To me my opinion is right! No one has to agree with me! I personally dont see how a game less intense is doing better! My opinion again, dont take this as me being a dick or trying to force my beliefs to anyone!
Yes but, you’re also actively maligning one game on behalf of ignorance.
You’re also abusing the shit out of the exclamation point.
There are several things about Halo that made it brilliant. I think these days too many people either see all of the games that copied features, or were engaged in PC snobbery when it came out, and never really played it in the context of FPS games available at the time. There is no question that Halo combined several innovations, some old ideas that hadn’t taken off, and that Halo has influenced almost every FPS since.
First, there was the health system with the recharging shields. That was an innovation – it completely altered the flow of the game – almost every modern FPS since uses that system. It was a huge departure that has been overshadowed by becoming so ubiquitous in modern games. People forget about the “hunt for health pack” play and “reload because I took some damage I shouldn’t have”.
Secondly, Halo was primarily a single player game. The multiplayer was there, but the main focus of the game was on the single player campaign. Co-op was more touted than the other modes, as well. The sequels enhanced the competitive multiplayer a lot, but the original Halo to most players was about the single player. The sense of mystery and awe in the campaign was something that was rare in games at the time. Half-life was big for that same reason, but there were very few FPS games offering more than the standard corridor crawl/bossfight/find the key.
Third, the graphics were great. They took a small hit going from the original mac platform to the xbox, but the art style, like it or not, was completely different than the rather low-detailed and primarily brown/lava/gray look that most other big FPS games had. In particular, the character modeling was pretty impressive because of the way the characters movements were more realistic looking.
Even more than that, it was the first FPS that had such an epic scale. Tribes had big open areas, but they were just that – big open areas. Most other games took place in smaller levels, very rarely giving you that feel of being somewhere alien and exotic and just plain… epic. (Such as when you step outside and see the huge battle between humans and covenant, and the snow is falling – that was a great game moment.)
The fourth thing about Halo was that the weapons were all useful, and had discrete functions that made their selection a lot more tactical. Compared with most games where you could carry lots of weapons and there were always good and bad weapons (rockets, railgun, disc thrower vs pistol, grenade launcher, elf gun), the Halo system of carrying only two weapons and being able to swap out for guns you found on enemies was another huge innovation. Again, it changed the gameplay in a way that made it a lot deeper.
Finally, Halo had incredible AI. Covenant forces worked together, they took cover, they would throw grenades, try to flank, and reacted to what you did. I really can’t think of another game before Halo that didn’t have AI enemies who acted mechanical and scripted, or incredibly dumb but with amazing accuracy. (The flood notwithstanding – but the flood would have been crappy without the contrast to the smart covenant forces.) The firefights in Halo were thus incredibly more tactical and deep than almost any previous game. You couldn’t just hole up around a corner and pick guys off, or stand there blazing away. It was much more important to keep track of your weapons and grab new ones off of downed enemies.
Yes, it had some flaws. There were repetitive areas, and a few checkpoint annoyances. Multiplayer was unbalanced after people figured out that the pistol was overpowered, though that actually took a while. Some people don’t like the vehicle steering system (I do, but I can see why people might not, it is a bit floaty).
But overall, Halo took all of the best elements of single player FPS games, added in a few new ones, and ramped it up to the next level. The enormous scale of the maps and the fights, the great AI, and the tactical depths of combat were all innovations that have been copied and tweaked over and over again. I think that if you think Halo was just another FPS, but for console noobs, or that it wasn’t revolutionary, or that it didn’t have anything on counterstrike (which wasn’t even a competitor - CS was multi-only, and Halo was single-player-centric), you weren’t really in touch with the FPS genre at the time Halo came out.
I think you made an error! That last sentence didn’t end in an exclamation point! Are you all right?!
Yeah, agree. If you’d never played a decent FPS before, I suppose Halo was a revelation. Otherwise? It was average, at best.
You know, I’m a huge PC elitist. A Valve fanboy to the core, and a dedicated FPS gamer since quake two. Still, I sneer at the hoards of foaming rabid fanboys who proclaim Halo is the end-all essence of games - I think the sequels have coasted almost entirely on the prestige of the first title.
Sort of like The Matrix trilogy.
But Halo was, by any metric or measuring stick, a great game. It was revolutionary, it was amazing, and damn fun. It’s basically the Half-Life of consoles. You people hating on Halo are being a bunch of elitist, crotchety old nerds. Please point out your criticisms of the game other than it being “very average” which is a vague and wishy-washy description.
Well, that’s the thing. There was nothing that set it above “very average”. It’s not so much an abundance of things to criticize, but rather a lack of things to praise. It’s great fun, sure, but so are any of about four million other FPSes. It brought nothing new to the table.
If you think calling it average is vague and wishy-washy, well, can you explain what exactly was revolutionary and amazing about it?
Halo is one of the few FPS that did hard right. Most FPS on hard make the enemies ridiculously overpowered and you ridiculously underpowered. In Halo, on legendary, you still felt like you were playing a kick ass killer, but a killer that had to play it smart.
He clearly forgot the rule that you only get 300 non-ironic exclamation points in a lifetime. Nobody actually bothered to violate this rule before so we don’t really have a punishment set up… suggestions?
I’m trimming down this excellent post that says most of what I was going to. I can’t believe someone actually posted “There was nothing that set it above ‘very average’” after this post. Maybe they skipped it for TLDR.
Other have mentioned the music. I remember Wolfenstein, Doom, Doom ][, and Duke Nukem 3D incredibly fondly, if that gives context to how long I’ve played games. One thing that I started doing somewhere around 1993 was to immediately turn off all music for every game I ever played, so I never really heard any game music. Halo did not let you turn off the music, which was a stroke of genius because the music was fantastic. It really put you into the Halo mindset.
Everyone has forgotten the biggest revelation of all: no load times. Halo levels were mind-boggling in their massive scale considering there were no infuriating “loading” waits whenever you went to the next section of map. Load times of 1 second instead of 20 (or longer) made it the greatest thing since sliced bread.
The story was top notch, as was the campaign. (Especially coop.) I find it funny that people turn up their nose at Halo’s noob-friendliness on the one hand and then complain about the storyline being incomprehensible on the other. The irony, it burns.
The introduction of the Flood was a work of art. You’re hours and hours into a game, blasting the hell out of a wide assortment of different enemies with different weapons. A complete game. Then all of a sudden, halfway through the game an entire new class of enemies shows up with the same radical departure of AI/appearance/weapons as the three races in Starcraft had. Totally out of the blue, total game changer. Stunning achievement that rivaled a compelling feature film reveal. Infinitely more compelling than anything I’ve ever seen before or since in a video game’s story. And in a FPS, which traditionally had no real story.
Cut scenes of perfect length. Metal Gear Solid was the most ridiculous game ever with those stupid cut scenes of 20 minutes and longer. Are they kidding with that? Halo cut scenes were a minute or less. Just long enough to advance the story without bogging down gameplay. (Maybe the ultra cool super-twitch-master Unreal elitists skipped the cut scenes, so they couldn’t follow the story?)
We’ll just have to replace all the exclamation marks with ellipses… That’ll introduce a sense of patience and wonder to his posts… Might even make it seem like he’s carefully considering everything… Maybe bring out the wise old sage in him he never knew was there… Worth a try, isn’t it…
The innovation that Halo introduced after Halo 1 is almost all multiplayer-related. Halo 3 introduced the 4-player co-op campaign, and other designers still haven’t done it. Bungie implemented the best lobby system, have online stats, Saved Films, Theater, the ability to post these online, to rip them to Windows Media files, many varied playlists, incredible customization of gametypes (which is currently the cash cow of MLG), Forge, updated maps, and so forth.
Ellis Dee and TLDR both nailed it. It’s been said that the true sign of influence is that, years later, people diss the original for adhering to the conventions that it itself spawned, and Halo: Combat Evolved is about as perfect an example of this as anything could be.
Halo’s success can be attributed to two different things: first, it happily stole everything that worked in previously successful FPS games, and second, it innovated in a number of subtle-but-profound ways.
At the time, PC FPS games were primarily multiplayer-focused twitch games (Half Life being the major exception), while console FPSes had completely stagnated since Perfect Dark. People were starting to say that FPS as a genre had reached its peak, that from a gameplay standpoint, there was nothing really new to offer. FPS games had fallen into a game design rut (from which many series today still haven’t emerged) - players used the same controls, the same 10-12 weapons of varying levels of overpowered-ness, and ran around within the same few corridor-based level designs. The few exceptions, such as Counter-Strike, tended to be creative PC mods rather than full-fledged games built from scratch.
Halo was never intended to be the Xbox’s killer app. In fact, up to just a few weeks before its release, game magazines and websites were already branding it the Xbox’s big flop - its most recent private demos had shown significant framerate issues that seemed to spell doom. Microsoft was downplaying Halo in its Xbox advertising and focusing much more strongly on DOA and Munch’s Odyssee. Those of us who had been Bungie fans since the Marathon days were half-convinced that Bungie had fucked* themselves* over by jumping ship to the burly black console.
It wasn’t until the overwhelmingly-positive reviews started pouring in that interest in the game actually began to rise, and within a few weeks of release, it had become clear that Halo was, by far, the biggest thing the Xbox had going. And the reasons for this had little to do with marketing push - Halo was as much of a sleeper hit as any launch title could be. Rather, Halo’s success came from how it elevated the shooter genre, not through any one bold innovation, but by perfectly polishing existing the FPS paradigm while introducing a large number of small, subtle improvements that, taken together, resulted in a new and satisfying experience.
The things that other games of the period did well, Halo did better. Its AI was (and remains) absolutely incredible - the Covenant enemies reacted intelligently and fought strategically, flanking or sneaking up on the player and acting realistically surprised when the player did the same to them. The weapons were well-balanced - each served a distinct and unique purpose, and had both strengths and weaknesses. Even the dinky weapons you started out with could be enormously effective when wielded by a skilled player, avoiding the “rocket rush” effect all-too-common in other FPS games. The vehicles were better-executed than any other game to date, with a unique but intuitive control scheme, smooth transitions from walking to driving, realistic driving physics, and the ability for multiple players to perform distinct roles in a single vehicle.
At the same time, Halo contained a number of gameplay innovations, most of which have since been adopted by every FPS made since. The two most important were the recharging shields, which encouraged cautious movement and tactical use of cover, and the two-weapon limitation, which forced players to consider their loadout more carefully. When combined with the “every weapon has its weakness” philosophy in weapon design, this added a novel strategic dimension to the game while simultaneously minimizing the annoying “he who gets to the rocket launcher first wins” effect endemic to other multiplayer shooters of the time. Similarly, giving grenade-throwing and and melee their own primary buttons on the controller (and making them correspondingly more powerful) added further tactical elements to the game.
Meanwhile, the single-player mode contained a compelling science fiction story, told sparsely (this was before Halo 2 and 3 came and mucked everything up with loads of bad dialogue and self-important backstory). And the world was just loaded with atmosphere. Yawning chasms, giant rockslides, beautifully designed ancient feats of technology, all backgrounded by the ever-present view of the ringworld circling up into the sky. At the same time, the musical score was unique for shooters of the time: almost no pounding drums or rock guitars, and relatively little bombast from the orchestral side. Instead, the score was filled with ambient textures, complex polyrhythmic percussion, a bizarre main theme written in the Dorian scale, and those iconic, haunting monk chants. All together, the art design and music gave the world a sense of loneliness and space that no other shooter game had even attempted.
Of course, the campaign is still a shooter campaign, and towards that end, Bungie took advantage of their powerful AI to create some really spectacular action setpieces: stumbling upon the Flood-Covenant battle in “Two Betrayals,” supporting an isolated group of Marines attempting to hold a rock formation until evacuation ships arrive in “Halo,” rumbling through icy valleys in your tank in “Assault on the Control Room,” the climactic Warthog race at the end of the game - all some of the most memorable single-player moments I can remember. And they were made doubly so because of Halo’s cooperative mode, which truly brought cooperative shooter fun to a whole new level.
The gameplay innovation that PC gamers pooh-pooh the most is the translation of FPS controls from the keyboard to the gamepad. But it’s telling that the console FPS market exploded after Halo’s release, and literally every single console FPS since Halo has used Halo’s exact control scheme, rather than the Goldeneye/ Perfect Dark model.
Of course, most PC FPS players correctly point out that Halo’s controls, even if they are well-designed, ultimately lack the precision of the keyboard/mouse combo. To which I say, yes, that is indeed a constraint of gamepads. But gamepads have two huge advantages over keyboard/mouse, and it’s the same one that consoles have over PCs in general: portability and lower space requirements.
And that’s where Halo’s last huge innovation comes into play, the one that almost single-handedly explains its massive success:
Halo was the first game that allowed a group of more than four friends to sit down and enjoy deep, strategic FPS gameplay without having to haul a bunch of computers together. It’s almost impossible to understate what a huge difference this made. Before Halo, the only people who cared enough to put in the effort necessary to make LAN parties happen were hardcore FPS fans who had the time and technical knowhow to spend hours moving and setting up their expensive PCs (one per player!). Halo allowed up to sixteen people to play for a fraction of the cost in money and space. Four people could huddle around each screen, allowing for perfect “team” setups in which entire 4-to-8-person teams could see exactly what their teammates were doing, while remaining oblivious to the moves of their opponents.
All of these innovations only seem minor today because Halo’s influence has been so pervasive that we can barely remember a time when they weren’t essential elements of FPS gameplay. Nowadays, FPS games with massive levels, cooperative campaigns, recharging health, weapons-carrying limitations, and multiperson vehicles are a dime a dozen. What made Halo “great” was that it was the first game to do every single one of those things, and do them remarkably well.
I’m at a loss for words. This might be the most complete and thorough ownage of haters I’ve ever seen. It’s more beautiful than magnum.
I was with you right up to this point… but the plot of the series, including the first game, was retarded.
The Forerunners or whatever they’re called are advanced enough to create a device that will destroy all sentient life in the galaxy, but not to defeat the Flood?
Their plan for saving the galaxy from the Flood is… to kill everything else in it. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
Leaving aside the fact that the Halos were a sci-fi cliche already and the general plot of the game is obviously lifted in part from Starcraft, it just doesn’t make any damn sense.
We were advanced enough to create a device that destroyed all life in Hiroshima but not to defeat the Japanese?
Their galaxy was a lost cause. They were saving other galaxies.
Don’t say it’s retarded and doesn’t make any damn sense just because you don’t like it.
Yeah, no kidding. It’s like how modern medicine still cuts off a limb if gangrene sets in.
Halos were a sci-fi cliche? I’m not that up on sci-fi; could you provide examples?
Excellent post, except for this one part. The time period between Perfect Dark and Halo was only 15 months, hardly enough time for the genre to “stagnate”. There was also not the flood of console FPSs as there was today and only a handful of games in the genre were even realeased. And of those that were, Turok 3, TimeSplitters and Red Faction, while not gamechangers like PD or Halo, were decent enough games.