I know that I'm a little late in posting to the thread, but i've really fallen off the gaming wagon lately and only got interested with games because of E3. Anyway, here is my thoughts on Halo 4. Beware, it is a little long
343, please don't take the wrong lessons from Bungie. Halo Reach did not hold the same kind of user base that the other Halo games did, and there is are multiple reasons why. This includes the alienation of the more hardcore Halo fans with the ranking system, and the way that armor abilities are used.
Probably the most fun for me in Halo (I hope everyone else is much the same way) is that when you spawn, everyone is on an equal playing field. An AR, a Magnum, some grenades, and that is it. Everything and everyone else is on the map, and there is beauty in this simplicity. In CoD (which i've enjoyed some of the games in the series), everyone spawns with an individual loadout. This works fine for them, but I like halo for its own gameplay. I hope that the way that you offer spawn customization that is quite limited; in Reach, having 5 different loadouts that changed both weapons and armor abilities was simply too much, I like the KISS principal in my halo games.
I think that armor abilities were fine, but were not handled in the correct way with Bungie. I actually didn't mind the abilities in gameplay, but wish they were a pickup on the map instead of the spawn item. Armor Lock, Jetpack, and the other armor abilities would have been fine if they were like the overshields and active camo from Halo 3. If they were pickups on the map that operated on a timer, I think they could have really added a lot of depth to gameplay.
While I never was a hardcore Halo 3 player, I enjoyed the system that they had in place. While I did kind of get stuck in place in my Lone Wolves rank, I truly felt like it was actually attempting to try and match me up with other players of equal caliber. While Reach MAY have been doing this as well, it wasn't ever obvious to me. Who says that players can't have 2 different kinds of ranks? Combine both Halo 3's competitive 1-50 ranking system to give an understanding of a players skill, and give Reach's system for a good understanding of the time devoted to the game. That way, more casual players can just focus on ranking up their "reach" rank, while the competitive players can be more focused on their ranked gameplay.
I just wanted to add in here a great big thank you here for keeping in assassinations from Reach. They are awesome!
I was a little worried when looking at the info here about Halo 4 when it came to multiplayer. You can drop in weapons on the map, and other things? It really reminds me of CoD, and i'm not sure if it is a good thing. One of the things i like best about halo is playing for hours on each map to get a great understanding of weapon spawns, map flow, etc. and I feel that something like a weapon drop would throw a monkey wrench in the whole thing. I'm certainly not saying that i'm completely opposed to it; if you implement it in a way that works, then it has my full support, but it has to be very careful; I like knowing that the last rocket launcher was just shot, and that it wont spawn for another 2 minutes; if you add care drops, it would really mess with thoroughly understanding a map's weapon spawns, as they could really mess with it.
BTW, i loved 343's Halo Reach map DLC, and thought they were great maps, which brings me on to my next point. Reach had awful maps IMO. I am sick and tired of Forge World, and the only map that I actually enjoyed playing on and felt like it was an actual Halo map (outside 343's map pack), was Powerhouse. Please have awesome maps
TL;DR keep Halo simple by keeping loadout customization low, Armor abilities are fine if they are map pickups, please no Reach ranking, but don't just go back to H3's, little curious how ordnance drops work, and release awesome maps.
