Mine would have as well - unfortunately, I forgot about the fact that my CC number had changed between the preorder and today
I have played the majority of Halo 4. When judged by the shooters of the current generation, Halo 4 is a great game. It would be unfair to compare this game to the older shooters.
Well, I completed the game. The game is a good reason for me to try Gamefly. I am not happy that I spent money on this game. Don't get me wrong - I stand by my comment that this is a great game. It's just that the game isn't for me. I don't have friends, so I can't play the co-op. And I am not a strong enough player to be playing multiplayer. I view multiplayer as being the playground of hardcore gamers. This means I am unable to play the other 50% of the game. When I am playing only half of what the game offers, and the game is retailing at $65, I am not getting full value for the money spent. (Personally, I wish there was more games where the single player campaign wasn't playing second fiddle to the multiplayer.) There is a scene towards the end where I felt sadness for the Chief. After playing the game, I find that I am unable to describe what the story was about, or the villain's motivations. The graphics were superb and among the best I have seen.
For the first time in a long while with the Halo series, I actually found the single player campaign worth the full price of the game. The multiplayer is just the gravy on top for a change and I appreciate that greatly. I found myself really caring for the Chief and Cortana and what they were going through and the sense of desperation that built throughout the game. I honestly think that 343 outdid Bungie here. Not just in making a game better then Reach, but in making THE BEST Halo game. I think 343 really proved themselves here I Microsoft deserves full credit for the team they put together.
God damn it, this game looks beautiful, plays beautifully - it's everything a Halo veteran could ever wish for and more. I wish I could take a week off just to dig into it really deep, really fast.
I just now started playing the Halo 3 campaign again, to get myself in the right mindset for H4. I going to pick up a copy later today.
Oh I finished this on Normal on Release, and completed Legendary a few days ago solo... Initially, I was a bit "WTF" on the whole thing. The end was very out "there" for my liking, with some pretty big leaps of faith 343i are hoping the audience will take. Plus it felt even shorter than Halo Reach for my liking. BUT, since playing through again on Legendary...the story has grown on me. I'm still a bit wtf on the ending, but I don't let it overshadow the rest of the game. Multiplayer is both amazing and crap at the same time however. It plays so much nicer than Reach imo, the games are much faster paced (I like instant respawn) and it almost feels like Halo 2 again online. On the flip side, Infinity Slayer is fun, but I despise the lack of a classic slayer mode with AR/BR Starts and power weapons dotted around the map. Ordinance drops are ok I guess, but you can only pick one, its almost always a SAW and you have to get a kill streak to earn them. IS is good, but I still want to play Halo the the way it always played before. Also, I'm already sick of fucking Haven and Complex. It's ALWAYS those 2 that come up and get chosen in IS. BTB is always Ragnarok. Yes, I get it, its been out a week, but it should have shipped with more maps, or at least more diverse maps. There's 3 freakin' forge worlds in 4, but none of those default maps show up in Infinity Slayer, why? Speaking of Forge, talk about 2 steps forward 3 steps back. Jesus christ, why have they removed the fine movement option you used to have from pressing down on the left stick?! And the zoom from the right. Now neither of these buttons do anything. Sure, there's "magnets", but they only work right half the time and when they dont your stuck fiddling around making huge movements when you only meant to move it an inch. Also, theres no human flying vehicles at all in MP (I miss the Falcon. And Hornet) even though people have been screaming about Pelicans, we finally get one in campaign but its not even a forge option in MP? Ffs. Also, you cannot co-op Spartan Ops missions on the same console, and you can't co-op campaign on the same console with 3 people either. So yeah, for me it boils down to this: Halo 4 is a great game, but if you've played and loved Reach you'll find they've changed a bunch of small things in forge and multiplayer which seem to serve no purpose other than annoying the living shit out of you. Oh, and I miss invasion too. Dominion is bollocks compared to Invasion. Still though, the campaign looked really nice anyway.
What about the ending was a WTF moment for you? If you have any degree of familiarity with the extended Halo fiction, you know that Cortana Spoiler: about the ending of Halo IV was going to die shortly because of her age so that shouldn't have come as a huge surprise.
I can't speak for Dac, but for me... Spoiler: ending How the Master Chief survived a nuclear weapon detonation from about two inches away. I think that 343 had the seeds of a good game, but they needed to spend more time fleshing out the story. I have read all the novels, and I'm still not entirely clear on what the Prometheans are. Spoiler: Halo 4 Composed Forerunners and humans, obviously. But how the whole "digitization" process works eludes me. I'm still missing terminals 1, 2, and 4 - those may explain it, though from the names I doubt it. Well, maybe Silentium will answer the question. It's definitely different from the Bungie games. It veers further in the "space fantasy" direction than Bungie's games did. There's a lot more cutscenes, it feels like. And I would have liked more callbacks to the old musical themes. But it's still a worthy successor overall.
If I were to guess, I'd think he was referring more to Spoiler: Halo 4 ending the chief surviving the detonation of a nuclear weapon literally right in his face, just because the light bridge rolled up into a ball to protect him. That was pretty hard to swallow. Edit: Sorry. Didn't mean to parrot ATimson. Posted while I was still typing. I'd argue over the terminology (Halo was always a space fantasy), but I agree about the change in tone. Bungie's Halo had a clean, well lit aesthetic, but the story content was really kind of dark. In Halo 4, the renewed war with the Covenant is treated like fun and games.
Regardless of the terminology for the Bungie games, 4 definitely pushes things much further in the fantastic direction. I didn't think the renewed war was treated as "fun and games", but rather "business as usual". For the Master Chief, the war had only just ended; for the characters not in cryo, their conflict had been renewed for quite a while now.
There's a decent chance that Silentium will. During the Halo Fiction panel at Comic Con earlier this year, Frank O'Connor said that Silentium was being released after Halo 4 due to the story connections between the two. I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up being one of those connections.