Um... Well...

I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for them.

I mean, 343i is building the next game while they build their studio... and they decide to do the whole "Big Damn AAA Better Than Reach" hype. No shakedown cruise, no 'moderately ambitious but within our grasp' games that tell a side-story. And the result was fractally broken. At every level of examination, Halo 4 is terrible and directionless.

Schlerf was one of the lead writers for Halo 4. Halo 4 suffered from terrible writing. It suffered from the same shallow comic-book level characterization and style-over-substance plotting that has been characteristic of most everything else 343i has commissioned and been criticized for over the past four years.

Y'see, the thing is, I can forgive an author for a bad story or a few, if I like his other work. Unfortunately, there has been scarcely ANYTHING that 343i has released that I liked. They don't seem to be learning or changing. So, the next best thing that can happen is that 343i's current writing team move on to something else, and they find new guys better suited to the universe.

I wish Schlerf the best of luck, and hope he can find something he truly excels with.