I have to say, this attitude has always confused me. I think it's symptomatic of this assumed mandate of "progress" inherent in how people view computer games as a medium. I don't see anyone complaining that football, basketball or baseball still play in the same fundamental way as they always have, much less demanding a whole new sport en masse. Yes, you have to keep buying new games and you want that purchase to be validated, but people continue to spend money on equipment or tickets for the same sport for their whole lives. Because they enjoy it, not just because its flavour of the month. I dunno about you, but I'd rather not pay for something that I enjoy less than its predecessor in pure gameplay terms just to tick an "advancement" box in my head and justify the purchase. That makes me less likely to purchase something. That's not to say I'm the opposite, that I'm inherently against change, but simply that it should justify itself and not simply adhere to this culture of progress. It's not like graphics or physics engines where you're going in an objectively progressive and beneficial direction, it's not inherently advancement at all, just change for change's sake.
Is this at all supported by real world statistics/polling, or is it just how you personally feel about the game? I don't ask that as a backhanded way of defending H4 (which I certainly have my issues with) - rather, I just think we should keep this conversation even-keeled and intellectually honest. And trying to read the minds of literally hundreds of thousands of people is not that. For what you are saying to be true, you'd have to first assume that "most" players have a good understanding of both the concept of balance in a game and what Halo was prior to this iteration. I don't really think either of those is true, let alone both of them. Halo may have a relatively large and vocal hardcore gamer contingent in its base, but they are by no means the majority, or even close to it. Most players demographically are younger; they play the game with out-of-the-box settings (see: the popularity of Infinity Slayer in this game, or the popularity of vanilla Slayer over Super Slayer/TU in Reach; see also: the extremely large population gap between casual modes like Infection and Grifball compared to the core competitive playlist, MLG). And for a lot of them, this their first or MAYBE second Halo title. The series gets older, but its player base stays fairly young simply by virtue of the fact that it's a console shooter: over time it sheds players like dead skin cells and adds new ones to replace them. How many players on this site never played CE or even H2? It won't be too long before most of the randoms in matchmaking you play with haven't played anything prior to Reach. When the next gen consoles come out and Halo 5 is made for the Xbox 720, that will become even more true than it already is. Plenty of hardcore types are leaving Halo 4, and speaking up about why on the internet. But don't confuse internet forums devoted exclusively to Halo with the game's population in general. The demographics are quite different from how they may appear. Edited by merge: The gaming industry has been partly responsible for that, because they're always selling new features as primary reasons to buy their titles. They set up a system where people expect and desire a certain amount of change, even to core mechanics. We even make fun of CoD for not changing these elements, for god's sake. I think it might be appropriate to hassle developers of single player games for making the same thing over and over again; single player games warrant the regular incorporation of new experiences and challenges for their buyers. But primarily-multiplayer games would probably be more appropriately treated like sports than like competitors to Grand Theft Auto. Which brings me to point 2: It's also related to the ongoing inability of e-sports to truly take off, because they're really only of interest to gamers, and even then just a minority of gamers that usually would classify themselves as competitive. If e-sports were more popular, I think the prevalent attitude you find among its participants (e.g. "Halo CE was the best Halo game and all the following ones should emulate its mechanics as much as possible") would spread to the general player base, sort of like how football fans aren't constantly asking for the NFL to radically change its rules every couple of years.
I made a post on NeoGAF some time ago that covered this issue. Not so much the addition of specific CoD features or mechanics but more the lack of structure and predictability that was present in previous Halo games but not in CoD games and now Halo 4 (And Reach to a lesser extend). It also deals with some other issues but I still think it's worth posting. So here: 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.
Nothing to do with forums. H4 sales were already lower than we might have expected, probably due to the fact that Bungie is no longer making it. It's not as though Halo titles have never had any competition in the past, either, so that feels like a weak excuse. Don't overthink it. No doubt people are playing other games, too, but people are a lot less likely to stick around with so many flaws to motivate their decision. I can tell you right now that I won't be playing this game as much as I played Reach, personally. With such a poor Forge and newb-friendly multiplayer that is segregated by forced perks, why linger?
Figures? I'm pretty sure it outsold Reach massively. What exactly does "lower than we might have expected" mean? Forge is, again, a very minority appeal thing, and newb-friendly MP (if you would call it that, which in certain senses I would, but not quite with the same conviction I'm getting from your posts) carried CoD to the best selling console FPS spot. The only reasoning I can get from this post is that you're put off, and you extrapolate that out to an entire gaming population.
It outsold Reach by only 20 million on launch day, while H3 made over 170 million in the US alone. H4's 220 is global. Considering that this title has a much higher investment than all the others, it's not as impressive as it ought to be. Halo being Halo carried it to the top spot originally. CoD being CoD allowed for their success. Halo being CoD doesn't add up.
Comparing the lifetime sales figures of a game that's been out 5 years to one that's been out a month or two? Not very convincing. EDIT: Checked wiki and see what you're saying. In fairness, the market is much more crowded than it was at Halo 3's launch. There was NO real contender for Xbox FPS games at the time, whereas that's dramatically not the case now with Blops 2 being released very shortly afterwards, splitting the market heavily. With all due respect, that's an awful argument.
They're all launch day, the only difference being what regions are included. I already explained why in my first post. If you really want to be technical, you'll have to define what CoD being on top means, or why that even matters at all. If it's the sales approach, they pump one out every year; it's the Madden of shooters, an easy money-maker. Also, irrelevant to the discussion.
^ The kind of comment that kills any respect for the thread. Analytical, reason filled discussion? Nope, let's throw recycled insults around!
Yup, edited my post. As I said there, the market is split now in a way it wasn't at all during Halo 3's release. I think that's testament to the 360 shooter market as a whole rather than an indictment of Halo 4 in isolated terms. I don't think you explained it at all. If the CoD aspects (which the aspects you identify very much are) are what put people off, why does CoD in itself do so well? Because its "CoD being CoD" is not a sufficient explanation as to why it works in one instance but not another. And your "one a year" point would work if we were talking about global franchise figures, but we're not. CoD games themselves sell incredibly well, as opposed to just the whole franchise grossing well through sheer force of numbers.
Actually, I mean it Like I was saying earlier (in long winded-ways that nobody read) If you remove the models and bipeds, and compare COD and Halo by mechanics alone, they are almost the same, at this time, you can even emulate COD gameplay by making a custom game type (weapon damage, player speed etc.) without having to worry about honor rules At the same time, you cannot emulate H1-reach gameplay, in H4 because of the new gameplay additions. This also means that the small maps that flourished in Halo can be no more, as they are now too confining for the space requirements of the spartan IV. the reason I summarized this was because no one reads wall text unless it involves them directly, hell, it may be that the only reason you will read this is because I quoted you.
The gun mechanics are fundamentally different in a way that you really can't emulate, and Halo still has a strong pick-up element to the weapon mechanics. I don't think your point stands at all.
This is definitely what I'd like to see with a debate prefix if it gets added. On topic: 1) Do you like the CoD? No. And it has changed the way I play halo. I'm not on Infinity Slayer anymore, unless I'm with friends who can't play without radar. Halo needs to move into territory unbeknowst to CoD in order to develop a solid fanbase unique to Halo and NOT CoD for success. In this regard, I feel that copying CoD elements is alienating some hardcore Halo players while trying to attract CoD loyalists. CoD has a fanbase solid enough that at this point, people buy CoD for the NAME. Halo can't change it's name. Therefore, it should take its own route. 2) Should Halo "keep up"? I dislike this question inherently because it implies that Halo is behind CoD in every sense. "Keep up" should not be the objective - that is the role of "Go beyond." 3) Increasing replay value, the KEY to any successful game: Yes, loadouts work to a degree, but what I'd like to see would be aesthetic things unlocked (like Reach armor) as well as single player content (a bonus campaign level? Secret ending, maybe? Perhaps Metroid Other M-style pickups in campaign/spops if it is kept?) that does not affect the balance of multiplayer. By doing this, Halo can create replay value through unlockables and at the same time not alienate people in multiplayer. The only issue is making the unlocks interesting (Wow, what's this? Oh, that's cool! or If I finish the campaign and go back to this level, I get xxx emblem/armor/something VS: Lemme go grind for ten hours opening and closing a map to see if this clue has appeared.) 4) Old classic games are common. Mario, Zelda, Pokemon to an extent, Metroid, Quake as a couple examples. "It's not possible" is never an excuse to fail.
Nintendo are a very interesting case when it comes to keeping old franchises alive, and even maintaining their mainstream appeal. However, one is left to question whether it'd be so easy A) in terms of multiplayer and B) in the FPS market. Both aspects are incredibly competitive right now, in a way that platformers aren't really. Quake is, imo, a poor example. We haven't had a successful title since Q3A. I don't consider Live to be an exception to that since it's an adaption of Q3A and uses an entirely different model: F2P.
the only lack here is the aiming reticle rifle damage can be emulated by adjusting damage settings you cannot disable autosprint, self designated loadouts, perks, or ordinance. I'm not saying that is a bad thing, but the point remains that it is happening, and if this trend of games borrowing elements from other games continues, we might just end up with all FPS being aesthetic variants of each other.
How much did Halo 4 sell in the US alone? And what is considered a good mark for single-console games in 2012 vs. 2007? How much did H3 sell globally in its first week? (FYI, Wikipedia claims both games did around $300 million total in their first week; but it also claims that H4 set a franchise record for first week sales dollars.) What was the specific dollar amount of that investment, for both games? (FYI, Google turns up no hard numbers that I can find - just one guy saying Halo 4 was the most expensive game ever made by Microsoft.) You have too much of an axe to grind here. These arguments are not made in good faith.
Even after stripping shields and adjusting damage settings (which, might I add, messes with the rest of the game), the AR does not play in the same way as the ARs and SMGs in CoD do. You're stretching here. I think you're getting ahead of yourself here. Convergence and divergence are part of the mainstream process, this is not a new phenomenon or one which will inherently end up as you're predicting. Furthermore, what you can make with heavily modified settings does not equate to what the game is. Vanilla is how the vast majority will experience the game, so your heavily adapted and still not-quite-CoD settings are next to irrelevant. I agree that not having a function to disable Sprint is a big deal, but not nearly as big as you're making out, and what's important is comparing out of the box experiences, ie. like for like.
I think you bring up some good points but personally, I feel like Halo was changed for the better (especially in comparison to Reach.) That's all I have to say about it really... Sure, they added some elements similar to CoD but I think they did it in such a meticulous manner that it didn't make everything ambiguous. Just my $0.02.
Pegasi, I could specify a game with ten characteristics of Halo and claim that it's not possible to do it with THOSE ideas. You're on a slippery slope here. As for Quake, fair enough, bad example.