Posted 04 April 2017 - 12:03 AM

I'm not going to write a mile long Halo post, but I think Halo 4 had a lot of missteps in just about all aspects. Going just off the campaign, it was even more linear than the later Bungie games, with dumb design choices in the gameplay department. I think it was hurt most by how the enemies have much simpler AI, supposedly due to the boost in graphics eating up more processing power. Aside from being more dumb, Prometheans and their weapons are simply less fun. If anyone wants to disagree with this point, I'd like to point you to Halo 5 and the fact that literally all of the Forerunner enemy mechanics aside from Crawlers, and ALL Forerunner weapon functionality was redesigned from the ground up.

Halo 5 makes some strides all around, but having 70% of the game feature Locke instead of John was a huge mistake. I think they were trying to show John as more of a character from a third-person perspective, but they totally botched that. It doesn't help that the only enjoyable characters on Fireteam Osiris were Buck and maybe Vale. Locke and Tanaka are just bland soldiers. Halo 6 desperately needs to focus only on Blue Team for gameplay. Hopefully we find out at E3. Multiplayer-wise 5 is a huge improvment over 4, but the design philosophy is so different now that I can't really think of it as Halo.

As for the story comment above. I think most of the hardcore fans consider the Bungie games to be solid, if somewhat generic adventure in a cool universe. I kept up with all the expanded universe during that era and it really added to the experience. Now it's fairly hit and miss, and 343 hasn't handled bringing in more EU stuff into the games so well, the Didact and his virtually zero explanation in-game for Halo 4 probably being the biggest offender here.