3 is a big return to form (but not a return to the .45 magnum (that came with Reach)) in that it is much more about sandboxes where you (and three friends) are given your choice of tools. Much less authored than CE/2’s campaign structure and has aged wonderfully as a result. Multiplayer is impossibly well balanced and its legendary plate-spinning haunts the people responsible for maintaining balance simultaneously across PvE and PvP in Destiny to this day.
ODST is stretching tone and narrative muscles they may not have used since Marathon (taking @shrug’s word for Marathon’s prowess here, can’t into keycards, born in '92) with an espionage story with a neat twist that is basically the antithesis of Starship Troopers (Verhoeven, again). There’s a song with a soprano sax solo and another song that’s basically Kashmir by Led Zeppelin and they somehow cohere. It’s a great gaiden game, made with Halo 3 assets as a series of flashbacks you access by finding your teammate’s gear around a hub city you can explore freely. Definitely prototyping for Destiny at work here. They also got a bunch of Firefly actors and use them well (?!).
Firefight is unlimited PvE Halo and introduced in ODST/modified in Reach. Best Horde imo, just lots of fun doing improbable bullshit around the margins of the sandbox.
I must admit I am a hardcore Reach stan - got the legendary solo campaign achievement.
I guess I may have been too biased against it from the combination of never liking the campaign in the first place + being let down by 2 + wanting nothing to do with 2000s Microsoft military funtime
I did have a real real good time with coop reach after ignoring all the other 360 stuff so I guess I’m looking forward to more of this than I thought
ODST and Reach get better at it by showing that the “heroes” are basically assassins for the fascist government. The first mission in Reach is checking up on some farmers that might be trying to rebel on the UNSC’s skunkworks colony.
The messianic shit with Master Chief is baffling tbh. I do like the Covenant society coming apart in the original games, though.
I bounced after 3 (seriously bought it at midnight along with a case of the first Gamer Fuel and marathoned through it coop Legendary before dawn, never touched it again) but I played an insane, insane amount of 1 back in the day, even doing the XBConnect thing to play it online in a janky unofficial way. I never touched ODST and Reach so I guess I’ll have to dip back in.
I do agree that it feels bizarre playing these with M+KB, I tried it with the 1 port and nothing felt right, especially vehicles.
3 is the best for having giant fights and giving you lots of tools to mess with them with three friends, which usually means it turns into a challenge of who can do the stupidest shit.
ODST and Reach are both worth it for making the “UNSC are fascists and Chief is an emotionless muderbot” plot much more explicit.
The cracked/modded version of Halo Online (cancelled Russia-exclusive F2P Halo 3) feels excellent on M+KB FWIW. The engine also scales beautifully with no game logic tied to refresh rate.
I wonder if they’ll take a page out of Destiny 2 PC’s book and change the tuning for controls, but without ADS I’m not sure what changes they’d make.
4 is a tech demo and Star Wars prequel created by a hodgepodge of ex-KojiPro, Bungie, etc. staff at 343i, the Halo-only studio Microsoft made. It’s a mess and it really fails to split the difference between console FPS design circa 2012 (i.e. BLOPS II) and traditional Halo.
5 is a weird one - makes a lot of the same mistakes that Halo 2 did like ending abruptly out of nowhere and “boss” “fight(s)” (and seemingly came in real hot because of technical issues) and the Chief half of the plot is extremely frustrating shit. I think @stylo or @Dracko had the joke that Cortana being secretive and paternalistic was “Just Like Mom” which is still vivid hilarity in my memory. The engine is great, though! They made a bunch of trade-offs in image quality to get to a totally unwavering 60 fps and the new power armor lets the spartans ADS (but you get knocked out if you take flinch damage and there’s no mathematical benefit to it) and boost around like Advanced Warfare.
343 said they view Infinite as a spiritual reboot, which, yeah, please.
They’re adding “catch-up” mechanics at the top of each season so it’s less of a brutal grind up to new stuff. If you don’t have time to play I still think the new lore books are worth a read on Ishtar Collective. They’re not terribly long but they’re excellent imagination fuel.
The single-player campaign in 3 is not great IMO. Like Halo 2, there is no persistent health behind your shield which means that the only result of encounters is either full survival or death. (I had a huge problem with that as it reduces levels to disconnected vignettes and neither penalizes carelessness nor reward perfection.) In comparison to ODST and Reach, some of the levels also came across as extended one-note gimmicks with lots of identical enemies.
Cortana ends up on a Forerunner world called Genesis where she finds “the fountain of youth for artificial intelligence,” which cures her rampancy. She then meets some of the more assholish of the Forerunners and decides that she needs to take up the Mantle of Responsibility which was the Pax Forerunneria enforced at gunpoint by gigantic evangelion-looking things called Guardians. AI, unlike organic life, are capable of “long-term planning” and Cortana makes a coalition of fascistic AIs to get her new thing going.
I tried to play ODST back in the day since it was divorced from the main storyline and man, I just bounced off so hard. But reading what people are saying ITT makes me want to try it again. I wonder if my Laptop will be able to run it since it’s just a remaster. (It can basically run anything that came out on the 360)
Removing persistent health never bothered me as it was so insignificant anyway; at least on Heroic and Legendary (which seem to be the only difficulties really worth playing on) health is lost so quickly it may as well not be there. Halo 1’s health packs feel like a vestigial element from FPS’s with a different structure and 2 & 3 were just more honest about removing superfluous complexity.
But I view Halo campaigns as most interesting when you sink into the tactical problems of a given room rather than being a long term resource challenge – after carefully coordinating with a friend to clear a room, barely able to breathe, I’m not sure I want anomalies in our execution to awkwardly cascade into the next section – there’s enough of that with guns and ammo already. Although I think Overshields have their place to allow occasional tanky tactics.
My criticism of Halo 3 is that it marked the point where the series tilted to a safer, more monotone campaign design that didn’t continue or build on the most interesting ideas in the first two.
Elites with recharging shields were replaced with less dynamic Brutes (which lost their low health berserk state), so battles are more easily won by attrition rather than reacting to surprise attacks or rushing to capitalize on a downed shield. Elites felt like your equal where an X factor broke the stalemate – in 3, that factor is more likely to be sustained battle rifle fire while peeking from cover. Now, I would much rather play this than say Call of Duty, and I think there’s a good argument 3 has the series’ strongest vehicle battles especially due to the three Scarab bosses (this is how you do bosses in an FPS), but something magical was lost in on-foot combat. The biggest reason Reach’s campaign is so strong is really as simple as Elites Again.
And three-way faction battles basically went away completely. To me these are still the clincher that put Halo 1’s campaign above the others, especially the way they were paced: the mid-game introduction of the Flood is memorably distruptive, but unlike 3 these new ideas are mixed back in with the Covenant giving the combat a real sense of interactive chaos (and front row seat in experiencing the consequences of an unstoppable disaster that changes how you play) rather than straining to convey epic with war diorama skyboxes and overscoped story that the later games started using. And Halo 2, despite having a buggy and disorganized campaign, felt like a truncated attempt to continue this high concept with the civil war scenario. In 3 onwards, that’s all gone.
It seems with the increased focus in online multiplayer the technical effort was refocused around realizing a player-scaleable sandbox with things like Forge and replays; advancing AI behavior for campaigns was swept aside while the Covenant ranks stagnated. The Prometheans were hyped for Halo 4, but inter-faction play was limited to one set-piece in stage 3 (that seemed like hard-coded behavior for that room). In other words, by this standard Halo 1’s campaign genuinely still feels more cutting edge, more like a vision of an FPS from the future. One of my big motivations to play new FPS’s is to come across something that takes this kind of design further, but it’s usually inconsequential or mostly smoke and mirrors (Far Cry 1 is probably my next favorite for doing something like this). I’m open to suggestions.
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So yeah this collection: given my 360 still hasn’t red-ringed I’m good, but it’s nice to know I can play some of these games years from now on PC with a more stable framerate. Always controller, though – I agree Halo feels so carefully designed around it – like, the pistol took into account the time to physically depress a trigger versus clicking a mouse button.
I take it Halo “6” is dead? I remember when the Reclaimer Trilogy became the Reclaimer Saga and there was this talk about not limiting the More Personal Story of Master Chief to three games etc. and after all the backlash and soiled goodwill it looks like they’re just hitting reset. Wonder if Infinite is going to be an online-only thing.