A Final Look at Halo 4

If you’re looking for a physical analogy for the comparative differences between Halo 4 and its predecessors, then you need look no further than the map Ragnarok. A battle-worn version of its big brother Valhalla, Ragnarok’s thinning grass, sterile metallic structures and lack of soul represents a small cog in the rapidly corroding machine that is Halo 4.

But has the damage to the series already been done? What began as a slow but steady decline in population post-release has peaked and petered out in a matter of months leaving Halo 4’s population a shadow of what it was back in November 2012. But what went wrong exactly? What made Halo 4 lose around 360,000 unique players in the space of a few months, and why did those exiled fans of abandon this game much quicker than the similarly inferior Halo Reach? Well, let’s take a look.

Firstly, it’s quite evident that the Halo 4 marketing campaign was a success. From TV spots to game trailers, branded merchandise and competitions, if you weren’t already hyped for Halo 4, you would be once the rampaging marketing locomotive finally caught up to you. Halo 4 also benefited from being the numerical sequel to Halo 3, as unlike Halo Reach, the game was seen as less of a spin-off to bridge the gap between proper releases and more like the true sequel to one of the greatest games ever made. With everything in place for Halo 4 to succeed and continue the Halo story that up until now had been told solely by Bungie, 343 said that they would deliver a true Halo experience and provide a game that was deserving of its place in the Halo universe. What we got was something that was unpredictably foreign and completely devoid of what we’d come to expect from the Halo universe. What we got was not Halo.

Now, before I go any further it should be noted that I didn’t enjoy Halo Reach. What was meant to be Bungie’s fateful swansong turned out to be a dull, unenjoyable experience that tried and failed in ushering in a new kind of Halo mechanic, and yet at its very core it still felt like a Halo game should feel. 343’s Halo 4 on the other hand took the example set by Halo Reach and rolled with it, rather than improving on it or scrapping parts altogether, whilst also taking us further and further away from the essence of the Halo series.

Firstly, load-outs became much more prevalent. An idea toyed with during the lifespan of Halo Reach, load-outs allowed players to spawn with whatever weapons they desired that weren’t deemed too powerful, and although that doesn’t immediately seem too different from starting a match with a Battle Rifle and Assault Rifle as is tradition, a combination of personal ordnance and player-perks drastically altered the balance of multiplayer matches. So, you’ve started a match with your Designated Marksman-Rifle and Magnum Pistol in tow, you’ve stacked your character with perks for quicker shielding, more grenades and a rechargeable armour ability that allows you to cloak to invisibility on command and you happen to accrue enough points to drop a Sniper Rifle in from the sky for your own personal usage. Now what? Well, find a corner, activate your cloak and Snipe to your heart’s content because next to array of enemies hoping to do the exact same as you; that is, succeed individually without breaking a sweat, multiplayer matches tend to fall into a rather predictable pattern. And therein lies the first problem with Halo 4; everything is set up to give the player an easy ride. No challenge, no onus to help out your team and no reason to do anything but play for yourself.

Next to the load-outs and personal ordnance that are at the forefront of 75% of the games multiplayer modes, we have the return of the Halo Reach ranking system in all of its unwanted glory. A credit-based system which rewards the player in both victory and defeat, you advance through the levels simply by playing and completing matches, and once you’ve reached the rather easily attainable level-cap at 130, you’re permanently stuck in a level-cap purgatory for the rest of your time with the game. I should give credit where it’s due though, as from levels 51 to 130 you can enlist in a specialization which allow you to unlock exclusive armour and armour abilities, however this quickly becomes tiresome as the latter stages of each 10 level increment take a ridiculously longer time to complete than the others. Not to contradict my earlier statements though, the level system feels awfully splintered across the generic levelling and specialization stages, and often the rewards that you work towards weren’t even worth the effort in the first place. The primary problem with this system is, like load-outs and ordnance, that it fosters laziness and doesn’t promote teamwork. Why should you go out of the way to help your team when you will receive credits and rank up win or lose? Unlike Halo 3 in which you only levelled up via victories, Halo 4’s overly simplified and essentially dumb system does nothing to promote the values of teamwork and cooperation whilst simultaneously rewarding players for playing badly.

The map quality that you would expect from a Halo game has also begun to slip in the case of Halo 4. In a game series that has given us multiplayer triumphs such as Avalanche, Sandtrap, Zanzibar and Blackout, it’s really hard to see how the likes of Settler and Complex can even compete. It’s unnerving that the usually structured map design you’d come to expect from the series is also beginning to mirror the most recent Call of Duty efforts rather that past Halo efforts, too. Maps like Monolith, Landfall and Wreckage are less about two teams deploying from parallel bases and assaulting the objective, instead favouring sporadic and rotational spawning that leads to spawn-killing and unsavoury deaths. There are however, a few exceptions. Aside from the remake maps, Ragnarok and Daybreak, Longbow and Exile are two great maps that wear the Halo badge with beaming pride and are both absolutely fantastic to play on.

It’s surprising that some of the most enjoyable maps have come in the form of DLC too, which the vanilla maps that the game has to offer simply not living up to the hype. Skyline is a great example of a DLC map that fits in well with the Halo ethos, however if you were looking to actually play on it in a competitive multiplayer match, then unfortunately you’re going to be left disappointed. Yes, as for reasons unknown, each DLC playlist that encompassed the new maps as and when they were released has already served its time and disappeared from existence, taking with it the achievement hunters and season pass owners that enjoyed what little time they could spend on them. As there are now no more DLC playlists and DLC maps have yet to be integrated into existing ones, there are now nine maps that owners of the collector’s edition paid for sitting dormant, just waiting to be played again. You’d think that all nine of these maps would at least be placed into their own specific playlist, but from a development team that spent the best part of eight months giving us a belated Big Team Objective playlist and finally adding an ‘X’ above recently deceased players, this is probably asking for too much.

On the whole, it would seem like Halo 4 is suffering from an identity crisis, not in itself, but in its affiliation with its predecessors. 343 Industries could’ve taken the series in a bold new direction whilst maintaining Halo’s personality, but they chose not to. Instead, we were given the new Halo, the bigger, bolder Halo, and a game that has been unanimously panned by those who have grown up with the series as part of them. A lack of competitiveness, a hugely dubious oversimplification and execution and a plethora of features made famous by its main competitor that have been allowed to taint the fabric of the game, and 343 have managed to concoct a recipe for disaster.

Now, despite the grievances I have with the game, there is a reason why I gave the game an eight out of ten in my game review. Halo 4 remains the complete package. Next to varied multiplayer matchmaking and campaign co-op you’re still given an entirely separate co-op experience in the way of Spartan Ops, a film tool in Theatre mode, a map editor in Forge and a community hub in Waypoint. Next to an enthusing albeit repetitive campaign and the tools for a fairly straightforward introduction to online multiplayer, Halo 4 represents a fantastic achievement in its own right for new patrons to the Halo series, yet it simply doesn’t cut it for those of us who lived through the Bungie era. It can be argued that it is decidedly the ‘whole point’ that Halo 4 is nothing like other Halo games seeing as it’s an entirely new trilogy created by an entirely new development team, however that doesn’t mean for one second that the past never happened, that 343 can just ignore everything that Halo used to stand for and that there is nothing to be taken from the likes of Halo 3 et al.

If its declination in population is anything to go by, I’m not the only person who feels this way, and although Halo 5 is 343’s chance to answer the criticism of a community that is knocking on their front door, I just don’t see that change being drastic enough to resurrect the series.

I won’t be playing Halo 5, but I still wish 343 every success in reinvigorating and re-establishing its wholly deflated community and restoring the shine to the Halo moniker.

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