Well now I'm more optimistic then I ever saw myself being after hearing of a Halo 4. Seeing the gameplay now and noticing that they're not turning Halo into some unrecognizable mess with only references to what we used to love is ever so reassuring.
From a gameplay standpoint, this seems to be more of a progression from Halo 3 more than Halo: Reach, as we can see through the lack of health system or armor abilities (though it seems that everybody has a sprint ability now; a good move), lack of reticle bloom, and bringing back the (now beautifully redesigned) Battle Rifle instead of Reach's equivalent, the DMR. This makes sense and gets the series into a familiar flow. That isn't to say that I didn't admire Bungie's bold new direction for it's finale, but bringing this into the more established area as a way to start a new trilogy is much prefered.
The team is full of talented people recruited from various other companies with the mindset of 'lets's just make the best Halo game possible', and that's exactly what they need, as a studio devoted to the franchise entirely. I mean, a studio devoted directly to one franchise? That's got to be something big. And, as visible from the remarkable graphical upgrade, there has been some major advancement. Not only in the graphics, but the motion capture clips and the audio team's immersive work (which REALLY hits you when they put it on display in the trailer). On the topic of the audio department, while I'm still not entirely sold on the music, the track used in the opening bit of the recent ViDoc was quite encouraging; it shows that there is still an ethreal and emotional pull to it instead of the standard fare action movie track in the second half that fails to sound like anything Halo related.
For multiplayer, it's been confirmed that there'll be customizable loadouts and progression based unlocks, which brings Halo up to the progression reward level of most other online shooters on the market at the moment. I'm just waiting for a bunch of people to scream and whine that Halo has become Call of Duty now, but I don't think that they understand that these are common traits of shooters nowadays and without them, Halo would'nt, have a chance of staying afloat. That said, I hope there is aspects to these that really grip you that these other shooters can't; which would be well within the tradition of Halo to do- Reach being the exception, having only armor pieces to unlock, unfortunately causing a lack of interest. Armor abilities, thought they don't make an appearance in the ViDoc, may still have their place here through leveling unlocks. Thought at the moment the online portion's graphics don't hold the same 'wow' factor that the campaign stuff does, the game is still in an early stage and Halo is notorious for going through massive graphical changes through development.
And then there's campaign. No new information given here (aside from the fact that it takes place five years after Halo 3), which is disappointing and leaves me still unsold on what has always been the most important aspect for my ongoing love of the series- the story. I don't need to repeat my thoughts on how I see the story as, at this point, being a redundancy, but I will say that Chief's redesign looks much better than what was previously shown in the CGI trailer, and the graphics are simply stunning... it looks like we may actually get the real-time reflective visor we've always wanted. All of the landscapes and locations seem to've been strategically blurred out of focus behind Chief, so there's nothing to really analyse in that department. We do know, however, that there will certainly be upgraded human technology in this place that Chief finds himself in... which leads one to the conclusion that Chief has linked up with a force of humans, once again. No sight of alien technology yet, Forerunner, Covenant, or otherwise.
I'll be watching this game closely now, and intent on seeing what info they release. I've been playing the series for ten years now, long before I was actually 'old enough' to, and with a bit of weariness, I feel I can properly gague my thoughts on these new developments; the thought of an entirely new trilogy following the Master Chief and Cortana and bearing the title of 'Halo 4' still seems a bit daunting to me, but now that they've pulled some of the right chords, I'm interested to see how the rest will play out. Not bad, 343, not bad at all.
