TransientHalo

Would you clarify how the core mechanics are better than Reach? Not that I disagree, I'm just curious to hear what you think is different and why? This game has a lot of facets from Reach still in it. Reticle bloom is still here, though more shallow than it was in Reach. Armor abilities are still present though thank God armor lock didn't make it's way into H4. The # of hits it takes for weapons to kill you is the same, except for assault weapons. Assault weapons are a little beefed up compared to Reach. I mean, other than assault weapons beefed up and a Reticle bloom being more shallow, I don't see much of a difference in game mechanics over Reach. I didn't think Reach was a bad Halo. The worst part of it was armor lock but plenty of playlists existed where you couldn't choose armor lock. Reticle bloom forced you to time your shots and certainly made the game harder and allowed players who had mastered the art of timing their shots rule with a DMR. In some facets Reach was less "noob" friendly and harder to play than H3. Especially on playlists which limited armor abilities to only hologram, sprint, and jetpack. Reach was all about precision. In H4 you can be good with full auto, if you went against a good DMR'r in Reach with the AR, even in close quarters, you were dead. Due to how much Reach prided itself on precision and then threw in a big reticle bloom, I would dare say it was maybe the hardest to play Halo ever made.

I would agree to this but only a 4 hit weapon if all 3 rounds from the burst land, and the 4th shot has to be a head shot, of course. Still, even with this you're opening a can of... well, we'd just have to see. I think it could go well, or go really bad. The BR might get complained about more than the BS. It's a fine line, 343i open a Beta and lets test this out.

Then it would fire like the Needle Rifle from Reach only without a super-combine. I don't know, the Carbine already has an edge if you're good enough to exploit it. That's kind of the point of the Carbine though. You can potentially stand to gain a weapon which will beat all other precision weapons in short to mid range, but you're taking a gamble. I think it's fine the way it is. Stick to the bread and butter if you're not good enough with it... DMR/BR.

Uhh, making the BR kill in 4 hits would make the light rifle obselete. I don't think anything needs to be done to either weapon. I prefer the BR on maps like Haven and Adrift, and the DMR on bigger maps like Complex, etc. I think if I were to compromise though, the thing that makes the most sense is what Benchimus said. Just slow the rate of fire of the DMR slightly, allowing the BR to be more potent close to mid range.

The boltshot will always be a 1 hit kill weapon and part of the loadout. That's what separates it from the plasma pistol. If anything, they'll just shorten the range on it, which honestly, would be just fine.

Armor lock, yes very annoying and stupid. Reticle bloom. Well, for starters I think reticle bloom was implemented to nerf out kids with rapid fire controllers from Halo 3. Also, reticle bloom made the game a lot more challenging and forced you to time your shots. This definitely made the game harder and less "noob" friendly. Although the reticle bloom in Reach may have been a tad too much as far as how much it actually bloomed. Banshee, yes, VERY annoying in the hands of a good pilot but still farily easy to take down.

Well, ideally you only need a few hundred people online to have the availability to play all the playlists. Hell, I know of a few old-school text based MMORPG's who still have that much online on a daily basis, but that's not the point. The point is, with numbers waning like they are it's making a very clear statement. That statement, I think, is this- people don't like Halo 4 that much. It took Reach a lot longer to drop as low as what Halo 4 has after only 1 month. Even now Reach still has almost as many online as Halo 4 does. If the numbers are between 100-150k (maybe peaking at 200k on a really good day) now, then what will they be in a year? Half of this or less? I mean, yeah, I like Halo 4 and I'm going to play it, but this makes me question how well the next Halo will fare. It just makes me sad to see my favorite game of all time on a downward spiral. There could be lots of reasons for this; a big one is CoD. I don't know, just kinda sucks.

What's the big deal with weapon loadouts if they're all pretty even? Ordinance drops are so-so. I can see people's point in that map and weapon control are muted because of this but I'm okay with it. In fact, if you were on an inexperienced team before against a team more experienced it got pretty old getting pwnd because the opposite team had all the power weapons. At least now, if you're good and your team sucks you can get something to help yourself out.

Halo 4 has been peaking around 150k in the evenings, EST, US. BO2 is still 4-7x higher than H4. Reach still has 100k during peak hours. I don't know, it just took Reach a lot longer to drop off as sharply as this game has, which is what bothers me the most. If it's only this many now, what will it be in a year? Guess we'll have to wait and see what the numbers are after Christmas.

I don't know man, I kind of like the loadouts and specializing. It allows for a certain amount of individualism and personal play-style. It also allows for loadouts for different situation/game types. I really don't see a problem with it so long as all the standard loadout weapons stay pretty evenly balanced. Kill cams and instant respawn are are kinda "meh" to me- I'm neutral on their existence in the game. I think this game is simply too much at once. With Reach they tooks a few small steps. 343i has taken those small steps and made a big jump. I'm okay with it, but I think apparently they shouldn't have done so much at once. The game will still probably be considered a success just because of how much $$ they made on opening day. I just wonder how well the next Halo will fare now. Even with all this said, it's still early in the game. This may be wishful thinking but gameplay could always come back, there are over 3M copies floating around out there.

You might be right on this. Though I don't think you can definitively make that statement. Facts are though, the numbers don't lie. I don't own BLOPS2 but I'd hate to see how many are online on that. I bet it's in the millions. This must have been what the Mayans predicted.

Yeah man, I'm 27 going on 28. I have a family and a full-time job. I've been playing Halo since the very first, in fact Halo is the reason I bought an xbox. I understand that they can't keep making the same game over and over, and I personally like the direction they're going with Reach and H4, but that's me. It's just a shame to see my favorite game of all time being suppressed by a game of campers because it's all about who sees who first. I never could get into CoD. I couldn't see the point. People argue that it's more "realistic", but uhh... it's a VIDEO GAME, hello? It's not like real war, our technology is no where near advanced enough to simulate that and if it was the entire gaming community would soil themselves constantly while playing it. I like Halo because it doesn't try to be "ultra realistic" - it's a game, and a good one indeed.

The numbers are disappointing, period. It took Reach a lot longer to drop off as sharply as what this game has. Blame it on Christmas, BLOPS2, 343i, or all of the above. The numbers are disappointing. Like I said I can only hope they'll increase after Christmas. I was online just a few minutes ago and the largest playlist on infinity war games had like 18k people. Then only two other playlists were even in the double digits (by double digits I mean 10k+). Though I didn't add it up I highly doubt there was 100k online, it was probably closer to 50k. This is pretty sad considering the game made 220M on launch day according to huffington post and microsoft. See link. http://www.huffingto..._n_2119268.html This 220M they made resulted in the sale of 3.1 million copies of the game, just on launch day. See link. http://bgr.com/2012/...-360-microsoft/ So, giving rough estimates. We know 3.1M copies at least were sold (that's the count from luanch day, many more have been sold since), and that there are roughly 100k people online (and that's being generous) So, taking the percentage of 100k out of 3.1M copies sold, that leaves us with only 3.2% of those who purchased the game are actually playing it. That's sad, period. 96.8% ARE NOT playing this game. This is either due to the game being wrapped up for Christmas or they're playing BLOPS2 or they just simply didn't like the game. Either way, these figures are quite SAD indeed. How's that for some factual data? Though this makes me sad, because I am apparently a small percent of those who actually like and enjoy this game. I hope gameplay picks up after Christmas. Even if there were 200k people online, that'd still only be 6.5%

Thinking about this, it should really only be added to Team Regicide- not even Regicide FFA or any other playlist. You have a valid point. I play team regicide and regicide FFA- they're my favorite playlists. On team Regicide it does seem like it takes forever for the king to get de-throned, even if they're sucking. As long as they can get a kill here or there they remain the king even though they're K/D ends up being 50/50 or negative. If you're bearing the weight of being the king you should be punished for dying even if it means subtracting from the team score. I think I'd rather lose a few points and get a better king because you'd do better in the long run anyway. Besides, with each side losing points here and there it'll make the games last longer and a bit more interesting. But yeah, Team Regicide is the only place where points should be subtracted and they should only be taken away from the King.

Precision can beat it in close range given the AR user doesn't melee and the precision user is 100% accurate. One miss with precision and it's game over. In Reach you could miss a few shots with the DMR vs AR and still win out with the DMR, especially at mid-range.