Vix_Sundown
Shared on Mon, 09/23/2013 - 07:59I finished the campaign of Halo 4 over the weekend. It only took me 10 months to complete. Must have set a new record, there!
Now I consider myself to be a fairly smart guy. I'm a mechanical engineer. A six-sigma black belt. I read lots of books. I'm no stranger to science fiction. And I'm no stranger to Halo. I've played all the way through Halo 1, 2, 3, ODST, and Reach. So I'm not just making shit up here when I say that...
Halo 4 sucked, big time!
The problem was not the gameplay. The problem was the story. Oh geez, the story... Ay carumba! It was the worst. It made no sense whatsoever. At no time in the course of playing Halo 4 did I have any clue what the hell was happening. It was about 10% clarity, 90% WTF. It had a bunch of junk about Composers, Librarians, Diadects, and god knows what else.
The reason this game took me so long to finish was because the more I got into the so-called "story", the less I cared. It is hard to sustain interest in events that make progressively less and less sense. I was lost from the beginning, and it never got better.
The only thing that made sense in it all was the Cortana Rampancy thing. That I could get my head around. But as for the rest of it...
- Where the hell is Master Chief? From the end of Halo 3, I thought he was alone. Then why are there suddenly other ships, other humans, other Covenant there?
- Why is there another group of Covenant? What is their agenda?
- Who is the Diadect? He's supposed to be a Forerunner? But it's already clearly been established in the other games that all the Forerunners are dead. So how is that possible? Some clarification, please!
- What does the Diadect want? Why is anyone fighting here?
- Who are these bad guys that we keep shooting? Some dog-looking things, and some big hulking guy that can teleport. I never have an effin' clue who any of these enemies are or why they want to kill Master Chief, which makes it hard to give a shit.
- Why are the humans arguing? It seems to be for no damn good reason, except to interject some absurd notion of "drama".
- Who is the Composer? Or what is it?
- Why are there more Halo rings? Where the heck did those come from?
- What happened to the freakin' Flood? Did we just forget about all that?
- What the hell is a Librarian? Why is there a Librarian in this game?
- Why does the Diadect want to go to Earth? There's plenty of intelligent species besides humans. The Covenant outnumber the humans. So what the heck?
- Why does the Diadect keep calling killing people "composing" them? They look more decomposed to me!
- The ending was not clear to me, either. So are all the people on Earth dead, then? If so, that's a pretty big damn deal. It sure deserved a little bit more story time than was shown.
The drama, the dialogue, all of it was terrible. Nothing shed any light on anything. After a while, I just gave up and played. Hear a bunch of dialogue, watch a cut scene, then shoot a bunch of monsters. Rinse and repeat.
I liked the ending, I think. It was pretty good. But it would have been better had I understood what was going on, or any of the stakes involved.
I was really disappointed by the campaign. This was supposed to be the start of a new Halo trilogy. But I've gotta say, if this if the future of Halo, then I'm not sure I'm interested. Complex, confusing, and weak. All of those terms spring to mind. And like I said, I'm not dumb, so all I can do is chalk this up to EXTREMELY bad storytelling.
The game itself was fine. Fun to shoot stuff. And an interesting "Tron Legacy" asthetic to the surroundings. But that's not enough for me to make a good game. It has to make at least a tiny bit of sense. Especially in a game series like Halo which takes itself so damn seriously. When you're that damn serious but not making sense to others, it just comes off as pretentious.
So this was the low point in the series as far as I'm concerned. A lot of people feel that way about the multiplayer. I actually like the multiplayer though. But I'm not so sure that I will be buying Halo 5. Maybe, but I don't know yet.
Hmmm... This post probably won't win me many friends among my fellow Halo fans! But I've gotta speak my mind.
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Comments
Submitted by cmandingo on Tue, 10/08/2013 - 11:15
Submitted by FriedPi on Wed, 10/09/2013 - 10:14
I've never played a Halo game, but halo 3 will be free on xbox live the 16th of this month. I will give it a try, but in general space/sci-fi shooters haven't appealed to me.
Submitted by Vix_Sundown on Thu, 10/17/2013 - 06:35
Hey Dingo - Yeah, I'm gathering that. Seems like almost everyone I know who "got" the story also read the books.
That's okay I guess. I like to read too. Just haven't read those. I don't like it when games spoon feed you a story, but seemed like Halo 4 was the other extreme.
Hi FriedPi - The story of Halo 3 was really good to me and made sense. But I had played the first two games. I'm not sure how Halo 3 would come off to a new player. The story may be pretty convoluted without the context of the first two games. I would be interested to know what you think!