To be fair, we rarely got any real look at gameplay for any of the games up until around 6 months from release which is quite scary.

H2: E3 Zanzibar MP, which I think was in May of 04, with H2 releasing about 6 months later? (the original Mombasa demo was a demo, not a real representation of the game they were working on)

H3: I believe it was the MP Public Beta vidoc? I think we had the beta may-june, game released in September, so at the earliest that was 4 months, maybe 5 depending on when the vidoc came out. News of the Spiker and Spartan laser came out I believe in December of 06 along with the first MP details.

Reach: Again, our first look of gameplay was when they released the trailer for the MP beta for May... I think we got that trailer in April, 5 months before the game launched.

H4: We didn't see anything of it until July E3 in video form, and February for our first pictures and news.

So we are really no worse off than we were before, and H4 was actually really good in constantly providing us information, more so than Bungie was.