: Speaking strictly as a fan of games in general, I gotta disagree here. There
: is ZERO "obligation" to follow such criteria. The whole point is
: that you purchase a specific product based on the merits of that product,
: and not necessarily because of the guarantee that all that came before
: will be included and added to/built upon. There are countless franchises
: that I'm a fan of that have feature sets that have ebbed and flowed, been
: added, subtracted, adjusted. I totally understand the desire to see your
: favorite features carried over, but using the term obligation strikes me
: as more than a bit hyperbolic/presumptuous. If you don't like a game's
: feature set, then don't buy it. Developers have no more obligation to
: include stuff in their games than consumers have to purchase them.

: Just my two cents. :-)

Mostly agreed. When it came to Halo 4, there were a big number of things that folks were left in the dark about. No word about campaign theater being gone, or Invasion, or Classic gametypes. Firefight was said to have been replaced with Spartan Ops, sure, but we didn't know too much about it before launch. Halo had, up to that point, been a series that established a lot of features, and consistently improved upon them. So when Halo 4 dropped, and all of those features were flat-out gone, it came as a surprise. Was the consumer entitled to those features? Not necessarily. Was it wrong to avoid and/or lie about the missing features? Yeah, you could say so.
Campaign theater was pitched as a "maybe", and ultimately never happened.

So with Halo 5, many people (myself included) asked specifically about the state of Campaign theater, and every last question was ignored. Bad sign.

Countless folks asked about Invasion, and the answer was still "No." Bad sign.

Forge wasn't in the game, split screen wasn't in the game, LAN was gone, offline co-op with it... Bad signs.

Did Halo 5 NEEEEED to have these features? No. It didnt need to have anything (apparently not even a good story, despite the marketing being all about it, rather than being about the apparently solid multiplayer), and Halo 4 set a precedent.

So many of us didn't buy it, because it didn't have the features that we had expected from a Halo title. Does that make it a featureless game? Not for the million folks that bought it, if they feel that they got exactly what they wanted. Many folks don't care about Theater mode. Many don't care about split-screen, or firefight, or Invasion. Many folks wanted Warzone, or competitive multiplayer, or a campaign with decent controls and encounters, and Halo 5 has everything that they wanted to pay $60 for.

So for those folks, I guess the Forge can be considered a "gift", since they didn't get the game for it. Maybe others were just waiting for Forge, and got the game early, knowing that it was on the way.

I can understand how giving us a feature back that we had for nearly a decade of entries, and labeling it a "gift" can feel somewhat insulting after years of removed features... But that's really an issue of perception. They probably weren't aiming for it to be as arrogant as it sounds.

But yeah, if you bought Halo 5, and a lack of features from Bungie's Halo came as a surprise to you, you can't really put the blame on 343i, since you should know better by now. A developer doesn't owe you anything. Vote with your wallet, or deal with it if you dove in. I bought the Halo 4 season pass (twice!) in good faith, and the fact that the DLC was crap (to say nothing of the 14 Day Buy and Play BS that 343 fed us) only made me realize that I was to blame for the money that I spent. Since then, I've been very cautious about not only preorders, but season passes as well. It's up to the consumer to research what he's going to get, so it's better to wait, and be sure of what you're getting, because Developers. Don't. Owe. You. Anything.