more or less

: Are we now the minority, guys? Is our little HBO clique just too curmudgeonly
: to embrace change? Maybe what's best for Halo really is to arbitrarily
: shove in a bunch of stuff that has no reason being there for fear of
: stagnation. I guess we just like stagnation.

I keep hearing NeoGAF mostly agrees and is often more adamant about things not changing than we are; I can't corroborate that though. I have seen various things around the Internet relating to TMCC meaning that Halo is "back", though, which indicates a lot of people feel it took a wrong turn somewhere.

: Maybe this is purely nostalgia talking but, when I think of Halo, I think of
: simplicity, clarity, no obfuscation or bullshit or trying to be too cool.
: That's what made Halo CE, Halo 2, and Halo 3 so cool. They weren't trying
: to be cool. They were just cool. Cool? Cool.

Halo was definitely trying to be cool.
The announcer? the medals? "oh it's not deathmatch, it's Slayer"? the advertisements? the armor? the nameplates? the game case that's made out of metal for no discernible reason? I like all those things but they do seem to me like they're supposed to be cool, rather than happening to be cool. Even shoving in a map editor one or two elements at a time might apply.

: I feel like 343 thinks I'm a tiny baby and is dangling keys in front of my
: face to try to get me interested. Halo has never needed that. I'm
: interested because it's an extremely simple sandbox from which complex,
: interesting scenarios arise. Frills don't add to the complexity. In a
: weird way, they restrict it. The complexity of a Halo 2 match is
: interesting because of how organic it is. The complexity of a Halo 4 match
: is not interesting because it feels engineered. It comes off as the
: developer trying to trick me into thinking what I'm playing is fun or
: interesting by just adding a bunch of crap to it.

I don't get why so many people are so concerned over what impression a company wants to make, be it this or some other game or some other industry. Surely what matters is whether they succeed or not, and the actual impression people get, right? If it looked fun, you wouldn't be criticizing them for trying to make it look fun, now would you? I can't figure out why people care so much unless they either a) want to like it but can't or refuse to or b) are concerned idiots will like and buy whatever it is and make it worse.