Halo 4 Thoughts

Wanted to make GFC videos concerning this but life and school rolled around, and now I'm sick. So random thought dump, let's do this.

The Good:
- Soundtrack sounds awesome

- Campaign looks awesome

- Spartan Ops looks awesome

- "Forerunner"/X-ray Vision seems awesome - Fuck campers

- Default Sprint - People running away from you all the time will be annoying, but when you sprint and jump, you're like a fucking gazelle. Sprinting will punish people who durdle around/choke/can't finish kills and should speed up the game when it's not slowing it down from people running away.

- Hit-scan, bloomless BR - That's the power of going back to Halo 2. Fix Halo 3's bullet spread and Reach's lack of a BR and bloom all in one go. Not sure how the recoil is going to affect it though

- Ranks and stuff coming back

The Bad:
- Random weapon respawn times - Random = bad, when will people learn this? When people can't control the game, they get pissed off. Yeah, it's funny and cool when the game glitches and some hilarious blooper happens, but those are genuinely random while this is built into the game. This is why Reach's bloom and Halo 3's BR spread were disasters. This will affect both good and bad players (bad players camp power weapons too, they just don't time it). Well, I'm not exactly sure how the time ranges will work (it could be ±10 seconds or  ±5 minutes ), but if it's too small, this mechanic will merely be an unnecessary nuance, and if it's too large, random blowouts/agonizing waits will occur. Let's say it's a 4v4 on Ivory Tower and the dominant team has hallway control and rocket/snipe. They're camping sniper spawn while overlooking rockets, and respawn times for the 2 are 3 minute each. If the range is say, 2 minutes, then they could potentially get a new sniper and/or rocket in 1 minute instead of 3, and just straight up win the game. This variance is bad for Halo, and won't solve the "problem" of good players beating up on new ones.

- All of the currently released maps look stupidly big and derp

- Press X to respawn - This will be a disaster for objective games and will make recuperation for players who are weak after killing a player nearly impossible. Stupid tug-of-wars are, well, stupid, and while this could work if you make players spawn mega far away from the action if they decide to respawn earlier, I don't think 343i can pull it off. Halo's spawn system isn't anywhere near what one would consider perfect.

- Unlocking stuff as you go to "customize your play experience" - Ugh, Halo is legitimately turning into CoD (possibly). Well, this hasn't been confirmed as what everyone fears it will be (being able to actually affect how you start off by choosing your weapon, perks, etc), but I'm still afraid. If this refers to a mere customization of how you look like in previous Halos, this will be perfectly fine, but changing how you look doesn't really "customize your play experience" IMO, so I'm a bit skeptical.

- Releases right before Black Ops 2 apparently - Halo can't compete with CoD; it simply can't. Yeah, I sound like a total downer right now and I'm probably the worse possible person to say this, but it's true. The last 3 CoDs have broken every record ever, they're multi-platform, and they have stronger casual appeal. These two games coming out at the same time will be a blood bath that heavily favors CoD. Halo really needs to start releasing after CoD games as opposed to directly before them.

- No dedicated Firefight mode

Well, despite how bad Halo 4 might be, I'm going to buy and play it anyways. I'm a Halo fan for life, and I don't have the time or energy to endlessly bitch and moan about video games like many people seem to do nowadays. Any game can be fun with friends (found that out with Halo 3 and again with Halo: Reach), so I'll definitely be giving Halo 4 a shot. Maybe I'll become the mega casual I was in 2006 when I was playing Halo 2, going -20, and having loads of fun anyways. I can only dream.