Halo 4 Designer Discusses the Game's Failures

[Cognimancer]

Halo 4 Designer Discusses the Game's Failures

Halo 4 had its fair share of faults and oversights, and its design director has taken to Twitter to open a postmortem on what could've been done better.

Despite what internet fanboys may tell you, no game makes it through the development process without flaws - there is no perfect game. That said, many developers and publishers never acknowledge the problems in their titles - so it's refreshing to see 343 Industries' Brad Welch doing just that. Welch, who served as design director on Halo 4, opened up a post-mortem with fans to discuss what went wrong with Halo 4 and what can be improved for the next game.

Halo 4 was by no means a bad game [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/reviews/10020-Halo-4-Review], but it had some issues. It hasn't enjoyed the same multiplayer popularity as its predecessors, and Welch has some ideas on what caused that.

[tweet t=https://twitter.com/bradford_welch/status/405990865601961985]

"Big Team is an area we focused on for H4," he goes on to say. "It's a whole different beast. We focused on heavies and I'm OK with that. That's a 2nd focus." After the brief explanation about the dev team's priorities, Welch answered a slew of questions from fans. Often when responders mentioned something that they didn't like about Halo 4, he asked what games did it better, to learn what the fans wanted. He also explained why some of the game's faults were present. "Very fair point," he said to one responder who criticized Halo 4's short progression system. "I actually designed that system and feel bad that it tapped out. Major surgery pulled me out of H4 a bit early."

It's nice to see an open conversation between developers and fans, particularly on the sensitive topic of mistakes. Welch received a lot of feedback from fans, and hopefully that new knowledge will be applied directly towards making Halo 5 a better game for its audience.

Source: Twitter [https://twitter.com/bradford_welch]

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[DaViller]

I think the first fault was letting 343 actually make the game. I dont think i'll come back to the series unless that one gets fixed, wich will probably be never.

 

[Stupidity]

Campaign was unplayable to me
Enemy AI retarded compared to Reach (I could write a whole essay on how bad this was)
New weapons (Promethean) just rip offs of existing ones but shinier
No new Vehicles
Marines magiced in and out of map, keeping them alive and armed was part of the fun.


Multiplayer was good though I thought

 

[blackrave]

Yes, the main fault is in the name "Halo4"
Can anyone guess what I mean?

 

[Shoggoth2588]

Opinion​

Halo 4 shouldn't have existed in general...not on the 360 anyway. I played through the whole thing and had two main lines of thought: "Wow, this vehicle section is freaking awesome" and, "Where is a Mantis? Give me a Mantis. I want a Mantis. Any vehicle really but specifically a Mantis." This game could have been the first in a new spin-off series of vehicle-centric Halo titles. Between the new vehicles and established vehicles there's no reason a story couldn't have been made linking a series of levels that start you out in a Warthog or, Mantis and lead you into space combat...then end traditionally, with a mongoose tearing ass away from disaster and into a waiting escape ship.

 

[Irridium]

Did anyone mention how over-saturated the game was and the lack of vibrant colors? Because those were my biggest problems with it.

Multiplayer, too, was much less fun than previous games. I don't know, in trying to modernize it, it lost some of what made it unique. At least in the current shooter landscape. Maps just weren't that fun, and many are essentially three parallel paths or a symmetrical arena. Which aren't necessarily bad, mind you, but when those are the only general layouts for the maps? It just gets real old real quick. And then there's the weapons. One thing I liked about Halo is that each weapon served a purpose. There weren't very many repeats. And if guns were similar, there was usually still something that made 'em stand apart. In Halo 4, many are essentially just re-skins. The Promethean weapons are the biggest culprits. Maybe it was to make the whole choosing what weapon to spawn with thing (another issue I had with the game) more fair, but it made many weapons just redundant.

 

[CardinalPiggles]

My biggest grief with the game was the terrible performance. Sure it looked all shiny and what not but having the game dip down to about 20fps (maybe lower) is unacceptable. Plus the Spartans just looked way overdone. And they would always throw too many enemies at you. It was quite overwhelming sometimes. Add on the fact that it all felt really dragged out and often very samey, it was just boring to play.

Oh right the multiplayer, it was ok, but it didn't feel like Halo anymore. Too many abilities and add ons. Plus the fact that everyone could sprint at all times made it too manic for me.

 

[Stupidity]

And they would always throw too many enemies at you. It was quite overwhelming sometimes. Add on the fact that it all felt really dragged out and often very samey, it was just boring to play.

I have a sure win strategy for when the game spawns hordes at you.
1. back up till you leave their range
2. shoot them in the face as they move in little circles and fire a few rounds every 30 sec. Enemies in Halo 4 are tethered to their spawn point and only rarely use cover well. (few months after release anyway)

 

[tdylan]

Often when responders mentioned something that they didn't like about Halo 4, he asked what games did it better, to learn what the fans wanted.

My intent is not to be cynical, but does that read like "tell us things that you like about other games so that we can include them in next in order to broaden its appeal" to anyone else?

"Very fair point," he said to one responder who criticized Halo 4's short progression system. "I actually designed that system and feel bad that it tapped out. Major surgery pulled me out of H4 a bit early."

Is this really what development is like on a Triple A title? "Guys! We need to work on the progression system, but Brad's not here due to surgery. Damn! We have no idea how to finish that up. It was Brad's baby. Oh well, we've gotta get the game to print. Just send it as is." There was no overall plan to the point that folks could say "Brad's not here, but we know his vision for the system so we can carry on without him." It is really THAT compartmentalized?

 

[Covarr]

Often when responders mentioned something that they didn't like about Halo 4, he asked what games did it better, to learn what the fans wanted.

My intent is not to be cynical, but does that read like "tell us things that you like about other games so that we can include them in next in order to broaden its appeal" to anyone else?

Not really. He's not asking for feature suggestions, but about better implementations of existing features.

P.S. Thanks

 

[TheSapphireKnight]

It is promising to see them admit the issues with Halo 4. I did honestly enjoy the campaign, Spartan Ops was an interesting concept it was just not well executed, but the multiplayer was just depressing. For all the problems Reach had, it never felt like it abandoned the core of Halo like Halo 4 did.

The multiplayer specifically never felt like a "Halo" game in the same way Halo CE-Halo 3(and even Reach) did. I'm a big fan of the Halo franchise as a whole. I'm not opposed to seeing different kinds of Halo games, I enjoyed Halo Wars as its own game and as part of the Halo universe. I wouldn't mind seeing some of the contents and ideas from Halo 4 become their own games, but I don't want to see them replace what I started out with in the first place.

Custom Classes(with "primaries", "secondaries", and perks), killstreaks, sprint, even smaller things like flinch or hitmarkers. None of these things fit with the "Halo" gameplay we started out with. It may be a solid game on its own, but from what I've seen it is not what a large portion of Halo fans want from a core title.

If the first "vidoc" style videos for Halo 5(or whatever it will be called) starts of with "hey we messed up so we are going back to our roots" I will be excited. However I am not exactly optimistic anything like that will happen.

 

[Paragon Fury]

You know what the funny part was?

Nearly everything that dragged the game down, at least in terms of multiplayer, was accurately predicted and foretold by pros and regular players alike MONTHS, MONTHS in advance. But 343i didn't listen - and their forums were basically an echo chamber filled with jack-booted thugs in the form of Forum Mods; it got to the point where they simply locked threads and banned members for having dissenting opinions. I remember one thread that was basically a graduate-student effort describing how the new CTF and weapon drop systems were a bad idea and wouldn't work as well as the old ones; they banned the creator and blocked the thread.

I got banned for pointing a novice-level flaw in their data gathering methods and because I got a little harsh with BS Angel after she proved just how bad she was at the game (she caused a team of three semi-pros to lose because she fed so hard) and said she probably shouldn't have any input on game balance.

But hey, stuff like that it'll happen when a good portion of your fanbase has more experience playing and perfecting gameplay than your design team has time making games.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

There was actually a lot I liked about Halo 4. I really enjoyed the spec ops missions (even though they were super cheesy) because it gave me and my friends something to do if we didn't want to play MP, and I really enjoyed the high production values of the cut scenes. I also really enjoyed the speed of the combat in Halo 4. I enjoyed having the ability to sprint as a default, and I thought it improved the flow of the game, especially on large maps in big team (which is what I mostly played).

Now the problems:

Like others have mentioned, campaign AI was pretty much a joke. The enemy AI in Halo Reach was some of the smartest I've ever seen, and to go from that to Halo 4 just felt like such a MASSIVE step back. Prometheans were stupid and not fun to fight. They had incredibly dumb AI and are just bullet sponges. They were a step up from Flood, but just barely.

Armor abilities in Halo 4 never really felt like they were particularly worth using. The maps never really seemed designed with them in mind. Jetpack never seemed like it was significantly more useful for traversing maps, the booster pack was completely worthless in default game modes. In fact, there really weren't any armor abilities worth using other than the cloak and the promethean vision.

Vehicle balance was atrocious. What idiot decided that ghosts should take a charged shot from a plasma pistol and 2 plasma grenades to destroy, while the banshee and the mantis get ripped apart like tissue paper by concentrated DMR fire?

The original maps the game came with were pretty terrible. The only maps I liked were Ragnarok (remake of Valhalla), Exile, and Adrift. With so few fun maps I really didn't feel any incentive to shell out for DLC, so I didn't. Forge maps also make the frame-rate shit itself pretty bad.

Ordinance drops are dumb.

 

[Bvenged]

Having been a Halo fan for years, I'd jump onto Twitter for the occasion to fire off some questions at a developer.

Except it'd be a waste of time. When I think about it, I'm not out for clarification, I'm out for blood. 343i ruined my most favourite game series of all time and drove me away from Xbox to PC. They handled the transition of the Halo series from Bungie about as delicately as a sledgehammer used in keyhole surgery.

Bungie got it fairly right with Halo 3, then improved on certain aspects even more with Reach. Granted not all of Reach was good, so 343i only had to take out Bloom, change the abilities and tweak the weighting some more, and they'd have made the perfect Halo game. They could've also put a little spin on things or something to make it more thier own... but what they ended up doing absolutely killed Xbox for me.

List:
No separation between social, competitive and ranked playlists,
No playlists such as "Team Objective,
No asymmetrical gametypes despite there being asymmetrical maps,
Bad netcode (no Locale, host is chosen by lowest level player),
Bad maps (see "No asymmetrical gametypes",
Bad UI (Look made for Kinect. Reach had best UI),
Fewer and worse gametypes (Infinity slayer, dominion, BTB),
Killstreaks... really?
Poor frame stability (stutters and frame-lag repeatedly),
Somehow worse graphics,
Bad matchmaking (because it didn't exist for many many months and sucked when it did),
Feature incomplete at launch (fileshare, ranking, Spartan Ops, etc),
Boring & Repetitive Spartan Ops,
Weak custom game editor (limited capability compared to even Halo 3),
Worse forge mode (good concept with maps and object skins, but fewer and broken tools),
6 months of unbalanced weapons...

That's just off the top of my head. I haven't mentioned Join In Progress, the cutscene quality, the bad cosmetics, the lame abilities, the slaughtering of Action Sack on Reach, the fact that the waypoint was a central hub, the party system, the voting system, etc etc.

So yeah, way to kill a game series 343i. So much ignorance to the original fanbase all in an attempt to appeal to CoD fans, who predictably left for CoD. I am disgusted.

How to alienate your original fanbase and yet fail to attract your new target audience 101: By 343 Industries.

 

[Hero of Lime]

While I didn't play the multi-player outside a few matches, I really enjoyed the Halo 4 campaign. For me Halo is all about single player, and in that regard, I genuinely like Halo 4 a whole bunch.

Though I still think it was messed up that you have to have an Xbox Live Gold account for Spartan Ops.

 

[jackpipsam]

I was keen with 343 when I saw the work they had put into things like Waypoint, Halo: CEA and all that stuff.
Halo 4 was disappointing, but I don't think it's entirely terrible.
It's still IMO a better shooter than most on the market of that year.

I think with Halo 5 (or whatever it is), they might be able to pull it off.
They have LOTS of talent there, no doubt about it.
However with a refocus, they could bring back the unmatched gameplay of yesteryear.

 

[electric method]

I find this kind of funny seeing as 343i has had constant feedback in the Halo 4 forums on what exactly went wrong. Granted, large numbers of posts of have been very hostile however, there have been just as many from passionate fans that tactfully and thoughtfully brought up many ways the game could be changed for the better.

I can remember pre Halo 4 launch on those forums too. Long time players and fans were telling 343i no ranked/social separation was a bad idea. No in game visible ranks was a bad idea. Flag pick up was a bad idea. Custom load outs, perks and the expanding of AA's was a bad idea for the Halo franchise. All 343i kept saying was "Trust Us". They've kept that mantra up managed to alienate large portions of the fans, implemented a wretched Competitive Skill Based Ranking system (that isn't even in game) and created/used some of the worst maps/forged maps to ever grace a main Halo title.

As others have said, and I've said in their forums; trust is earned. They had one chance to prove Halo was in capable hands. They did not prove that and have continued to prove they don't know what makes Halo, well Halo.