Halo 4 Designer Discusses the Game's Failures

[Scorpid]

Speaking only for the single player; I didn't hate Halo 4 and it wasn't the worst in the franchise (that honor going to 3), and I think for a first time dev team who was being as closely monitored by nosey producers, it wasn't a bad product. And Halo series has never suffered from the same sense of repetition that the dreadful CoD series does, but it certainly could of done alot of things better if someone had had some balls to tell a different story.
1) Can we just admit that Masterchief is probably the most boring protagonist put to a game. I mean it is really baffling how many fanboys he has, when he has, as a character, the emotional range of a slab of concrete. I mean coming off of Reach where perhaps they didn't have 100% original characters but at least they actually used them well.
2) We don't need to fight the exact same covenant again with not even new hats.
3) Making Cortana the way they did was cheap and sleazy.
4) Going from maguffin to maguffin is not effective story telling.
5) The newest baddies were kind of bland. Their weapons felt really off to me. There was no satisfaction in firing them like there is for the snazzy looking alien weapons or the tough looking marine weapons.
6) Tell a story of your own maybe, don't try to pick up and run with a story line that Bungie all but ended as solidly as possible.

 

[Brian Tams]

On a personal level, I want to strangle whoever thought customizable loadouts were a good idea in a Halo game.

Anyways, the game was too focused on shiny-shiny, and as a result, so many other elements were either subpar or awful.

The biggest offender of rushed mechanics has got to be the AI.

While the friendly AI in Reach were traditionally pants on head retarded, the enemy AI were very smart, and well designed, and were actually capable of strategies. Imagine my surprise when the first squadron of Elites you fight began utilizing frustrating guerrilla tactics to wear me down. In 4, the enemy AI just kinda... stood there and soaked up damage. Lame. That's pretty amateurish design right there.

Honestly, the best way to fix things in time for Halo 5 would be to can the lot of 343i and start from scratch.

 

[Mike Richards]

Weapon loadouts alleviate allow you to jump right in to your preferred play style, so you don't spend minutes combing the map with a gun you hate looking for a spawn that someone has probably already taken. Drops then add a level of variation to this that both rewards performance and allows you to evolve your approach without really affecting anything in the match beyond your own abilities.

The story was hands down the best of the series, bringing in a greater focus on many of the elements that have either only been hinted at before or supplied only by the novels. The greater focus on Chief's characterization is particularly welcome, IE the fact that he's not just a blank robotic soldier because the writer forgot to hand him a character but because that's actually who he is as a person, and the events of the story pull him out of that shell into an emotional place he is very uncomfortable with.

The Promethean weapons may not have broken entirely new ground but they provided some interesting new takes on familiar ideas that allowed you to know exactly what something was and how to use it the moment you picked it up, but still differentiated themselves from their more standard counterparts enough to worth choosing.

The new enemy types also added a considerable new dynamic to combat, and in general I found them to be more challenging adversaries then previous enemies in a very good way. Maybe it's just something I don't bother paying much attention to but I didn't notice any change in AI behavior between 4 and any of the previous games. Things shoot me and try not to get shot, that about sums it up. If there is actually any change I really couldn't care less. It worked.

To summarize, every entry is great in it's own different way, but 4 is easily my new favorite. Come at me bro

 

[Chaos Isaac]

Weapon loadouts alleviate allow you to jump right in to your preferred play style "

Weapon loadouts alleviate allow you to jump right in to your preferred play style

The story was hands down the best of the series

The Promethean weapons

The new enemy types also added a considerable new dynamic to combat, and in general I found them to be more challenging adversaries then previous enemies in a very good way. Maybe it's just something I don't bother paying much attention to but I didn't notice any change in AI behavior between 4 and any of the previous games. Things shoot me and try not to get shot, that about sums it up. If there is actually any change I really couldn't care less. It worked.

To summarize, every entry is great in it's own different way, but 4 is easily my new favorite. Come at me bro

Well, you asked.

1: Ahah, unless you like vehicles. Then being plasma pistoled and sticky grenaded consistently did not add to the game. Hell when I played, unless they could one shot, they were practically useless. Even Mantis', unless they had super good ground support.

Or even playing ground where a new guy can start with the same exact gear and have the same opportunities to get better weapons around the map just like a player whose been around. What can a new guy do when he doesn't have anything of the things a player whose been around has? A even bigger disadvantage. Doesn't add to the game.

2: You're serious? Between the terrible storytelling and complete lack of caring about the villain or anything, it wasn't that good. I mean, the Didact is a super weak villain with a odd sense of superiority, 10,000 year old prejudice, can pilot his own ship that had him imprisoned five minutes ago, a odd resurgence of Covenant when we just got done with that whole thing, unexplained space magic, and magic control of all the robots. 'Cause nothing was done to make sure he didn't get control of them again, and nothing in their programming or whatever let them stop and try to talk to MC instead of just trying to outright kill him. Unlike later when they're seen commanding Covenant. Who oddly obey for no adequately explained reason. Especially when he refers to them as mindless beasts.

Hell, after playing Reach where your mostly quiet Spartan is shown to care, doesn't need to be told what to do all the time, and fight like hell. MC's return, character, and subsequent story is merely hollow.

3: Being one shotted by a quick scoping Promothean rifle that hit my ankle, or oddly consistently being assaulted by a incineration launcher or being hilariously taken out by a boltshot by a dude running around a corner did not improve the experience.

4: The A.I. is a lot dumber. In Reach, it was satisfying to fight, in 4, not so much. While they're not human, they are generally craftier and more challenging. Sure, it's not the best A.I. around, but Reach didn't need to throw bullet-sponge robots at me to threaten me.


I mean, to each his own, but I disagree with you, and above is why. But hey, it's not bad for a new group picking up after Bungie.

 

[spartandude]

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.

....? Apart from Halo Anniversary this was their first game. I don't think its fair to say that aslong as they make it yoy wont buy it. I mean what if the next Halo was more like the older ones rather than Halo 4?

 

[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.

....? Apart from Halo Anniversary this was their first game. I don't think its fair to say that aslong as they make it yoy wont buy it. I mean what if the next Halo was more like the older ones rather than Halo 4?

I kinda doubt that since halo 4 disappointed me in pretty much every aspect. From the new spartan design, that looked way to skinny compared to previous ones, to the CoD esque multiplayer. I was a pretty much diehard halo fan before but i don't have high expextations of the new game. Pretty much the only thing I liked was the weapon sound design that was the best in the series. Everything else pretty much sucked as far as im concerned, especially 343's rock hard boner, in the form of bright ass light, hanging in my face all the time.

 

[spartandude]

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.

....? Apart from Halo Anniversary this was their first game. I don't think its fair to say that aslong as they make it yoy wont buy it. I mean what if the next Halo was more like the older ones rather than Halo 4?

I kinda doubt that since halo 4 disappointed me in pretty much every aspect. From the new spartan design, that looked way to skinny compared to previous ones, to the CoD esque multiplayer. I was a pretty much diehard halo fan before but i don't have high expextations of the new game. Pretty much the only thing I liked was the weapon sound design that was the best in the series. Everything else pretty much sucked as far as im concerned, especially 343's rock hard boner, in the form of bright ass light, hanging in my face all the time.

I wont argue that Halo 4 is really dissapointing (although i do actually like it), im just saying i dont think you should hate the next one purely because it has the 343 logo on it.

 

[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.

....? Apart from Halo Anniversary this was their first game. I don't think its fair to say that aslong as they make it yoy wont buy it. I mean what if the next Halo was more like the older ones rather than Halo 4?

I kinda doubt that since halo 4 disappointed me in pretty much every aspect. From the new spartan design, that looked way to skinny compared to previous ones, to the CoD esque multiplayer. I was a pretty much diehard halo fan before but i don't have high expextations of the new game. Pretty much the only thing I liked was the weapon sound design that was the best in the series. Everything else pretty much sucked as far as im concerned, especially 343's rock hard boner, in the form of bright ass light, hanging in my face all the time.

I wont argue that Halo 4 is really dissapointing (although i do actually like it), im just saying i dont think you should hate the next one purely because it has the 343 logo on it.

If I´m gonna end up getting an xbox and the game is good yeah ill definitly play it. But I think the chances of that happening are pretty much zero. Silent hill(well shattered memorys was actually pretty cool), DmC and now Halo, awesome series that changed dev after the old ones where done and then went to shit.

 

[Elijah Newton]

Yes. Yesssss.. Feeling vindicated as someone who'd debated getting it and passed based on two things, and two alone :

1) Jetpacks not what they are in Reach.

2) No firefight mode.

I hadn't been a big fan of the series prior to Reach but g*damn if they didn't nail the franchise with that iteration (for me). Anything they took away simply translated into, 'less than.'

 

[Spartan448]

As a longtime fan of the series, here's what I'm going to say on H4: Yhatzee was right. The game certainly has it's redeeming points, and props to the storywriters who managed to do about as good a job as you can making an 8ft tall cyborg death machine seem like a character with emotion that can feel pain and loss. The Mantis was also pretty fun, but it will never compare to blowing everything away in an Atlas with AC-20s and all (Sorry 343 but Battletech beat you to the part of my heart that would marry a 'Mech if it could). But everything else was kind of meh. Most of the campaign just seemed like a filler episode. Actually, that's a great way to describe it - H4's campaign was a filler episode. And although a lot of people are kind of beat up about the fact that MS is now just milking the Halo cash cow after we were supposed to have "finished the fight", and to be fair, that is true, Halo's lore actually justifies a continuation of the series. The original mission of the Spartan program has yet to be fulfilled, and the Insurrection could definitely be a good plotpoint to make games on, IF DONE RIGHT. And that's a BIG "if". To make that plotpoint work, to make a game that would truely justify being more than just another cash cow release, the story is going to have to be top notch. But it could work.

I'm not going to use the excuse of "this is 343's first game" because it technically isn't. Many of the employees of 343 were on Bungie's Halo dev team, who didn't want to abandon their project. But they do need time to test the waters with what they can and can't do, and they need to build up some funds. MS needs to know that 343 hasn't lost any profit potential, 343 needs to know they can release something, and the community needs to know that 343 is there for them. Also, there's the fact that the market for shooters, especially console shooters, has definitely changed, and it's hard to ignore CoD's numbers when the higher-ups from MS review the proposal for a game. Now that they have Halo 4 under their belt, H5 will probably be at least a little bit better.

Although for my two cents, there seems to be a thing with Halo games that every odd numbered game does well, and every even numbered game kind of sucks arse.

Also, even if only for campaign, bring back the Halo 1 magnum. Something's been missing from every Halo since then, and I think it's that feeling of 3-shotting a Hunter with a puny Human pistol.

 

[Dogstile]

This was the game where they added killstreaks right?

Hahaha fuck 343 so hard. They have no idea what they're doing, they're just copying.

 

[EightGaugeHippo]

The biggest mistake was trying to make it call of duty. Sprint, killstreaks, loadouts?
What was good about CoD doesn't belong in Halo, and vise versa.

Can we please stick with having different multiplayer experiences instead of just the copying and proliferation of the "CoD like" we've seen in recent years.

 

[Evonisia]

The game's biggest failure gameplay wise was the Codification of it. CoD has spent years ripping off Halo (or the stuff it made popular) so ripping off CoD is like a bizarre shit circle.

It's biggest failure was letting the script be comprised of fan fiction, bad fan fiction.

 

[Evonisia]

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.

....? Apart from Halo Anniversary this was their first game. I don't think its fair to say that aslong as they make it yoy wont buy it. I mean what if the next Halo was more like the older ones rather than Halo 4?

343 Industries has lead a one company crusade to completely ruin Halo. Gameplay wise they clearly couldn't give two shits as evident of 4 just being a Codified glitchfest wearing a Halo skin. Storywise they've only ever did one thing remotely right and that was Cortana's rampancy. Besides the horrible ending of Halo 4 it was handled quite nicely. If you look up anything else 343 has allowed to happen in the Halo universe you'd see how much fan fiction they're spewing into an otherwise pretty solid foundation.