Dear 343 Industries, it has rapidly come to my attention that you guys do not seem to be knowing what you are doing. Ever since you took over for Bunjie as the producers of Halo, things have quickly gone to shambles. With Halo 4, I was glad to see that you guys added new medals and game types to spice things up, and brought back many of the favorites to ensure some sort of closure, However, needless to say, this was not even close to being enough. You, as a company whole, ought to be ashamed, utterly ashamed, of what you have done to this Franchise. Halo was the very first FPS that I played as a child, and I loved every second of every match. Unlike games like Call of Duty, Halo required skill to play. In Call of Duty, a general rule of thumb is the one who shoots first will kill the other person. Plain and simple. However Halo had what they didn't- something that attracted people and bound them in unfailing loyalty to its game- in multiplayer you needed skill, cunning, intuition, team work, and timing. It added so many factors to account for what Call of Duty lacked. If you shot first, you were anticipating how they would shoot back, and making sure you didn't lose the upper hand with every passing second of that fire fight. What you did in Halo 4 was utterly destroy this- you literally took Call of Duty mechanics, added blocky robots as characters, pasted Halo on the cover, and shipped it out. To this day I still cannot believe it. Everything about Call of Duty you brought to Halo in an ill-thought attempt to bring in extra capital. While Bunjie may have been all about money, they weren't that outright blatant with it, and they sure did fail at it as miserably as you did. A lot of my friends, loyal to Halo up until 4, dropped and sold the game the minute they played their first match. To this day I still think Halo 4 is one of the cheapest and most supplied game for the 360 console, and probably from all the people who resold it the first day it was on the market. Next we come to the MCC, the laughing stock of all games, a game so ill thought out and that it makes windows 98 look good by comparison in today's standards. It makes Battlefield 4's launch look like a road paved with pure gold. A total disaster. I do hope you realize how many people, just in my college alone, sat outside GameStop, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, etc, unknowingly waiting to buy a game they would return faster than the blink of an eye. I personally downloaded the content, and my school has an 8GB download limit in a 36 hour period? Do you know how many times I went over that limit downloading your piece of crap? How many times I was unable to respond to family emails, load up class files sent from professors, and enjoy my Xbox One, a console still unable to work without a stable internet connection? You turned everything electronic of mine into a veritable brick, and I let you do it because I had ill faith in what you would do. It's over a month into launch, and while writing this I am still in que, searching endlessly and being lied to by the game about 'players found' and how the game is 'connecting to a session'. Even your own game is lying to your loyal, previously at least, fans. You should be down on your knees begging for forgiveness for the way you deceived your fans. I truly don't think you understand that we, the consumers, are your paycheck, with more power than any CEO. We keep you in business, and you turn around and stab us in the back... we forgive you and you slit our throats. Your game still isn't fixed, and now you're forcing more crap onto us, forcing your beta on us when your previous work is flopping around on the ground gasping for air. Let's think about your failures as an analogy. You go to a restaurant, and order a burger after sitting for ten hours. Later, the waiter comes back and hands you a pizza covered in insects, and turns and walks away. After another ten hours of sitting, watching the insects inside your pizza squirm for freedom, he returns, sees your meal, and gasps as if he hadn't seen it coming, hadn't noticed you got the total wrong meal, served crap, as if he hadn't seen it on his tray before he gave it to you. Would you go back to that restaurant? No. You would demand a total refund and make sure no one ever went there again. But, you've gotten good service before, and loved their cooking. So you return again. This time, the waiter brings you an empty tray... You ask where the food is, and he shrugs and walks away. He later brings you a glass of water when you ordered a steak, and hands you a bill for $30, the price of the steak. You, and everyone who was served similarly outrage, and so they make a deal. They'll take $4.00 off of that meal, and give you a lemon to go with that water, free of charge. Sounds like a total deal right? After all, that's what you wanted, right? No. Let's just say that restaurant will be losing people faster than it thought possible, and they better straighten up quickly. In case you haven't noticed, Halo has started to fall to the wayside, and there is a damn good reason for that. Halo can be timeless, but the way you're running it will make sure that it doesn't last another two years. I still am in utter disbelief at what you have done to those of us that used to have faith up in the sky. Personally, my faith in you is buried six feet under ground now, and I probably may not even buy Halo 5 unless you guys have Jesus on your team who can give you some sort of miracle. Feel free to email me, it shouldn’t be that hard to find out with your resources at Microsoft, and I would so look forward to hearing your justification for your blatant deceit of your consumers.
Sincerely, an ex-fan