: I trust 343 to learn from the past, and fix things that ultimately didn't end
: up working. Spartan Ops is one of those things. I don't think they are bad
: at making games (not at all), but it was their first one so some
: experimentation and learning is going to happen.

I actually agree with everything you said. It's more the lies, contradictions, "we know better" attitude, smugness, "we hired the best people the industry over and we all love and get Halo" parts, and the "we hired people who hate Halo to make it better" and the list goes on and on and has been beaten to death a number of times and written far more eloquently by others than by myself here. They outsource plenty of things to other studios, such as Certain Affinity or Blur or whoever made H1A. First game or not, it was a huge flop (obviously not sales-wise). Even Activision was able to go out, grab up random studios (some of which people had hardly if ever heard of) and get them to start pumping out random CoD games each year with moderate success.

I trust 343 to get MCC correct. Because they're all Bungie games. Well, except for H4 which no one will play. I predict their extremely outrageously early H5 Beta will be a huge hit, and will not be very indicative of final gameplay a year later. I predict that H5 will sell pretty well, though not as well as H4. I predict H5 will be better than H4, and that 343 will have learned a lot and come out on top. I still predict that H6 will be the one that's actually a truly good game, and that H5 will still only be "decent". Multiplayer will probably be good, regardless of the Beta. After H4's campaign writing and design, I can't say that I expect H5's to be good. I'm welcome to being wrong, but I get the feeling this turns into a "Schooly Was Right" or "I Was Right" down the line.