First of all, don't get me wrong. This is not a topic intended to bash the game. Halo 4 is amazing; the core mechanics are great and the game itself plays very smoothly. However, this was also the case with Reach. The mechanics were great but the game essentially flopped because of a couple of reasons:
- Bungie refused to listen to the community and do anything about bleedthrough and the badly implemented bloom.
- all of the maps were mediocre/bad, leaving us with the only option of Forge maps.
- there are many more reasons, but for competitive play they were irrelevant (the biggest one was probably armor lock but it was only relevant in casual gametypes)
I doubt many people would disagree when I say that the maps in Halo 4 are mediocre at best, but leaving that aside there are many things that need to be changed to make the game competitive. I will address these issues one by one.
Weapon spawns - Weapons spawn at the very beginning of the game and basically never respawn. When they do, they're (from what I'm seeing) completely random weapons in completely random spawns and they have giant cursors indicating where they are on your HUD. The ordnance system doesn't cut it in this game. When a team gets the lead, because of the fact that there are really no weapon drops past the initial spawns, there is no reason to push to a certain portion of the map. Essentially, the current system promotes camping, something that was NEVER a problem in previous Halo games because of the weapon spawns.
Instant respawns - Though this isn't a problem in objective gametypes, there is no way to change the instant respawn in Slayer gametypes. You can easily instantly respawn, sprint back to where your last enemy killed you, and finish him if he's weak. This should not be possible.
Auto-pickup - In objective gametypes you shouldn't instantly pick up the flag/ball and you should have the option to drop it. Though this is mainly personal preference and not necessarily a "problem" with the game, it's definitely a controversial issue that needs to be discussed. It basically forces players that have power weapons to never want to be the one to pick up the flag because they'll probably just die and give the power weapons over to the other team. There's also the issue of accidentally picking up the flag/ball which is especially relevant in ball because the other team can throw the ball to you and they can kill you easily. Being able to the oddball isn't really a problem.
These are pretty much the main flaws of the gameplay right now. It would also be nice to see some balance tweaks between the primary weapons (BR/DMR/Carbine/LR) because right now the DMR is much, MUCH better than everything else.
Feel free to discuss! I hope 343 sees this and puts some thought into what I've said.
