Halo 4

The Franchise Killer

Halo games were slowing killing themselves well before 343 Industries took over. Game release after game release Bungie was slowly degrading the Halo franchise with awful campaigns. By awful campaigns I mean the stories themselves and how they decided to tell them because the game play was always fun. However 343 Industries’ choices were so bad that they killed the franchise for me. It was so off putting that my last achievement was popped in March of 2014. That means I have not touched this game in over six years. Now that the game is shutting down servers, it is time to finish it once and for all.

The focus of this review is on the two major aspects that most developer almost always incorporate into their games. First the campaign and how the story unfolds. The second component will be the online multiplayer. The first Halo game was amazing, the discovery of the ring world, earth’s battle against the covenant, and then the Flood. It was an awe inspiring game. There was nothing else like it. The Halo: Combat Evolved title truly lived up to the name. Then the franchise starts to go off the rails in Halo 2 with the split story arcs and the Little Shop of Horrors ending. The releases that follow tell fragmented stories of which none are as good as Combat Evolved. Then there is Halo 4. The day that 343 Industries decided to define and tell the Forerunner’s story was the final nail in the coffin. What could they have done? 100 hundred other things, but they needed an enemy that was bigger then the covenant. So why not the Forerunners. It was a mistake and in the process the mystery of this wondrous technological society was gone. The story they tell in this game is forgettable as your AI partner Cortana begins to slowing decay for some reason. So you need to save her and also humanity from the new Forerunner threat in the Didact. If AI decay was a thing, then one would never get attached to their AI. It would be a tool like a battle rifle or a Warthog.

Even with all the missteps in telling a story, the one thing that Bungie did really well was creating long lasting multiplayer experiences. Long after the mediocre campaigns were done the multiplayer kept each game alive and fun until the next release. When 343 Industries took over multiplayer it was the day they took that coffin put in the ground and just filled that six foot hole with concrete. Their brilliant idea to innovate was to erode the core Halo gameplay and mash it with elements from Call of Duty and Battlefield because they feared they might be loosing gamers to those other franchises (or was it that they wanting to attracted new gamers from these other franchises). Halo multiplayer experiences are based on everyone being on the same level playing field. You learn where the weapons spawn and you fight for them. It was a simple concept. Adding elements like loadouts was ultimately a horrible decision, because it then becomes a different game. I played plenty of Battlefield and very little of Call of Duty online. I liked them for what they were, but I loved Halo for what it was (by being so different then all the other franchises). If I wanted to play those other games then I would go and play them instead of a poor knock off. This is how they lost me.