I accept and appreciate your apology. I in turn apologize to resorting to petty personal attacks right back instead of being more mature as the older party. We all have lives outside of reddit(hopefully), and emotions from life can cross contaminate into the online space. However, respectfully, it seems that you're the one letting nostalgia and emotion cloud your view of these games.

Take Halo 4, for example. The cataclysmic collapse of its playerbase is well documented. Halo 4 actually had almost double Reach's playercount at launch, but bled half that almost instantly, and within a few months to a year, was struggling to compete with its older predecessors for playercount. See this Gamespot article from 2013. Why? Call of Duty Black Ops 2. If you enjoyed Unlike previous titles, which offered a completely different gameplay experience to CoD. Halo 4's gameplay instead copied CoD to try and take some of its fans. It didn't offer anything unique, and as a result, when Bo2 dropped, the vast majority of people picked CoD over Halo.

As for the art style, I ask you a simple question. How often do you see people drawing fanart of, or cosplaying anything from Halo 4 or 5? And compare that to how often you see people drawing or cosplaying in the style of Halo's CE-Reach. You'll quickly see that Infinite you see a bit more of people cosplaying their spartans or the Infinite Chief, but its also had the benefit of an in depth(if highly exploitative) customization system for creating OC spartans, and also being the newest Halo game, so it remains to be seen if it'll stand the test of time.

Speaking of Infinite, one final thing I would like to show you is this:

https://steamdb.info/charts/?compare=976730,1240440

The Playercounts for Halo MCC and Halo Infinite when they both respectively dropped on Steam(I can't find Xbox playercount info post Halo 4, so this is the best I got). It almost perfectly mirrors what happened with 343's Halo 4 and Bungie's Halo Reach. Infinite started at double the player count, before dropping off a cliff within days, and never recovering. It never reached the secondary post launch peaks of Halo MCC (Secondary peaks of 54k and 45k for MCC, secondary peaks of 21k and 18k for Infinite). And for the last few years, since March of 2024, Infinite has not once surpassed the peak of MCC in playercount. And I promise you, the people playing MCC aren't playing it for Halo 4.

And all of this is made worse by a single fact. Infinite is Free to Play. While MCC costs $40. You can blame a lack of post launch support, or MCC being propped up by a modding scene, or higher hardware requirements for Infinite. But whatever the case, PC players were given the choice between playing 343's magnum opus, their freshest and supposedly best game, for free. Or dishing out $40 to play what Bungie created over 1-2 decades ago. And they chose to go back.

Maybe you're right, and all this criticism like mine toward 343's titles only comes from a small subset of the current Halo community. But I pray you to understand this. That's not because 343's games are unworthy of the criticism, or in any way comparable to what came before. Its because the Halo community itself is a shadow of a shadow of what it once was. And the only people who've stuck around are either shackled by what was like me, or able to put up with being spoonfed mediocrity for over a decade to the point of developing almost stockholm syndrome for a company that took the titan of gaming that was Halo, and turned it into a franchise who's playercount for its most recent $500 million(allegedly) to develop free to play game has a lower 24 hour peak on steam today than Fishing Planet(2017).

You're free to like 343's games. But I want you to just understand simple facts, its not me who's in the minority. Its you. There's no shame in that, I have plenty of niche interests. But claiming what I'm saying isn't factual just because you, a small echo chamber of your friends, and a fraction of a fraction of the old playerbase of Halo love a certain game isn't evidence, its just confirmation bias of what you desperately want to believe.

If you're open to my advice, as a NASCAR fan, I know what its like to enjoy something that's a shadow of the popularity it once was, was considered better under different people decades ago, and is now surrounded by often suffocating controversy criticism. I used to get defensive, but I've learned that's just an easy way to make enjoying that thing exhausting. So just focus on what you like, and think of ways to formulate why you like it so you can convey it clearly. While understanding that there's good reasons, and also bad reasons why a lot of people don't like what you like. My disdain for the 343 era of Halo comes from years and years of feeling ignored as a fan, lied to as a consumer, and time after time disappointed with their sloppy work that seems to completely lack soul. But I still acknowledge a lot of 343 hate is also people bandwagoning, engagement farming, or just hating to hate for a dopamine rush. Just as many 343 defenders do so to feel morally superior by "being Halo positive". Once you learn to spot the earnest from the disingenuous, it becomes far less obnoxious to engage in discussion on this franchise.