The biggest issue I have with Halo 4 is that it's not as predictable as previous Halo games, including Reach to a lesser extent. Halo’s multiplayer to me has always been about its simplicity. There are two teams who all being on an even playing field who are placed on a map and whoever plays the best during a match will win. The end result is only influenced by what the players do during a game, nothing else.
Halo Reach changed this slightly. You could influence the match by choosing what you spawn with. At first Bungie acted like this was going to be a big deal in Reach but in the end only Invasion really used to a great extent. Outside of that playlist most loadouts only differed in what AA you would spawn with. Even this, though, caused some annoyances on my part. You couldn’t predict what type of AA chose at spawn which lead to frustrating moments like people suddenly going into Armor Lock, going invisible out of nowhere or getting up to places with the Jetpack which you couldn’t practically predict. Luckily these annoyances were relatively rare as most people chose for sprint most of the time so in most cases you knew what you were up against. Then as time went on more and more AAs were removed from certain playlists making them less and less of an issue. Sure, the AAs themselves were still very obnoxious at times, but that’s another issue entirely. In terms of predictability Reach wasn’t all that bad (lol bloom).
Halo 4, however, takes all of this a step further: it allows you to completely determine what kinds of weapons, AAs and even perks you spawn with. You could be going up against someone with an automatic rifled, precision rifle, a mini-shotgun, a plasma pistol, a headshot capable secondary, most of the time you don’t find out until you’re already in a battle with him. Then take into account the AAs and perks and it turns the game into an inconsistent mess. Just like in Reach people can go invisible, they can dash away, they can be (sort of) invincible, all at the press of a button, without warning. But even there was a clear visual indication of what kind of AA or perk someone has it wouldn’t be enough. By the time you find this out you could be screwed over by it already.
Then there’s the global ordnance drops. 343 said previously that it’s implemented to prevent people from camping at certain areas on the map waiting for a power weapon to spawn, but I doubt this is their real reasoning. It most likely has more to do with bad and inexperienced players not knowing where and when everything spawns and them getting killed numerous times by players who
did put effort into getting to know all this. To prevent this they shrank the gap between the two groups and made it so it’s practically impossible to consistently predict where weapons spawn. I feel like global ordnance ruins the flow of matches. Where in previous Halo games you could set up goals mid-match of getting a certain weapon, or prevent the other team from getting one, that’s gone now. People mostly just run around the map looking for people to kill and every now and then move towards a waypoint that appeared on the map somewhere. There’s much less direction to a match than previously and it makes everything feel a bit sloppy and uncontrolled.
Personal ordnance drops are probably a worse offender than the global system, though. It’s only in a few playlist but I still think it’s worth mentioning because I really don’t want 343 to take it a step further with it. Next thing you know the personal ordnance system has “evolved” its way into all playlist as a basic feature in Halo 5. The problem with the system, again, is that it’s not predictable. Both in terms of predicting when someone else will get it and what kind of weapon that person will get. Numerous times in (Big Team) Infinity Slayer I would get killed by a power weapon which I could not have seen coming in any sort of practical way. Someone could let a Sniper or Binary Rifle drop in and kill you before you even knew that kind of weapon was on the map. It results in many frustrating moments throughout every match. Overall I’ve been doing quite well in Halo 4 but even just dying a few times because of things that I couldn’t possible predict can ruin a match for. I can go 20 in 5 and feel annoyed because a guy pulled a Incineration Cannon out of his ass when I ran around the corner. How can I anticipate something like that?
Every one of these aspects cause the game to be unfairly unpredictable in my eyes and results in me feeling screwed over by the game mechanic and systems, rather than being outplayed by the player that killed me. It’s the same reason why I stopped playing Call of Duty. At a certain point during MW2 I got tired of getting taken down by predator missiles off spawn and sold it.
With Halo 4 I just don’t have the patience anymore. 343 is clearly taking the franchise into a direction that I heavily dislike and I don’t see any patches, title updates or matchmaking updates fixing the biggest issues I have with the game. Even if so it’ll probably only available in a single playlist which simply isn’t enough for me. I want a game that isn’t completely designed around things that I don’t like.
And let’s not forget all the issues that the game has aside from this big issue with predictability.
- Flinch is an annoyance more than anything, especially considering that you have to zoom in more often because of the size of the maps. Sure, descoping was annoying at times but I liked the dynamic of the mechanic, especially during battles at medium range. I also don’t see how flinching gives people a better chance to fight back if you get pinged in BTB. You still get ripped to shreds before you have a proper chance to fight back.
- Active Camo. It simply doesn’t work in any way as an Armor Ability. 343 had the perfect opportunity to turn it into a power-up again via the personal ordnance system but didn’t for some reason.
- Jetpack. Aside from it breaking the layout of most maps, it simply isn’t fun fighting against them. The movement of jetpackers simply isn’t predictable enough in my opinion. When you run around a corner you have your reticle at head level because that’s where most people will be. With the jetpack that positions people can be at increases exponentially making it very frustrating to fight against.
- Promethean Vision. Sure, it doesn’t have such an immediate effect as some of the other AAs, but it can make the game slow down to a crawl, more so than the radar ever did. It also shrinks the awareness skillgap since people can see where people are, what direction they’re facing and heading, and even what kind of weapon they’re wielding.
- The Boltshot. It’s a shotgun that you can spawn with. I used it all the time and I’ll admit that I enjoyed doing so, but it’s pretty broken.
- The campaign. I’m not going to do a big write-up about this but I’ll just say that is was pretty underwhelming. The storytelling was particularly poorly done, gameplay was dull and the levels felt restricted compared to Halo 3. Why, after two games, we still haven’t gone back to the scale of that game I will never understand.
- Forge. In several ways a step back from Reach’s variant. Overall, the objects are less useful than in Reach, precision placement is gone, and Impact, Ravine and Erosion are less flexible than Forge World ever was. Even the better lighting introduces several issues like it making enclosed maps look bland and it sometimes glitching out when the amount of objects on a map gets too high.
- Spartan Ops. I hoped this mode would give us challenging, more specific types of co-op missions it gave us something entirely different. A mode where you mindlessly kill hordes of Covenant and Prometheans (both of which aren’t that fun to fight), with an infinite amount of lives, reused and seemingly random environments, a lackluster story (during the missions), no customization and no theater is what we got instead.
I could go on and on about the numerous big issues that Halo 4 has (
Which I did) but I’ll keep it to this for now.
So yeah, I kept playing Reach for a long time (Mainly because zero bloom, Forge map testing, and Team Objective pooping) and you won’t find me saying that it’s a better game than Halo 4, but at its core Halo Reach is more Halo to me than Halo 4 is. Reach was annoying enough at times, but Halo 4 takes this a step further and I simply can’t enjoy it anymore. I’ll admit: Reach was mostly fun because trueskill didn’t work properly as a result of the low population number of the playlists that I played in. I’ve played a shitload of Team Objective and Squad Slayer simply because whenever we went into those playlist as a team, 90% of the time we would go incredibly positive and absolutely destroy the other team. MLG (0% bloom, no sprint) was the only competitively viable playlist in Reach and it was the only playlist that was fun to play in against good players, but sadly not many people on my friendslist played it regularly so I stuck to beating up bad players.
Trueskill in Halo 4 does seems to work better, (I definitely got better opposition towards the end) but ironically enough this actually made the game less fun for me. Both Reach (MLG aside) and Halo 4 are not competitively sound in my eyes so actually playing it against good players isn’t fun at all. This is because I feel like I get killed often not because the other player is that great, but because some aspects of the game are flawed. Bloom in Reach is a good example of this. Sometimes I would get killed because my opponents just spammed his DMR and got a lucky headshot, just like I’ve done to my enemies numerous times. It feels unfair.
I’m tired of hoping for that matchmaking update, that TU, that next game that will make most of what I want in Halo a reality. Halo has lost most of the aspects that appealed to me the most and what made the franchise stand out for me so I bid it farewell, for the time being at least.
