Halo 4 Receives Massive Update

If you’ve been keeping up with the Halo franchise these past 7 months, you’ll probably know about the many complaints long time fans of the franchise have had for Halo 4, and the low population has shown that things needed to change, soon. 343 Industries tried adding loads of new game play features into Halo 4 that weren’t seen in any Halo games before. Some of these idea’s showed promise, like the Personal Ordnance system that allows players to call in power weapons, power ups and grenades, but sadly, most fell short of their true potential.

But enough about the mistakes.

343 Industries has been hard at work these past few months working on some re-tuning to Halo 4’s sandbox. Many people looked over many of the new updates and purely see it as a weapon update, but a lot has changed this Monday with the Halo 4 Turbo update.

Firstly, the weapon balancing. Up until now, the DMR was the most useful weapon, where most guns fell into a specific role, the DMR excelled in every role. Many people asked for the DMR to receive a nerf that would decrease its ability, but instead, 343 Industries decided to bring all the other load out weapons to the DMR’s level. Most notably, the Battle Rifle is now a 4-burst kill, reminiscent to Halo 2 and 3, and is probably the change most fans love more than anything.

Next is the Carbine buff, allowing for a 7-shot kill instead of 8, and an increase in accuracy, but decrease in range.

Another precision rifle that received a buff is the Light Rifle. While un-scoped, the Light Rifle has actually been nerfed to become less useful at closer ranges, but when scoped, a rate of fire increase allows for much faster kill times at long ranges.

Also, the Assault Rifle, Storm Rifle and Suppressor all have decreased aim-assist, but increased damage, so more skill and aim will be required to use these weapons.

Finally, for weapons at least, the Warthog and Mantis chain guns have received damage increases of 35%.

Now, other than weapon changes, the Halo 4 Turbo update increased player movement speed to 110%, which was the movement speed of Halo 2. This allows for strafing to become a more viable tactic again, and makes the game just overall faster paced.

Another huge change that came with the update was map changes.

On all Halo 4 maps, additional items have been added (IE: extra Gravity Lifts on Haven, Crates on Solace to make certain jumps) to make maps flow a bit differently and play more like maps from earlier games in the franchise.

And lastly, Static Weapon Spawns. In Halo 4, 343 tried to switch things up by creating a weapon spawning system that would take set weapons and set locations, and randomly choose which of the set weapons would spawn in whichever set location; meaning in one match, a Rocket Launcher could spawn in one spot, then in the next game, a Pulse Grenade could spawn there and the Rocket Launcher would be where the Grenades spawned last game. Ultimately, this made map control a bit useless and really defeated the purpose of map control entirely.

Luckily, with this update, Random World Ordnance no longer exists, and instead, consistent weapon spawns and consistent spawn placements have been re-implemented to make map control more viable again, and to deal with the weapon spawn changes that really were unnecessary.

With this new Halo 4 update, 343 is really showing that they do care about what the fans want and really want to create something amazing. They’ve admitted to their mistakes before, and are really showing that they’re listening, and trying to fix the honest mistakes that have plagued Halo 4.