player character primarily. But even in external Bungie media he's not even emotionless, he's just stoic and developed the kind of emotional maturity you'd see in a battlefield - during and after Reach he basically became a symbol for the UNSC, it REALLY doesn't help if he breaks down prior or during a battle. Hell, you can see it in a lot of the media at the time (excluding 343-era Waypoint shit and Frank O'Connor's garbage) that the Master Chief is fully capable of social interaction. Hell, in the original trilogy he always has little moments like witty one-liners or corny jokes. A 'soulless automaton who needs orders' wouldn't do that.
I HATE this idea in modern media that the characters HAVE to be hyper-emotional. That they have to laugh, scream or cry at every situation. IMO the scene in Infinite between Master Chief and the pilot wasn't even that good of a scene - though I like that instead of the Chief being emotional himself he acts as more of a teacher or mentor. But it's the same "If you're scared I'm terrified" trope, and the pilot was acting WAY too hyper-emotional throughout the entire game. Seems like nobody likes subtlety or subtext to their media anymore.
Honesty, I don't necessarily agree with your assessment of the B-Plot of Halo 4. As you said, the first three games gave us plenty of moments showing Chief's soft side. Johnson's final moments, the Gravemind level when he's finally reunited with Cortana, and when he crashed the Banshee on purpose on the Pillar of Autumn level.
The B-Plot focuses on the Chief's PTSD because no matter how well trained, he is going through a war of survival where he saw countless atrocities that would scar anyone. At the beginning of Halo 4, Chief believes himself to be the last of the Spartan 2s, outliving his family, and when faced with the possibility of losing another person he cares about, forces him to focus on the mission.
I'm not denying your words and offering my limited perspective since I'm a game-only fan.
Scrеw you, jedi are not emotionless. Stop with the misinformation.
holy shit I just cant believe how much time I spent with this game when it came out and how I remembered virtually none of it prior to seeing this great video. shows how forgettable it is, even though, like you, i was in the extreme hype camp as well. I even had the countdown timer to the halo 4 release application on my phone at the time, and it was one of my only applications lmao. good times, but i agree with basically everything in the video. i was however initially excited at the prospect of advanced movement and more equipment because I thought it'd make me feel more like a Spartan, but i think 5 executes and achieves that concept a lot better.
For me I hated how kill streaks created pod drops. Map control for weapons was no longer a thing. You could pick up the rockets on the map just to be killed by rockets from a pod drop.
I would argue that's a FAR greater benefit. It disincentives power weapon spawn camping in favor of an action based reward system.
@@Liberator130 as well as means new players aren't immediately at a massive disadvantage for not knowing the exact spot where the OP weapon is and running to it in the first 20 seconds like the older Halos. You can tell Halo 4's design philosophy was about casual fun
Those drop pods are actually highly overrated. I played halo 4 for like a year, and I rarely saw anyone actually get kills with drop pod weapons. Plus, the weapon would disappear by the time you ran back to get it if you died.
@@raulpetrascu2696 That's why I like Reach, 4, and 5 best out of all of the Halo games. Reach still had that semi-sweat 3 had but the abilities made it a crap shoot and mixed up the gameplay, 4 was just flat out chill fun, and 5's weapon variants are the reason I still play it to this day.
@@Liberator130exactly. Especially when older games had horrible net code and hit detection, getting screwed over pushing a weapon is just a game thrown away.
I'd like to see them try Spartan Ops again in Infinite, now that they have enemies that are actually fun to fight.
@Donal Tronp smiling that's what I mean to try again. Learn from the mistakes the first time, and try again. They fixed one problem, crappy enemies, now they just need to keep going until they it's done and it's worth playing.
@@lotgc
In an alternate universe where 343 could currently focus on that instead of all the other insane Infinite problems, I wonder how well it would work if each "Spartan Ops" episode was just a single, long mission. Quality over quantity, and all that jazz. Could fill the linear campaign void of Infinite
@@Spritzkrieg There really is a void in the campaign of infinite. All of the upgrades are just boring or things that you should've had from the very beginning. His tech might be a bit outdated, but why does John 117 need to upgrade his over shields when spartan 2 suits are known for having the best tech in UNSC!?! I don't wanna have to run around fighting bosses or fighting bases full of enemies to get stronger for later game bosses when I'm gonna die in 4 hits without fully upgraded shields.
"You fight Voldemort and his army of Bionicles." 😂
It is amazing how Halo 4 killed my enthusiasm for the future of Halo single handedly and immediately.
I wasn't jaded or influenced by cynical youtube critics. It was 2012 and I was a young kid who was obsessed with Halo since I got 3 alongside my first xbox 360.
I was so unbelievably hyped for Halo 4. I thought Halo was finished after Bungie sold the rights and was amazed at the idea that my favourite franchise ever was continuing.
I started playing Halo 4, and I didn't feel any sort of dislike, or annoyance, or anger from it.
I just felt... nothing.
This just wasn't anything close to the game series that I loved so much. It didn't even slightly feel like Halo. It felt like a generic copycat.
I played it for an hour, then I just quit in the middle of a mission and went straight back to playing Reach.
Still own my copy of Halo 4, still not touched it since that first attempt in 2012.
I've never agreed more with a video. Especially about the Forerunner mystery to never be revealed and art direction's jarring shift. I've been talking about near all these points for nearly a decade now.
Revealing the Forerunners is probably one of the things I hated the most. The entire point of a dead precursor race is that they're, y'know, dead.
Yeah, the Forerunner books were well written. Yeah, they were alright stories. But quite frankly, this decision was neither necessary nor particularly beneficial. Why the hell would we demystify the Forerunners when we're just going to make a _completely new precursor race_ which IS mysterious?
I liked the idea that the forerunners weren't a singular race but a group of all the races we see in the series and that was made them great, being united.
But the mystery is dead now.
I've always hated the new forerunner designs, the art style, it just doesn't feel halo
@Donal Tronp smiling No. Lol. You are very out of touch. Very big difference between giving more hints that only beg more questions and showing the actual face, literally, too. And also no. Reach was complete ass with music, art, and gameplay differences. Before that, the progression was pretty much perfect.
@Donal Tronp smiling here's the thing.
People seem to have fooled themselves into thinking that the OT was about the Forerunners. It wasn't. The Forerunners were just window dressing- a plot device. Fundamentally, they were simply an explanation for the giant rings which the Covenant wanted to use.
Revealing the Forerunners implies that they needed to be revealed in the first place. That they were important. But were they _really?_ Apart from blurbs in the terminals and Guilty Spark, the Forerunners were absent from the games. The books? I suppose there is Ghosts of Onyx, but that's just the protagonists running around a deserted shield world.
They are only important because 343i _made_ them important. We get more than enough information on the Forerunners from the main 3 games. The Halo 3 terminals are perfect in this regard, showing some basic events but not going any further than that. We didn't need a whole trilogy about them. It wasn't necessary, because Halo was never about the Forerunners. It was about the UNSC and the Covenant living in their shadow.
Wanting to know about the Forerunners is like wanting to know about a random extra in a movie. It simply isn't relevant, and is probably actively damaging to the main narrative.
It sucks knowing everything in the original trilogy means nothing now because of 343 lore
Halo 4 committed more sins than Halo 5 and that’s a LOT of sins. The main villain gets his ass kicked by a bridge and a really shitty grenade.
Also Infinite wouldn’t be a soft reboot if 4 and 5 were actually good. You know they didn’t do that because it’s the sixth mainline game. They did it to distance it from the Reclaimer Saga. I remember it used to be called the “Reclaimer Trilogy” until 5 came out. They wouldn’t just drop the trilogy because saga sounded better. They realized they fucked up and are trying to mostly start from scratch.
And he’s not even beaten there. He’s beaten in a graphic novel that released after the game! At least 5 is fun to actually *play*
@@Fuk99999 my issue with 5 is that the movement gave the player so much freedom that vehicles as well as 4v4 arenas with vehicles became obsolete. It was simply too fast and fucked with the dynamics that Halo established itself with in every other entry.
My biggest problem with Halo 4 is that there's just too much going on with the environments and colors. 343 really over did it and that also is true for the new art style, which changed many of the 'iconic' Halo designs, like the Battle rifle and Beam rifle for example. I will say I enjoyed the story, specifically the Master Chief and Cortana sections (as you said the B-plot). However many things are then forgotten with Halo 5 which honestly just ruins a lot of the tension when Cortana 'dies'. So all in all it's still an enjoyable game and I prefer the story over Halo 5s anyway, but it could've and should've been so much better.
And the completely ruined the designs of the covenant. I have not seen one person who likes the design change of the elites. the H4 and H5 elites have terrible designs and They do not look threatening at all.
@@GVWOLF11 I like the upgrade in size, but making them pink and fleshy with the weird armor shapes is off putting. Like if they looked like the Halo 3 Elites but were the size of Halo 4 Elites it'd be great
Fr, the old designs were Alien but looked believable and lived in, even high charity looked like something that could actually exist, in halo 4 tho it just looks over designed like a child’s drawing
THAT EXACTLY my thoughts about this game! not as good as the other Bungie games, but i stil enjoyed the game, as long i could brace myself
Noone hates halo 4 cortana
She's 8
I do
@@SpartanJoe193 Based
She's the worst in Halo 4, with the whining and bimbo tier observations about things. And why would a warship AI need a pornographic avatar? Imagine being on the Autumn's bridge and the AI thats telling the Captain to seal an airlock condemning your best friend and 300 other sailors to their death is a hologram of Riley Reid with her 🙀 lips out.
i hate halo 4 cortna lol
shes been character assassinated as fuck in art and character
I don’t understand why the hell they gotta keep changing Cortana’s facial structure. Like fuck! It’s over 3 different ladies at this point and no I don’t care about a romance storyline between Chief and Cortana. Halo shouldn’t be a Disney storyline.
Debatable.
I will agree that too much player dialogue can get in the way and the QTEs were bullshit, but I disagree that Master Chief is simply a player avatar in the Halo OT, more on Bungie's part than yours. Bungie wanted to have their cake and eat it, too. You can't have the player character in cutscenes, deliver badass one-liners, and show subtle signs of dialogue and body language that underneath his stoic exterior that remind you he's human, and also say that character is a husk for the player to fill. Master Chief is not a silent protagonist, and he was given characterization within the original trilogy. He always had a personality, even if that was "badass stoic action hero", and if having a blank slate for the player to fill was Bungie's intent, they would never have allowed for Expanded Universe novels about Chief, and given him the Gordon Freeman treatment.
Alright so, couple things. First off, I 100% agree with your take here. It’s an issue I’ve had with both Halo and Zelda fans for years. Link has had various personalities since they made him 3D. People really don’t understand you can decipher personality traits from things like vocal noises, facial expressions and body movements. And in the case of Chief, he has those plus action hero one liners. He’s a vehicle, not an avatar. You’re driving him, but you aren’t him. All that being said, I have to note Bungie wasn’t fond of the novels existing in the first place and on a few occasions made it clear they were the final say on what was canon and what wasn’t, which is why Reach had the inconsistencies it did. As far as they were concerned, only Contact Harvest was actually truly canon because Staten wrote it. We were really just lucky that none of the books back then inherently conflicted with anything in the games. I mean, we’re talking about the guys who didn’t let Chief go into DOA4 proper because they were worried about how that would affect canon lmao
Quoting joe staten, Halo original trilogy writer, "A part of the stories success is that we didn't spend a lot of time figuring out who the Master Chief is, The master chief is a Husk, He is a big green suit of armour that you move around". The chiefs whole personality was vague mysterious cowboy, so that he could be tough and cool, without having a personality that imposed on the story and made him stand out. Hes not quite gordon freeman but hes close,
@@Fuk99999 It’s not they weren’t fond of the novels existing, Fall of Reach came before CE. It’s just they gave the games more importance. They always included side material. Reach had Halsey’s journal. Speaking of Halsey, many characters like her are book characters that then made it into the games and various book events are alluded or referenced in the Bungie games.
343 also replaced steve downes and jen taylor (the voice of master chef and cortana).
They made the whole game with different voice actors but during prerelease the feedback was so bad they were forced to re voice with original actors.
Halo 4 is to Halo what Doom 3 was to Doom, except worse. Halo 4 isn't a bad game, its just a bad Halo game and significantly worse compared to any other entry in the series.
Doom 3 is actually a good game tho. Halo 4 is mediocre
@@Fuk99999 Yes, thats why I said its like Doom 3 but worse. Doom 3 may have been subpar as a Doom game, but atleast what it tried to do as an individual title was pretty good.
30:30 - Bursted out laughing at that “Little baby in the booster seat” descriptor for the Knights. Now that enemy type will forever be unseen as a that 😂
Hate 343 Halo.
The tone of story shifted from an enemy closing in on you, everyone around you dying, and seeing the horror of the flood, but always having hope and Chief & Cortana managing to squeak out a victory, to just being depressing and watching Cortana spiral, without being able to do anything about it.
The genre started out military/sci-fi with a bit of horror with the Flood, but 343 Halo tries to introduce stupid Dungeons & Dragons / World of Warcraft magical themes. You can’t even fight the Didact because he’s too OP and has magic powers, which is so stupid.
4:40 oh boy did those early Bungie employees get their loyalty rewarded
I still avoid Halo 4, 5, and Infinite like the plague. I refuse to acknowledge them as canon, except for maybe infinite… but that ones story is basically non-existent.
You realize that in halo 3 343 guilty spark directly states "you are forerunner" to chief after essentially stating that mankind had been there every step of the way during the initial activation of the halo installations.
Halo fans: lets say, hypothetically, for the sake of argument, halo 4 is a good game.
No.
No, sorry.
Halo 4 ruined the mystery and lore of Halo that made me love it from the beginning. Forerunners suddenly had a face instead of being enigmatic figures. They existed through their rings, technology and architecture.
The multiplayer was a mess. People play Halo, because it’s Halo. Some weapons were became redundant, like the carbine and battle rifle when the DMR was superior. Sprinting ruined big battles, now everyone runs away when they’re about to die.
At least 5 had fun multiplayer. 4's was an exceptionally half-assed COD knockoff.
Man Favyn would argue so differently, he fucking hates 343's multiplayer in all their Halo games lmao
@@Serocco too be fair pretty sure favyn hates everything that's not halo 3
@@xUseTheForks that dude just hates all the time there r always positive and negatives about the games but he just always focus on negatives only
It’s been that way since Reach. Of course, I’d argue that the Reach DMR is mostly the cause of it. Change that and everything else is slightly different.
@@smugplush 343 sure did considering he was part of their direct line feedback team
God I hate how I still remember that entire song from the start screen
This video has put into words so much of what I've thought about when seeing what Halo has become and what 343 has tried to do. The nanobots were a stupid explanation from the start and I wasn't sure if they had really committed to that idea because of how nonsensical it sounded. I think a big part of what has honestly killed most of my interest in Halo how little 343 grasps what made the story so interesting before. Halo had a very good art direction and it's writers had a really good sense of taste. Thinking about it now it's actually impressive. I love that the Forerunners were meant to stand more as a literary device than be completely dissected and known about. Halo had substance before that has been completely lost.
What you said about the forerunners reminded me of one of my biggest criticisms of subnatica bellow zero. Instead of being mysterious and cool about the aliens like the first game, the second game literally put one of the aliens in your head so he could tell you all the secrets about ever alien thing you ran into. they even eventually gave him a body so you know what the species looked like instead of leaving you wondering. it killed all sense of interest and discovery and made every alien structure encounter feel more like a house tour than finding something new.
How much you bench?
Halo 4 suffered the 'Phantom Menace' effect
Everybody, including me, overhyped the game, believing that it would be the best so far, and when it actually came out we were in denial that it wasn't good
It took years for us to accept it and then forgive it
It’s weird because THIS was my literal introduction to Halo- the only shooter I played actually, back in 2012. I thought it was the shit, and looking back now, even though I definitely can see why it sucks, I had so much fun in its multiplayer and Spartan ops missions.
That’s awesome you had fun. I guess it wasn’t horrible game but if you compare it to other Halos it does fall short
Even the worst halo is better than most games.
Halo 4 has its flaws, but it definitely isn’t a horrible game
The chief cortana B-plot is my most hated part of the 343i Halos.
For me? The ugly art style was far too much of a stylistic shock. The Music & Cinematography were total downgrades from their Bungie predecessors. The story was emotional drama nonsense full of convoluted and ridiculous lore. The campaign levels were extremely linear and closed-in, with less dynamic enemy AI. And finally, the MP was knockoff call of duty, with perks, loadouts, killcams, streaks, etc.
Don’t forget those campaign levels were also too long
@@Fuk99999 were they too long? Maybe it was the poor level design making them feel longer because other Halo games had much longer levels
The music track in the background of Midnight was AWFUL. The same 2 notes repeating themselves as you fight through prometheans.. and if you died because they have pin point accuracy on any difficulty.. you had to listen to the same track again and again.
Just.. F***ing awful.
I remember the wait for Forge Islands so we could finally have an large and engaging canvas like Forgeworld but for Halo 4, little would I have known 343 was about to embark on a decade long disappointment journey.
As far as I'm concerned, there's no lore outside of the OG games.
Call me a fanboy, but I don't give a shit about video game lore written in books. I'll accept those little booklets that came in the case, but that's it.
I'm just now hearing about the Greg Bear books and I'm pretty sure the whole 'wtf are these bionicles' thing is revealed in the game itself... though yeah, relying on terminals tucked away in the side paths of the levels for major exposition didn't work so well here.
The worst sin of the storytelling is that they don't explain the Covenant being the bad guys again. They had every opportunity to show Jul 'Mdama's Covenant as tragic cultists that are addicted to the dead Prophets' Kool Aid. A splinter faction of extremists who can't handle the truth and instead embrace Truth. I'm thinking about the single line Chief says about them in level 1 about how they 'seem more fanatical.' There's zero context for the line. All they had to do was have some covies praying at Requiem through Forward Unto Dawn's windows, or take the opportunity to show us an actual ritual from the Covenant religion, or have a Grunt worshiping the ground a Promethean was stepping on. SOMETHING.
But nah, just one throwaway line. Kinda surprised the video didn't touch on that.
heard cheif say that and was like what? how? LOL
>sprinting in halo 4
Wow this is so dumb! i hate this feature
>sprinting in halo reach
WWOOOOAAAWZERS GREAT GAME DESIGN OOOHHHH
Are you referring to his opinion or the general playerbase?
@@nenish general playbase. Other than nostalgia i have no idea why people hold reach in such a high regard
@@jimmycarburator2012sprint was optional in reach
@@Doubleback99 all use sprint lol and is wort because lvl design
@@jimmycarburator2012the art, music, characters, level design, story, gameplay, etc. All amazing. You’re high.
Fall damage and a lack of dual welding turns me off gameplay wise. Story wise, they turned cortana into a needy damsel.
Correction: Halo Reach’s map packs were published by 343 and developed by Certain Affinity, Bungie had no involvement in them.
One of the main gripes I have with this story is that it ignores the fact that for much of the original trilogy the forerunners were implied to be humans. And instead retcons it with a bunch of makes up shit.
I mostly agree
I was very hyped when I saw the first trailer and heard that it was 343i developing it, then it came out, I tried it once at like a GameStop (or Game probably) and basically never touched a new halo game until MCC PC.
Having played through it a couple of times now and having played quite a bit of the multiplayer I've concluded what I assumed like 10 years ago, it's a mostly competent game that sucks as a halo game, much like if you order a pizza and get a cheeseburger with tomatoes, because "lol it's just bread, cheese, tomatoes and meat. It's just the same, no?".
The story gets far too explainy while also throwing in random words (ancilla, Promethean, terminus, geas, "primitives" or whatever he called his telekinesis) to try and make it seem mysterious "just like before", and while the didact has some decent lines, like the embers of sand one, he just shows up, trashtalks you and tosses you around a bit while knowing you're probably the sole thing that can stop him, then chills out until the final mission.
It's also bizarre how the campaign is by far the buggiest one I've played in terms of sequence or major game breaking bugs. H2 has you jumping across mountains and buildings, CE has you carefully pushing a ghost through a hole and then being very precise in not going too fast and actually killing all the flood in one spot, or the rest of the mission doesn't load. H4 I had dozens of times where the game just kicked me and my co-op partner back a checkpoint during the airlock part, or bounces my ghost into space every 2 minutes on the mammoth mission, or mutes all sound except for reloads during a long sniper section, or the BRAIN-DEAD choice to not only give every single grunt and jackal the ability to overcharge plasma pistols, but also give them infinite ammo and a global audio notification so you just know it's _minimum_ one of the 30 grunts in this driving section, probably closer to 10, who are ready to drop you instantly. Oh and weird unpickupable grenades, those too, do not help when you're playing like you've got the famine skull on because h4 gives you like a mag, maybe two to go, and enemies for 24 players in Spartan ops.
Only game that even got close to this for me was reach because some missions I'd just be running over rocks or something and the jamming spire and enemies just past the rocks (on the gúta level), including the finale of the level, just didn't spawn.
I remember starting the game for the first time and I hated the music and I only played the game for a week or so and just felt the character models and gameplay wasn’t halo to me.
Halo 4 is a crime against humanity.
no
@@centurymemes1208 I respect your opinion.
@@deece1482He said no. He doesn’t have an opinion.
That’s a bit extreme. Halo 4 wasn’t great but it is far from a crime against humanity
The real crime against humanity is microtransactions
One change i really hated was chief and cortanas relationship. They were always portrayed as more siblings than lovers. They have been through hell and forged an unbreakable bond, but bungie never showed a romantic relationship. Flirting from cortana yes but battle field banter is not the same as genuine flirting and it fot her personality as a smart sassy woman very well
The forge was such a terrible downgrade, god I hated it hahah
A lot of the multiplayer I didn't mind but I hated weapon loadouts with a passion.
Halo was about it's delecate weapon sandbox and the Assault Rifle was as generic of a base weapon as it gets, some of the most exillerating rushes from 3 and Reach even came when you respawn and you rush into a nearby enemy for another weapon by emptying a magazine while rushing them down to finish off with a melee.
4 having weapon loadouts basically klilled the funtion that fully automatic base weapons had in favor if precision weapons because the latter was able to headshot and the former didn't have a way to compete with that level of extra damage.
I desperatly tried to make the Assault Rifle and Suppressor wotk as a default loadout just to get tired of the classic default weapon becoming useless and dropping multiplayer from Halo all together.
Wait they hired people who hated Halo? Is that why we got a "clothed" ver of Cortana in Halo 5, because they hired some stupid feminist
I mainly got mad of “A lot can change in 4 years” supposed to be as an explanation for everything. The forerunner villain I don’t even remember his name was so forgettable and how he was basically a God yet a simple grenade took him down while Chief survives a nuke to the face. This is like basic marines being able to survive multiple shots of the Covenant rifles in Halo 2 on Legendary while Chief gets one shotted in his new and improved armor
Chief actually getting a character was really good and Cortana's whole deal was great as well. And I always considered it a good note to start focusing on Chief as a character or to end on. I dunno if this is a hot take but I think the series should move on from the Chief eventually ya know. I just can't see Halo going on for like 10 years with story content always centered around Chief. Maybe Arbiter being the new focus for a game? I dunno it's a tough topic to talk about since Chief is so iconic and stuff. He is like Halo's Mario but not as versatile as Mario imo. If you finish the Chief's story arc continuing on would need a reboot maybe or it'd feel like beating a dead horse I think. Like keeping a character from a TV show alive/around when they finished doing their thing. They end up just being there or devolving into like a shell of what they used to be. Basically like a lot of the Dragon Ball cast now that I think about it.
the fans will not let master chief rest.... the og halo5:[ ], halo5 guardians... hunt the truth... we lost a lot....
@@caliginousmoira8565 unfortunately that's true ever since 2 fans have gone rabid whenever a new character takes focus away from chief
@@shadewolf0075 halo 5 added a ton of lore to the Halo-Verse. Everyone hated it.
If it were up to "halo fans" chief and cortana would just be fighting on another halo ring against the covenant.....oh wait....thats halo Infinite 😂🤣
@@manz7860Halo 5 was also an ass game, that’s why everyone hated it.
“Imagine a Star Wars Movie that Doesn’t open with a Star Wars Theme,” is so sad because it happened recently 💀
343 didn't add sprint, bungie did.
It's just a shame that bungie added sprint to the main games and didn't put it into a spin off game
Personally, I hate the styling of the armor in 4, which is especially bad for me since customizing my armor is one of the things that kept my interest in the series for so long. The armor doesn't flow well together, and is so busy you can't really tell what a set is specialized for (contrasted to the wonderful degree of specialization you could get out of Reach or 3, where it could be clear that one spartan is a sniper, while another is a heavy weapons expert). As for the campaign, it is the only MCC campaign I have never finished, and will probably remain that way.
Halo 4 was the game that introduced me to the franchise when I was 12 or so. I have a lot of fond memories of it and I do have a soft spot for it.
Game still kinda sucks tho ngl
Apart from the boring Promethean enemies and crappy weapons, the other thing that ruined campaign gameplay was that the game behaves like Bungie games do with the famine skull. You are CONSTANTLY out of ammo in Halo 4. I'm not sure why but it constantly feels like I'm searching for ammo or a new gun.
18:20 I approve of the way you disagreed with the old Human Forerunner canon. I respect that perspective. Mine was that it acted as a reward for players who payed enough attention to actually catch the subtext that Humans and Forerunners were the same.
Better insist on mystery than claim the new canon is smarter though. So Kudos!
Honestly, not only do I agree the mystery element is better (not just for the forerunners, but the precursors and flood as well) but I am pretty much never fond of the idea that ancient humanity was this highly advanced species wandering around the universe. It takes way too much suspension of disbelief for me (as someone who researches history as a hobby) to accept the sheer amount of contrivances you would need to explain that story element. Especially when your universe already establishes human history as being the same one we have IRL. Which means you would need to explain not only why it took 180,000 or so years for human civilization to start up again, you would need to explain why it took 200,000 years just to get back into space. The reason why you need to explain these to people like me is because there’s an established trend for human beings recovering from every massive disaster faster than the last and a general increased rate in technological advancement every time one is made. Like the Neolithic lasted a long time, but once we figured out Bronze, things started to speed up rapidly. The Neolithic lasted about 6000 years. The Bronze Age lasted about 2000. The Bronze Age collapse occurred and various iron ages began to emerge after only a few centuries and from there, it only took us maybe 1000 more or so to put a man on the moon.
What I’m trying to illustrate here is….humanity after gaining knowledge of something tends to expand that knowledge rather quickly. Along with it the spread of useful tools and skills. And because of that, even disaster periods tend to be recovered from fairly fast, and often lead to technological booms. It took modern man like 180,000 years to go from stone to bronze. It took less than 10,000 to go from Bronze to Industrial. So why and how do you explain ancient advanced humans losing all of this progress *and* forgetting about it entirely? Even today, we are discovering a lot of mythological stories and even linguistics date back to things even older than the cultures we associate with them now. How and why you explain the hard nerf? Even 343 tried to do this with forced de-evolution approach, but as seen in their current lore, that by no means stopped ancient humans from actually recording all that they knew or passing on their legacy adequately. It just doesn’t make much sense.
I genuinely have a lot of fun during the Covenant levels of the campaign... but then the Prometheans show up.
Halo 4 was like watching paint dry. Excessively glowy paint. I played through it once on Legendary shortly after launch (after getting talked into it by friends), and I remember nothing about it. Because nothing is worth remembering.
The series ended in 2010. Never forget, when the creators bow out of a series, that's your signal to do the same. Fitting that Halo 4 released on the same day as a rediculously bad president formally continuing his reign.
Probably the best intro I've seen introducing a controversial topic in a long time, nice job.
Halo 4 is my favorite halo, no cap- I've enjoyed every halo to some degree and think 5 is probably the worst when compared to contemporary games.
What I agree to can relate with:
The artwork and lighting I think are a little overdone, but I don't think I would go as far as to say it completely rejected OG halo.
The A plot is somewhat complicated and confusing, but it did invoke some exploration for me: I had read 1 halo novel before, but never something about the forerunners or Prometheans. I think it forced me to ask questions, but admittedly, this wasn't good for someone who wasn't terribly interested in the story or had little prior knowledge.
The B plot is solid, I think the game's view on chief aged well as I aged. It added depth to his character and the story.
The BR's state at launch, 5 shot kill was a disaster. Hard Agree
Between thruster and hardlight shield, it's a little to easy to escape in this game, it's probably the most annoying thing about multiplayer. Only armor lock compares.
Spartan ops are a shell of firefight.
Fast weapon despawn is frustrating.
Kill streaks can be somewhat annoying by leading to an abundance of weapons of the map, but them not being as crazy like a COD chopper or attack dog hoard or something actually made them more balanced and not something that was frustrating to play against. Who likes getting spawnkilled by some killstreak they can't fight back against? There's also more than just infinity slayer, so it's not like it's every game you're dealing with it.
No ranked is pretty stupid.
Disagree with:
Hard disagree with multiplayer take: I enjoy this multiplayer more than any other, and I strongly think that halo could not be COD and keep pumping out the same stuff every year. While it became more COD-like, this halo NEVER felt like I was playing COD (I used to play it a lot), more like I was playing a sped up version of halo reach. Each halo experimented on some level. 2 it was dual wielding, 3 added equipment, reach added rudimentary armor abilities. 4 more than anything to me was pace. 4 was relieving for me in so many ways; Power weapons weren't as dominant, you could be the best player in the game without touching a special weapon. Loadouts made the game more about gunfights/positioning and less about AR into melee like halo 3 or 2. No projectile lage from 20' away on the BR. Bloom wasn't as hindering on the DMR. The sword and shotgun weren't as good because of the easy of using the other weapons, but certainly weren't bad. I never spent excessive time racing around or camping power weapons because I didn't need to. Vehicles weren't OP: you had tools to prevent their dominance, but if you don't use them you'll still get smashed. The mantis, wrath, banshee, hog are all still good and can dominate games when played well. I always hated how easy it was for a hog, banshee, or tank could run a game if your team wasn't good. Not as big of an issue in 4. The increased speed made it so you couldn't camp on powerplay positions as easily. No more sitting on the top looking down at the beach on zanzibar from crazy high ground. No camping at the top of construct. If felt like if I played well, unless I was getting absolutely spawn camped by an entire team of sweaties there was no way I wasn't putting up a fight. Even if I was I could still pick up kills.
Balancing of the armor abilities:
Let's look at some of them:
Thruster- In my opinion, the most annoying and game breaking for the escape ability. It really made it impossible to kill a quality user of it when they had teammates preventing any sort of flank or surprise. Jet pack and promethean can help with some of this, but this is one of main abilities for a good 4v4 player.
Jet Pack- Worse than it was in halo reach, making it more bearable. Still very strong. Everyone having BRs makes them an easy target.
Camo- Irritating, especially on BTB, but not game busting with the radar indication. Can see if you look hard. Probably the most annoying is a sniper sitting cross map that you just can't see.
Hologram- Hilarious and could occasionally fool people into wasting nades. Worth including in the game.
Promethean- The hated cheater vision. As if Camo didn't exist to mess this guy up. Jet pack can surprise them by being above. Thruster to escape their pre-fire and nades. I think the biggest issue with this is more that it forces you to use camo (A kind of lame armor ability) sometimes and makes it easy to throw nades, especially when paired with the big nades. Also it's pretty easy to use, I would know as someone who did but switched to jetpack.
Regen- Useful in the right situation, but not really strong like halo 3s (not to bag on 3s, it's a power item).
Hardlight- Annoying, and an easy version of thruster that isn't quite as useful. Flank obliviously makes them an easy kill, and if they are close throw a nade. Could pass on this one being in the game.
Points Scoring:
Distractions, comeback kills, are we really complaining because they added a few things like this? I can't see how giving some points to guests who are just trying to play with the bois is something to complain about. Assists are good medal, why are we complaining about this, let's encourage teamwork maybe?
Can't say much on:
Forge: I didn't mess around in enough in reach or 4 to know.
I get this game wasn't halo fans' favorite, and that I'm in the small minority by being a big H4 guy, but I think the idea that halo needed to keep doing stuff the old way was never going to work. It's not that you have to change everything or make a completely new game, but the reason I'm not playing COD and haven't much since 2013 is because it never changed, it never improved (warzone might be an exception). I'd had enough. And yes, I realize COD hasn't changed and has still sold really well, but do you really think a slow paced H3 recopied 8 times is going to sell like COD has? I really doubt it, COD is able to do it because of its simplicity and appeal to young fans trying to get into their 1st or second shooter. It's way easier to pick up than halo is, and I know good shooter players who are trash at halo but good at everything else. It really is unique as a shooter to this day. Maybe I'm wrong on this, but I don't think COD's fanbase is a bunch of people who have been playing it for 20 years, but they managed to create new ones to replace the people who got tired of it. I think they could have leaned into the fans and made 4 more like 3 and reach, and the adjustments could have been more fine-tuned to keep the halo feel and reduced the difference between them. But 4 was fighting with nostalgia and anything significantly different was going to get fans heated, so ultimately the series had to get a new story & some fresh gameplay if it wanted to continue and try to appeal to new fans.
In trying to make a game for everyone, they made a game for no-one. Alienated the large established fanbase in an attempt to win over CoD fans, who were never going to be interested in Halo.
I thought it was okay for halo to change. Halo 4 to me felt more like really fast destiny.
It was fun, I was glad the tempo increased as "tactical" shxt isn't really my style. Anyone remember Brink?
@@KNGDDDE, unfortunately, the formula wasn't what most players were looking for. Hence the population collapse shortly after release.
I'm not ashamed to say that I enjoyed its storyline
It was more or less the stylistic choices and overall esthetic that bothered me
But other than that it was a pretty decent experience
I love the story. Constantly being out of ammo and the linear levels upsets me. However my brother who is still in middle school has been playing all the Halo Games with me for the first time cause he bought Infinite. And while the gameplay pisses me off at times. I'm still having a great time seeing his enjoyment from it all. He said so far 4 has been his favorite which I had to bite my tongue but all the power to him. I do really enjoy the story though. However I've also read the forerunner trilogy which may be why I appreciate it more then those who just play the games.
That was a good video and never expected that my Halo 4 Banshee clip would make it in a video like this 24:10
Hot take but halo 5 is much better than halo 4
nice try because halo is always campaign focus.
typical casual enjoyer
It's my favorite halo. Cortana is a babe, there is a huge variety in precision rifles, sprint adds to the learning curve, and vehicles feel less OP.
H4 sucked, nice vid
Honestly, I couldn’t get over the art style change, the changes to the lore, and the poor writing. Then the new additions in the prometheans were just not fun and didn’t feel like they belonged in the Halo universe. The architectural differences between the sentinels and Forerunner structures and the prometheans are absolutely jarring-there’s no way they’re both made by the Forerunner. Overall, Halo 4 was when Halo truly stopped feeling like Halo to me and that’s why I don’t like Halo 4 and 343i’s Halo as a whole. They wanted to hire people that didn’t like Halo and it really shows in the results..
The Forerunners being Humans was always the perfect answer, there was no way the Forerunners actually being revealed could have been anything but a disappointment.
I'm mixed on the B Plot. While it is well written, it's not Halo. Halo never had existentialism like 4 introduced. Chief wasn't a little cry-baby with a hologram waifu. He readily left her behind, knowing full well she might blow up High Charity, which would include herself. Rescuing her was also part of the overall plan to use the replacement Alpha Halo ring. While I like the ending bit in the hard-light bubble at the end, it was so not Chief and Cortana. You know how the Chief and Cortana from the first trilogy would have said goodbye?
Chief: "How do we get out of here?"
Cortana: "I'm not coming with you this time. Most of me is down there. I held just enough back to get you off the ship."
Chief: *small silence* "It has been my honor to fight beside you."
Cortana "The honor was all mine, Cheif. Take care of yourself, John." *fades away*
That's the Chief and Cortana I know. Both soldiers, to their core, ready to live and die for the UNSC and Humanity. That's one thing that 343i never understood about Chief. He's not a God. He's not irreplaceable. Hell, there were 30 more just like him, and he is ready to spend his life if the cost warrents it. They don't know how to not make Chief some kind of almost spiritual figure. He's a soldier, a soldier with the UNSC, and has and will have friends and people close to him die on operations. Hell, almost every Spartan II is dead, and he never once shed a tear or got the boo-hoo's. The kids he trained with, grew up with, got augmented with, and spent decades of his life fighting side by side with. The closest thing he had to family, and he even sent some to their deaths willingly, because that's the cost. That's the job. That's what he's trained to do. I don't see him getting all espresso depresso because his e-girl deleted her account.
"Oh Johnathan, my forbidden love, the flesh to my heart. Live on! Though I am machine and you are man, our ties were greater than most others, but all my ones are turning to zeros and my bits will be scattered to the celestial winds!"
"Cortana! Spectral poison of my heart! Though I have never had the opportunity to caress your flesh, for you have none, our minds have tangled within this iron shell of mine. My heart bleeds as your subroutines faulter! Goodbye my love, the artificial ghost of my beating heart!"
Get outta here with that shit.
Halo 4 was terrible. I struggle to find anything I liked about this game.
Videogames are supposed to be fun. Halo 4 wasn't fun.
I was the biggest Halo 4 hater when it came out but it grew on me over time. It had a ton of issues and will never live up to Halo 3 but still was fun to play. I hated Reach and Halo 5 way more than Halo 4.
Hi…21 year long lifetime halo fan here, and I absolutely loved Halo 4. One of my favorites in the entire series.
Trollbait
@@MapleMaf1a it’s actually not. Halo 4 is a good game, stay mad about it
@@xsoundofsil3nc3x96🤡
You're totally entitled to your wrong opinion while the rest of us, the real fans, (that vastly outnumber you) talk about Halo, champ. That's totally fine.
@@DigitalApex “real fans” lol did you not see the part where I said I’ve been a halo fan for over 20 years? I’ve been to the midnight release of every single Halo game since CE, and have thousands of hours in every halo game. It’s my favorite series of all time, I’ve read all the books, and even watched the god awful tv show. You “real fans” hate over half of the entire franchise, your not halo fans, your fans of a few games from a series with over 10 games at this point. It’s like claiming I’m a “true” Harry Potter fan but everything after the third one was garbage. And I know PLENTY of other die hard Halo fans who loved Halo 4, so you can keep crying that it’s not 2007 anymore, while me and all the other REAL halo fans continue enjoying this amazing series.
I knew as soon as I played Halo 4, something was drastically wrong. Like, *really* wrong.
Shredded delivers! I have been waiting for this
Dude, I WISH the prometheans were Bionicles.
I know that there's alot of missed potential with halo 4. Looking at the beta content makes me upset cause most of the beta stuff was so much cooler and worked much better. I really still enjoyed the story anyways. But the classes should have been a new game mode instead of the whole game. I feel like halo 4 is a game that was dragged down by alot of things. One of the things 343 did which was a mistake was to place too much focus on the story and by that I mean they cut out some features just because they weren't "lore friendly" The reason we don't have playable elites anymore is because 343 made the multiplayer canon and for some reason elites didn't train with Spartans so they just decided to cut it out. They also didn't let the prothethans fight the covies most of the time cause that would go against the story. I feel like the story got in the way of gameplay alot of the time. Which lead to dull gameplay.
343 should have also not listened to normies/cod players about halo. COD players don't like halo and listening to them would turn halo into a carbon copy of COD and then these same COD players demanding for such changes to make the game fun for them wont even play the game. Due to this halo 4 felt like it was copying cod not only because most of the testers expected halo to play like a generic FPS but also because the new dev team 343 had no idea on what they were doing. I mean sure a lot of the stuff made was high quality. Tracks like mantis, 117 and never forget midnight are my favorites but there just not halo music. Chiefs armor and the Prometheans look so cool but it doesn't look like halo.
I also haven't enjoyed the trend of killing off the halo 3 art style and changing everything to be practical. It made no sense. But we haven't seen halo 3 style stuff in a while in terms of the vehicle and weapon design. It would have made more sense for the storm covenant to have halo 3 vehicles not reach ones.
Despite all of this I really have enjoyed halo 4, I still like reach and 3 better. But I feel there's alot of potential that went to waste but fret not if 343 hasn't forget about MCC we modders can fix halo 4 to give it the potential it could have had. Give the proper art style. make the prothethans fun to fight. Add back duel wielding, fix the AI and other campaign problems. even though there was missed potential it doesn't mean it should be thrown away. Hopefully in a few years some modders can make better campaign versions to give halo fans who didn't like halo 4. The halo 4 they wanted.
well that's my take on it atleast. Sorry if the grammar is bad. I didn't sleep all day and I don't want to miss the chance to talk about halo 4 here.
@Bob Duckington they didn’t drop that dialogue. You hear Cortana reference during one of her rampancy moments. I believe on Reclaimer mission. “They don’t care about you, they replaced you”
Either way, the games writing is amateur hour contrived garbage
according to a friend who worked microsoft at the time of halo 4's development time there was A LOT of animosity to Bungie
343 leads had a culture of "fk you it's OUR game now!" and it really shows in the final product with how much they worked to try and change everything they could about the game
Long consistent things like even down to the art style and sound design of many iconic weapons vehicles and characters. Everything had to be changed so they could plant their boot down that this franchise belongs to 343 and microsoft now
And the franchise hasn't been able to recover ever since. Halo was the warning bell of things to come with star wars, lord of the rings, witch and other beloved franchises being claimed by new owners who don't care for their legacy, only to make it theirs