It looks like the Halo 4 Spartan Ops series will be longer than the entirety of the gameplay in Halo 3: ODST, as revealed by 343 Industries. While ODST wasn’t at all a bad game, some players complained about its short campaign. A lot of fans think it was just a filler that was tossed out by Bungie in between Halo 2 and Halo 3, and they’re right.
For those of you who don’t know, Spartan Ops is a new co-op mode for Halo 4 that will be launched in a series of 10 episodes that follow a TV-style of production. Each week a new episode will release and with it will come 5 new missions to be played. These missions will last anywhere between 10 and 15 minutes long, and will require teamwork to complete.
In a post seen on NeoGAF Spartan Ops Designer David Ellis noted that “SpOps season alone is longer than ODST.” He also commented that the Spartan Ops missions and Halo 4’s campaign are being worked on by “completely different teams.” Some of the franchise’s fans were upset following director Frank O’Connor’s response to their concern at how long the game’s single-player campaign will be. An Achievement list that surfaced online revealed that it will only contain 8 missions.
O’Connor commented saying, “Number of missions has no bearing on the length of the campaign. It’s a Halo-sized campaign. Plus SpOps etc.” Until the game releases we’ll have no real way of knowing just how long it will last. I’m assuming that we’ll get at least 8 hours out of the game’s campaign like most FPS titles, but if 343 wants to knock this out of the park they’ll need to stretch it as far as they can.