I doubt very much if Microsoft will do that again. Remember the issues they had with Halo 2 & Gears of War?
Yeah it went super downhill after Halo 3. I still found Reach playable despite the stupid changes and played just over 2,000 hours worth of it though. But Halo 4... 343 has no idea what they're doing and completely killed it rather than saving it. I've played 3 days worth of Halo 4 since launch. When a game is so bad it completely turns a diehard fan like me off the series you know they really screwed something up. I miss it so much. Getting both of my accounts to 50 and getting as much EXP as I could on my main account was really fun. Getting Onyx and Inheritor in Reach was just meh.
Halo 3 PC, I would defiantly play, even though I have previously beat it on 360. After that I dunno about Halo anymore since its no longer developed by Bungie. Can't wait to what Bungie brings with Destiny though.
HALO 2 yes, Gears of War... no. Gears worked perfectly fine on WinXP. It's "AA" was supposed to be an exclusive Vista/DX10 feature. But there were ways around that. And HALO 2 was a DX9 game that was only able to run in Vista. It had nothing special... and was a pretty terrible port.
Yeah with GOW, the only issues i encountered was a time and date problem which could be fixed either by adjusting the time/date settings whenever you went to play or a patch from Microsoft i believe. And then there was the 3hr install...3hrs...from disk...3. But if they release H3, will def be picking it up. Dedicated servers please.
I picture it being a Win8 exclusive too (time for a poll: Win8 exclusive, PC agnostic, not coming to PC, other). I'd love to play it as well, just for single player though.
I'll tell you how I imagine this going. MS are going to jump on the PC F2P bandwagon and they will add additional ways to make money through the various armour and weaponry catalogues the game has. Not only that but something tells me that we won't even see a main campaign added only the release of a standalone multiplayer component. I even reckon we could see things such as the The Legendary map pack and Heroic map pack for an extra additional cost. And guys Windows 8 exclusive? I highly doubt that now considering the slow uptake by gamers and PC owners in general. My two cents anyway.
I highly doubt they would make it Windows 8 Exclusive, the enthusiastic gamers are all shouting win 7 is better for games with the casual gamers taking heed of this outcry and sticking with 7. I'm not trying to start a debate with the 2 OS platforms. Samsung are even blaming MS for the bad marketsales on the failure of 8's sales. Anyways... They could however introduce exclusive features to win8 in hope it can sway you to upgrading. Just hope that they don't try to follow EA's idealogy and try and milk the consumer for every penny they have with small purchaseable features that aren't even worth calling DLC.
But the fact remains the vast majority of PC gamers have stuck firmly with Windows 7, myself included. Windows 8 might have some advancements as a newer OS but when it comes to simply playing games there's little to no need to make the change. For MS to make anything they release now a Windows 8 exclusive will merely show that they learned next to nothing concerning the whole Halo 2 PC ONLY ON WINDOWS VISTA debacle from a few years back. I honestly doubt they are truly that short sighted. Windows 7/8 + Steam + F2P will score big for them I reckon.
HALO 3 is meh at best. It improved on Bungie's terrible level design from the previous two games... but the whole experience is still really weak. ODST had a great art style for it, but the story was crap and the level design falls back into the overly redundant nature of Bungie's earlier HALO games. Copy and paste. Reach... looks a lot better then the previous games. But on the 360 the performance was awful. The game stutters and chugs in a lot of the later areas. Story is a little better, and the level design is also a little better... but the overall game just feels... meh. Again. I've never been a HALO fan, but that's because none of the games have ever managed to "wow" me. At least the games from Bungie. HALO 4 from 343 Studios was awesome. The gunplay feels a lot more solid this time around, there's weight to the weapons and how the fire. Enemies are more challenging, level design is a LOT better. The story is much more interesting and there's some emotion put into the characters. I think now the HALO series is in the right hands. Was never a fan of Bungie's games, not the design... but how they handled the design. 343 have shown that design can work.
Playing to Halo games singleplayer coop is still some of the BEST gaming experiences ive had. Driving about a vast open level in a Warthog with your mate in the gattling gun mowing stuff down is just epic. Would love to see Halo 3 to come to PC
Halo 4 to me looked and played like it was made by Section 8 devs TimeGate Studios. Everything from weapon design to level design was very similar but I can still very much appreciate what 343 achieved with the game overall.