@Fistfulofmetal said:

@ShaggE said:

343 was making arguably inferior Halo games every other year until Bungie dropped the ball and 343 had a creative fire lit under their collective ass?

:P

I know what you mean, it's just not the greatest analogy. Halo should be so lucky as to have its own "Black Ops" entry. I guess ODST comes closest to that.

Yeah I admit the analogy is not the greatest but it's the best I can think of to give my opinion context.

Though it is weird, I feel the same way about the Halo series as I do about COD. So far every other entry has been a disappointment.

Halo CE - great

Halo 2 - awful

Halo 3 - great

ODST - didn't like it

Reach - great

Halo 4 - not liking it

Explain.

@BigBoss1911 said:

@Fistfulofmetal said:

@ShaggE said:

343 was making arguably inferior Halo games every other year until Bungie dropped the ball and 343 had a creative fire lit under their collective ass?

:P

I know what you mean, it's just not the greatest analogy. Halo should be so lucky as to have its own "Black Ops" entry. I guess ODST comes closest to that.

Yeah I admit the analogy is not the greatest but it's the best I can think of to give my opinion context.

Though it is weird, I feel the same way about the Halo series as I do about COD. So far every other entry has been a disappointment.

Halo CE - great

Halo 2 - awful

Halo 3 - great

ODST - didn't like it

Reach - great

Halo 4 - not liking it

Explain.

That ending sure did piss off just about everybody.

I wouldn't call it awful, but the marketing promised a battle for Earth and beyond one mission in Africa, that... really wasn't what we got. Also have I mentioned that the ending sucked?

@Oldirtybearon said:

@BigBoss1911 said:

@Fistfulofmetal said:

@ShaggE said:

343 was making arguably inferior Halo games every other year until Bungie dropped the ball and 343 had a creative fire lit under their collective ass?

:P

I know what you mean, it's just not the greatest analogy. Halo should be so lucky as to have its own "Black Ops" entry. I guess ODST comes closest to that.

Yeah I admit the analogy is not the greatest but it's the best I can think of to give my opinion context.

Though it is weird, I feel the same way about the Halo series as I do about COD. So far every other entry has been a disappointment.

Halo CE - great

Halo 2 - awful

Halo 3 - great

ODST - didn't like it

Reach - great

Halo 4 - not liking it

Explain.

That ending sure did piss off just about everybody.

I wouldn't call it awful, but the marketing promised a battle for Earth and beyond one mission in Africa, that... really wasn't what we got. Also have I mentioned that the ending sucked?

Sure the ending pissed me off, and the earth battle was short, but I thought the campaign beat most of Halo 1's repetitive levels, not to mention it had the best multiplayer of every halo imo.

Regarding the campaign, I feel that first person shooters in general really limit themselves and Halo 4 has got to be one of the worst offenders. I played Borderlands 2 not only for randomized elements, but the great voice acting and story that actually got me interested in moving on. Not to mention Goliaths being an extremely entertaining type of enemy amidst the fodder. Halo 4's enemy variation is about as varied as its weaponry. It really does feel like the campaign is an extension of MP and not vice versa. When will games learn that no one likes doing QTEs on the main antagonist?

Except Treyarch has been the CoD A-Team since Black Ops...

@OtakuGamer said:

@Oldirtybearon: Is the gameplay or multiplayer completely redundant to you?

I'm not a multiplayer guy, and gameplay is a means to an end. I'm a narrative guy.

bad analogy, Treyarch makes the better call of duty games atm.

@Sammo21 said:

@project343:

You are shitting on a game from 2001 that revolutionized the console shooter genre. Congratulations. Sure looking at that 11 year old game now looks dated and the pace off. Half-Life 2 is amazing but its pace doesn't hold up now. I think that they hold up incredibly well still which for a shooter period is good. Half-Life 4 is very pretty but there are still plenty of areas that look the same and making the "point" that there's lots of diversity is odd. The UNSC stuff looks the same, the forerunner stuff isn't really new but is just built off of existing Bungie art, and 343 has been drawing forerunner tech that way for years now. I would say you could take out 1/2 of the guns in the game and you'd never notice...its lazy design. There are just basically 3 different versions of each type of weapon. There isn't some revolutionary weapon balance going on here.

Ummmmm Half Life 2 still does hold up now, I just got done showing Half Life 2 to a bunch of Codboys who have never even heard of Half Life and they're all still playing it in my buddies room, seriously don't try and compare HL2 with Halo because those two games are completely different, yeah they may be shooters but one still hasn't had a true sequel since 2004 and people are still demanding one from Valve, the episodes were great but I can tell you that everyone wants a full game now.

Anyways..... I have yet to play Halo 4, but anyone that says that Reach and Halo 3 had a great storyline, is a Bungie fanboy. I'm just gonna flat out say it, cause those games sucked with storyline, I honestly didn't give a damn about anyone in Reach, and above all the damn game was soooooooo fucking boring.

Halo 3 was meant to end the trilogy and satisfy everyone, honestly.... It sucked, it was extremely disappointing and lacked the kind of assimilation that it needed to define itself in what was at the time, the next gen xbox. I know to use the phrase "define itself" with the word "assimilate" in the same sentence is contradictory. However understand this: Halo... Halo was THE game for the xbox, if you didn't have Halo then you weren't really a gamer. So when the 360 came out, and all the new tech, and hardware was shown off, I know me and my friends were pumped to see what Halo would be like. Seriously! I can remember the conversation with my brother, how the last Halo game was coming out for the 360, the very idea of a new engine, new graphics, new physics, new possibilities! And it was gonna be end of the war that had almost destroyed the entire galaxy. But rather than "assimilate" with the new tech that the 360 offered and take advantage of everything like Call Of Duty, Battlefield 2, Condemned, hell even Perfect Dark had.....When the time came for release, it ended up being the exact same Halo that just had slight better graphics, and a half assed storyline. Honestly Halo 3 was disappointing as hell. The only real reason it did well was the same reason MW3 did well; Decent enough for a good review, known well enough to sell no matter what.

@Fistfulofmetal said:

Halo 2 - awful

get out of here man. right now. just stop.

If this is 343's World at War to Bungie's Call of Duty 4, I'm really excited for 343's Black Ops because that was when the transition happened: That was when Treyarch took the risks and changed things.

And it makes sense. Treyarch, following COD4, had to stick with what worked to prove themselves (Especially after COD3). 343 has done that. I haven't played the game yet but I get the sense that there is a consensus that this is more of the same. Its more of the same because it had to be.

I believe Halo 5 will be when we see 343 truly shine. Hopefully.

'interesting setpieces' - sorry, but stopped reading there

You're not feeling Halo 4? I didn't even feel Halo 3, and that was my first Halo. In their quick look of Halo 4, Brad and Jeff pretty much came to a consensus that 343 is playing it safe since this is their first attempt at a Halo game and they don't want to screw it up.

I'll never understand the love for infinity ward. I found the Treyarch games to be at the same quality. Beyond COD 2, I everything else was was kinda meh.

So far with Halo 4 I feel like they got everything that bungie did well right, but then also got right what bungie wasn't so up to par with.

I agree, Halo 4 is better in every way than previous Halos just like Treyarch CoDs are to IW's!

Treyarch > IW.

WaW proved they could do WW2 better, and Black Ops proved they could do modern warfare better.

Also, Halo 4 is pretty boss, and i'll be damned if its not the best looking FPS i've ever seen.

@baconbits33: Halo's story is always seconday to its multiplayer. I agree the story was lacking, but it was still better than Halo 4. At least in Halo 3 more things happened that just pressing buttons and putting cortana into things and taking her back out. Oh and Cortana didn't shield Chief from a nuke he set off in his own hands. Dumbest gaming moment of this generation for me, by far.

The ending of 4 feels like they were lost and they needed to end it. I can't even say it was a clean resolution or a climatic ending...it just was, and what it was = boring.

Also, its pretty much wildly acknowledged that the pacing of Half-Life 2 is god awful. I love the game, its in my top 10 of all time but even I can admit the pacing is terrible. Halo 3 satisfied in the puzzle combat, more so than 2 did in my opinion. So far, for me, Halo 4 is a complete clusterfuck. Maybe when the server pressure eases down I will get better gameplay experiences. While I am disappointed that the same enemies show back up and Chief is by no means on his own (aka, same old UNSC as before pretty much) the actual gameplay is solid. I just wish 343i did something remotely interesting with the story.

I personally have always been more into the story/lore of Halo than the game-play and I have generally gotten these details from the expanded universe by way of the books and comics. Halo 4 however gave me more of that than any of the previous games.

I do understand that some are not getting a portion of Halo 4's campaign plot if they have not delved into the non-game media. I also get that a lot, if not the majority, of players are more about the shooting than the back-story.

For myself ...that ending... I felt it.

@Sammo21: fucking spoiler tags dude.

@Canteu said:

Treyarch > IW.

WaW proved they could do WW2 better, and Black Ops proved they could do modern warfare better.

Also, Halo 4 is pretty boss, and i'll be damned if its not the best looking FPS i've ever seen.

none of their games exist without infinity ward though so we don't really know.

@JayDee: Right, but Treyarch make better games than Infinity Ward. They're making the same games, yet Treyarch did it better. That counts in my book.

That's implying that Bungie would continue to make Halo games. Also there are a few former Bungie guys at 343i.

@BigBoss1911: Let's Play Halo 2...multiplayer...together!

@Sammo21 dude come on the game hasn't even been out a week. Spoiler tag crap like that don't be a douche.

Just finished the campaign

I feel the last few levels of the game are actually far better than the rest and leave a pretty good impression:

The battle on the research station, then the little Star Wars Rebel Assault II stuff with the Broadsword, then the battle on the Didact's ship. All of that was pretty fun, and had a good momentum and pace.

The ending was weird. Wasn't bad or anything amazing. Just a bit interesting.

Overall it's still a disappointing game. The entire middle section of the game is mostly tedious and annoying instead of fun. I really hope they inject some freshness into this series next gen.

@Canteu said:

Treyarch > IW.

WaW proved they could do WW2 better, and Black Ops proved they could do modern warfare better.

Also, Halo 4 is pretty boss, and i'll be damned if its not the best looking FPS i've ever seen.

You might like the Treyarch games better, for whatever reason, but that doesn't change the fact that they have been made off the template IW created. Anything considered innovative for the genre has been done solely by IW. Let's see what happens next generation when a new engine needs to be built along with new mechanics to keep people coming back. Do you have a lot of faith in Treyarch? I sure don't.

@carlthenimrod:

I wouldn't say everything innovative has been done by infinity ward but they start everything. In the case of Halo, 343 is doing nothing original as they are taking the groundwork from Bungie and then taking the rest from Infinity Ward. They even take things unlocked from the beginning of every Halo and put them behind stupid progression walls.

That's weird because I always thought of Treyarch as being like Infinity Ward but with personality and good campaigns. I dig the new Halo, the graphics are fantastic (Even relative to time of release I'd say it's the best looking Halo by a fair stretch) and all of the guns feel great. The story is a bit more engaging than the original trilogy as well.

@Fistfulofmetal said:

Poor wording on my part. Sentence should have read "never play a Treyarch COD game again. I've played a number of them (never finishing). Black Ops was the breaking point.

How can you have never finished one? By the time you've played enough to realize you don't like it you probably only have a half hour left.

A lot of Bungie guys are at 343 now.

I think Halo 4 has its highs and its lows, but I feel that its highs are way too high to be considered a B teams creation. There is a lot of heart in this game, and though I think it seems a little bumpy in terms of its over all effect. I have now gone through the Campaign 2 1/2 times, trying to gather my thoughts on it. In the end I think I have found that there are some amazing parts, with some middling parts sprinkled in. Halo 4 finally made the Chief start to feel, it had some really solid drama, great art, fun combat, an amazing HUD, music, good story, and really solid game play. I just wish that it had more substance to its story in terms of detail, and pacing, I also thought there was too much of pressing buttons and some boring sections of level design. Though 343 did take an approach to story that Bungie never did, as some kind of Halo "super fan" I am pretty excited that they are finally touching on things that have only been touched on in the books up until now.

i just think its the best halo multiplayer yet. and funnily i thought the same for call of duty when i played world at war, so maybe you have a point. but if we are right about this, it means the next two halo games made by 343 will be garbage.

The last really good CoD was Cod 4