Was Halo 4 as good as Halo 3 and Halo Reach?

Halo: Reach is the second best in the franchise, next to CE. Halo 4 is probably my least favorite game in the series. I still don't consider it anywhere close to bad though; any game with that set of core mechanics is pretty decent in my book.

I didn't think Halo 4 was trash at all, it was miles better than Reach for sure.

Halo 3 > Halo 2 > Halo 4 > Halo Reach

Bungie dropped a turd on their way out

Halo 3>>>>2>Reach>4>ODST>>>>>>>>>CE

You mean like Bioshock Infinite?

Sorry I had to lol


While I don't think that 4 was nearly as good as Reach, the pinnacle of the series for me, it was still a good game and a good Halo despite all the fucking CoD elements in multiplayer. I think the 343i knows what went wrong with 4 and guys like Frankie have a lot of love for the franchise so I think we'll be seeing a lot better Halos in the coming years.

Halo 4 and Halo Reach were sub par. Halo 3 was the last great Halo game.

It's not that it's worse. It's that it's more fucking halo made by Bungie's tribute band. Bungie isn't exactly good enough to get a tribute band doing exactly the same nonsense they were doing. It was tiring, and poorly thought out when Bungie was doing it, it's just as offensive when poor man's Bungie is doing it.

Halo 5 needs to show itself as some genuine departure from Halo, because the MP is half assed change. It mixes up enough randomness to Halo, but tries to keep it Halo and those 2 aspects of the games conflict with each other. Either go all in, or don't. And the Solo play is more fucking Halo. Like top to bottom, except for some stupid reason post Halo 3 this whole idea of a FPS puzzle became Halo's signature, and that's not what made the best Halo levels fun. It's when you had space to operate in and do some on the fly stuff and cool shit to handle a scenario. The FPS puzzle routine leads to you needing to figure out exactly what order you need to take down a scenario, and that's just boring and tedious in comparison for a 6-8 hour game.

Infinite's last five minutes aren't an infodump, though. :P

We wouldn't be here if they had any understanding of the franchise. They talk like they understand what went wrong, but until I see them come out and say, "Yep, we screwed up, and this is how we're going to do better next time," talk is all it is.

No. Reach>3>4. Reach and 3 were godly. Halo 4 was a mess.

The **** it wasn't. It was basically - "In case you didn't connect all of the dots in our interesting, but poorly told story, we'll give you all you need to know in a compressed manner in the last 10 minutes of the game." But that's a discussion for another thread/time.

And 343i have addressed their mistakes. Here's an interesting article from Gamasutra with input from people like O'Conner and Wolfkill. It's a bit longer but well worth the read: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/191234/making_halo_4_a_story_about_.php?page=1
There are some other interviews/articles scattered about dealing with the same thing but I think this one is the best.

Read that, and it brings up promising ideas, but you actually need to pull it off and execute it. Anyone can say they learned from their mistakes. Did you know Bungie said they understood flood only levels have been weak point in the previous 2 halo games? and were willing to learn from their error? True Story. I remember that stuff on Bungie.net. I also remember they made Cortana. Regardless 343 made some decent strides in trying to tell a story, and in that regard the yare automatically better than Bungie who are incompetent at it. But, they just replaced Bungie's half assing with relying too much on info dumps, buzzwords, and a Halo app. Plus trying to get a guy who doesn't have a face to emote to a sappy situation doesn't really work. It looks silly.

343 is in an interesting position to go with the story, but I think they are at a point where it's time to put a face on Chief. If you're going to go down the sap train route, then you need a face. Because that yellow visor doesn't exactly get anything across.

Also to be fair Infinite also goes with a resolution with their info dump. I don't disagree that it gets info dump happy, but 343s plot literally relies on this one massive info dump during one segment of the game. While talking about things that have no actual meaning yet. Like the reclaimer and the thing, and the index and this the composer, and the all that jazz. Shit I don't even remember the words they were using.

Each Halo MP has been worse than the last, so no.

(sorry, but I never cared for the BR domination in 3, the ranking system, or the maps. Think Halo 2 handled all of that much better.)

Either way 3 was the last great Halo MP game. Reach and 4 have just been subpar.

At that point it's less infodump and more conclusion. At least Irrational had the grace to make theirs playable, and didn't trap you in a cutscene where they constantly threw undefined words at you and expected you to understand them.

Man if it looks like an info dump, structured like an info dump, and runs its mouth like an info dump; it's a damn info dump.

Besides that's Irrational's brand of story telling to begin with. They don't use cutscenes where you don't control the player very often between their last 2 games. It's just how they do things. If she's not that, she at least becomes full Deus Ex Machina status with how she solves every mother fucking thing and understands the secret to life while she's at it at the end.

Well, yeah. I'm just saying it was kind of necessary. There's no way to explain something that complex without explaining all of it at once. That bit could have been structured better, but at least it fucking made sense.

I'm not saying that 343i will pull it off but the fact that they have been very open about their mistakes is promising. And I agree on giving Chief a face. Bungie never did and I was cool with that because all they ever projected and that's all I ever saw but if 343i are going to with this whole Chief having all of this humanity and personality and shit, then they need to go full with it and not half ass it like you mentioned.

Infinite does have a resolution but the fact that it was so damn info dumpy in first place annoys the **** out of me. It's shouldn't have been. I expect that shit from anime and shitty JRPGs, not Ken Levine and Irrational. Those guys are better than that.

I'd also add that BioShock Infinite tells a deconstructionist story, and thus rules of what makes "good" or "bad" narrative structure are purposefully manipulated or done away with (though you can still have your own opinions on the matter, of course). Halo 4, on the other hand, tries to spin your typical epic sci-fi yarn. Though made unnecessarily complicated, its story is (in its most basic sense) pretty damn simple, and it makes no point of toying with storytelling convention in the way Infinite does, thus making its narrative issues a lot more glaring.

No I agree that aspect is appreciated, but at some point you need to execute. At this point they are treyarch territory. It's not that they aren't capable or don't make good games(well I don't like Call of Duty, but whatever forget that aspect). It's that you're working off someone else's back, and you're doing just more of what that studio did with no real direction of your own. 343 needs to take the effort to put their own stamp on the game. That own stamp can't be the tone of the plot being different. That's just cosmetic. The game at this point needs to go in another direction, and they need breath some new life into what has been a used up series.

Nevermind that lets be real it hasn't had a good campaign since 2001, and that one in 2001 isn't exactly one that has aged very well.

@ProtossX:

I liked Halo 4 more than Reach or Halo 3.

Halo 4 was the weakest in the series, but I still think it was a great game. I think 343i learned a lot from it and will take player feedback into account for the Halo on Xbox One.

4 was garbage. I was incredibly disappointed with the shit multiplayer as well.

3>CE=2>>Reach>>>>>>>>4

I've only played Halo 4 and honestly i don't ever feel like playing another halo again, that was pure garbage.. i couldn't take it... and this is coming from someone that finished Lost Planet 3. Yes, Halo 4 was that horribly dull... but someone told me that Halo is a franchise you have to grow up with.