: They innovate: They get slaughtered.

Just my opinion but... there was very little innovation that went into Halo 4. To innovate, you have to understand what makes a process work, and 343i doesn't seem to have this. A lot of what they changed or added was borrowed from other games directly or was the combination of elements that were already present.

This can be a good thing. You can innovate this way.

But, well, look at Spartan Ops. It could have been innovative: An episodic Halo campaign that stars your own characters and ties off loose ends from Halo 4's plot. Every single part of that sentence would have had me screaming for more back in 2009. But... they tried to combine it with Firefight, which has a very different philosophy of play than Halo's campaign. And they didn't do anything to rectify that. They did a lot that made the whole thing worse, like not writing the story to justify returning to the same dozen maps over and over again.

Everything else I have to say, Scarab already said better than I could.