Just wondering because serious I have seen it fall during each installment. Do you think 343i has the skills to bring back what they lost if they intend to make Halo great once again? I feel that they do, they just need to look back on the greatness the other Halo had and go off them. Also add where we can see just how many players are doing what, like in MM, Customs, Forge, Theater and Firefight (if they add that back) and so on.
I certainly hope so, but much of it will also depend on the success of the next Xbox. If there is a large enough player base on the new system, and 343 can learn from their mistakes, 5 should end up very promising.
It can, but I am near certain that it won't. A few key things like dedicated ranked/social playlists, wider playlist variety, more custom game options, and increased communication with the community is ALL it would take to restore Halo to what it used to be. Don't get me wrong, I think there's lots of other things that need improvement, but fixing these four things is the bare minimum to bring back all the people who left. Unfortunately, at this point it's almost too late. Every month that goes by without these things, people start moving away and finding new homes for their gaming needs. If they wait until Halo 5 they'll be able to get some people back, but not enough to bring Halo back to the top. Ultimately, 343 is focusing too much on casual gameplay and not enough on competitive. I know that they want to bring in more casual players, and I 100% understand that, unfortunately though they're doing a piss-poor job of balancing their attentions which is absolutely necessary with a game like Halo. Without casuals, the game will die; without competitives, the game will die. It's possible to satisfy both groups - Halo 3 always has and always will be the pinnacle of this.
With the community being the shithole it is now? I've tried to be optimistic for a long time now, but I don't see any hope for the Halo franchise at this point.
There is no chance of getting back the population it originally started with. too much water under the bridge. 343i made some critical mistakes, and they listened to the hard core community only to find that the population explosion for their obedience to said suggestions was non existent. I expect the hard core playlists to dwindle or barely be supported after throwdown's population.
I think 343 really did themselves in with this preset loadout system, it essentially traps everything at two layers or tiers, the starting guns that have to be crazy balanced because they're starting weapons, and then the second level tier two stuff you can earn through kills. So unless you have one of the bonus guns from 5+ kills out and earning you some easy points, the game grinds down to who can use the starting weapon the most efficiently, there's less breathing room for strategy. And many times, once relative skill with the predominant starting gun becomes established, it feels like moving through a race where you're all at constant speeds, constant relative positions, driving but really going nowhere. There isn't like a choice you can make to take a risk and overtake your opponent, or a countermove/counterweapon you can try, you just kind of trudge along ahead. My thinking is that weapons and their relative power levels have a lot of leeway room when you lay them out on the map and part of their stats is the time and difficulty it takes to get them. Making things a static delivery system really traps you at what I've described, two really rigid grades of weapons. There are no decisions and then counter decisions because everything is really samey, one-note, really static. As an analogy, in a trick taking card game you can have powerful cards because part of the balancing mechanic of those cards is that you don't draw them all the time, you can't always count on having them in your hand. If you had a trick taking card game where you could, at the start of the game, pick out your cards plainly, with full view of the whole deck, you'd have to develop some really specific balancing of every single card and then have the skill of the game happen elsewhere. In Halo 4's case, the skill happens in how well you wield the starting gun, once you get tired of that weapon, or you rank up enough so that people simply us it more effectively than you, you hit a wall. You aren't going to counter them with a different weapon that enables a different way of playing. In Halo 3 I got a lot further in rankings than I should have because I finagled out wins by using odd weapons choices, things that were effectively paper to the rock that opponents normally used. That definitely isn't going to be happening in Halo 4.