Halo 4 had a good campaign. Halo 5 had really good multiplayer. They both reviewed well. They arnt bad devs. Both games where hurried. They where their 1st and 2nd games the studio ever made.
I wish more people would keep that in mind.
The halo series is a really unique one these days because it gets judged on both single and multiplayer modes. How many other series do that? I'm not going to pretend the story in Halo 5 doens't feel like a spinoff instead of a sequel. 343 has made mistakes.
You know who else made mistakes with every Halo game? Bungie.
Halo ce literally cut pasted the second half of the game, and included the worst level in the series. The pistol was overpowered due to a programming error, and 2 guns of the only 8 that were present in the game were functionally useless in multiplayer. I know people who would rather melee with an empty pistol than switch to the ar or needler.
Halo 2 was blasted on release for the cut features (it was supposed to have sprint, grenade cooking and melee combos. There was a boss fight cut so late in development that it is referenced in the manual of the limited edition but not playable on disc), the missing final level, the arbiter sections and the changes to gameplay. Randall glass of the warthog jump fame wrote an essay about how Bungie ruined halo 2. Luke Smith wrote an article about how halo 2's multiplayer was busted.
Halo 3 had the most feature rich release of any shooter to date. but was lambasted for not being as pretty as gears or COD4. People said it played slow, looked no better than halo 2, brutes weren't as fun as elites and the equipment function didn't add much.
ODST is considered a darling of the franchise but people again bitched about the graphics, complained about it being a full priced expansion, about still fighting brutes, about the lack of matchmaking for firefight.
Reach got hit for weapon bloom. For armour abilities. For the jetpack. For armour lock. For not being call of duty enough. Gametrialers literally complained that it took too long to kill other players.
And when they left Halo, they made Destiny, which created an entire genre of games where launching in a barely complete state is like a rule or something.
Halo 4 had the unfortunate timing to be developed while people were screaming that halo needed to be more like call of duty, and to release right AFTER people got tired of it. The multiplayer was far from bad. Weapon unlocks in progression is heresy in halo (and I agree. It is never NOT a shitty design choice) but it wasn't a total deal breaker, and infinity slayer was an awesome mode. It still manages the best story of the games, and is still one of the prettiest games ever made
And special attention needs to be paid for halo 4's development. 343 wanted it to be the Xbox one launch title, which would have gven them an extra year to work on it, given the xbox one a killer app at launch. 343 were so constrained by the 360 hardware at that point that they were limited in the number of objects the system could hold in memory. So certain large bits of geometry (like the Mammoth vehicle) were literally kitbashed from upsized warthog and battle rifle parts with their size value shifted, because the 360 literally could not hold one more unique asset in memory at the time. They were denied their request....by Don Mattrick, who valued the extra sales they would get by releasing it on 360. They still got it made on time, made one of the best looking games of the generation, tried new things like spartan ops.
With Halo 5 they were working with a then 15 year old engine and desperately wanted the time to make a new one from scratch. They didn not. And of course that was the game that launched during the middle of resolution gate so they NEEDED to find a way to get an OK xbox one to run a game at 1080p/60. It should be noted that Naughty Dog, when working on uncharted 4, on more powerful hardware, could not manage 1080/60. And people bitched because of the lack of couch co op which only a handful of games released this generation even have. It still managed the best multiplayer in the series since the second one (which if you recall, was not nearly as popular as people remember) and to be like the only game to include loot boxes in a non exploitive way. Oh and free map packs and expansions for over a year at a time when nobody was doing that.
343 are some technical fucking wizards. They have been given one of the hardest game series to develop for, one with a very divided fanbase and incredibly high standards that most other games don't have to meet (look at red dead and last of us deciding to forgo multiplayer with zero consequence. Hell, RDR2 online launched as a broken mess and the game still swept the GOTY awards. halo could never get away with that even if both multiplayer and single player were stellar.) and both times have had to do so while dealing with crazy technical restrictions.
