I was completely unaware the knights had shields, like played the entire game & never realized they didn't just have a weirdly big variable amount of health
Fun fact: Engineers made you feel bad when you killed them, their name denoting their role as non-combat individuals, and would make a fearful shriek when they were about to die. But the watchers... well...
And with the Engineers, if you understood the lore (which for Bungie games was totally optional, which is how games should be), you'd understand that Engineers exploded when you killed them because the covenant attached bombs to them to keep them under control. The engineers didn't want to fight the player, they were forced to.
engineers were sentient and made you feel bad for shooting them watchers on the other hand made you feel annoyed and wish you could wipe all of them out because of how fucking annoying watchers are
Recently listened to Fall of Reach, and the Engineers are described as non-combative and more like researchers as they disassembled cars. Makes sense they’re not a threat
Not only are you forced to use the forerunner weapons due to lack of ammo, but they feel the worst to use. The game genuinely forces you to play in the worst possible way
mfw when they introduce an LMG near the beginning (LMGs are my favorite kind of gun) and then they proceed to have it show up maybe 3 times the whole campaign.
I completely agree. I didn't like using any of the Forerunner weapons. They felt like they had a lack of impact to them and none of them were particularly aesthetically pleasing to look at.
This entire video: Look at this - halo 4 has this thing (all other halos also have this but I'm not going to show you) and here's another halo which has this thing (halo 4 also has this but I'm not going to show you). It's like what a classroom would show you as an example of purposeful selection bias.
@@EliteKnight97 There are plenty of green and blue areas in halo 4 and plenty of brown and grey areas in the other halos. Hence the selection bias with the examples shown.
Hi, as a game developer who worked in AAA as a programmer, regarding 16:55 I can tell you that companies will absolutely remove fun elements to bring the rating down. I've seen it done to ragdolls, where the inability to mess around with a character body once it's no longer alive was done explicitly to bring down rating.
@@danilosardo1179 It widens the market. Movies rated 14A make more money than Rs. There's a reason why there was almost no blood throughout The Dark Knight Rises.
Ah yes, the Watcher resurrecting the Knight, who is also able to summon another Watcher. Man I always hated that mechanic. Glad you brought it up in the gameplay section.
When you think about it, doesn't the enemy design in Halo 4 seem like Boss design? "Guy can summon drone to pocket him and will vanish when you pop his shield" or "Drone that summons baddies and hides when you shoot him" would be perfect as bosses, but as average goons? That's silly.
@@luckyducky7819 Yeah I agree. Honestly as a Boss Fight... I don't mind the concept of a duo that continuously resurrect each other. Elden Ring's GodSkin Duo fight has them both repeatedly come back to life but they share a healthbar so you don't lose progress and it's honestly a pretty fun fight imo.
@@Zecuu They kinda did just that with Halo 5's Knights tbh. They added in Promethean Soldiers, which replaced the Halo 4 Knights, and made the Knights much stronger and gave them more clearly defined weak points. I can't really speak to how well they played in comparison, but on paper they definitely seemed a lot more interesting.
@CandiRokz H5 Knights are a huge improvement. Unfortunately Halo 5 also introduced the Warden Eternals... who are even more annoying to deal with than H2 sniper jackals.
The key difference in design philosophy between Bungie games and 343 games that I've noticed is that Bungie gives you a sandbox to outsmart and to break, while 343 locks you down and says "you will play this the way I designed it to be played"
It's a lot more than that, too. Halo was a colorful, player paced, dynamic experience. They designed levels to be played multiple ways with care and dedication to each. You can hoof it with your desired weapon, pick up a ghost, and quickly blast everything. You could hijack a tank and slowly slog your way through blasting enemies in groups. You could pick up a banshee and fly your way through. Sure, each level had more or less a specifically designed way, like Metropolis clearly wants you to use a tank on the bridge, but you don't have to. They even provide you with a Warthog in case you just want to get to the other end. The only dynamic play I can think of in Halo 4 is throwing a random Banshee down, but the areas were too small to be fun to fly around anyway. No care taken to make sure it was fun if you picked up a Banshee or any other vehicle. Hell, the levels are even designed around specific weapons a lot of the time for fucks sake. No freedom what-so-ever. Bungie also had little set pieces that could be played out or interrupted, like a Brute about to kill a marine if you didn't shoot him in time. Or massive AI battles that you could participate in or just sit on the sideline and watch them blow each other to smitherines. The only thing I can think of is the Jackal that tackles and viciously kills a scientist that you can't even interrupt. If you can, it's exceedingly difficult to because I've never managed it. There's a word for something like that. Care. You can tell Bungie devs were talking to each other saying "dude, wouldn't it be cool if the player could do this or that?" Or "what if we did this and this so the player can do this or that?" When it feels like 343 was like "Okay, let's make this level like this and that. No, Jimmy, don't try and mess around with it. Just make the level." You can just tell that 343 has the high brass telling their peons what to do and they're so stiff and uncreative, no one shares ideas in fear the higher ups would shoot them down because they do so often. The Bungie offices was open and creative and you can tell they would order pizza and work late on projects because they had passion. 343 is probably just an office where they clock in and clock out on time every day.
You missed a critical aspect of enemy design that bungie was maestros with that nobody seems to be able to do. Enemy death animations. I can tell from across the map if I headshoted a grunt immediately. Halo 4, sometimes the grunts still look like they're alive. Note that bungie halo games did not use hit markers but nowadays hit markers are the only way to know you hit anything in an fps.
Speaking of death animations, 343 did an unholy job at vehicles exploding in halo infinite literally all of them turn red and explode the exact same way
Hit markers are needed now in the game because they have done a poor job of feedback. Easiest example is play Halo CE in classic and anniversary graphics and shoot an Elite. New graphics make it very hard to tell.
@@ZSTE Yeah but the Elites' shields in Anniversary graphics are barely noticeable anyway, in Halo 2A they're done way better and it proves you don't need hitmarkers if you have actual feedback, even with modern graphics
@@ZSTE Ah my bad, I thought you meant modern graphics in general make it hard to have the same kind of feedback on hitting enemies as the original games did
34:14 I've seen these values (percent chance that an enemy will overcharge the Plasma Pistol) and on Legendary they have a 100% chance that they will! I covered it a bit in my own video but had no idea it was this bad, and you're not just imagining things. Completely untested, and unacceptable. 34:51 Ooh! Ooh! I know! I know! Pick me! Yes, thank you! So um, in Halo 4 enemy melee attacks are 10 frames in duration. 1/6 of a second to insta-kill you!
oh wow, that's 0.16667 seconds! I wonder how much time you get to react to that! ... average human reaction time is 250 ms, maybe slightly lower for the average video game player person... in other words.... by the time you register it happen you can already see your corpse.
The only way to 'counter' the unfair melee attacks, if you can even call it a counter, is that you have to always assume that the enemy can & WILL use it. Now, for a game like Monster hunter, that's acceptable as the player has a multitude of options; blocking, dodge rolling, guard point, etc. Here's the issue, in Halo, you DON'T have an option like that, so the only solution is to avoid getting into melee range period. I've gone through Halo 4 on Legendary for over 120 hours and still have no Idea how much damage the melee attacks do, sometimes, they one shot, sometimes, they don't and there's no way to tell which is which. That just adds another layer of frustration. The only saving grace is that the Pulse grenade will "stun" knights if you hit them directly, but even then, that will only buy you 1 second, which most people aren't going to be able to capitalize on for a back smack to one shot the knight. I'm not defending 343i, far from it, I just wanted to highlight that the melee system in Halo 4 is not only just unfair, it just feels unpredictable at times, but I feel that also stems from the game running on Reach's engine. Not ALL of the blame should be directed at 343i for the BS melee attacks, Reach was the game that implemented THAT particular feature, 343i was just too lazy to adjust it properly. I say both Bungie & 343i are at fault for the MELEE being bullshit. The rest of the issues: Ammo, vehicles made of tissue paper, and lack of weapon verity are 343's fault, shit they easily could have fixed with proper play testing, or just having actual Halo fans play through on legendary and give feedback... Alas, that isn't the case, and what's done is done...
The problems with h4's forerunner environments are still present in Infinite. Yes, Infinite cut down on the lense flares and the over complication, but they're still the same dull, silver, lifeless environments that look fresh off the press rather than some ancient ruin.
Halo Reach did it best when it came to the actual Forerunner Maps that came with the map packs. The subtle lightings, and ancient worn down designs all stayed true towards the original Trilogy.
@@BlkPhoenix1111 Bungie knew how to make grey/silver environments really appealing, in a way 343 just doesn't get. Then again even explosions looked better in bungie games than they have in any 343 game. Its wild given the graphical improvements that 343 just can't pull this off.
343's forerunner designs are some of the most devoid of personality things I've ever seen. They want to show off how slick and sci fi their designs are. Look at the polygon count! Look at the lens flares! When it has no soul or history like bungie's forerunner designs.
I'll pay more attention to the forerunner architecture next time I play Infinite, but from memory I thought it looked great. H4 and H5 had the worst in the whole series.
@@hrthrhs Its a hard thing to explain admittedly. Yes, it does look alot closer to the classic style than h4/h5 did. But at least to me personally it still has this too clean, sterile look to it. I think part of it also comes down to diversity in the forerunner environments. The forerunner tileset in each level of CE alone is different for each level (not counting the remixed levels in the later game). The levels halo and silent cartographer are similar but still quite different. The assault on the controll room is also quite different. The library is this vast open interior, and uses brown heavily rather than silver, and the silent cartographer is a mix of silver and brown areas. You can probably tell each level of CE by merely looking at its forerunner archetecture, but all of Infinite's structures look like they could be the same building. The final level adds some gold bits here and there at least.
My brother photoshopped the arms off of the Halo 4 elites for a joke "save the elites' arms; help us fund complete armor" ad. Or, it might have been pretending to raise money to buy them all prosthetics. Anyway, I'm glad to hear you mention how absurd it is! Great video!
I always imagine them looking like some dirt bag from New Jersey wearing a tang top at the beach for some reason. Also their skin is completely different from how the Elites looked in previous games.
I started at the beginning with Halo 1. I never liked 4, hated the digital enemies, hated all the lore, hated the fake feel of the game. Everything pointed out here in searing detail brings a bad feeling, a bad taste that was my experience with 4. I hardly played when new, never returned to it. These videos explain exactly why.
I kid you not, I played this godforsaken game twice (the lowest amount I've played any Halo game up to that point), and I never knew there were more than one type.
Also I love how CREATIVE ASSEMBLY, a real-time strategy game studio, was able to make HALO WARS 2 more in league with Bungie's Halo than 343i was And then 343i stole their ideas and shat all over them.
Before CA it was Ensemble Studios who made Age of Empires as their claim to fame. They were not supported by Bungie during their development of Halo Wars (their last game before being closed by Microsoft), and yet they still paid more respect to the series than 343 did in Halos 4 and 5. 343 just would not do that until Halo's popularity had dropped to critical levels after 5, and by then it was too late because they still didn't understand why old Halo was so well liked.
@@jurassicarkjordanisgreat1778exactly!!! The Banished was perfect to help save this franchise. And then 343 comes along.... I fucking HATE this company!!!!
So the reason H4’s graphics look crusty is because 343 invested in making all-new High res models for next-gen but scaled them down to run better on the 360’s hardware.
Thats only part of the reason. The main reason is that 343's artists are uninspired and incompetent, which mostly has to do with the sharp decline in the quality of art schools over the past decade or so. Which is why I hate the "its the executives fault" excuses people always jump to whenever a game releases broken, unfinished, and just generally low quality. Anyone with some tenure who has worked in these industries will tell you that the quality of work has gone downhill, because the quality of the workers themselves has gone downhill. Which is itself a result of the institutions where these workers are educated having gone downhill. The early 2000's was an era of creative visionaries releasing legendary games on shoestring budgets with overwhelming deadlines, like Halo 2. Those men didnt let executive pressure (that was much more serious and destructive than it is nowadays) stop them from making passion projects that delivered amazing experiences, because they were true artistic geniuses and masterful computer scientists. The creative teams responsible for these modern games are passionless worker drones who got into the industry because its a "good career opportunity", being overseen by talentless hacks who worked their way up the corporate ladder by playing office politics. The quality and character of the people making these games is completely different from the old guard of the video game golden age.
They had to scale down the textures to the point of being noticeable outside of a zoom function, example zoom into the elite armor in halo reach and zoom into the elite armor in halo 4, halo 4 has a higher polly mode but the textures are scaled down. Also the lighting is fucked on some missions.
You compared the Knights to Bionicles, but they'd be far better if they were more like Bionicles. Give each rank a colour, the highest being Gold. Give them unique face masks, etc. And make the weapon an obvious attachment on their arm. Then of course all their weapons need to be changed to be visually distinct like the Covenant's are. Each a different colour and obviously different shape.
funny too cause if they would have been cooler and maybe fit in more if they did look more like bionicles, since bionicles don't usually do large amounts of neon, and floaty bits
I honestly think it would have been cooler in the Prometheans had a more angelic aesthetic. A sort of actually knightly appearance. Could even still have lights and floaty bits. You could still have the glowing skull and other nonsense show when damaged. But i like the idea of the Prometheans looking regal but having a darker underlayer would have given them a lot of character.
GeneralHeed actually recently proved that 343i could've easily made the different ranks have different coloured lights, but that would've taken away from the MP™
Going back to enemy design. The covenant had personality, grunts were funny and cowardly, brutes were aggressive and, well, brutish. Elites were lean and bossy, jackals were scappy and slimy. Even in CE where the covenant aren't translated, you can understand this from their actions and responces to your attacks. Although halo 4 covenant mostly carries this over (even though they no longer translate the covenant again for some reason), the prometheans have none of this. They're just robots with zero personality and nothing to remember them by. Part of the fun of fighting the covenant is seeing how they'll react to the chief, the panic or anger in their voices upon seeing The Demon. They would even jump backwards. The prometheans, on the other hand, just immediately start start shooting, have zero lines of dialogue, and don't talk to each other at all.
The flood had no personality compared to the Covenant, but that is what made them scary. Instead of communicating and trying to stay alive, they would make uncanny noises and charge without fear of death. The promethians were boring robots even compared to the Sentinels (which would get old fast if they were the only enemy fought for 75% of encounters).
I have no idea what your talking about. I wish they were like how you described. I always though it was bizzare that the forerunners would design a robot dog that howls (crawler), a four armed bipedal foot soldier that poses and taunts you, (Promethian Knight) and a little angle with circle wings (watcher). These things were meant to fight the flood. They are supposed to be lifeless robots with no personality like the Sentinel aggressors, Sentinel officers, and sentinel enforcers in the bungie halo games. The Promethians are too life like. That's why I hated them. They don't seem like forerunner creations at all.
8:28 i actually screamed "yes, YES, YEEEEEEES!" I'm really baffled when people defend the artstyle. I don't know when I subscribed but whoever shits on halo 4 is automatically on my favourite TH-camrs list. In all seriousness, great videos, you have summarised exactly how I feel about the game. Looking forward for more of your content, great job.
i dont think he talked about this in the vid actually but making the grunts talk their own language and removing their hilarious dialogue killed the spirit of the game, removed the fun and was pretty emblemic of why 343's version of Halo feels totally soulless.
@@colorantics8160 they should've made them speak English because this game was far ahead of reach, and reach has a good excuse for grunts to speak their own language since it's a prequel. Atleast the fake grunts speak their hilarious dialogue on 5, but its a game I don't wanna touch anymore either way.
@@thesamejackalsniperthatkil117 The point was to make the Covenant much more alien in feel rather than just the timeline. Hence why Elites look much more like sharks too
Halo 1 was the first M-rated game my dad let me get after he saw me playing the Silent Cartographer on a demo disc that came with my Xbox. Halo 2 was the most excited I have ever been for the release of any game ever. I brought my official Xbox magazine to summer camp, wrote the release date on my middle school calendar like it was a holiday. It didn't disappoint. Halo 3, Reach, and ODST got me through high school. I bought Halo 4 at the midnight release in while I was in college. I haven't purchased a Halo game since, and you articulated exactly why.
Same here, preordered and bought the legendary edition of 4 at launch. Played through the whole campaign, played one game of multiplayer, and didnt touch it again until it came to MCC, never really knowing why I didnt care for it at the time.
They do the same thing with all of Halo’s lore, they argue that 343 never retconned the fact that humans were forerunners in the old lore despite all of the evidence in the Bungie games saying otherwise. And the thing is, the only two pieces of Bungie era lore that contradicted this, the Librarian and Didact Terminals from Halo 3 and the IRIS ad campaign (which was an ad for said terminals, and these are the only two things that contradict it, even the other terminals back up Humans=Forerunners) were both written by Frank O’Connor, someone who hasn’t even been able to correctly summarize a single Halo game. No, seriously, Frank thinks Halo CE had a prophecy of some kind (he said this in an interview a while back), he thinks that at the end of Halo 3 Humanity and the Covenant came to a truce (this is shown in Halo Legends Origins Part 2, and Chief also says this at the start of Halo 4, even though that never happened in Halo 3, the Elites broke off from the covenant entirely), and he tried to retcon the Arbiter’s entire backstory in Halo Legends The Package, the Elite Major is supposed to be the very same Thel Vadamee from Halo 2 and 3 (this was later retconned again, now he’s some some other elite named Thel, but still, he seriously didn’t know the Arbiter’s backstory ffs). And remember, the guy who said/did all of that is the pretty much the sole person who worked at Bungie that didn’t think humans were Forerunners
The Halo 4 stans are just vocal, I would say the silent majority on the Halo sub still dislike it. I for one hate it with a burning passion. People like us don't make posts about it but in the comment threads you'll see a lot of very upvoted comments mention how shit the game was and list the reasons why. The Halo 4 fans almost never give reasons for why they even like the game, just vague discussions of the story (and never the mechanically terrible gameplay which they so conveniently gloss over.)
@@Slender_Man_186its hilarious that he didnt know the arbiters backstory considering in the very first scene we ever see arbiter the prophets are literally giving a recap of what happened in CE, why it pisses them off, and why they blame arbiter for it.
@@perrytran9504 it’s less the “silent majority” and more like the absent majority since like 95% of the fanbase completely bailed after Halo 4’s population dipped to only 20k in less than a year.
@@kabbablabba4073 seriously, it’s blatantly obvious that he never even watched the cutscenes let alone played the games, and HE is the one who was put in charge of Halo’s story as a whole when 343 took over.
Even in the original DOOM they knew the value of distinct, easily identifiable enemy designs. You can tell an imp from a pinky from a baron of hell just by looking at a silhouette. H4 prometheans were so god awfully designed it was impossible to tell one from the other. Everything about 4 is done half assedly because 343 didn’t earn Halo, they were gifted it. They didn’t refine and perfect it over the course of 5 titles, they were handed a fully formed franchise and instead of making the best they could, they were determined to make it “their” game and put their mark all over it. Which they did, and it killed the franchise, so mission accomplished I guess.
I remember when Halo 4 first came out and friend was trying to convince me how cool it looked, he flipped out when I wasn't impressed. I damn near told him everything you said here and he looked at me like I was crazy. It's really cathartic to have this kind of vindication when the people around you always treat you like some kind of naysayer or contrarian who just wants to oppose anyone.
My first direct contact with Halo was through Master Chief edition on PC. And you know - with zero nostalgia for the series, zero bias towards one team or the other, because I simply didn't care who made which game... Halo 4 is such a monstrous drop in quality it hurts. I went through original trilogy and ODST and Reach in one fell swoop - and most of it felt very consistent and coherent. Story, for the most part, made sense, drama was organic, and everything felt somewhat grounded, despite a lot of bonkers stuff happening. Halo 4... I just could not finish. A dropped the game soon after first encounter with Prometheans. But even before that, something felt off - the Covenant remnants felt wrong, especially Elites lacking their trademark agility - combat felt like a slog. And suddenly you get to enemies with build in synergising respawn mechanics, close range instakills and completely stupid AI that will murder you senseless if you get close... But does virtually nothing when you are away. Their lack of aggression combined with design that forces ranged combat made fighting them... boring. And the only tense moments in fighting them were when I had to dive in for ammo, because why would be able to carry ammo in a shooting game, right? I quickly figured out that these boring assholes would be a bread and butter of the combat - I mean, they are 343s "original character, donut steel" thingamajigs - so surely they would not be a throwaway enemy in their debut game... So I quit. And never looked back. I didn't want to sour my fresh, good memories of the original Bungee games.
Thanks for making these videos. I just played Halo 4 for the first time recently, and you really summed up the experience of it better than I ever could've. I think a lot of us knew that the feel of the game was off, that it was made by people who don't understand (or worse, actively dislike) what Halo was. I really do not miss the trends of the 2010s, especially these awful overuse of bright lights, lens flares, and visually noisy environments with little care taken for enemy readability/cues/silhouettes.
There's been a lot of revisionism going on with Halo 4 recently. Glad to see more gamers/fans like you setting the record straight on how dogshit the game really was.
This! I saw the other day a post by Sacred icon halo and I was very surprised at how many people were praising Halo 4s MP. Like, did these people lived on the same timeline as us? I played the game religiously, but I knew the piece of shit game I was playing, to the point I would always go back to Halo Reach and 3. I wasn't too vocal at the time nor I actively thought "this thing is so bad", but deep down I never enjoyed it as much as I did Halo 3
@@StrikeAxl It's probably just younger generation growing up. As a kid I did kind of enjoy halo 4 but I still stuck mostly to bungie halo games. Nowadays hearing 343 and halo makes my blood boil.
I feel like this happens with tons of bad games in popular franchises. People are waiting so long for something good that they begin to put their fantasies onto shitty games despite it being nothing they're thinking about.
Its also kind of wild that halo wars seems more grounded in the universe even tho it was also made by another studio (which bungie did not want to help)
The bit about visuals really hits the nail on the head. MCC is a great example of the clashing art styles, I am actually incapable of playing through the forerunner interior bits of Halo CE with the "Updated Visuals" active because the sheer amount of glossy shiny reflectivity actually gives me sensory overload, which isn't something I've ever experienced before then. That and the lighting in some areas is just completely massacred, with parts that are meant to be bathed in shadows instead being clearly and rather harshly lit. Its honestly shocking how much the style was massacred. I'm just glad someone cared enough to make it opt-out.
Don't forget that the same "Updated Visuals" took away from the level by removing details like the blood splatters everywhere and how they were so desperate to make the game look good they left some really bad spots where you can clearly see the enemy but your bullets get caught by an invisible wall.
The one exception I'll say is The Library. It still looks like hell for the most part, but the arrows printed on the ground solve the issue of getting lost on the worst map in CE. I just recently played through CE on legendary again, and would flip to the remaster if I was having trouble navigating that area, but man does it look funny.
The "Call of Dutyization" point is basically something we see now with games needlessly adopting Battle Royale modes just to keep their player base from leaving and trying out Fortnite. Though the battle royale craze is less harmless than this was back in the day. At least a game can still maintain its identity while having a battle royale game mode if they want one.
If you like this, you should check out C3 Sabertooth’s video “We Were Forerunner” he completely shred’s Frank O’Connor’s lore and dispels every 343 fan’s cope that “343 didn’t change or retcon the lore.”
If I understand your meaning, I think astroturf is a little much. I did like Halo 4 enough when it came out. I may have only been 17 at the time, but I still thought it was okay.
@@Blockistium it really isn’t too much. Any time there’s a controversy in the halo community the entire Reddit page and other forums gets entirely censored except posts that defend the actions of 343. Even if you don’t believe they’re implementing bots or fake accounts for PR purposes, the former example is undeniable.
@@dad5410 I did not read Reddit or any online thing about Halo during the time of Halo 4's release. My opinion was entirely my own. Maybe not the case for other people, but I experienced it almost isolated.
@@Blockistium for a more recent example look up the remember halo video. It was a love letter to the old halo games yet since it added in some elements of the failures of 343 it was entirely banned from the halo sub.
@spiral7399 A good art style can make up for poor graphics. Infinite might have better graphics than Halo: Reach, yet Reach still looks better despite being over a decade older with less money and half as much development time. Graphics aren't everything though, but while comparing the two games, Infinite still has less content than Halo: Reach with a far worse free player customization system.
Two quick points, 1. The shield issue is applicable to Halo CEA as well. In Halo CEA, it is REALLY hard to tell if you've damaged an enemies' shields or not, and even worse, if you've popped them. This was fixed in Halo 2A, but it's still an issue in CEA. 2. Engineers, at least in Reach, also have a headshot region. This means you have the ability to kill them in two shots. The first shot knocks off the "faceplate" and the second shot will kill them. Watchers don't have this. Watchers CAN be assassinated, but that's small potatoes when they literally fly out of the map when damaged.
@@danielhambrook3669 They do, it's extremely useful on Firefight legendary. And on heroic you can also instakill them with a supercombine (though you need more damage on legendary.) As much as I found engineers overtuned in ODST when playing the firefight maps on legendary, they are at least a lone hazard that was a reasonable addition to the sandbox, and they are not as common as watchers. The main annoying thing with them is just how insanely tanky they are plus the explosion after you kill them, but unlike the watchers they don't run away and actively try to waste your time fighting them.
The difference is CE is a 20 year old game for one, and for another the visual cue of the shield is made moot by the point that shooting an Elite will still let the player know whether shields have returned or not, which still doesn't happen nearly as fast as Knights (which is the salient point overall).
@@Batdude36 I know... but the original graphics do show shield indications. I never play on the remastered graphics because they absolutely fucking ruin the atmosphere and feel of the entire game. It's horrid.
Fun fact about Promethean Vision: 343 copied that armor ability from an Indie game called Blacklight Tango Down where in that game you had an ability to see though walls for like 5 seconds. And not only that the 343 employees who made this game came from other studios like Tryarch, Infinity Ward, Bioware, Ubisoft etc. Who made this game, there was a 343 vidoc on the Halo Waypoint 360 app that I once watched back in 2011 where they talked about how 343 formed and then comes to opening title sequence where all those studio logos showed up and they formed into the infamous 343i logo we all know today. I know that vidoc still exists since I used to spent countless and countless of hours in that app trying to get my milestones and watch the daily updates on the Halo 4 news becuase back in those days I used to so vividly hype for this god awful game since I didn't know any better at the time since I was purposely deluding myself that this game was good but eventually I saw how bad this game was an never touched it again, and y'know whats funny? 343 Fanboys are always claiming that 99% of 343 are mostly Bungie employees even tho thats 1000% pure bullshit if you take your time to read through the ending credits. The more I look at this game the more how bad it looks and I wished I never wasted my time on this game way back in the day.
While I don't disagree with your overall post, even if they copied that ability from that game, I highly doubt that Blacklight Tango Down was the first fps to include that kind of ability. I don't even think that what is essentially a temporary wallhack constitutes a proper mechanic, it's entirely derivative
@@goldcreeper7376 Never knew of any FPS that integrated wallhacks into the main gameplay loop before BLTD. Other games have it but it's usually a power up or a debug code, not an ability you use routinely to keep track of enemies. Halo's was definitely closer to Blacklight's (even in the colors it visualizes as)
@@OmegaF77 it was an actual video game mind you on the indie side released back in 2011. It was a generic twitch shooter like COD but it had it's own unique charm to it.
I wholeheartedly agree bro Halo 4 was a complete embarrassing. I didnt even grow up with Halo, I started on Reach when it released on PC and the very first moment I got to Halo 4 I could feel something was horribly wrong on every single level. Now I have like 2k hours on MCC and probably not even 1% has been Halo 4, I despise the mere thought of playing it
In the second mission the first thing I did was complain about the weapons, Warthogs and the Dawn being wrong. I always said that if they were so adamant about changing them, they should have just used Halo 3s stuff until the Infinity shows up. Additionally, Halo 3s movement is not actually all that slow, the field of view makes it feel far slower than it actually is. I only realised this once Halo 3 was on pc and I could up the field of view.
It only applies to the 343 apologists who don’t know what they like. They act like a few forum posts of people bitching about Halo 2 back in the early 2000s means people hated Halo 2. They ignore the fact that back then the internet wasn’t nearly as widespread in its use. They can’t comprehend just how small the internet was. Hell they probably think TH-cam was also huge back in 2005…
Agree I couldn't understand why Halo 4 felt so off, but he explains it quite well. Also appreciate Halo 3 way more, especially the masterful Ark level.
With people saying they want more Spartan ops they don’t mean they want it’s insane repetition and Brian reed’s awful writing What they actually mean is they like the concept of it for halo basic pve mission content focused around a story focused around your Spartan done in a live service format You see people supporting it now because infinite has a ‘story’ focused around your Spartan but all they do is stay at base and get told to play vr. Where I think a lot of halo campaign enjoyers would have at least loved to have gotten something more actually playable and despite the numerous flaws with Spartan ops it’s the only real example of a playable side campaign we’ve had in a halo game.
good video. I would have added to the unbalanced difficulty part, that weapons despawned almost as soon as you looked away from them. 343 put so much more memory on shiny graphics over Reach, that they couldn't afford to maintain all the bodies and dropped guns that was a staple of the bungie games. On legendary from H2 to Reach, I could backtrack at least a couple of rooms back to top off my sniper ammo if I remembered where a copy of my gun dropped. or needler ammo or fuel rod ammo or whatever. the memory budget wasn't just used for graphics, it was used to maintain a lively sandbox. halo 4 was torture on legendary. I had no motivation to keep trying after the second mission. Every Bungie halo was tantalizing on Legendary. yeah it would kick your ass but you knew you could win if you played smart and used the ammo around you. you wanted more.
Try Halo Infinite. Weapons and bodies disappear almost immediately. A cool thing in the old Halo's is backtracking previous rooms to top off your ammo and seeing the end of the carnage that you just inflicted. And this is Halo Infinite a game that visually doesn't look next gen is released on the most recent hardware PC and the Series X and somehow lacks the performance to have some bodies and weapons linger just a bit longer.
@@quintonlim4275 that does not sound fun. the whole thing sounds un-exciting. don't hop to new locations across the galaxy in a tight storyline, stick to a 5 mile "open world" square and just keep revisiting locations and camps and shit. uncover a storyline that happened out of sight, in the past, because it was easier to write. Cortana was going to disrupt the status quo after Halo 5, now that's all undone because it was hard to write about. don't worry, here's a new cortana just like the old familiar one.
I think the reason why some people say that halo 4 is not as bad as they remember is because the bar is so low now compared to before. I mean halo 5 had a worse campaign then halo 4 and Infinite has been such a disspointment that people think halo 4 was not that bad when in reality it was pretty bad. It is a similar situation to the disney star wars movies who are so bad that people remember the prequels as great hidden gems when in reality those movies in some aspects where pretty bad. The lower the bar gets the higher the praise for undeserving things. People used to hate on Reach but today many people have fondness for the game because it was the last good halo game. You dont know how good you have it until you lose it and halo reach is a perfect example of that.
Remember when Frank O'Connor said Chief's armour changed because of nanobots while he was asleep? But there was no explanation for the relatively small frigate _Forward Unto Dawn_ suddenly quadrupling in size and also completely changing hull design?
That excuse he made was stupid as fuck. Halo games never featured any nanotech and here we learn that Chief's armor was upgraded while he was asleep in a SPLIT OFF PIECE OF SHIP which should be barely functioning?! There is no way he could have come up with a worse excuse other than Magic.
And how the Arbiter looked different in Halo 5 supposedly because they didn't have time to reimport his H2A model, yet that doesn't explain why he still has his H5 design in the comics.
Not only that, but from the Lore standpoint it would be a giant waste of resources, because there are no visible changes that come with it. Chief remains the same, in fact, he is worse in Halo 4, because he can't take any hits without recharging his shield and hiding behind covers.
I've never played Halo 4 since my friends warned me of its awfulness, but watching these two videos has really made me realize why Halo fans have such an extreme resentment to 343 Games. It's not that their reactions have been extreme - it's that the insult done to Halo as a whole was extreme. Like I genuinely cannot believe Microsoft (and therefore Xbox) let their prized icon be worked on by such incompetent developers and somehow failed to do even the most basic quality control on whether any of the game was even good or not.
you sir have an underrated channel, like editing, pacing, music, and script all hit way above their weight class for as small of a channel as you've got. You deserve 300k sub at least.
One of the biggest problems with the Watchers is that they stifle play style variety. Here's an example: you come across a squad of Covenant; 10 grunts, 2 blue elites, and 1 red elite. Who do you kill first? Well, you could take out the elites first, demoralising the grunts. But, there's a risk if you do, the grunts might swarm you and overwhelm you. So you could kill the grunts first, while making sure you don't get outflanked by the elites. You can take them out from a distance, or you can get up close. You can snipe them. Or you can get up close, grenade them, and gun them from up close, never giving them a chance to fight back effectively. Everything was risk-reward. But with these floating fuckers, why would you ever _not_ go for the Watchers first? They're so overpowered since they can shield the enemies, spawn new enemies, and catch grenades. In the Bungie games, I found myself varying my play style depending on the environment, situation, and class of enemies I was facing. With Halo 4, I found myself doing the same thing on a loop - sniping the Watchers from a distance, at which point I might as well just snipe everything else from a distance.
Tron Legacy was 2010. That's why all the Forerunner hallways have that color scheme. I can hear it now, "Tron made 400 million. Yeah, people loved that movie. They love orange and blue strip lighting with trapezoidal patterns. We can do that! We can do it better than Tron did!! We can make 500 million!!"
That ending rant was definitely the crown jewel of this video. I absolutely despise the faux trust people are putting in 343. Especially now that Infinite is getting updates (you know, content that SHOULD HAVE BEEN IN THE FUCKIN GAME AT LAUNCH) and people are virtue signalling and "TRUST THE PLAN" groupthink. I appreciate this video so much.
If Halo CE was the evolution of combat in gaming, then halo 4 and onwards is the rapid if not outright instantaneous devolution of gameplay, visual and mechanical clues, and otherwise quality of product. Did i mention complete and utter story dissolution? It's a rough time for the halo franchise, and i think it's too far gone to come back thematically without a complete retcon of the last few games. Sure, they can take steps to stabilize very slightly, but it'll never be as good as it could've been prior to the lore disasters that have plagued this series since 343 took over. Bungie, we miss when you were great, we miss when you were leading the industry and changing the game in it's entirety, and we miss when you were in charge of Halo. And thank you Andy, these two videos were extremely and fantastically done, and you've more than earned a subscriber out of me, and i look forward to your future content!
I went into this skeptical, but outside of a few disagreements on characterization, your review has been a sobering experience. I booted Halo 4 up last night and found so many of your points absolutely hitting home in my brain, especially the stuff pertaining to visuals. I'd never thought the game was amazing, but I guess now it's shifted in my mind from a decent and understated title to...a guilty pleasure, I guess. It's really soul-numbing realizing that even from the onset of 343i's career they were doing a poor job, huh
A lot of people say halo 5 is the worst halo but, as bad as it is at least I had some fun with it. Halo 4 was so bad I basically immediately went back to halo reach
Another thing. The music! Does anyone remember a single score from Halo 4? Any soundtracks that stick in your head to this day? Marty is gone and replaced by someone who should make music for a different game. It just dosen't sound like Halo.
I mean I remember some of it but not for a good reason well in my opinion at least it is not a good reason to remember it as it sounds kind of "ripped" from star wars game like I would not be surprised to hear some of it in a star wars game like no joke I prefer the halo wars soundtrack as it at least sounded like a halo soundtrack a little bit
6:36 to your point here, I think that was what Bungie wanted to accomplish. While it was alien, it wasn't totally uncomfortable, because it was designed by ancient humans so it's intrinsically familiar. That was until 343 decided to come along, retcon everything good, and fuck up the lore completely.
Issues with Halo 4's multiplayer as someone that played it competitively that I didn't see mentioned here : Halo 4 had Haven as its only competitive map until forge maps were added in. Not getting descoped when getting shot was a huge issue, as well as the flinch added in. Bolt shot being a one shot kill available to anyone as a starting weapon. AGL picked it up months after MLG dropped it, and they never paid most of the teams that won. The start of maps having such terrible lighting where looking at a light source blinds you, because artists love showing off their lights. No scoping with the beam rifle was far too easy because of its insane hitbox when fired from the hip. Sprint being in the game for everyone means that the maps are all larger to accommodate for this. Might seem needed in BTB but those maps are made to be huge because of sprint. When you are trying to play a competitive map they go from small arena style map, to what H2 or H3 would have used for a BTB game. Not being able to drop the fucking flag and now having a pistol with unlimited ammo was the dumbest thing. In Ce, 2, 3, and Reach flag juggling was done because you moved faster when you were not carrying the flag. This made juggling it a skill. Stat sites like Halotracker no longer worked because 343 refused to allow 3rd party sites use their game data the way that Bungie did. No ranked system at all. You would go from playing against a guy and his 3 friends all playing on one tv, to a team of 4 that were trying to pubstomp, to playing against 4 randoms. BR was a 5 shot kill while the DMR was a 4 shot kill while also shooting faster and farther. The BR had a chance that some of its 3 bullets would miss as well, making it take more shots to kill or even pop a shield. I highly enjoyed both videos man. Got a sub from me for this.
Aside from CTF, 4's MP was nearly unplayable and boring. It felt like a cheap COD knockoff (which it was) and had ZERO competitive appeal. It also lacked basic features like player-counts and even the Red Xs when you died so your team could see on the map. I gave it a chance but like many went back to H3 on the 360 after a few months.
Interestingly, Reach had the same problem with the melee timing. The Elite melee stomp was way too fast to be reacted to and was a guaranteed kill iirc.
I only recently learned that Reach was basically a side-game assigned to secondary team members while bungie's main talent worked on Destiny. Helps explain why the core gameplay was so much worse than that of the mainline games.
@@georgebaggy Yeah Reach isn't as bad as 4, but replaying it more makes me realize it was a noticeable step down from the trilogy + ODST in sandbox and AI balance. Elites moving around a lot is fine as it's clearly meant to evoke CE, but their grenade throws and melees are extremely fast animations not meant to be reactable like the older games. 343 should've reverted away from this, but instead they doubled down for Halo 4 and even made an entire faction worse than the elites in animation balance.
Halo 3 still being popular to this day isn't just old halo fans playing for nostalgia either. I was 2 years old when it came out and me and my friends were playing halo 3 earlier this week. We even play halo ce a lot
Good video! Found you from your Redline video, and I like your to-the-point style. It's possible I was distracted when you brought these things up, but I'm surprised by a couple things you didn't bring up. Notably, elites in Halo 4 can melee attack faster than human reaction speed. It's a carryover from Halo Reach, but it's partially on 343 for being too lazy to fix such an egregiously terrible design choice. There's also that ridiculously unfair Knight attack where they rapidly teleport towards you and one-shot melee you. It feels like it's based on luck whether you can evade it or not. I also would've mentioned how atrocious the Mantis sections are, where you're getting endlessly pelted from all sides and needing to hide behind cover IN A MECH SECTION.
Yes I replayed it not long ago after ages. What's up with like 200 enemies firing at you from all directions constantly in this game everywhere? Like it's cool Halo 4's engine can handle it and all but for fucks sake this game needs to chill for a second.
Completely agree with you on how H4 and H5 just look unappealing. I could never explain why myself but you did a good job. I think part of it is the over designing 343 do with their environments.
Can we also talk about the sound design? Covenant weapons lost their alien twangs, human weapons sound too mechanical, the Scorpion's cannon is just abominable, everything has this crunchy or high-pitched sound to it, like metal foil, with no base. Once again, moving away from the military-sci-fi roots of Halo to trying a more "realistic" COD-style soundscape, and it just doesn't fit. Halo's sound was in the vein of games like Half-Life, or movies like Star Wars, where sometimes existing sounds were manipulated beyond recognition, and more often completely novel sounds were created (you know, the way a talented artist might do). Instead, they just recorded real life sounds and left them as is. I'm not expert enough to really describe it, but they also botched up the sound design.
100% my man. You hit the nail on the head with how I felt about 343 and their direction with Halo since after Reach. Part one was definitely where most of my frustrations lied with Halo 4, and that long rant about how that five minute cutscene with the Librarian destroyed both the canon going forward and the previously established lore from before. I stopped reading the books after Contact Harvest, but I've researched into the Forerunner trilogy and that writing is the most convoluted bullshit ever written. Like if you were going to have ancient humans being a space faring race, then why not cut out the middle man and just make humans forerunners like Bungie had previously established? Plus Master Chief being "The Chosen One" is just so stupid. Halo was first and foremost a military story, that had a little bit of mysticism sprinkled in. Halo 4 was like, "Nah, Ancient Aliens this shit ayy lmao! Space Magic go!!!!" Anyways, Halo Anniversary and Halo 4 basically killed Halo for me back in the day, and with Gears of War 3 tying up its stoey in a nice bow, I didn't even bother to pick up an Xbox One, and I still haven't gone back to Microsoft since and it's a shame.
I agree 100% with everything you said. "The chosen one" story lines completely removes a character's agency. Now Master Chief isn't good because of his skill, he's good because it was destiny. Also, now almost all the "military hard scifi" aspects of the games are gone. The UNSC no longer feels like an actual military. Hell, the new Spartan Branch doesn't even have ranks!!! I also feel like franchises shouldn't last forever. Once they reach their natural conclusion, they should be allowed to end. Halo should have ended after Reach. Bungie was ready to move on, and the franchise had already peaked. Microsoft really needs to develop new IP's.
I really think that Halo 4 is good mental gymnastics is simply younger generation growing up with 343 trash instead of Bungie games trying to brainwash themselves into "ah remember how good my childhood games were"
Dude I got to play eldewrito when it released and hot damn was that fun. I never got to experience halo 3 multiplayer when it was popular, but back in 2018 I got to feel it!
The only Halo games I’ve owned was ODST and 4. Finishing 4 it left unfulfilled, but playing ODST I felt a sense a relief like the characters in the game do. ODST is my favorite installment of Halo.
22:12 Silouetes are very important for FPS games. Being able to quickly identify an enamy and what gear they have is tremendously important in FPS games. Some of my favorite games like Battlefield 1 or Battlefront II have this. I can tell in BF1 from 150+ m out what class and faction the enemy is. It helps a lot in Hardcore mode.
Something I love Elites and Brutes having bright colours and unique armour pieces to signify rank made sense from a story perspective as well as a gameplay one. This is an army that has been largely unrivalled for a long time so has little need for stealthy camouflage and in large scale battles you need to be able to identify officers from a distance at a glance so you know who's in charge once a battle starts turning into chaos.
War historically was an opportunity for rich people to show off their social status. In the time of Medieval and Renaissance war doctrine (which the Covenant never really progressed past despite their technology), people made a big deal about donning fashionable armor if they could afford it and passed numerous laws dictating who could wear/wield what. Sound familiar with the elites? Exact same thing. Of course, as you said it also helped to identify who was a higher rank when organization at the unit level was strictly inferior to a more modern military. Luckily for the UNSC (and the player), it also makes it easy to quickly prioritize who is the biggest threat based on who has the most bling. So kudos to Bungie for making art consistent with story and gameplay needs at the same time.
9:05 - The thing about Halo human tech, and this is actually one of the things I loved most about Halo, is that it is this wonderful combination of grounded, yet futuristic. Like the battle rifle looks like a rifle that humans would make. Except small stuff like the digital ammo indicator make it feel just a little bit more high tech and sci fi. It's a great balance that Halo struck PERFECTLY in the original trilogy with almost everything. This is not at all true for later games.
My parents got me an Xbox just so I could play Halo. I saved up for an Xbox 360 and got one on 9/25/07, the day Halo 3 released... Halo 4 was the main reason I didn't get an Xbox One
The worst part about the prometheans is that 343 could've made it interesting, they could've made a dismemberment ability, where if you shoot the arm off it can't shoot. It could've been awesome.
I remember when LITERALLY EVERYONE who defended Halo 4 said it was not copying Call of Duty. And Halo 4 had a lot more people defending it back before 5 came out. Even Infinite didn't receive criticism until a while after launch. Despite how bad each Halo game has been, the community often defends them (but never plays the game for more than 40 hours) or jumps on the hype train for a few months after launch before hating it. 343i isa huge problem for Halo, but the community itself is about 10% of that. And I'm not w/o sin. Took me till Infinite, but oh boy do people still defend this game.
The ONLY disagreement I have with this vide on anything is the criticism of Reach’s story. Reach had better storytelling, ambience and worldbuilding than even halo 3 in my honest opinion. Nailed the cold imposing aesthetic of the covenant AND the mystique of the forerunners like no game prior, made the story feel gritty and hopeless while maintaining a sense of militaristic realism that still highlights the valiant sacrifices, tragedy and heroism that led up to the original trilogy
One big change in Halo 4 was the draw distance for enemies. As someone that loved the sniper, I would walk into a level with a snipe ready and scan the area. In previous games, this allowed me to pick off the fodder before I was never near danger. However, in Halo 4, the enemies wouldn't spawn half the time until you were in firing range. I would check out the area with the snipe, see no enemies, and waltz right into the middle of the map only to find that everyone just spawned around me and I was suddenly under heavy fire.
And dropped weapons despawn. In CE i could walk back through several sections and collect a weapon/smmo or grenades i needed. 3 would have despawn but it wasn't very aggressive. In 4 sometimes weapons will despawn 10 feet away from you after 30 seconds
I’ve just binged every Halo, back to back , with my gf, and lemme tell you. As soon as we hit Halo 4, it immediately felt different. The firefights in the arenas did not feel fun. Between banshees that swarm you, and are hard af to shoot down because of lack of any weapon variety, Promethians that teleport and have revival mechanics. Grunts that don’t sound or even look like grunts. It honestly felt like 343 took all the hard work, world, and characters from Bungie’s games, and said FUCK YOU. It seriously feels like they thought hey could one-up Bungie and failed so hard.
The Avengers movie and it's consequences have been a disaster for the human race. A hate capeshit and it's influence on movies and games so much it's unreal.
I believe I read somewhere that 343i brought on one of the guys who designed Gears of War to work on the Covenant units; which makes a lot of sense because the Elites literally look like they're related to the Locust horde.
If i had license to teach design, i would use 343 as one of the examples as to how not to redesign something, i swear to you man, every single 343 re-design its worse from the previous design that they want to replace, for me, the greatest example is the shotgun, the shotgun is literally a UNSC ship skin but they shoot a 12 gauge shell, when you think about the human weapons in the old halos, in your mind you can imagine a marine disassembling a battle rifle, for example, to do a maintenance, i have NO IDEA how a marine would disassemble a 343 shotgun, its so overly design as every single 343 design that you dont even know where to look, its literally a design a 8 year old would make in his imagination with the premise of, it would be cool if, nothing serves a purpose other than, it looks cool and slick, look at how many polygons this thing have, when it doesnt have a identity, personality, purpose or history, and this is coming from a company that removes the Elite from multiplayer using "lore" as a excuse, you could make a montage with a human fleet, replace one of the ships with a shotgun, and no one would see a difference. I have always been the guy that hated Halo 4, the idiotic and infantilization of the narrative and characters always pissed me off, i never understood the melodrama between Chief and Cortana, Cortana was his partner, but Chief had lost countless childhood friends in the war against the covenant, he is a man on a mission, he is a adult, which writers these days doesnt know what that entails, in my mind, the moment that Cortana would show signs of rampancy, Chief would pull the plug if it would jeopardize the mission, and not having this mental breakdown because a AI was going to cease operations, transforming Chief in to a manchild, the more you think about Halo 4, the worse it gets, the only point that people comes back to it its how the story is well made, but the more you think about it, the worse it gets, you have to have too much talent to have 10 years worth of L's and still be in business, this video is amazing, and encapsulated almost everything that i could say about Halo 4, i would love to see something similar to Halo 5, Infinite and even MCC if you have something to say about those titles.
This video is should be trending but unfortunately its not, it would take weeks to get this video to 10k. And hopefully the TH-cam algorithm reccomends this to everyone.
@@thesamejackalsniperthatkil117 The excuse is that since Halo 4's multiplayer, "War Games", are in-universe training simulations on the Infinity it wouldn't make sense to have Elites onboard the Infinity. Even though Elderwrito has Elites since it apparently takes place on a space station that's made by both humans and Elites lmfao
@@nagger8216 it would make sense since the elites formed an alliance with the humans in halo 2 and continued it in 3. Yeah the elites are a different species and look hideous but still, give us some diversity in the warzone. Halo 2 3 and reach wouldn't be the same without those four jawed lizard men.
@@thesamejackalsniperthatkil117 Nah that's what I'm saying, they had a perfectly good explanation to have Elites without it "breaking the lore" yet they still chose to leave them out in future games. I also really like the idea of Elites and humans coming together after Halo 3, it's a lot better than the stupid "Storm Covenant" and "Banished" shit where they just want to kill humans again.
Fun fact! Halo Reach was technically the first to let you fly a Pelican. It wasn't part of the mission but there was an easter egg you could accomplish then after flying through the weird building with the gap in the middle if you fly a Falcon it turns into a Pelican and a Banshee turns into a Phantom. So take that Halo 4! one of your positives is a lie!
Halo 4 (and Halo 5) is a Call of Duty game in a Halo skin with a Gears of War art style. This is why Halo 4 is so heavily criticized. It stopped being a Halo game, and tried to become a game that it's not. Part of what made Halo so fun is that it was different from all the other FPS games. When it changed, it lost what made it special. I'd bet all the moneys that if a future Halo game ever goes back to what Halo was in Halo C.E. through Halo Reach, it would return to prominence and set records.
I remember my friend at school had a modded Xbox, and one of the mods he had for Halo 2 put the Pelican model on the Banshee game object. It's funny looking back, because that's what the Pelican segment in Halo 4 feels like. No part of it plays into the fantasy of flying a dropship like that, ferrying marines around, etc etc. Just feels like a Banshee segment.
I've played through Halo 4 twice and watched others play it, and I honestly didn't know that there were different kinds of Promethean Knights until you showed them on screen.
Have to disagree with you on Reach story being weak. I might just be biased seeing as Reach was the halo game i played most growing up, but i think Reach perfectly accomplishes what it sets out to do. The story really reflects humanity's desperate fight for survival against a far superior foe which i would say is what is the focus of the story. The character work is pretty good and leads to some of the most gripping and emotional moments of the series partnered with Marty's as usual stellar sound track. Other than that, great video!
@Riorozen disconnected from CE? You deliver a fragment of Cortana to the Pillar of Autumn at the end, the end of the game even answers the old question about who Keys and Cortana are talking about at the very start of CE. “Do you think they made it?” “I think we both know the answer to that question.” The data the fragment of Cortana has is even speculated to be the Slipspace co-ordinates to Installation 04. Of all of the criticism I could levy at Halo Reach, such as how the story itself feels kinda meandering, or how it was in fact written by Frank, that’s not one of them.
Reach is short, characters are weak (to be technical: there are no characters, only personalities), and the story has a flat arc. I need to explain that that's not saying flat arcs are bad. Chief has a flat arc in CE. But a flat arc is better for a character to have than a narrative to have. Halo 1-3 are stronger, 4 is arguably stronger with subplot character change arcs, odst has a subplot character change arc, and so you could place reach in 4th or 6th place, with infinite and 5 vying for a distant last place
I will say that your critiques on art style and aesthetic are Objective. What makes halo 1-each so playable is that everything is readable really quickly. You’re able to look at an arena and decide a course of action, ya know like a trained super soldier. A muddy art style works fine in call of duty because every enemy is about the same. But in halo enemy types can do wildly different things. You’ll see a big silhouette with a banner on the back and say “hey it’s a brute, better gun him down before he charges.” Then you can mop up the other guys.
“Butbutbutbutbut I want the players to see how creative I am” - made me laugh so f*ing hard, because it’s so pathetically true. It’s like if you gave the self taught tweener who can draw “fRoM tHeiR ImAgiNaTiOn”
9:05 That was what Bungie were going for, for the human designs. Retro, or more accurately, cassette-futurism. Think of Aliens and the USCM. Pretty much where Bungie took inspirations from. Then came 343i and wanted to mix it with Star Wars and Marvel for some reason. Hell, I think 343i even admitted they wanted Halo to be like Star Wars. Well, like Disney, they pretty much did that and fucked it up. Only difference is that there isn't enough side-projects to salvage it.
Funny thing about the ammunition gripe, I swear to god Halo 4 was the only game in the series I had an issue with scavenging ammunition just simply due to the fact that most corpses and their weapons dropped despawn seconds after looking away from them. And it just kept happening to me on Legendary, regardless of how many enemies dropped a weapon I would need ammo for, it would just majestically disappear when I needed it most.
Re: The Mammoth and Pelican - Both of these vehicles would have made for very cool mobile base and fire support sections. The Pelican in particular could have been a lot of fun, letting you support groups of otherwise cut off marines either by using the built-in weapons, landing and supplying the marines with ammo and weapons, or even dropping off vehicles and reinforcements. You know, things Pelicans do. And the Mammoth, tacticool monstrosity that it is, was clearly intended to achieve fire superiority over a significant area. With it's armory, compliment of Warthogs, array of turrets and big MAC gun it's the UNSC's way of saying that whatever scrap of dirt it's on or near is off the market. And yet it doesn't achieve that purpose at all. Every time it gets near an objective in the mission it's used in it has to stop and wait for the Chief to DMR all the scary bad guys. Why not let us use that MAC gun to shoot down incoming Phantom and Spirit dropships (hey guys remember Spirits, which this Covenant splinter group should definitely still be using?!)? Or use those turrets to keep pursuing Ghosts and Banshees off of nearby allied vehicles? Maybe repel Covenant or Promethean boarding parties? Total missed opportunity in both cases and it's a damn shame.
Ngl, I will ALWAYS look at someone that accepts 343 bullshit explanation for, say, the Mjolnir "upgrade" as nanotechnology that was just conveniently available for Cortana in that cryopod on the Dawn as a crazy person that needs to be committed ASAP. There's simply no justification for the needless artstyle change as just 343 wanting to be distinct from Bungo. No, MFrs. Halo HAS a distinct look, and the LEAST you could have done was to stick to that look with just some slight visual upgrades.
You know, I ALWAYS see people saying "Halo 4 looked amazing! The lighting was insane" or something along those lines and I feel like I'm in crazy town because God damn does it look ugly. I don't care if it has more polygons or if it technically has a more advanced lighting system, the game looks terrible compared to what came before. I always and I mean ALWAYS see people complimenting Halo 4's lighting as if it was some huge upgrade but in my opinion it is the worst lighting I've ever seen in a game. Laughably bad.
I remember playing Halo 4 with my friend for the first time and wondering, "why isn't this fun?" I just blindly believed that a Halo game would be good no matter what. It didn't even cross my mind that a Halo game could be bad.
Halo 4 made me wait 3 years to get halo 5 for $10. Halo 5 made me use the $1 promo to play halo infinite on gamepass. Halo infinite has made me unwilling to get any future game unless it's a reboot to remove everything 343 has done and start again at a completely different halo 4
It's so funny watching the H4 gameplay compared to original trilogy. OG Halo: *Getting up close, using grenades and melee, prioritizing targets, circlestrafing, etc.* Halo 4: *Lightrifle spam at long range. Lightrifle spam at long range. Lightrifle spam at long range. Lightrifle spam at long range.* It's the only strategy that works in H4; you often are fighting prometheans with only their weapons, and all their weapons are shit except the power weapons and the lightrifle. If you try to get close the tanky knights will just eat your bullets, instakill you with a melee, or just teleport away if you manage to pop their shields somehow. The ONLY tactic in H4 that works is *Lightrifle spam at long range* which is so mind-numbingly boring and directly in stark contrast to the sandbox design of the OG games.
I never realised how bad the Halo Anniversaries looked until I watched this video. I launched up Halo 4 on MCC and did what he did with the colors using Nvidia game filter and it looked so good. I kept turning it off and on to compare them both because of how much of an improvement it made. So I went to Halo 2 Anniversary and was honestly shocked how bad it looked without the filter. Same story goes for Halo CE Anniversary. It's amazing how this simple filter made them feel more like Halo with all the vibrant colors on specifically the grass and sky. Thankfully all of them work well with the same color preset so I don't have to switch when going to another game.
![Halo Infinite is a Hilarious Mess - Review [1/2]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/mjDftHRrJgs/mqdefault.jpg)
If I had never watched this video, I would have lived my live thinking that there are no promethein knight ranks in halo 4.
Same
I didn't even know the elites still had colours lmao
@@NGRevenant Bungie: Blue, red, black, white, gold
343: Puke green, puke brown, puke purple all at the same time
everybody knows that making readable ranks requires little to no contrast and silhouette change
I was completely unaware the knights had shields, like played the entire game & never realized they didn't just have a weirdly big variable amount of health
Fun fact: Engineers made you feel bad when you killed them, their name denoting their role as non-combat individuals, and would make a fearful shriek when they were about to die. But the watchers... well...
And with the Engineers, if you understood the lore (which for Bungie games was totally optional, which is how games should be), you'd understand that Engineers exploded when you killed them because the covenant attached bombs to them to keep them under control. The engineers didn't want to fight the player, they were forced to.
engineers were sentient and made you feel bad for shooting them watchers on the other hand made you feel annoyed and wish you could wipe all of them out because of how fucking annoying watchers are
Also, everyone wants a pet engineer, no one wants a pet watcher
Every Watcher I kill makes me feel warm inside. When I see one, I immediately focus all attention in killing it, and when it dies, I smile.
Recently listened to Fall of Reach, and the Engineers are described as non-combative and more like researchers as they disassembled cars. Makes sense they’re not a threat
Not only are you forced to use the forerunner weapons due to lack of ammo, but they feel the worst to use.
The game genuinely forces you to play in the worst possible way
mfw when they introduce an LMG near the beginning (LMGs are my favorite kind of gun) and then they proceed to have it show up maybe 3 times the whole campaign.
I completely agree. I didn't like using any of the Forerunner weapons. They felt like they had a lack of impact to them and none of them were particularly aesthetically pleasing to look at.
This entire video:
Look at this - halo 4 has this thing (all other halos also have this but I'm not going to show you) and here's another halo which has this thing (halo 4 also has this but I'm not going to show you).
It's like what a classroom would show you as an example of purposeful selection bias.
@@he.5865 examples of what you mean?
@@EliteKnight97 There are plenty of green and blue areas in halo 4 and plenty of brown and grey areas in the other halos. Hence the selection bias with the examples shown.
Hi, as a game developer who worked in AAA as a programmer, regarding 16:55 I can tell you that companies will absolutely remove fun elements to bring the rating down.
I've seen it done to ragdolls, where the inability to mess around with a character body once it's no longer alive was done explicitly to bring down rating.
But why would they want to bring their rating down? Isn't that counterproductive?
@@danilosardo1179
It widens the market.
Movies rated 14A make more money than Rs.
There's a reason why there was almost no blood throughout The Dark Knight Rises.
@@Stormfin Ohh, I got it, they referred to M, R, T, etc. I thought they were talking about general rating, like bringing it down from 9.1 to 7.3
@@danilosardo1179
Nah man, honest mistake, I getcha.
This might explain why Portal 2 isn't a quiet, atmospheric, isolating puzzle game like its predecessor.
Ah yes, the Watcher resurrecting the Knight, who is also able to summon another Watcher. Man I always hated that mechanic. Glad you brought it up in the gameplay section.
When you think about it, doesn't the enemy design in Halo 4 seem like Boss design? "Guy can summon drone to pocket him and will vanish when you pop his shield" or "Drone that summons baddies and hides when you shoot him" would be perfect as bosses, but as average goons? That's silly.
@@luckyducky7819 Yeah I agree. Honestly as a Boss Fight... I don't mind the concept of a duo that continuously resurrect each other. Elden Ring's GodSkin Duo fight has them both repeatedly come back to life but they share a healthbar so you don't lose progress and it's honestly a pretty fun fight imo.
@@Zecuu They kinda did just that with Halo 5's Knights tbh. They added in Promethean Soldiers, which replaced the Halo 4 Knights, and made the Knights much stronger and gave them more clearly defined weak points. I can't really speak to how well they played in comparison, but on paper they definitely seemed a lot more interesting.
@CandiRokz H5 Knights are a huge improvement. Unfortunately Halo 5 also introduced the Warden Eternals... who are even more annoying to deal with than H2 sniper jackals.
@@luckyducky7819 If you think about it that makes sense for the average goons of a force made to fight the flood, problem being we aren't the flood
The key difference in design philosophy between Bungie games and 343 games that I've noticed is that Bungie gives you a sandbox to outsmart and to break, while 343 locks you down and says "you will play this the way I designed it to be played"
It's funny because that's also how Bungie treats Destiny. Really miss OG Bungie.
It's a lot more than that, too. Halo was a colorful, player paced, dynamic experience. They designed levels to be played multiple ways with care and dedication to each. You can hoof it with your desired weapon, pick up a ghost, and quickly blast everything. You could hijack a tank and slowly slog your way through blasting enemies in groups. You could pick up a banshee and fly your way through. Sure, each level had more or less a specifically designed way, like Metropolis clearly wants you to use a tank on the bridge, but you don't have to. They even provide you with a Warthog in case you just want to get to the other end. The only dynamic play I can think of in Halo 4 is throwing a random Banshee down, but the areas were too small to be fun to fly around anyway. No care taken to make sure it was fun if you picked up a Banshee or any other vehicle. Hell, the levels are even designed around specific weapons a lot of the time for fucks sake. No freedom what-so-ever. Bungie also had little set pieces that could be played out or interrupted, like a Brute about to kill a marine if you didn't shoot him in time. Or massive AI battles that you could participate in or just sit on the sideline and watch them blow each other to smitherines. The only thing I can think of is the Jackal that tackles and viciously kills a scientist that you can't even interrupt. If you can, it's exceedingly difficult to because I've never managed it.
There's a word for something like that. Care. You can tell Bungie devs were talking to each other saying "dude, wouldn't it be cool if the player could do this or that?" Or "what if we did this and this so the player can do this or that?" When it feels like 343 was like "Okay, let's make this level like this and that. No, Jimmy, don't try and mess around with it. Just make the level." You can just tell that 343 has the high brass telling their peons what to do and they're so stiff and uncreative, no one shares ideas in fear the higher ups would shoot them down because they do so often. The Bungie offices was open and creative and you can tell they would order pizza and work late on projects because they had passion. 343 is probably just an office where they clock in and clock out on time every day.
Almost makes you wonder why they sold it to them? What did they see or not see? And why?
Doesn't infinite have an open world?
@@Backfisch5927 Thats not the same as an open sandbox
You missed a critical aspect of enemy design that bungie was maestros with that nobody seems to be able to do. Enemy death animations. I can tell from across the map if I headshoted a grunt immediately. Halo 4, sometimes the grunts still look like they're alive. Note that bungie halo games did not use hit markers but nowadays hit markers are the only way to know you hit anything in an fps.
Speaking of death animations, 343 did an unholy job at vehicles exploding in halo infinite literally all of them turn red and explode the exact same way
Hit markers are needed now in the game because they have done a poor job of feedback. Easiest example is play Halo CE in classic and anniversary graphics and shoot an Elite. New graphics make it very hard to tell.
@@ZSTE Yeah but the Elites' shields in Anniversary graphics are barely noticeable anyway, in Halo 2A they're done way better and it proves you don't need hitmarkers if you have actual feedback, even with modern graphics
@@nagger8216 That was my point... CEA did it bad.
@@ZSTE Ah my bad, I thought you meant modern graphics in general make it hard to have the same kind of feedback on hitting enemies as the original games did
34:14 I've seen these values (percent chance that an enemy will overcharge the Plasma Pistol) and on Legendary they have a 100% chance that they will! I covered it a bit in my own video but had no idea it was this bad, and you're not just imagining things. Completely untested, and unacceptable.
34:51 Ooh! Ooh! I know! I know! Pick me! Yes, thank you! So um, in Halo 4 enemy melee attacks are 10 frames in duration. 1/6 of a second to insta-kill you!
oh wow, that's 0.16667 seconds! I wonder how much time you get to react to that!
... average human reaction time is 250 ms, maybe slightly lower for the average video game player person... in other words.... by the time you register it happen you can already see your corpse.
The only way to 'counter' the unfair melee attacks, if you can even call it a counter, is that you have to always assume that the enemy can & WILL use it. Now, for a game like Monster hunter, that's acceptable as the player has a multitude of options; blocking, dodge rolling, guard point, etc.
Here's the issue, in Halo, you DON'T have an option like that, so the only solution is to avoid getting into melee range period. I've gone through Halo 4 on Legendary for over 120 hours and still have no Idea how much damage the melee attacks do, sometimes, they one shot, sometimes, they don't and there's no way to tell which is which. That just adds another layer of frustration. The only saving grace is that the Pulse grenade will "stun" knights if you hit them directly, but even then, that will only buy you 1 second, which most people aren't going to be able to capitalize on for a back smack to one shot the knight.
I'm not defending 343i, far from it, I just wanted to highlight that the melee system in Halo 4 is not only just unfair, it just feels unpredictable at times, but I feel that also stems from the game running on Reach's engine. Not ALL of the blame should be directed at 343i for the BS melee attacks, Reach was the game that implemented THAT particular feature, 343i was just too lazy to adjust it properly. I say both Bungie & 343i are at fault for the MELEE being bullshit.
The rest of the issues: Ammo, vehicles made of tissue paper, and lack of weapon verity are 343's fault, shit they easily could have fixed with proper play testing, or just having actual Halo fans play through on legendary and give feedback...
Alas, that isn't the case, and what's done is done...
Tbf, you kinda need to play 4 assuming that a Knight is always about to melee you... Which ruins the gameplay....
Your vid was brilliant btw
Only super smash bros melee players can react to halo 4 enemy melee attacks.
I have to turn this off because it's too thorough, well thought out and infuriating to ruminate on. 343 did Halo so dirty.
The problems with h4's forerunner environments are still present in Infinite. Yes, Infinite cut down on the lense flares and the over complication, but they're still the same dull, silver, lifeless environments that look fresh off the press rather than some ancient ruin.
Halo Reach did it best when it came to the actual Forerunner Maps that came with the map packs. The subtle lightings, and ancient worn down designs all stayed true towards the original Trilogy.
@@BlkPhoenix1111 Bungie knew how to make grey/silver environments really appealing, in a way 343 just doesn't get. Then again even explosions looked better in bungie games than they have in any 343 game. Its wild given the graphical improvements that 343 just can't pull this off.
343's forerunner designs are some of the most devoid of personality things I've ever seen. They want to show off how slick and sci fi their designs are. Look at the polygon count! Look at the lens flares! When it has no soul or history like bungie's forerunner designs.
I'll pay more attention to the forerunner architecture next time I play Infinite, but from memory I thought it looked great. H4 and H5 had the worst in the whole series.
@@hrthrhs Its a hard thing to explain admittedly. Yes, it does look alot closer to the classic style than h4/h5 did. But at least to me personally it still has this too clean, sterile look to it.
I think part of it also comes down to diversity in the forerunner environments. The forerunner tileset in each level of CE alone is different for each level (not counting the remixed levels in the later game).
The levels halo and silent cartographer are similar but still quite different. The assault on the controll room is also quite different. The library is this vast open interior, and uses brown heavily rather than silver, and the silent cartographer is a mix of silver and brown areas.
You can probably tell each level of CE by merely looking at its forerunner archetecture, but all of Infinite's structures look like they could be the same building.
The final level adds some gold bits here and there at least.
My brother photoshopped the arms off of the Halo 4 elites for a joke "save the elites' arms; help us fund complete armor" ad. Or, it might have been pretending to raise money to buy them all prosthetics. Anyway, I'm glad to hear you mention how absurd it is!
Great video!
I always imagine them looking like some dirt bag from New Jersey wearing a tang top at the beach for some reason. Also their skin is completely different from how the Elites looked in previous games.
I started at the beginning with Halo 1. I never liked 4, hated the digital enemies, hated all the lore, hated the fake feel of the game.
Everything pointed out here in searing detail brings a bad feeling, a bad taste that was my experience with 4. I hardly played when new, never returned to it. These videos explain exactly why.
I like H4 for making me understand what makes the other Halo games so good.
There are 4 different type of Promethean knight? I honestly thought there are 2 those who have hair and those who are bald...
I kid you not, I played this godforsaken game twice (the lowest amount I've played any Halo game up to that point), and I never knew there were more than one type.
Never noticed lmao I only replayed this campaign once only to help a friend.
only 2 stand out the one with that holographic shell (y'know the gas station company) logo and the one with LED lighting all over it
@@bruhgod123 “and the one with LED lighting all over it” THAT’S EVERY PROMETHEAN!
@@Slender_Man_186 the one with like 10x more led lighting
Also I love how CREATIVE ASSEMBLY, a real-time strategy game studio, was able to make HALO WARS 2 more in league with Bungie's Halo than 343i was
And then 343i stole their ideas and shat all over them.
Before CA it was Ensemble Studios who made Age of Empires as their claim to fame. They were not supported by Bungie during their development of Halo Wars (their last game before being closed by Microsoft), and yet they still paid more respect to the series than 343 did in Halos 4 and 5. 343 just would not do that until Halo's popularity had dropped to critical levels after 5, and by then it was too late because they still didn't understand why old Halo was so well liked.
343 ruined the banished
@@jurassicarkjordanisgreat1778exactly!!! The Banished was perfect to help save this franchise. And then 343 comes along....
I fucking HATE this company!!!!
20:42 That’s not fair to Bionicle.
Agreed
So the reason H4’s graphics look crusty is because 343 invested in making all-new High res models for next-gen but scaled them down to run better on the 360’s hardware.
Thats only part of the reason. The main reason is that 343's artists are uninspired and incompetent, which mostly has to do with the sharp decline in the quality of art schools over the past decade or so. Which is why I hate the "its the executives fault" excuses people always jump to whenever a game releases broken, unfinished, and just generally low quality. Anyone with some tenure who has worked in these industries will tell you that the quality of work has gone downhill, because the quality of the workers themselves has gone downhill. Which is itself a result of the institutions where these workers are educated having gone downhill. The early 2000's was an era of creative visionaries releasing legendary games on shoestring budgets with overwhelming deadlines, like Halo 2. Those men didnt let executive pressure (that was much more serious and destructive than it is nowadays) stop them from making passion projects that delivered amazing experiences, because they were true artistic geniuses and masterful computer scientists. The creative teams responsible for these modern games are passionless worker drones who got into the industry because its a "good career opportunity", being overseen by talentless hacks who worked their way up the corporate ladder by playing office politics. The quality and character of the people making these games is completely different from the old guard of the video game golden age.
@@aceambling7685 wow great comment! so true
@@aceambling7685 truth! Why the fuck do those companies hire people who don't play games to work on games? Diversity quota?
@@thesamejackalsniperthatkil117 ehm ehm frank o Conner
They had to scale down the textures to the point of being noticeable outside of a zoom function, example zoom into the elite armor in halo reach and zoom into the elite armor in halo 4, halo 4 has a higher polly mode but the textures are scaled down. Also the lighting is fucked on some missions.
You compared the Knights to Bionicles, but they'd be far better if they were more like Bionicles. Give each rank a colour, the highest being Gold. Give them unique face masks, etc. And make the weapon an obvious attachment on their arm.
Then of course all their weapons need to be changed to be visually distinct like the Covenant's are. Each a different colour and obviously different shape.
funny too cause if they would have been cooler and maybe fit in more if they did look more like bionicles, since bionicles don't usually do large amounts of neon, and floaty bits
343: Best we can do is Robot Dogs. Would Ya like some Robot Dogs in your Halo game? Genius. Robot Dogs. Dogs Robots. They’re gonna love it.
I honestly think it would have been cooler in the Prometheans had a more angelic aesthetic. A sort of actually knightly appearance. Could even still have lights and floaty bits.
You could still have the glowing skull and other nonsense show when damaged. But i like the idea of the Prometheans looking regal but having a darker underlayer would have given them a lot of character.
GeneralHeed actually recently proved that 343i could've easily made the different ranks have different coloured lights, but that would've taken away from the MP™
@@Janx14 Make them look like the Prefect armour from H4 and speak in garbled, robotic but human sounding voices
Going back to enemy design. The covenant had personality, grunts were funny and cowardly, brutes were aggressive and, well, brutish. Elites were lean and bossy, jackals were scappy and slimy. Even in CE where the covenant aren't translated, you can understand this from their actions and responces to your attacks. Although halo 4 covenant mostly carries this over (even though they no longer translate the covenant again for some reason), the prometheans have none of this. They're just robots with zero personality and nothing to remember them by. Part of the fun of fighting the covenant is seeing how they'll react to the chief, the panic or anger in their voices upon seeing The Demon. They would even jump backwards. The prometheans, on the other hand, just immediately start start shooting, have zero lines of dialogue, and don't talk to each other at all.
At least they vould have made the Promotheans having sparkles of personality or dven some whitt.
The flood had no personality compared to the Covenant, but that is what made them scary. Instead of communicating and trying to stay alive, they would make uncanny noises and charge without fear of death. The promethians were boring robots even compared to the Sentinels (which would get old fast if they were the only enemy fought for 75% of encounters).
I have no idea what your talking about. I wish they were like how you described. I always though it was bizzare that the forerunners would design a robot dog that howls (crawler), a four armed bipedal foot soldier that poses and taunts you, (Promethian Knight) and a little angle with circle wings (watcher).
These things were meant to fight the flood. They are supposed to be lifeless robots with no personality like the Sentinel aggressors, Sentinel officers, and sentinel enforcers in the bungie halo games. The Promethians are too life like. That's why I hated them. They don't seem like forerunner creations at all.
8:28 i actually screamed "yes, YES, YEEEEEEES!" I'm really baffled when people defend the artstyle.
I don't know when I subscribed but whoever shits on halo 4 is automatically on my favourite TH-camrs list. In all seriousness, great videos, you have summarised exactly how I feel about the game. Looking forward for more of your content, great job.
i dont think he talked about this in the vid actually but making the grunts talk their own language and removing their hilarious dialogue killed the spirit of the game, removed the fun and was pretty emblemic of why 343's version of Halo feels totally soulless.
@@colorantics8160 they should've made them speak English because this game was far ahead of reach, and reach has a good excuse for grunts to speak their own language since it's a prequel. Atleast the fake grunts speak their hilarious dialogue on 5, but its a game I don't wanna touch anymore either way.
@@thesamejackalsniperthatkil117 The point was to make the Covenant much more alien in feel rather than just the timeline. Hence why Elites look much more like sharks too
Literally the only parts I liked about 4’s art style are the jackals and chiefs new armour (but not enough for it to be his main armour)
@@YodaOnABender those are like the worst parts about the new art style lmao
Halo 1 was the first M-rated game my dad let me get after he saw me playing the Silent Cartographer on a demo disc that came with my Xbox.
Halo 2 was the most excited I have ever been for the release of any game ever. I brought my official Xbox magazine to summer camp, wrote the release date on my middle school calendar like it was a holiday. It didn't disappoint.
Halo 3, Reach, and ODST got me through high school.
I bought Halo 4 at the midnight release in while I was in college.
I haven't purchased a Halo game since, and you articulated exactly why.
Same here, preordered and bought the legendary edition of 4 at launch. Played through the whole campaign, played one game of multiplayer, and didnt touch it again until it came to MCC, never really knowing why I didnt care for it at the time.
Thank you man. I knew I wasn't the only one feeling this way. Reddit casuals really warp reality in order to defend 343 when it comes to halo 4.
They do the same thing with all of Halo’s lore, they argue that 343 never retconned the fact that humans were forerunners in the old lore despite all of the evidence in the Bungie games saying otherwise. And the thing is, the only two pieces of Bungie era lore that contradicted this, the Librarian and Didact Terminals from Halo 3 and the IRIS ad campaign (which was an ad for said terminals, and these are the only two things that contradict it, even the other terminals back up Humans=Forerunners) were both written by Frank O’Connor, someone who hasn’t even been able to correctly summarize a single Halo game.
No, seriously, Frank thinks Halo CE had a prophecy of some kind (he said this in an interview a while back), he thinks that at the end of Halo 3 Humanity and the Covenant came to a truce (this is shown in Halo Legends Origins Part 2, and Chief also says this at the start of Halo 4, even though that never happened in Halo 3, the Elites broke off from the covenant entirely), and he tried to retcon the Arbiter’s entire backstory in Halo Legends The Package, the Elite Major is supposed to be the very same Thel Vadamee from Halo 2 and 3 (this was later retconned again, now he’s some some other elite named Thel, but still, he seriously didn’t know the Arbiter’s backstory ffs). And remember, the guy who said/did all of that is the pretty much the sole person who worked at Bungie that didn’t think humans were Forerunners
The Halo 4 stans are just vocal, I would say the silent majority on the Halo sub still dislike it. I for one hate it with a burning passion. People like us don't make posts about it but in the comment threads you'll see a lot of very upvoted comments mention how shit the game was and list the reasons why. The Halo 4 fans almost never give reasons for why they even like the game, just vague discussions of the story (and never the mechanically terrible gameplay which they so conveniently gloss over.)
@@Slender_Man_186its hilarious that he didnt know the arbiters backstory considering in the very first scene we ever see arbiter the prophets are literally giving a recap of what happened in CE, why it pisses them off, and why they blame arbiter for it.
@@perrytran9504 it’s less the “silent majority” and more like the absent majority since like 95% of the fanbase completely bailed after Halo 4’s population dipped to only 20k in less than a year.
@@kabbablabba4073 seriously, it’s blatantly obvious that he never even watched the cutscenes let alone played the games, and HE is the one who was put in charge of Halo’s story as a whole when 343 took over.
Even in the original DOOM they knew the value of distinct, easily identifiable enemy designs. You can tell an imp from a pinky from a baron of hell just by looking at a silhouette. H4 prometheans were so god awfully designed it was impossible to tell one from the other. Everything about 4 is done half assedly because 343 didn’t earn Halo, they were gifted it. They didn’t refine and perfect it over the course of 5 titles, they were handed a fully formed franchise and instead of making the best they could, they were determined to make it “their” game and put their mark all over it. Which they did, and it killed the franchise, so mission accomplished I guess.
Oh hey, cool to see you here
I remember when Halo 4 first came out and friend was trying to convince me how cool it looked, he flipped out when I wasn't impressed. I damn near told him everything you said here and he looked at me like I was crazy.
It's really cathartic to have this kind of vindication when the people around you always treat you like some kind of naysayer or contrarian who just wants to oppose anyone.
I wonder whats his opinion on Halo 4 now?
@@BlkPhoenix1111 Oddly enough I had a falling out with him years ago.
@@daegnaxqelil2733 It's always a bit tough being a critical thinker. It tends to put you at odd ends with a lot of people.
@@daegnaxqelil2733 wtf 😂😂😂😂
@daegnaxqelil2733 please tell me you're playing a character rn, you're too much 😂😂
My first direct contact with Halo was through Master Chief edition on PC.
And you know - with zero nostalgia for the series, zero bias towards one team or the other, because I simply didn't care who made which game... Halo 4 is such a monstrous drop in quality it hurts.
I went through original trilogy and ODST and Reach in one fell swoop - and most of it felt very consistent and coherent.
Story, for the most part, made sense, drama was organic, and everything felt somewhat grounded, despite a lot of bonkers stuff happening.
Halo 4... I just could not finish. A dropped the game soon after first encounter with Prometheans. But even before that, something felt off - the Covenant remnants felt wrong, especially Elites lacking their trademark agility - combat felt like a slog.
And suddenly you get to enemies with build in synergising respawn mechanics, close range instakills and completely stupid AI that will murder you senseless if you get close... But does virtually nothing when you are away.
Their lack of aggression combined with design that forces ranged combat made fighting them... boring. And the only tense moments in fighting them were when I had to dive in for ammo, because why would be able to carry ammo in a shooting game, right?
I quickly figured out that these boring assholes would be a bread and butter of the combat - I mean, they are 343s "original character, donut steel" thingamajigs - so surely they would not be a throwaway enemy in their debut game...
So I quit. And never looked back. I didn't want to sour my fresh, good memories of the original Bungee games.
bungie halo is garbage
I went through all the trouble to get all achievements in this game and now I will never play it again through MCC.
Thanks for making these videos. I just played Halo 4 for the first time recently, and you really summed up the experience of it better than I ever could've. I think a lot of us knew that the feel of the game was off, that it was made by people who don't understand (or worse, actively dislike) what Halo was. I really do not miss the trends of the 2010s, especially these awful overuse of bright lights, lens flares, and visually noisy environments with little care taken for enemy readability/cues/silhouettes.
There's been a lot of revisionism going on with Halo 4 recently. Glad to see more gamers/fans like you setting the record straight on how dogshit the game really was.
This! I saw the other day a post by Sacred icon halo and I was very surprised at how many people were praising Halo 4s MP. Like, did these people lived on the same timeline as us? I played the game religiously, but I knew the piece of shit game I was playing, to the point I would always go back to Halo Reach and 3. I wasn't too vocal at the time nor I actively thought "this thing is so bad", but deep down I never enjoyed it as much as I did Halo 3
@@StrikeAxl It's probably just younger generation growing up. As a kid I did kind of enjoy halo 4 but I still stuck mostly to bungie halo games. Nowadays hearing 343 and halo makes my blood boil.
I feel like this happens with tons of bad games in popular franchises. People are waiting so long for something good that they begin to put their fantasies onto shitty games despite it being nothing they're thinking about.
Its also kind of wild that halo wars seems more grounded in the universe even tho it was also made by another studio (which bungie did not want to help)
Yall really just don't like other people's opinion huh?
The bit about visuals really hits the nail on the head. MCC is a great example of the clashing art styles, I am actually incapable of playing through the forerunner interior bits of Halo CE with the "Updated Visuals" active because the sheer amount of glossy shiny reflectivity actually gives me sensory overload, which isn't something I've ever experienced before then. That and the lighting in some areas is just completely massacred, with parts that are meant to be bathed in shadows instead being clearly and rather harshly lit. Its honestly shocking how much the style was massacred. I'm just glad someone cared enough to make it opt-out.
Don't forget that the same "Updated Visuals" took away from the level by removing details like the blood splatters everywhere and how they were so desperate to make the game look good they left some really bad spots where you can clearly see the enemy but your bullets get caught by an invisible wall.
The one exception I'll say is The Library. It still looks like hell for the most part, but the arrows printed on the ground solve the issue of getting lost on the worst map in CE. I just recently played through CE on legendary again, and would flip to the remaster if I was having trouble navigating that area, but man does it look funny.
the outdoor environment in CEA weren't bad, very pretty but im agree for the interiors.
The "Call of Dutyization" point is basically something we see now with games needlessly adopting Battle Royale modes just to keep their player base from leaving and trying out Fortnite. Though the battle royale craze is less harmless than this was back in the day. At least a game can still maintain its identity while having a battle royale game mode if they want one.
Finally someone inspects the astroturf 343 implements within the halo community.
If you like this, you should check out C3 Sabertooth’s video “We Were Forerunner” he completely shred’s Frank O’Connor’s lore and dispels every 343 fan’s cope that “343 didn’t change or retcon the lore.”
If I understand your meaning, I think astroturf is a little much. I did like Halo 4 enough when it came out. I may have only been 17 at the time, but I still thought it was okay.
@@Blockistium it really isn’t too much. Any time there’s a controversy in the halo community the entire Reddit page and other forums gets entirely censored except posts that defend the actions of 343. Even if you don’t believe they’re implementing bots or fake accounts for PR purposes, the former example is undeniable.
@@dad5410 I did not read Reddit or any online thing about Halo during the time of Halo 4's release. My opinion was entirely my own. Maybe not the case for other people, but I experienced it almost isolated.
@@Blockistium for a more recent example look up the remember halo video. It was a love letter to the old halo games yet since it added in some elements of the failures of 343 it was entirely banned from the halo sub.
Halo 1's graphics actually blew me away when ot first released. It was hands down the most graphically impressive title of its era.
It's the first game I remember seeing bump maps being used. Seemed like magic back then.
@Spiral i disagree. the second level of CE when the game first came out was something else that nothing else at the time really captured imo
the first level I played in CE was silent cartographer and it blew my fucking mind
@spiral7399
A good art style can make up for poor graphics. Infinite might have better graphics than Halo: Reach, yet Reach still looks better despite being over a decade older with less money and half as much development time. Graphics aren't everything though, but while comparing the two games, Infinite still has less content than Halo: Reach with a far worse free player customization system.
Ce proves that detailed textures aren't necessary to look good.
Two quick points,
1. The shield issue is applicable to Halo CEA as well. In Halo CEA, it is REALLY hard to tell if you've damaged an enemies' shields or not, and even worse, if you've popped them. This was fixed in Halo 2A, but it's still an issue in CEA.
2. Engineers, at least in Reach, also have a headshot region. This means you have the ability to kill them in two shots. The first shot knocks off the "faceplate" and the second shot will kill them. Watchers don't have this. Watchers CAN be assassinated, but that's small potatoes when they literally fly out of the map when damaged.
Another point about Engineers: to my knowledge Engineers in Halo 3: ODST will die in one shot from an overcharged plasma pistol on any difficulty.
@@danielhambrook3669 They do, it's extremely useful on Firefight legendary. And on heroic you can also instakill them with a supercombine (though you need more damage on legendary.) As much as I found engineers overtuned in ODST when playing the firefight maps on legendary, they are at least a lone hazard that was a reasonable addition to the sandbox, and they are not as common as watchers. The main annoying thing with them is just how insanely tanky they are plus the explosion after you kill them, but unlike the watchers they don't run away and actively try to waste your time fighting them.
The difference is CE is a 20 year old game for one, and for another the visual cue of the shield is made moot by the point that shooting an Elite will still let the player know whether shields have returned or not, which still doesn't happen nearly as fast as Knights (which is the salient point overall).
@@Fyrecide No he's referring to CEA, the "remaster" of Halo CE that 343 gave to another company to do.
@@Batdude36 I know... but the original graphics do show shield indications. I never play on the remastered graphics because they absolutely fucking ruin the atmosphere and feel of the entire game. It's horrid.
Man I HATED the promethean weapons, and they’re basically the only guns you can use in the game due to ammo availability. Pitiful.
Fun fact about Promethean Vision: 343 copied that armor ability from an Indie game called Blacklight Tango Down where in that game you had an ability to see though walls for like 5 seconds. And not only that the 343 employees who made this game came from other studios like Tryarch, Infinity Ward, Bioware, Ubisoft etc. Who made this game, there was a 343 vidoc on the Halo Waypoint 360 app that I once watched back in 2011 where they talked about how 343 formed and then comes to opening title sequence where all those studio logos showed up and they formed into the infamous 343i logo we all know today. I know that vidoc still exists since I used to spent countless and countless of hours in that app trying to get my milestones and watch the daily updates on the Halo 4 news becuase back in those days I used to so vividly hype for this god awful game since I didn't know any better at the time since I was purposely deluding myself that this game was good but eventually I saw how bad this game was an never touched it again, and y'know whats funny? 343 Fanboys are always claiming that 99% of 343 are mostly Bungie employees even tho thats 1000% pure bullshit if you take your time to read through the ending credits. The more I look at this game the more how bad it looks and I wished I never wasted my time on this game way back in the day.
While I don't disagree with your overall post, even if they copied that ability from that game, I highly doubt that Blacklight Tango Down was the first fps to include that kind of ability.
I don't even think that what is essentially a temporary wallhack constitutes a proper mechanic, it's entirely derivative
@@goldcreeper7376 Never knew of any FPS that integrated wallhacks into the main gameplay loop before BLTD. Other games have it but it's usually a power up or a debug code, not an ability you use routinely to keep track of enemies. Halo's was definitely closer to Blacklight's (even in the colors it visualizes as)
@@RatsFunHouse101 Didn't Perfect Dark do it before that with the Farsight?
@@goldcreeper7376 The word "Blacklight" before "Tango Down" makes it sound like a porn game.
@@OmegaF77 it was an actual video game mind you on the indie side released back in 2011. It was a generic twitch shooter like COD but it had it's own unique charm to it.
I wholeheartedly agree bro Halo 4 was a complete embarrassing. I didnt even grow up with Halo, I started on Reach when it released on PC and the very first moment I got to Halo 4 I could feel something was horribly wrong on every single level. Now I have like 2k hours on MCC and probably not even 1% has been Halo 4, I despise the mere thought of playing it
No it wasn't
@@fortnitekidlover9171 sure
@@fortnitekidlover9171 Nice logical argument there lol.
@@fortnitekidlover9171 username checks out
It's tolerable on normal difficulty but there's no reason to play it on legendary
In the second mission the first thing I did was complain about the weapons, Warthogs and the Dawn being wrong. I always said that if they were so adamant about changing them, they should have just used Halo 3s stuff until the Infinity shows up.
Additionally, Halo 3s movement is not actually all that slow, the field of view makes it feel far slower than it actually is. I only realised this once Halo 3 was on pc and I could up the field of view.
YES, this is why I felt weird playing it, thank you again.
the "Halo cycle" is a lie
The "Halo Cycle" has been pure bullshit since the very beginning.
It only applies to the 343 apologists who don’t know what they like. They act like a few forum posts of people bitching about Halo 2 back in the early 2000s means people hated Halo 2. They ignore the fact that back then the internet wasn’t nearly as widespread in its use. They can’t comprehend just how small the internet was. Hell they probably think TH-cam was also huge back in 2005…
@@gabethebabe3337 Spoken like a true Bungie stan, pretending only one side exists/is guilty of a certain behavior
Agree I couldn't understand why Halo 4 felt so off, but he explains it quite well.
Also appreciate Halo 3 way more, especially the masterful Ark level.
@@Espartanica whatever you say pal. At least Bungie’s Halo games were actually popular
With people saying they want more Spartan ops they don’t mean they want it’s insane repetition and Brian reed’s awful writing
What they actually mean is they like the concept of it for halo basic pve mission content focused around a story focused around your Spartan done in a live service format
You see people supporting it now because infinite has a ‘story’ focused around your Spartan but all they do is stay at base and get told to play vr. Where I think a lot of halo campaign enjoyers would have at least loved to have gotten something more actually playable and despite the numerous flaws with Spartan ops it’s the only real example of a playable side campaign we’ve had in a halo game.
good video. I would have added to the unbalanced difficulty part, that weapons despawned almost as soon as you looked away from them. 343 put so much more memory on shiny graphics over Reach, that they couldn't afford to maintain all the bodies and dropped guns that was a staple of the bungie games. On legendary from H2 to Reach, I could backtrack at least a couple of rooms back to top off my sniper ammo if I remembered where a copy of my gun dropped. or needler ammo or fuel rod ammo or whatever. the memory budget wasn't just used for graphics, it was used to maintain a lively sandbox.
halo 4 was torture on legendary. I had no motivation to keep trying after the second mission. Every Bungie halo was tantalizing on Legendary. yeah it would kick your ass but you knew you could win if you played smart and used the ammo around you. you wanted more.
Amazing points. Going back on legendary to get a rocket you know you saw get dropped somewhere to beat a certain section you're stuck on
Try Halo Infinite. Weapons and bodies disappear almost immediately. A cool thing in the old Halo's is backtracking previous rooms to top off your ammo and seeing the end of the carnage that you just inflicted. And this is Halo Infinite a game that visually doesn't look next gen is released on the most recent hardware PC and the Series X and somehow lacks the performance to have some bodies and weapons linger just a bit longer.
@@quintonlim4275 that does not sound fun. the whole thing sounds un-exciting. don't hop to new locations across the galaxy in a tight storyline, stick to a 5 mile "open world" square and just keep revisiting locations and camps and shit. uncover a storyline that happened out of sight, in the past, because it was easier to write. Cortana was going to disrupt the status quo after Halo 5, now that's all undone because it was hard to write about. don't worry, here's a new cortana just like the old familiar one.
I think the reason why some people say that halo 4 is not as bad as they remember is because the bar is so low now compared to before. I mean halo 5 had a worse campaign then halo 4 and Infinite has been such a disspointment that people think halo 4 was not that bad when in reality it was pretty bad. It is a similar situation to the disney star wars movies who are so bad that people remember the prequels as great hidden gems when in reality those movies in some aspects where pretty bad. The lower the bar gets the higher the praise for undeserving things.
People used to hate on Reach but today many people have fondness for the game because it was the last good halo game. You dont know how good you have it until you lose it and halo reach is a perfect example of that.
Its unfair to call the prometheans "Bionicle-like" because at least bionicles have different colours and clear design .-.
Remember when Frank O'Connor said Chief's armour changed because of nanobots while he was asleep? But there was no explanation for the relatively small frigate _Forward Unto Dawn_ suddenly quadrupling in size and also completely changing hull design?
That excuse he made was stupid as fuck. Halo games never featured any nanotech and here we learn that Chief's armor was upgraded while he was asleep in a SPLIT OFF PIECE OF SHIP which should be barely functioning?! There is no way he could have come up with a worse excuse other than Magic.
And how the Arbiter looked different in Halo 5 supposedly because they didn't have time to reimport his H2A model, yet that doesn't explain why he still has his H5 design in the comics.
@@seth3491 , or that Elites we see in Halo 4 and 5 are different because they are Sub-species yet for some reason Arbiter also looks like that.
Not only that, but from the Lore standpoint it would be a giant waste of resources, because there are no visible changes that come with it. Chief remains the same, in fact, he is worse in Halo 4, because he can't take any hits without recharging his shield and hiding behind covers.
And said "nanomachines son" upgrade...kept the gash in his armor from Halo 3. Lol.
I've never played Halo 4 since my friends warned me of its awfulness, but watching these two videos has really made me realize why Halo fans have such an extreme resentment to 343 Games. It's not that their reactions have been extreme - it's that the insult done to Halo as a whole was extreme. Like I genuinely cannot believe Microsoft (and therefore Xbox) let their prized icon be worked on by such incompetent developers and somehow failed to do even the most basic quality control on whether any of the game was even good or not.
you sir have an underrated channel, like editing, pacing, music, and script all hit way above their weight class for as small of a channel as you've got. You deserve 300k sub at least.
agreed! i cant imagine how much editing these two videos took. Makes me cringe just thinking about it lol
it is for a good reason
@@daegnaxqelil2733 have you not shut up yet?
he's toxic
@@giannilyanicks1718 according to who?
One of the biggest problems with the Watchers is that they stifle play style variety. Here's an example: you come across a squad of Covenant; 10 grunts, 2 blue elites, and 1 red elite. Who do you kill first? Well, you could take out the elites first, demoralising the grunts. But, there's a risk if you do, the grunts might swarm you and overwhelm you. So you could kill the grunts first, while making sure you don't get outflanked by the elites. You can take them out from a distance, or you can get up close. You can snipe them. Or you can get up close, grenade them, and gun them from up close, never giving them a chance to fight back effectively. Everything was risk-reward.
But with these floating fuckers, why would you ever _not_ go for the Watchers first? They're so overpowered since they can shield the enemies, spawn new enemies, and catch grenades. In the Bungie games, I found myself varying my play style depending on the environment, situation, and class of enemies I was facing. With Halo 4, I found myself doing the same thing on a loop - sniping the Watchers from a distance, at which point I might as well just snipe everything else from a distance.
Tron Legacy was 2010. That's why all the Forerunner hallways have that color scheme. I can hear it now, "Tron made 400 million. Yeah, people loved that movie. They love orange and blue strip lighting with trapezoidal patterns. We can do that! We can do it better than Tron did!! We can make 500 million!!"
You might be right. Tron did it better tbh...just goes to show it's usually best to stick with your own style rather than chasing trends.
@@gaiusfulmen Absolutely. Chasing the audience is never the way to go. They'll always outrun you. Even if you add a sprint function.
That ending rant was definitely the crown jewel of this video. I absolutely despise the faux trust people are putting in 343. Especially now that Infinite is getting updates (you know, content that SHOULD HAVE BEEN IN THE FUCKIN GAME AT LAUNCH) and people are virtue signalling and "TRUST THE PLAN" groupthink. I appreciate this video so much.
If Halo CE was the evolution of combat in gaming, then halo 4 and onwards is the rapid if not outright instantaneous devolution of gameplay, visual and mechanical clues, and otherwise quality of product.
Did i mention complete and utter story dissolution?
It's a rough time for the halo franchise, and i think it's too far gone to come back thematically without a complete retcon of the last few games.
Sure, they can take steps to stabilize very slightly, but it'll never be as good as it could've been prior to the lore disasters that have plagued this series since 343 took over.
Bungie, we miss when you were great, we miss when you were leading the industry and changing the game in it's entirety, and we miss when you were in charge of Halo.
And thank you Andy, these two videos were extremely and fantastically done, and you've more than earned a subscriber out of me, and i look forward to your future content!
I went into this skeptical, but outside of a few disagreements on characterization, your review has been a sobering experience. I booted Halo 4 up last night and found so many of your points absolutely hitting home in my brain, especially the stuff pertaining to visuals. I'd never thought the game was amazing, but I guess now it's shifted in my mind from a decent and understated title to...a guilty pleasure, I guess.
It's really soul-numbing realizing that even from the onset of 343i's career they were doing a poor job, huh
A lot of people say halo 5 is the worst halo but, as bad as it is at least I had some fun with it. Halo 4 was so bad I basically immediately went back to halo reach
Another thing. The music! Does anyone remember a single score from Halo 4? Any soundtracks that stick in your head to this day? Marty is gone and replaced by someone who should make music for a different game. It just dosen't sound like Halo.
i remember revival, 117, midnight, arrival
"To Galaxy" was actually pretty good.
I mean I remember some of it but not for a good reason well in my opinion at least it is not a good reason to remember it as it sounds kind of "ripped" from star wars game like I would not be surprised to hear some of it in a star wars game like no joke I prefer the halo wars soundtrack as it at least sounded like a halo soundtrack a little bit
6:36 to your point here, I think that was what Bungie wanted to accomplish. While it was alien, it wasn't totally uncomfortable, because it was designed by ancient humans so it's intrinsically familiar. That was until 343 decided to come along, retcon everything good, and fuck up the lore completely.
23:33 up until now, I never knew Prometheans had shields or had different ranks
Issues with Halo 4's multiplayer as someone that played it competitively that I didn't see mentioned here : Halo 4 had Haven as its only competitive map until forge maps were added in. Not getting descoped when getting shot was a huge issue, as well as the flinch added in. Bolt shot being a one shot kill available to anyone as a starting weapon. AGL picked it up months after MLG dropped it, and they never paid most of the teams that won. The start of maps having such terrible lighting where looking at a light source blinds you, because artists love showing off their lights. No scoping with the beam rifle was far too easy because of its insane hitbox when fired from the hip. Sprint being in the game for everyone means that the maps are all larger to accommodate for this. Might seem needed in BTB but those maps are made to be huge because of sprint. When you are trying to play a competitive map they go from small arena style map, to what H2 or H3 would have used for a BTB game. Not being able to drop the fucking flag and now having a pistol with unlimited ammo was the dumbest thing. In Ce, 2, 3, and Reach flag juggling was done because you moved faster when you were not carrying the flag. This made juggling it a skill. Stat sites like Halotracker no longer worked because 343 refused to allow 3rd party sites use their game data the way that Bungie did. No ranked system at all. You would go from playing against a guy and his 3 friends all playing on one tv, to a team of 4 that were trying to pubstomp, to playing against 4 randoms. BR was a 5 shot kill while the DMR was a 4 shot kill while also shooting faster and farther. The BR had a chance that some of its 3 bullets would miss as well, making it take more shots to kill or even pop a shield.
I highly enjoyed both videos man. Got a sub from me for this.
Aside from CTF, 4's MP was nearly unplayable and boring. It felt like a cheap COD knockoff (which it was) and had ZERO competitive appeal. It also lacked basic features like player-counts and even the Red Xs when you died so your team could see on the map. I gave it a chance but like many went back to H3 on the 360 after a few months.
After this 2 hour review of Halo 4, no one can claim Halo 4 was good. Halo 4 is officially buried
Interestingly, Reach had the same problem with the melee timing. The Elite melee stomp was way too fast to be reacted to and was a guaranteed kill iirc.
The stomp or the Sparta kick?
I remember the overhead stomp is extra easy to dodge if you go left.
I don't think the Sparta kick is dodgable at all.
Halo 2 as well
@@peanutgallery4 nah, halo 2 elites have other (way bigger problems).
I only recently learned that Reach was basically a side-game assigned to secondary team members while bungie's main talent worked on Destiny. Helps explain why the core gameplay was so much worse than that of the mainline games.
@@georgebaggy Yeah Reach isn't as bad as 4, but replaying it more makes me realize it was a noticeable step down from the trilogy + ODST in sandbox and AI balance. Elites moving around a lot is fine as it's clearly meant to evoke CE, but their grenade throws and melees are extremely fast animations not meant to be reactable like the older games. 343 should've reverted away from this, but instead they doubled down for Halo 4 and even made an entire faction worse than the elites in animation balance.
Halo 3 still being popular to this day isn't just old halo fans playing for nostalgia either. I was 2 years old when it came out and me and my friends were playing halo 3 earlier this week. We even play halo ce a lot
Good video! Found you from your Redline video, and I like your to-the-point style.
It's possible I was distracted when you brought these things up, but I'm surprised by a couple things you didn't bring up. Notably, elites in Halo 4 can melee attack faster than human reaction speed. It's a carryover from Halo Reach, but it's partially on 343 for being too lazy to fix such an egregiously terrible design choice. There's also that ridiculously unfair Knight attack where they rapidly teleport towards you and one-shot melee you. It feels like it's based on luck whether you can evade it or not. I also would've mentioned how atrocious the Mantis sections are, where you're getting endlessly pelted from all sides and needing to hide behind cover IN A MECH SECTION.
Atleast you can stomp and teabag with the mantis
Yes I replayed it not long ago after ages. What's up with like 200 enemies firing at you from all directions constantly in this game everywhere? Like it's cool Halo 4's engine can handle it and all but for fucks sake this game needs to chill for a second.
Completely agree with you on how H4 and H5 just look unappealing. I could never explain why myself but you did a good job. I think part of it is the over designing 343 do with their environments.
Can we also talk about the sound design? Covenant weapons lost their alien twangs, human weapons sound too mechanical, the Scorpion's cannon is just abominable, everything has this crunchy or high-pitched sound to it, like metal foil, with no base. Once again, moving away from the military-sci-fi roots of Halo to trying a more "realistic" COD-style soundscape, and it just doesn't fit. Halo's sound was in the vein of games like Half-Life, or movies like Star Wars, where sometimes existing sounds were manipulated beyond recognition, and more often completely novel sounds were created (you know, the way a talented artist might do). Instead, they just recorded real life sounds and left them as is. I'm not expert enough to really describe it, but they also botched up the sound design.
100% my man. You hit the nail on the head with how I felt about 343 and their direction with Halo since after Reach.
Part one was definitely where most of my frustrations lied with Halo 4, and that long rant about how that five minute cutscene with the Librarian destroyed both the canon going forward and the previously established lore from before. I stopped reading the books after Contact Harvest, but I've researched into the Forerunner trilogy and that writing is the most convoluted bullshit ever written. Like if you were going to have ancient humans being a space faring race, then why not cut out the middle man and just make humans forerunners like Bungie had previously established? Plus Master Chief being "The Chosen One" is just so stupid. Halo was first and foremost a military story, that had a little bit of mysticism sprinkled in. Halo 4 was like, "Nah, Ancient Aliens this shit ayy lmao! Space Magic go!!!!"
Anyways, Halo Anniversary and Halo 4 basically killed Halo for me back in the day, and with Gears of War 3 tying up its stoey in a nice bow, I didn't even bother to pick up an Xbox One, and I still haven't gone back to Microsoft since and it's a shame.
I agree 100% with everything you said. "The chosen one" story lines completely removes a character's agency. Now Master Chief isn't good because of his skill, he's good because it was destiny. Also, now almost all the "military hard scifi" aspects of the games are gone. The UNSC no longer feels like an actual military. Hell, the new Spartan Branch doesn't even have ranks!!!
I also feel like franchises shouldn't last forever. Once they reach their natural conclusion, they should be allowed to end. Halo should have ended after Reach. Bungie was ready to move on, and the franchise had already peaked. Microsoft really needs to develop new IP's.
I really think that Halo 4 is good mental gymnastics is simply younger generation growing up with 343 trash instead of Bungie games trying to brainwash themselves into "ah remember how good my childhood games were"
Dude I got to play eldewrito when it released and hot damn was that fun. I never got to experience halo 3 multiplayer when it was popular, but back in 2018 I got to feel it!
I completely forgot about dewrito despite how much time I spent playing it😂
@turututu2113 No, they killed the servers like a month after it came out. Microsoft straight up told them to stop it.
Its back man, 0.7 dropped with mod support
@@unknownwill4th549 word? I can't wait to get back to my computer!
For years I knew 343 halo was ass. Thank you for this
The only Halo games I’ve owned was ODST and 4.
Finishing 4 it left unfulfilled, but playing ODST I felt a sense a relief like the characters in the game do.
ODST is my favorite installment of Halo.
22:12 Silouetes are very important for FPS games. Being able to quickly identify an enamy and what gear they have is tremendously important in FPS games. Some of my favorite games like Battlefield 1 or Battlefront II have this. I can tell in BF1 from 150+ m out what class and faction the enemy is. It helps a lot in Hardcore mode.
343: you aint seen nothin yet!
(releases halo 5)
"Well that fuckin sucked. Gameplay was good though"
Halo 6*
Halo 6 is good@@TrickyPanda65
@@Imhimfrfr14 that's the worst one it looks like a woke fortnite game
@@TrickyPanda65 did you even play it lmfao
Something I love Elites and Brutes having bright colours and unique armour pieces to signify rank made sense from a story perspective as well as a gameplay one. This is an army that has been largely unrivalled for a long time so has little need for stealthy camouflage and in large scale battles you need to be able to identify officers from a distance at a glance so you know who's in charge once a battle starts turning into chaos.
and if they needed camouflage they could use active camo
stealth elites, brute stalkers, etc
War historically was an opportunity for rich people to show off their social status. In the time of Medieval and Renaissance war doctrine (which the Covenant never really progressed past despite their technology), people made a big deal about donning fashionable armor if they could afford it and passed numerous laws dictating who could wear/wield what. Sound familiar with the elites? Exact same thing.
Of course, as you said it also helped to identify who was a higher rank when organization at the unit level was strictly inferior to a more modern military. Luckily for the UNSC (and the player), it also makes it easy to quickly prioritize who is the biggest threat based on who has the most bling. So kudos to Bungie for making art consistent with story and gameplay needs at the same time.
9:05 - The thing about Halo human tech, and this is actually one of the things I loved most about Halo, is that it is this wonderful combination of grounded, yet futuristic. Like the battle rifle looks like a rifle that humans would make. Except small stuff like the digital ammo indicator make it feel just a little bit more high tech and sci fi. It's a great balance that Halo struck PERFECTLY in the original trilogy with almost everything. This is not at all true for later games.
I like how the real halo killer was made by people who miserably failed at making an halo killer.
My parents got me an Xbox just so I could play Halo. I saved up for an Xbox 360 and got one on 9/25/07, the day Halo 3 released... Halo 4 was the main reason I didn't get an Xbox One
The worst part about the prometheans is that 343 could've made it interesting, they could've made a dismemberment ability, where if you shoot the arm off it can't shoot. It could've been awesome.
I remember when LITERALLY EVERYONE who defended Halo 4 said it was not copying Call of Duty. And Halo 4 had a lot more people defending it back before 5 came out. Even Infinite didn't receive criticism until a while after launch. Despite how bad each Halo game has been, the community often defends them (but never plays the game for more than 40 hours) or jumps on the hype train for a few months after launch before hating it. 343i isa huge problem for Halo, but the community itself is about 10% of that. And I'm not w/o sin. Took me till Infinite, but oh boy do people still defend this game.
I was one of those 343 fanboys who used to say that bs until I wisened up.
The ONLY disagreement I have with this vide on anything is the criticism of Reach’s story. Reach had better storytelling, ambience and worldbuilding than even halo 3 in my honest opinion. Nailed the cold imposing aesthetic of the covenant AND the mystique of the forerunners like no game prior, made the story feel gritty and hopeless while maintaining a sense of militaristic realism that still highlights the valiant sacrifices, tragedy and heroism that led up to the original trilogy
One big change in Halo 4 was the draw distance for enemies. As someone that loved the sniper, I would walk into a level with a snipe ready and scan the area.
In previous games, this allowed me to pick off the fodder before I was never near danger.
However, in Halo 4, the enemies wouldn't spawn half the time until you were in firing range. I would check out the area with the snipe, see no enemies, and waltz right into the middle of the map only to find that everyone just spawned around me and I was suddenly under heavy fire.
And dropped weapons despawn. In CE i could walk back through several sections and collect a weapon/smmo or grenades i needed. 3 would have despawn but it wasn't very aggressive. In 4 sometimes weapons will despawn 10 feet away from you after 30 seconds
I’ve just binged every Halo, back to back , with my gf, and lemme tell you. As soon as we hit Halo 4, it immediately felt different. The firefights in the arenas did not feel fun. Between banshees that swarm you, and are hard af to shoot down because of lack of any weapon variety, Promethians that teleport and have revival mechanics. Grunts that don’t sound or even look like grunts.
It honestly felt like 343 took all the hard work, world, and characters from Bungie’s games, and said FUCK YOU. It seriously feels like they thought hey could one-up Bungie and failed so hard.
100%
Don't forget how the TTK in 4 is also an example of "call of dutyization" that made camping essential if you want to do anything in the game.
The Avengers movie and it's consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
A hate capeshit and it's influence on movies and games so much it's unreal.
Fuck Capeshit
All My Homies Hate Capeshit
Can you elaborate? I sense the same thing too but can you explain it further? I can’t really put it into words
I absolutely agree
Death to capeshit
@@chrisrods1994 no, i am dumb.
I believe I read somewhere that 343i brought on one of the guys who designed Gears of War to work on the Covenant units; which makes a lot of sense because the Elites literally look like they're related to the Locust horde.
If i had license to teach design, i would use 343 as one of the examples as to how not to redesign something, i swear to you man, every single 343 re-design its worse from the previous design that they want to replace, for me, the greatest example is the shotgun, the shotgun is literally a UNSC ship skin but they shoot a 12 gauge shell, when you think about the human weapons in the old halos, in your mind you can imagine a marine disassembling a battle rifle, for example, to do a maintenance, i have NO IDEA how a marine would disassemble a 343 shotgun, its so overly design as every single 343 design that you dont even know where to look, its literally a design a 8 year old would make in his imagination with the premise of, it would be cool if, nothing serves a purpose other than, it looks cool and slick, look at how many polygons this thing have, when it doesnt have a identity, personality, purpose or history, and this is coming from a company that removes the Elite from multiplayer using "lore" as a excuse, you could make a montage with a human fleet, replace one of the ships with a shotgun, and no one would see a difference.
I have always been the guy that hated Halo 4, the idiotic and infantilization of the narrative and characters always pissed me off, i never understood the melodrama between Chief and Cortana, Cortana was his partner, but Chief had lost countless childhood friends in the war against the covenant, he is a man on a mission, he is a adult, which writers these days doesnt know what that entails, in my mind, the moment that Cortana would show signs of rampancy, Chief would pull the plug if it would jeopardize the mission, and not having this mental breakdown because a AI was going to cease operations, transforming Chief in to a manchild, the more you think about Halo 4, the worse it gets, the only point that people comes back to it its how the story is well made, but the more you think about it, the worse it gets, you have to have too much talent to have 10 years worth of L's and still be in business, this video is amazing, and encapsulated almost everything that i could say about Halo 4, i would love to see something similar to Halo 5, Infinite and even MCC if you have something to say about those titles.
This video is should be trending but unfortunately its not, it would take weeks to get this video to 10k. And hopefully the TH-cam algorithm reccomends this to everyone.
What """lore""" did guilty spark's prick company use to not include playable elites.
@@thesamejackalsniperthatkil117 The excuse is that since Halo 4's multiplayer, "War Games", are in-universe training simulations on the Infinity it wouldn't make sense to have Elites onboard the Infinity. Even though Elderwrito has Elites since it apparently takes place on a space station that's made by both humans and Elites lmfao
@@nagger8216 it would make sense since the elites formed an alliance with the humans in halo 2 and continued it in 3. Yeah the elites are a different species and look hideous but still, give us some diversity in the warzone. Halo 2 3 and reach wouldn't be the same without those four jawed lizard men.
@@thesamejackalsniperthatkil117 Nah that's what I'm saying, they had a perfectly good explanation to have Elites without it "breaking the lore" yet they still chose to leave them out in future games. I also really like the idea of Elites and humans coming together after Halo 3, it's a lot better than the stupid "Storm Covenant" and "Banished" shit where they just want to kill humans again.
The projectile tracking explains a *lot* about why Halo 5's needler is so broken
The only thing Halo 4 did right was Cortana's model
Fun fact! Halo Reach was technically the first to let you fly a Pelican. It wasn't part of the mission but there was an easter egg you could accomplish then after flying through the weird building with the gap in the middle if you fly a Falcon it turns into a Pelican and a Banshee turns into a Phantom. So take that Halo 4! one of your positives is a lie!
Halo 4 (and Halo 5) is a Call of Duty game in a Halo skin with a Gears of War art style. This is why Halo 4 is so heavily criticized. It stopped being a Halo game, and tried to become a game that it's not. Part of what made Halo so fun is that it was different from all the other FPS games. When it changed, it lost what made it special. I'd bet all the moneys that if a future Halo game ever goes back to what Halo was in Halo C.E. through Halo Reach, it would return to prominence and set records.
I remember my friend at school had a modded Xbox, and one of the mods he had for Halo 2 put the Pelican model on the Banshee game object. It's funny looking back, because that's what the Pelican segment in Halo 4 feels like. No part of it plays into the fantasy of flying a dropship like that, ferrying marines around, etc etc. Just feels like a Banshee segment.
Honestly, the Falcon part in Reach is closer to what we wanted when flying a Pelican than what we got in 4
4:05 it’s crazy how much better it looks without the brown filter who thought it should look that way?
One of the fun things about the pelican in Halo 4 was that it was faster to decend by jumping out of it, then free falling and jumping back into it. 😂
I've played through Halo 4 twice and watched others play it, and I honestly didn't know that there were different kinds of Promethean Knights until you showed them on screen.
Have to disagree with you on Reach story being weak. I might just be biased seeing as Reach was the halo game i played most growing up, but i think Reach perfectly accomplishes what it sets out to do. The story really reflects humanity's desperate fight for survival against a far superior foe which i would say is what is the focus of the story. The character work is pretty good and leads to some of the most gripping and emotional moments of the series partnered with Marty's as usual stellar sound track.
Other than that, great video!
@Riorozen disconnected from CE? You deliver a fragment of Cortana to the Pillar of Autumn at the end, the end of the game even answers the old question about who Keys and Cortana are talking about at the very start of CE. “Do you think they made it?” “I think we both know the answer to that question.” The data the fragment of Cortana has is even speculated to be the Slipspace co-ordinates to Installation 04. Of all of the criticism I could levy at Halo Reach, such as how the story itself feels kinda meandering, or how it was in fact written by Frank, that’s not one of them.
@@Slender_Man_186 it does disconnect from ce in some ways. But more importantly reach disconnects a lot from the book fall of reach.
@@Slender_Man_186 What the other guy said, Reach breaks canon hard from The Fall of Reach which was released as a promo for CE.
@@lofiseeker1790 except he never even mentioned Fall of Reach, only CE, and that still doesn’t explain *how* it “feels disconnected from CE.”
Reach is short, characters are weak (to be technical: there are no characters, only personalities), and the story has a flat arc. I need to explain that that's not saying flat arcs are bad. Chief has a flat arc in CE. But a flat arc is better for a character to have than a narrative to have. Halo 1-3 are stronger, 4 is arguably stronger with subplot character change arcs, odst has a subplot character change arc, and so you could place reach in 4th or 6th place, with infinite and 5 vying for a distant last place
I will say that your critiques on art style and aesthetic are Objective. What makes halo 1-each so playable is that everything is readable really quickly. You’re able to look at an arena and decide a course of action, ya know like a trained super soldier.
A muddy art style works fine in call of duty because every enemy is about the same. But in halo enemy types can do wildly different things. You’ll see a big silhouette with a banner on the back and say “hey it’s a brute, better gun him down before he charges.” Then you can mop up the other guys.
“Butbutbutbutbut I want the players to see how creative I am” - made me laugh so f*ing hard, because it’s so pathetically true. It’s like if you gave the self taught tweener who can draw “fRoM tHeiR ImAgiNaTiOn”
9:05 That was what Bungie were going for, for the human designs. Retro, or more accurately, cassette-futurism. Think of Aliens and the USCM. Pretty much where Bungie took inspirations from. Then came 343i and wanted to mix it with Star Wars and Marvel for some reason. Hell, I think 343i even admitted they wanted Halo to be like Star Wars. Well, like Disney, they pretty much did that and fucked it up. Only difference is that there isn't enough side-projects to salvage it.
Funny thing about the ammunition gripe, I swear to god Halo 4 was the only game in the series I had an issue with scavenging ammunition just simply due to the fact that most corpses and their weapons dropped despawn seconds after looking away from them. And it just kept happening to me on Legendary, regardless of how many enemies dropped a weapon I would need ammo for, it would just majestically disappear when I needed it most.
The despawn made me rage. Since ce being able to go back for ammo was one of the distinctives about halo
Re: The Mammoth and Pelican - Both of these vehicles would have made for very cool mobile base and fire support sections. The Pelican in particular could have been a lot of fun, letting you support groups of otherwise cut off marines either by using the built-in weapons, landing and supplying the marines with ammo and weapons, or even dropping off vehicles and reinforcements. You know, things Pelicans do. And the Mammoth, tacticool monstrosity that it is, was clearly intended to achieve fire superiority over a significant area. With it's armory, compliment of Warthogs, array of turrets and big MAC gun it's the UNSC's way of saying that whatever scrap of dirt it's on or near is off the market. And yet it doesn't achieve that purpose at all. Every time it gets near an objective in the mission it's used in it has to stop and wait for the Chief to DMR all the scary bad guys. Why not let us use that MAC gun to shoot down incoming Phantom and Spirit dropships (hey guys remember Spirits, which this Covenant splinter group should definitely still be using?!)? Or use those turrets to keep pursuing Ghosts and Banshees off of nearby allied vehicles? Maybe repel Covenant or Promethean boarding parties? Total missed opportunity in both cases and it's a damn shame.
Ngl, I will ALWAYS look at someone that accepts 343 bullshit explanation for, say, the Mjolnir "upgrade" as nanotechnology that was just conveniently available for Cortana in that cryopod on the Dawn as a crazy person that needs to be committed ASAP.
There's simply no justification for the needless artstyle change as just 343 wanting to be distinct from Bungo. No, MFrs. Halo HAS a distinct look, and the LEAST you could have done was to stick to that look with just some slight visual upgrades.
You know, I ALWAYS see people saying "Halo 4 looked amazing! The lighting was insane" or something along those lines and I feel like I'm in crazy town because God damn does it look ugly. I don't care if it has more polygons or if it technically has a more advanced lighting system, the game looks terrible compared to what came before. I always and I mean ALWAYS see people complimenting Halo 4's lighting as if it was some huge upgrade but in my opinion it is the worst lighting I've ever seen in a game. Laughably bad.
"I grew up with Halo. I lived and breathed Halo. Halo 4 is the game that killed my love for the series."
Same
I remember playing Halo 4 with my friend for the first time and wondering, "why isn't this fun?"
I just blindly believed that a Halo game would be good no matter what.
It didn't even cross my mind that a Halo game could be bad.
Halo 4 made me wait 3 years to get halo 5 for $10. Halo 5 made me use the $1 promo to play halo infinite on gamepass. Halo infinite has made me unwilling to get any future game unless it's a reboot to remove everything 343 has done and start again at a completely different halo 4
The only 343 Halo game I played was 5 and... my god it was a bad experience. I don't want to play it again.
It's so funny watching the H4 gameplay compared to original trilogy.
OG Halo: *Getting up close, using grenades and melee, prioritizing targets, circlestrafing, etc.*
Halo 4: *Lightrifle spam at long range. Lightrifle spam at long range. Lightrifle spam at long range. Lightrifle spam at long range.*
It's the only strategy that works in H4; you often are fighting prometheans with only their weapons, and all their weapons are shit except the power weapons and the lightrifle. If you try to get close the tanky knights will just eat your bullets, instakill you with a melee, or just teleport away if you manage to pop their shields somehow. The ONLY tactic in H4 that works is *Lightrifle spam at long range* which is so mind-numbingly boring and directly in stark contrast to the sandbox design of the OG games.
I never realised how bad the Halo Anniversaries looked until I watched this video. I launched up Halo 4 on MCC and did what he did with the colors using Nvidia game filter and it looked so good. I kept turning it off and on to compare them both because of how much of an improvement it made. So I went to Halo 2 Anniversary and was honestly shocked how bad it looked without the filter. Same story goes for Halo CE Anniversary. It's amazing how this simple filter made them feel more like Halo with all the vibrant colors on specifically the grass and sky. Thankfully all of them work well with the same color preset so I don't have to switch when going to another game.