360 Gamers: Why have you stopped playing Halo?

[Vrex360]

Anyways, off that tangent, and onto my gripes with the single-player portion of Halo 4; actually, my stance is almost identical to Vrex360's (minus his opinion that the Sangheili should never, ever be enemies to the humans after Halo 3), so I'll just avoid typing a 6-paragraph rant on those things.

To clarify I'm not saying humans and elites should just throw away their weapons and become BFFs and skip away into the sunset on a green hill, that would be absurd. It's been thirty years of conflict, there are bound to be tensions, hostilities would exist and even small scale conflicts could be accepted. I get that.
Hell I even understand why someone like Jul Mdama would exist in this climate.

What I don't like however is the way 343 went about doing this, to have the sole representation of Sangheili in Halo 4 be these generic bad guys getting slaughtered and having the characters in Spartan Ops mowing them down while shouting racial slurs at them and then there's all the expanded media of late that seems to be trying its very hardest to reinforce Sangheili as nothing but evil, be it the Initiation comic, Spartan Assault, the Glasslands trilogy and so much else. There was a cool elegance and moral ambiguity to the Sangheili that gave them more nuance than your standard evil aliens in science fiction and now it's all but gone.

I mean look at the way they're designed, it's just hideous and to top it off they're portrayed as idiots unable to even farm while humans somehow turned into a galaxy spanning empire despite being on the brink of extinction not four years prior. On top of that any moral ambiguity just isn't there, the Sangheili as well as being made hideous are being portrayed constantly as just cackling villains and our human 'heroes' as well that, heroes.

If you actually read the story of the glasslands trilogy you'd actually know that Spartan Ops main villain Jul Mdama is actually sort of justified in his anger towards humanity, at the very least ONI. They did awful things to him and have truly evil vile plans for the Sangheili as a race. At no point however is this addressed and at no point are we expected to challenge the human characters attitude towards the Sangheili. Which frankly I find kind of.... creepy.

Sangheili and humans don't have to be best friends forever but when you realize all the potential story being wasted, humans and elites being forced to fight side by side, learning to put aside grudges, occassionally political intrigue and high level negotions and general race politics that could even paralel our own in the real world and maybe even suggest that maybe humanity can be just as bad as the Covenant was I find it really frustrating that all we get is:

KILL DE EVIL ALIENZ GO SPARTINZ

 

[Vrex360]

There WAS a genuine creative spark in this franchise once and it came from people wanting to try new things and above all makes fun games. 343 by contrast are a studio that SOLELY exist to create more Halo games for Microsoft.

You're wrong.
Plain wrong.

And if you think 343 doesn't have a creative spark then you need to listen to this podcast with the creative director:

http://epdaily.tv/all/type-of/news/episode-19/

All of it.

And if it's not available in your region try itunes

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/vics-basement/id544958335

(Episode 19)

I'm not going to say 343 is devoid of any artistic talent, the dialogue between Chief and Cortana is quite good from the scenes I saw, but again from what I've seen too many changes are being made to a formula that worked fine and the only reason I can see for why that was is for sake of 'appealing to a wider audience'. Maybe you see things different and I respect that but that's my view and I don't much like the direction Halo seems to be heading.
Plus it's still tied to the Xbone so its future is uncertain at best as a lot of people still seem determined not to buy from Microsoft even after they took back all their policies.

 

[Chester Rabbit]

I never was one for online competitive play with Halo because, I?m just not that good and I don?t like being that one guy who is an easy kill for the big dogs. That and also after I first bought Halo 4 (and didn?t suck, huh how about that) I haven?t touched the game since. Once I played the story I just couldn?t stand to touch that game again and just did my best to repress all the dumb crap that went on in it and go back to thinking it all stopped at 3.

 

[LAGG]

I wasn't that into it because it wasn't quite the pure FPS genre I'm used to. Halo had that sort of pick up and play playstyle, where anyone can start it up and have the same abilities and potential as someone else who had been playing longer, not to mention using crosshairs and mixing out weapon strategies, a lot like Quake or TF2 or Unreal Tournament...

But at the same time, I thought Halo still paced itself like slower-paced FPSs like Call of Duty and Battlefield because the game wasn't paced that particularly well, and the objective-driven maps (which is easily the best part of any FPS) are only a dressed-up form of team deathmatch. Movement speed needs to be faster, firefights can't end in four seconds, vehicles usually have no drawback and almost certainly better than infantry combat. I think Reach took a step in the wrong direction with adding things like Armor Lock, Jetpacks, and Sprint, because was a huge step back from my point in the first paragraph.

That's exactly my grip with it too. While trying to keep goos stuff from good FPS games, it's way too slow.

 

[Cabisco]

Snip

You have pretty much covered all the reasons I disliked Halo 4.

Simply put, it wasn't the Halo I loved anymore. Just a cruel animated husk of its remains, when Bungie left so did the soul of those games.

I've moved on now like many have to new things (and perhaps in the future Destiny). I don't want to play these new games and have this wonderful image of Halo slowly decayed. I'd argue Halo:CE to Halo Reach was the best game series of all time, such is my love for those games and the amount of time I spent on them.

 

[mysecondlife]

I primarily played on 360 before I moved on with PS3. Naturally I stopped playing Halo after Reach.

I stopped playing because I left college

I had no one to play with and that was pretty much the only reason I ever played Halo. I don't like arcadey shooters like that (where I can get the drop on someone but because I have the starting weapons, it takes me half a clip to kill them and they take me out because they turned around with the "FUCK YOU" power weapon). I had continued buying Halo because of the campaign but Halo 4's campaign was quite terrible so it's likely that even that mode is now out the door and Halo is out completely for me.

So I took my talents to South Beach Call of Duty instead where I found Hardcore mode gave me the joy I was looking for. However, CoD is about to become the victim of next-gen as my buddies are upgrading and I find getting the Xbox One (or any launch system to be honest) at launch is the biggest waste of money ever. Losing the CoD friends means that CoD has 0 chance of being bought again...

There there... good things are bound to happen to people who leave Cleveland Halo (eventually)

 

[ZorroFonzarelli]

KILL DE EVIL ALIENZ GO SPARTINZ

I forgot to address this one also; yes, they missed a golden opportunity to advance the story behind the game to put it into the continuity established in Halo 3, and they badly screwed it up.

Brutes made a perfectly good fill-in for the Elites in H3. The idea that we must start over with Elites again betrayed that advancement of the story. It's fine for Jul Endama (whatever) to be the main Covenant villain, sure. He'd naturally have a few Sanghellis, but for a franchise to stand the test of time (especially one with the caliber Halo has had), you MUST advance the storyline - especially when it comes to such profound moments as the Sanghelli breaking with the Covenant and allying themselves with Humanity.

Make them a wild card if you want, but Bungie DEVELOPED them, and 343 undeveloped them for no real reason.

Excellent point...

 

[Trippy Turtle]

Well Halo 4 just isn't as fun as the others for me, and due to consumerism meaning 'New is best' people play Halo 4 or nothing.
I sometimes boot up Halo 3, but as fun as it is I've grown used to better graphics of games like Black Ops 2 or Dark Souls.
Also Halo is all about custom games.
Its near impossible to find a random group of people to make friends with and play custom games for hours on Halo 3 these days, and the newer games have terrible custom games.

 

[FrozenLaughs]

Because Halo 4 sucks. When 343 decided to get rid of the perfect multiplayer balance with a focus map control and teamwork that has been of a staple of series in favor Call of Duty style perks, killstreaks, and loadouts, they pretty much killed what made Halo great and unique. They tried to win over the COD crowd by making the game more like COD, but instead just pissed off the few die hard Halo fans (like myself) that had already chosen Halo over COD long ago.

As for Halo 3 and Reach, I've already played the hell out of those, I am done with them. I would have normally moved onto the next Halo game, but Halo 4's aforementioned shittyness put a quick stop to that. Unfortunately, I don't think we're ever going to see real Halo again (I expect 343 to continue the COD-ification of the series), so the only hope for a great multiplayer shooter that isn't a COD clone that I see on the horizon is Destiny.

Pretty much this. 343 fucked up Halo badly so my friends and I just stopped playing it. Halo 3 lasted about 3 years for us and Halo 4 about 3 weeks.

Couldn't explain it any better than this. Also the campaign was meh. Did you think the story was about stopping the Didact? Pfffffff the true story was to make everyone feel bad about John losing Cortana.

 

[w9496]

I played Reach 2-3 times a week up until Halo 4 came out, beat Halo 4, and never played it again.

4 was such a huge step back in terms of multiplayer. If you use anything besides the DMR and the Boltshot, then prepared to get your ass handed to you unless you are godly with the BR or Assault Rifle. They also added a perk system which broke the balance even more in a game where everybody used to start on a pretty level playing field.

Spartan Ops got old after I realized that it's just 2-3 maps played on rotation per season, and the story doesn't feel like it really matters at all. If they just called it Horde mode, which it is, then it wouldn't bother me so much, but that's not the case.

Overall Halo 4 ruined the franchise for me, and it would take quite a lot of convincing to get me to willingly pay for another 343 product after what they did.

 

[Tsun Tzu]

I really enjoyed, and played heavily, every game in the series (Halo 2 and Reach are standouts for me)...up until Halo 4.

As others have said, the blatant CoD-ification was grating, the campaign was lackluster, Spartan Ops was talked up and wound up being anything but engaging, and the lack of firefight and multiplayer variety/mechanics changes outright killed the experience for me.

Bungie not being at the helm really, really did harm the series.

That said, I do commend the 343 guys for a valiant first effort and they may be able to pull up from this nose dive in the next title.

Sad to say, it'll most likely be a rent for me this time, if at all, if only to play the campaign.

 

[Texas Joker 52]

Well, other than the fact that I've moved to more of a single-player mindset when it comes to games, Halo 4 simply doesn't feel much like Halo. Sure, the original Trilogy, along with ODST and Reach, were a little formulaic. They weren't particularly creative, comparatively speaking. But you know what? They had style, something inherent that you could just recognize and appreciate if you were a fan.

Halo 4 may have been made by some of the same core people involved with the original games, but that same sense of style, that inherent thing that really made Halo, Halo, wasn't really there. Part of it was the new direction for the campaign, another was the fact that Multiplayer was shifted rather drastically. Now it had an in-lore explanation for it, and now you can make loadouts with 'Support Packages', which ultimately added up to little perks that could help in little ways, and pushed the balance earlier Halos tried to have, just a little too far.

The lack of playable Elites was pretty bullshit too.

But, I think one of the ultimate factors was that, the Halo series ended at 3, with Reach being an enjoyable prequel, and ODST a fun romp with Nathan Fillion. Halo 4 not only seemed like it was milking a cash cow for all it had from the beginning, but when it came out, it felt a little like it too when I played it. I just didn't have the same fun.

 

[Korten12]

snip

Honestly I don't even know what to say. I don't think your a Halo fan. A fan doesn't need to blindly love everything but your a SANGHEILI fan, NOT a Halo fan.

 

[ZZoMBiE13]

Mostly because Halo 4 was a big fat letdown. Although I rarely played any Halo for more than a few months so I would have been done with it long before now anyway. But even still, I only got a few weeks out of Halo 4 and most of them were disappointing. No proper Firefight mode, Multiplayer was fun but seemed limited with less maps, less modes, and just a lot of repeating moments, and the story mode (which was usually why I showed up to begin with) was simply lacking.

When Halo 3 ended we all knew Master Chief would be back. You don't keep the main character of a franchise on ice for very long. But honestly, I had more fun with ODST and Reach. And when they brought the Chief back, it just felt like a huge missed opportunity. They could have jumped 50 years into the future to show us how Humanity and the Sangheili truce led to a new era of peace, they could have had new vehicles, hover-warthogs and scorpion tanks, new enemies that didn't suck... and instead we got the same old Halo enemies and the Promethians which were awful. Every fight with the Promethians required the exact same tactic and it was dull to fight them. Shoot the Flyers, pick off the dogs, then go after the bullet soaking BattleWagons or whatever they were called. It was a slog. Couple that with Spartan Ops being so much of the same thing over and over and so many features stripped out of the former games (less theater mode options, limited Forge, etc) and it just wasn't a package I wanted to keep coming back to. So I didn't.

 

[Use_Imagination_here]

Halo 4 sucked ass? The map designs are freaking stupid and forge somehow manages to feel more empty despite being improved.

 

[Neverhoodian]

Why? It's quite simple, really.

The fight was finished.

I'm one of those strange freaks of nature that played Halo games pretty much for the single player/co-op campaign. I've also come to appreciate when a series knows to end on a high note. The ending of Halo 3 provided just that. All the major loose ends had been tied up. Both the Covenant and the Flood were defeated and, while not everyone made it out alive, humanity survived the ordeal with hopes of rebuilding what had been lost (and possibly make some friends out of former enemies). His task finally complete, the Master Chief returns to cryo-sleep in the same state that you found him at the beginning of the first game. There was a real sense of closure that made the previous years of playing feel all the more satisfying.

Then came ODST and Reach, and I loved them. I didn't have a problem with them because they fleshed out events that happened both during and right before the events of the other games, thus tying in nicely with the main narrative (though I wish Reach hadn't demolished the canon that had been previously established in the novel The Fall of Reach). Again, Reach provided closure of a different sort at the credits by ending with the same words uttered in the very beginning:

"Cortana, all I need to know is did we lose them?"
"I think we both know the answer to that."

Beautiful.

Then PSYCHE! NOPE, YOU AIN'T DONE YET, SON! WE GOTTA MILK THIS FRANCHISE FOR ALL IT'S WORTH!

Yeah, no thanks. It's been one hell of a ride, but I'd rather quit while I'm ahead.

 

[Terminate421]

I still pop in Halo 4 every now and again to keep up my flow going with it. Mainly because it's still hella fun. However one reason I am discouraged is probably because every team mate I am placed with is about as moronic as it could possibly get. Also GTA V just came out and I am in college and it all keeps adding up.

Campaign wise was good but it lacked the spirit and finale that Halo 3 left us with. The original Halo trilogy I hold as a master piece of work mainly for it's loose ends all tied up, no issues, and still ended on a satisfying note. Halo 4, starts off like it was all prepared from there, Bungie left it the way they did because they wanted to do more. Microsoft wanted more money from it.

I am a die hard Halo fan, and I'll keep buying them so long as they are good. But it's something I have come to notice about the games recently.

 

[Terminate421]

snip

On your side. I think the first red flag was when I saw the new design for Elites in the Game Informer magazine. At which point, I then saw the other covenant design and saw the problem.

THEY SUCKED.

I enjoyed the Halo 3 depiction of the elites the most, the hunched over part of them felt more ferocious but their personality still gave them a dignified warrior-like sense.

Arceus only knows how they'll fuck up the Arbiter in future games.

I'm not mad at 343. The worst they did to the Halo franchise for me was change a few things that hurt what I loved but didn't kill it.

Pretty much, I feel like Bungie are the only ones who know how to handle a franchise like this without fucking it up. And for those that point out Halo: Reach's inconsistencies, I say fuck that and put Halo: Reach over the novels.

I read a large portion of the novels but have little interest to catch up at this point because they drown me in lore to back up the lore they have made. A few novels isn't too bad for me to pick up on, about 8 of them before one game is.

That and I don't even think Microsoft knows what a Halo is.