Mr. X

Regardless if it actually adds or takes away "skill" from the game, I think 343 made choice for the sole purpose of making this game "faster" (which as they stated numerous times was their goal). Think about it: Instant respawns, delayed shield recharging, sprint - they really want you to die more/quicker in this game. Again, I'm not saying it maker the game better or worse, but I have to say that I don't like how they are trying to artificially quicken the pace with those things. I wouldn't fault anyone for thinking that this choice was a bit inspired by CoD.

Halo 4 is actually the easiest Halo for me after Halo 3. But yes, when I started playing it for the first time (on Heroic) I found it quite hard, too. Like fo rexample i kept dying many times in Dawn, but when I played it on Legendary for the second time i found it really easy. I guess it's just because you have to adjust to the new game design etc. when you start.

I think Palmer could become a very interesting character if 343 shows us that they know she's got a really messed-up personality. They should make a scene in which one character calls Palmer out on her excessive idolization of Spartans, her trash talking the scientists or not taking the Covenant seriously. But if 343 actually intended her to be Sargeant Johnson V2 and we are supposed to see her as this awesome and hard-boiled power-amazon who spits out great one-liners then they failed majorly.

Exactly. I think it begs the question why the Covenant didn't already lose long before. If you look at the Spartan Ops campaign they are gettin pwned constantly no matter how hard they try. I mean yes, If you are playing a game you will eventually "win" the given mission - otherwise it would just be a 'game over' and the story wouldn't continue like intended. It is now the job of the developers to not design the given mission in a way which would lead to de devaluation of the enemy. For example, Imagine if Bungie had designed a mission in Halo 2 in which the intendet story was that the Chief would break into High Charity (which wouldn't be war-torn at that moment) all by himself, kill the 3 Prophets and get out again. The player woudl evventually "win" the given mission because it was designed/intended that way by Bungie - but the Covenant would seem like a huge joke. Although I'm exaggerating, this is the kind of direction that Spartan Ops is going in my opinion. I know this has also something to do with the emulation of the Firefight feature, but I'm quite struggling to which amount I should take Spartan Ops seriously because of those things. Not least because Spartan Ops WANTS to be taken seriously as a story.

We can't do anything really, I just hope 343 get the message and don't get their next game out with half the content seemingly missing. Also your stats can't be right; surely it isn't possible that Reach has more than six times the population of Halo 4?

I'm sure as hell that they won't add any new weapons in Halo 4

lol I wouldn't describe it as "can't seem to shut up" by far. The only line that fell into this category a bit and bothered me slightly was when Chief was saying "asking is not my strong suit" in response to something Cortana said in the second mission. This was the only line that I remembered as objectively unnecessary and something pre-Halo 4 Chief never would have said - not to mention that the Chief never displayed an affinity for "ironic" statements. It sounded more like something Marcus Fenix would say ^^ But yeah, I really liked that the Chief was talking more. First, this is exactly the point of the Man vs. Machine theme in Halo 4 because it serves to humanize him. Second, it can be justified by the story itself, because Cortana gets worse and worse and the Chief one one hand needs to comfort her and on the ohter hand is also affected personally by her state, which makes him talk more of course - you never had such intimate problems in the previous Halos, it was just all or nothing, complete your mission or everyione dies.

I think they are going too much Nylund/"Halo Wars"-style in the cutscenes (especially episode 6) where Spartan Thorne can't go down without of course taking a load of elites out at first. And since when is a Elite killed by two shots out of a Storm Rifle?? I know that the whole thing has got to be cinematic but I think they are devaluing the Covenant too much with this. The same thing goes for the comments of Palmer etc. during the gameplay when she say stuff like "What, only six Phantoms? That won't nearly be enough for Team Crimson". I know it's supposed to be her personality but practically every other charactor does the same; they don't take the Covenant really seriously because uber-awesome Team Crimson is too badass for them anyway. Fighting against the Covenant just seems too much of a piece of cake or a simple "clean-up" for Crimson, even though many players die like 10 times every chapter...

I think they wasted a load of potential on the mission objectives! By that I mean the things you as a player are actually doing during the campaign, which in Halo 4s case is "PRESS BUTTON X". Seriously, you have actually 2 missions (Forerunner and Shutdown) entirely dedicated to shutting down a generator or whatever (e.g. "press a button"), not to mention that even the 'final fight' consists of this, too. It's so ennerving that every time you find something it's blocked/jammed etc. for no apparent reason by some random generator which you have to deactivate. The worst thing is that they make you do it not just once but several times, which makes the mission feel really uncreative and artificially stretched; like 343 had no other ideas. One of the best examples of this artificial lengthening of the content was during the mission Shutdown when you had to, well, shut down one of the towers and were riding the gondola (Halo 2-style) from point A to B. Of course, the gondola gets stopped (also Halo 2-style) and you have to kill all the enemies. When you continue driving, they actually pull the same thing another time, just now with Promethans instead of Covenant! At the 2nd stop I really thought to myself: "duh, here we go again" and the mission really became a chore. Because of all this, everything you do during the missions seems really inconsequential, which of course is a huge negative contrast to the supposedly epic story running in the cutscenes somewhere in the background while you do the button pressing. I repeat, 2 of 8 missions as well as the end fight are consisting entirely of this (plus numerous objectives in other missions), so it really sticks out. Granted, the previous Halo's had such moments, too (Two Betrayals), but they weren't nearly as obvioulsly striking and plentiful as in Halo 4. In Halo 2 alone you were defending a space station, fighting through a city, eliminating a heretic, chasing Prophets, searching for the Index in a desolated complex, chasing Prophets again or juist kicking some hairy Brute-butt. In Halo CE you had to rescue a captain, help evacuating marines etc. If you tried you could maybe sum up Halo 4 in such a exciting way more or less, too, but the above mentioned feelings still remain for the above mentioned reasons. Damn, I'm so pissed at this that I wanted to make a thread about it, but well. What agonizes me is that this flaw didn't really get critizied in reviews, so it maybe won't draw 343's attention and be improved in Halo 5.

I liked him very much because he was one of the few actually developed characters in the series - in Halo 2 at least.; what they did to him in Hao 3 was horrible. On the other hand I can't imagine his H2 personality translated on one of those beast-like H4 Elites, he seemed just too intelligent and cunning for that. Not to mention that the Elites don't speak English/ anymore...

I actually found the campaign quite easy with a few difficult encounters like in the beginning of the the level "Reclaimer" - after that it was easy - or near the end of "Midnight". The difficulty in Halo 4 imo comes from the shortage of ammo and damage the enemies can take (mainly Knights), but that's it. Somehow the AI doesn't seem as aggressive or intelligent like in previous Halos, because in H4 Knights and Elites sometimes happened too just stay on the spot while I was shooting at them. It still isn't as easy as Halo 3 but I hoped it would be harder; ,missions like "Dawn" were a joke. The hardest mission in Halo 4 for me was "Midnight" because of the last bit where you have to insert Cortana for the first time to disable the Didact's shield. You have to fight through a lot of Knights and on top of that there's one with a Promethean rocket launcher waiting right before the chekpoint. Out of all Halos I have played on Legendary, I would rank it as follows: 1. Halo 2 2. Halo Reach 3. Halo CE 4. Halo 4 5. Halo 3

Funny is that the Plasma Pistol is acutally one of the strongest weapons in the game and better than the Storm rifle if you fire it quickly. Even on Legendary you can drop shields of all sorts very easily that way without even overcharging.

Yes a (mini)boss-Enemy would have been needed dramatically in H4 - above all in the Campaign. It was a bit disappointing that even in the last level the only things you had were the standard Prometheans and a CoD-style QTE. Halo 2 had Tarturas and the Scarab, Halo 3 had loads of Scarabs and Spark and Reach's (second-)last level was just so well made that it didn't need any. The only thing that came closest to a boss fight in Spartan Ops were the Phantoms, but they didn't really do it.

Yes, this is precisely what I meant with my mentioning of "run-down" (don't know if its the right word) and my comparison to the Stranded/Savage Locust from Gears of War 3 - who also became disorgnised after GoW 2 - in my initial post. Cortana even said that these Covenant seem a lot more fanatic than before in the first level. As for funny ramblings in Halo 5 - I don't know if it would work if the Covenant would suddenly speak English etc. and throw funny lines at you again after being portrayed in this "no-nonsense" way in Halo 4. I know, Bungie had done it in Halo 2, too, but the change was a lot more radical in Halo 4 and the intended path for the Covenant to take (aka dirty or whatever you wanna call it) was marked much more clearly.

I didn't read the newer books but isn't this because they don't have any Technicians anymore? It's not like the Prophets were only "developed" Covenant Reace - the Elites were supposed to be on the same level as them Intelligence-wise. You can see this perfectly in Halo 2, where Rtas Vadum and the Arbiter converse with the Prophets (and also the Humans) linguistically on the same level. In contrast to that, I can't really imagine our Halo 2 Arbiter looking like an Halo 4 Elite but sill talk and behave the way he did in all the cutscenes. That's why I liked their previous, "polished" look a bit better; because they seemed more intelligent (and more like the badass, calculating strategists) and somewhat on the same level as humans, whereas now they look much more beast-like. Yeah, they definitely don't feel like the Covenant you played against till Halo Reach and grew familiar with. But I don't know if they are more of a threat because of that (I still respect the "polished" Halo CE Elites, for example), but they feel certainly more agressive - which fits the darker tone of Halo 4, as mentioned.