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I found this post over at Waypoint and thought it was relevant, at least to my line of thinking.

@Bloody Initiate wrote:

The mistakes of Reach and Halo 4 are very similar. Both pissed off a lot of the present fanbases with a lot of radical changes at launch. Both then gained new fan bases of their own. In Reach the TU was received by a bunch of players who weren’t asking for it because the players who wanted it had long since stopped playing.

I remember going back to Reach for a friend early 2012 and I met a guy who loved Halo Reach the way it was, was much better than me at Halo Reach, and didn’t want to play the TU stuff. He was a new fan, I was an old fan. I didn’t get what I wanted when Reach launched, he didn’t get what he wanted when they “fixed” it.

Whether Halo 4 follows that same path we’ll see, but what I STILL don’t understand is why Bungie with Reach and now 343 with Halo 4 felt the need to change so much about the game that had worked just fine for so long before.

In Halo Reach we got enormously powerful explosives and a sniper rifle a blind toddler could use. Except rocket launchers, grenades, and sniper rifles were never underpowered before. Why did Bungie buff things that didn’t need to be buffed? We’ll never know.

In Halo 4 we get a pathetic 5-shot BR, a DMR which has left one of its bullets at home, a shield that leaves you one-shot for 3 times the amount of time it takes to resolve a fight, but none of these things failed to work on the old settings. No one ever complained that their shield was coming back too fast or that their gun had too many bullets in it. So why did 343 change these things?

I just don’t get it, I never will. You leave the things alone which worked fine, you improve the things that didn’t, and you add new things to keep the game fresh. You don’t screw with things that aren’t broken, or at least you’re not supposed to.

Yet we’ve gone two Halo games in a row where the matchmaking at launch falls short. Two Halo games in a row where the fans who buy the game at launch aren’t going to be the fans playing it 6 months later. Two Halo games in a row which depart so drastically from the former work that we wonder what the hell we’re playing anymore.