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Mr. Freeze

When did Old School FPS fans turn around on Halo?

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Remember when older FPS fans hated Halo for regenerating health, a two-weapon limit and cutscenes? I do! When did opinions change and what prompted it? It came out of nowhere for me, one day going on Youtube and seeing a Gmanlives video on Halo Infinite. Back in the day nobody would've given a Halo campaign the time of day! Same with Call of Duty, one of the oldest communal punching bags for well over a decade. 

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My opinion hasn't changed. I played the pc demo of either Halo 1 or 2, forget which, and found it bland and boring. Never played a Halo game since.

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1 hour ago, Mr. Freeze said:

Remember when older FPS fans hated Halo for regenerating health, a two-weapon limit and cutscenes? I do!

 

I don't remember this at all. Assuming you're talking about the OG XBox release, people thought the multiplayer and vehicles were radical. I don't recall anyone trying to compare it negatively to Quake or CounterStrike or such.

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8 hours ago, Mr. Freeze said:

Remember when older FPS fans hated Halo for regenerating health, a two-weapon limit and cutscenes? I do! When did opinions change and what prompted it?

 

Of course I remember. I was a bit like that myself at one point. Though nowadays, I respect its place in the genre. And this might be an unpopular opinion on Doomworld or any old-school fps forum, but games like Half Life and Halo were important for the genre. If every shooter was a "Boomer shooter" (God I hate the term, thanks Civvie) the genre would have become stale.

 

Now on the other hand, my opinion on the game (Halo:CE) itself has been pretty consistent throughout the years. The core gameplay mechanics are solid, the graphics are great for the time, but the biggest weakness of the game is the level design, especially the copy-pasted interiors with large empty and almost mono-textured walls. It's an alright game, but far from my favorite.

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I turned around on Halo when I actually played Halo for the first time on the OG Xbox.

 

First off, the game had incredible controls for a console game - literally the first console FPS that I didn't feel like I was playing with one hand tied behind my back.

 

The AI of the Covenant was also sufficiently advanced to the point where each battle felt like a realistic combat puzzle to be solved, which I absolutely adored.  This was something that Half-Life had dabbled with the fights against the HECU, but Halo did them much better.  Beating the game on Legendary actually meant something.

 

Halo also got the feel of the vehicles incredibly right - the first time I got a Warthog drop from Foe Hammer I was shocked at how heavy and realistic it felt.  Not to mention there are countless games released between then and now - including Half Life 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004 - with worse handling vehicles than Halo.

 

Split Screen Halo was also something to behold, especially if you had a dozen friends over, bringing additional Xboxes and ended up having a grand old LAN party.  The multiplayer had the trappings of Arena FPS games, but the slower move speed made the game much more accessible than any other Arena FPS game of its era.  It was a blast.

 

And speaking of multiplayer, Halo 2's multiplayer was better than anything you could find on the PC, and I don't say this lightly.  It was one of the first games to rely solely on matchmaking and private lobbies instead of server browsers, and it was a breath of fresh air.  For one, I was shocked that I was finally able to play all of the levels and game modes that shipped with a multiplayer title, instead of the community hyper-fixating on the same 3-4 maps and 1-2 game modes over and over.  I was even more shocked that pretty much all of the levels were fun to play, felt like they had actually been playtested instead of haphazardly thrown together to fill a quota, and even accommodated multiple game modes effortlessly.  It's a masterclass of multiplayer game design, and even today I would rather play Halo 2-3 multiplayer than Quake III or UT2004.

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You can't turn around on Halo if you never turned towards it in the first place.

 

I tried it once on the Xbox, I did not see the appeal then.

 

I tried Infinity once on the Series X via Game Pass, I still did not see the appeal. I'd say of that one in particular it felt like the nu Doom games if you removed everything remotely fun from the experience. 

 

Edited by hybridial

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Never particularly hated halo, but never really enjoyed it aside from Halo 2. The first one felt extremely bland and my head began to hurt after playing it for a few hours. Mostly because too much same-y corridors everywhere. I replayed it recently and the headaches are gone, but it's still nothing to write home about.

Halo 2 was a bit different because it got new weaponry which 1 severely lacked. Mid-range combat got a much needed leg up via doubling plasma-rifles and a very punchy handgun/DMR. It's multiplayer always felt like one big rube goldberg machine, and that's what actually did please me. To this day, Halo 2 is the only game in which I managed to commit suicide ... By shooting myself in the head with a sniper rifle. Go figure how that one works.

Halo 3, I didn't play until a couple years back when it got ported to PC. And once more, it's nothing to write home about. The things that made Halo 2 great are gone in Halo 3. The DMR and handguns don't feel nearly as punchy. There are more weaponry overall, but most of it feels weak, inaccurate, lacking punch and report. Every weapon is basically Halo 2's caseless SMG. And if it isn't, then it's a pistol which can't actually kill things. (I'm exaggerating here, but that's what it feels like)

Halo Reach is basically Halo 3 on steroids. Weapons are even LESS punchy, somehow.. The new abilities are a cool gimmick for about the first use, and then quickly are forgotten about.

Didn't play any other Halo game, and to be frank, am not interested to. I've wanted to play H3 for about a decade, thinking it'll give me the same vibe as Halo 2. The disappointment was a heavy blow. I don't particularly hate it, and I get why some people enjoy it. But to me it's just ... Bland and boring. Same as Overwatch is boring, DOTA and League of Legends is skull drillinglly bad and actually decreases mental capability by killing my neurones ... But I get why there's so many people who do like these games.

Ultimately I don't hate Halo because I realize, I'm an elitist.

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I enjoyed the campaign, but being hardcore into UT2004 at the time the multiplayer was seen as a gimmick by my past self.  Still enjoyed it but didn't really take it seriously.

 

I ended up buying the Master Chief Collection maybe two years ago, started a playthrough of the original campaign with the shiny coat of paint on, made it to level 3 and then thought to myself "what was it that made this game so great again?" and haven't touched it since.  Don't get me wrong - it's a great game, most of the entries in the series are solid,  and what it did to the FPS scene was nothing short of world-shattering but somewhere along the way I kind of just don't see or enjoy the appeal it has any longer.

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It was a series I initially grew up with but lost interest in with 4. I only ever played Reach online, and I was more into Perfect Dark than Halo 1 at the time. That middle school coop playthrough was lots of fun at the time, though, as were a few system link parties.

 

I went through Halo 1 and a chunk of 2 not too long ago with a friend. There was some fun to be had but we got bored nearly halfway into the sequel. For both of these campaigns, it started feeling like we were running into the “bad” type of repetitive, the “padding” kind. We might skip straight to 3 or Reach at some point. Or we’ll just keep playing Deep Rock.

 

Also I’m still looking for a way into the alternate reality where Halo wasn’t turned into an FPS and Bungie kept it as an RTS like a futuristic Myth. If anyone knows a way into that timeline please let me know, thanks!

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18 hours ago, dasho said:

 

I don't remember this at all. Assuming you're talking about the OG XBox release, people thought the multiplayer and vehicles were radical. I don't recall anyone trying to compare it negatively to Quake or CounterStrike or such.

 

You sure about that? In particular the two weapon limit and lack of healthpacks was a major sticking point for a lot of people. Unfortunately a lot of that has been lost to time but I know what I saw. 

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49 minutes ago, BGrieber said:

Also I’m still looking for a way into the alternate reality where Halo wasn’t turned into an FPS and Bungie kept it as an RTS like a futuristic Myth. If anyone knows a way into that timeline please let me know, thanks!


Ask and ye shall receive.
 



These are the official ones, for xbox.



Otherwise, you have this mod for CNC3 Tiberium:
 


It's still in development and to me seems like developement hell. But the dev is still active, has their own discord and talks to the community. So they might still pull it off. Happy hunting, Spartan.

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Honestly......it seems like the turnaround has been recent, such as it is. At least until a few years ago, it seems like it was hard to go anywhere without some grumpy older gamer saying "Halo ruined FPS games" when in truth, the linearity that Halo gets trashed for had also been present in Half-Life. Maybe some people realize Halo is actually pretty fun if you give it a chance? Call of Duty and other MMS games that aren't Spec Ops: The Line for some reason aren't bad games necessarily, but there's a certain amount of cardboard lifelessness to them that just make them more disposable.

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halo's fuckin awesome, but mostly for atmosphere, story, level design, visuals, and music. the gameplay is the least interesting part, but its good enough to get passed the finish line to still be in the "awesome" category. plus the vehicles kick ass. (multiple asses, potentially, although this remains to be confirmed)

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12 minutes ago, LadyMistDragon said:

Honestly......it seems like the turnaround has been recent, such as it is. At least until a few years ago, it seems like it was hard to go anywhere without some grumpy older gamer saying "Halo ruined FPS games" when in truth, the linearity that Halo gets trashed for had also been present in Half-Life. Maybe some people realize Halo is actually pretty fun if you give it a chance? Call of Duty and other MMS games that aren't Spec Ops: The Line for some reason aren't bad games necessarily, but there's a certain amount of cardboard lifelessness to them that just make them more disposable.


Half Life is a little different from Halo in so far that at the time of it's release, aside from being a linear game, it was also a proof of concept. Particularly Half Life 2, which brought physics based puzzles front and center. At the time, the gravity gun alone was revolutionary. Halo doesn't do that.

Another major difference between Halo and Half-Life, and to a lesser degree, Halo and Call of Duty, is Bungie's love of maze-y corridors. It's broken up with the occasional outdoors section, but tech-base like corridors are really where it's at for the most part in the Halo campaign. Halo 2 less so than the others.

Finally, the final part of why Halo got singled out imo, is it's tendency to tell, not show. 90% of Halo as it pertains to the games is very confusing to a newcomer. Who actually are the covenant and what do they want? What are the UNSC beyond the generic "space marine corps"? The heck is a Forerunner, and how do they differ from the other 10 alien races which are all named relatively generically? Some hints of this are established in the games, but the majority of actual storytelling and lore is going to be in the novels, not the games.

If you only ever played Halo 1, 2 and 3, you'll likely have no idea how abusive and dirty the UNSC is. How Spartans are created. What exactly the relationship between Master Chief and some of the characters is. Across the years, people became more and more familiar with the series and this information is now more accessible, but at the time of Halo 2's release a decade and then some ago, there was very little in the way of "Why should I even care about this story and these characters?".

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i'm a new-school FPS fan, and the only Halo game i really LOVED is Halo 3. the multiplayer is insanely good, and the campaign was pretty great too.

it's funny, because the last "good Halo game" came out like 12 years ago. as time goes on, it's going to be another boomer shooter like everything else, while the Halo name is becoming less and less relevant to the wider gaming audience. other games (namely Doom) have once again taken back the single player campaign, and as much as some people on here would hate to admit it, even COD has managed to stay consistent in the multiplayer department over a long period of time.

 

so as the "retro FPS community" finally changed their views on Halo, people have already moved on. the series couldn't evolve to save it's life, and 343's management of the series has been laughable in recent years.

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Im in the "grew up with halo" crew, it was the first time i had ever seen the first person person perspective in a video game iirc. this doesnt mean i am particularly attached to the series in any way, it is just a fact of my life.

 

the only egregious design decisions in any of bungie's halo games are not mechanical, but rather the very literal "backtracking" that is in the first game. "backtrailing" might be more apt. the "go through the level, and then go through that same level again but in reverse" design was so much more apparent when i replayed it in 2019, and it does this at multiple times, with a chapter for each direction. smdh every time. if the marathon trilogy are doom clones, halo is definitely a half-life clone.

 

if anything, i "turned around" on halo around 2005-2006 because i was a contrarian kid who had just found out that there had been first person shooters on personal computers too.

 

on the whole (sound, visuals, level design and story), i still think halo is not as good as marathon 2 & infinity. Was it the scourge of the FPS so many folk (i, as a grumpy young g*mer, included) were convinced it was? Heck No. Theyre all solid games in with pretty worlds and some particularly pretty texture work, especially on the forerunner architecture.

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1 hour ago, LadyMistDragon said:

At least until a few years ago, it seems like it was hard to go anywhere without some grumpy older gamer saying "Halo ruined FPS games" when in truth, the linearity that Halo gets trashed for had also been present in Half-Life.


That seems like an odd thing for these nebulous “grumpy gamers” to be petty about. If I was one of them, I’d just make it simple and hate all linear FPS games - arrrrgh!

 

If anything, I would think those grumps to be upset with Halo being a “console first” shooter.

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2 hours ago, Mr. Freeze said:

 

You sure about that? In particular the two weapon limit and lack of healthpacks was a major sticking point for a lot of people. Unfortunately a lot of that has been lost to time but I know what I saw. 

 

Am I sure that I never encountered this? Yes. I'm not claiming that zero people every felt this way about Halo back in the day, but everyone I knew who played Halo usually also had access to a PC and didn't expect the same kinds of experiences or games on both. Reduced weapon limits and regenrating shields/whatnot make a lot more sense on a console where you've only got so many "keybinds" and the level of precision on an analog stick is nothing compared to a mouse. And, like I said, the split screen and vehicle handling were almost universally loved.

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My memory was that Halo was considered a successful console FPS - very much geared towards the stereotypical console experience (streamlined and presentation-heavy).  And that was fine, consoles didn't have much of a history of FPS games at that time beyond a couple of breakout hits (e.g. Goldeneye), so as a primarily PC player at the time I had no issue with it - it did what it set out to do rather well.  I never really played it (I tried the PC port and found it lacking) but I didn't have beef with the game.

 

Now, Call of Duty 2, which took many of the "streamlined" innovations Halo introduced and applied them to a PC game, now that I remember people have issues with.  Things like recharging shields being applied to health itself (they even dropped the GUI) felt like an intrusion of console sensibilities into the PC space.  That is really what felt the beginning of the end of AAA arcade-shooters.

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Here's the thing about Halo. I think while it introduced a lot of design elements that would form the basis for a generation of mediocre, bland FPS games in the mid-to-late 2000s and early 2010s, the original Halo trilogy was still using those game elements in ways that felt novel.

 

The 2-weapon limit was a byproduct of trying to make FPS games more console-friendly, by simplifying the weapon situation. But unlike today where most games base this limit around a loadout system where you define what weapons you carry until you die, Halo was still doing it in an inventive way: you could swap out weapons by picking up others you find in a level. This adds a sense of strategy around this limitation instead of dumbing it down.

 

As for cutscenes, I don't know where the idea that cutscenes are heresy for oldschool FPS comes from, because the fact of the matter is cutscenes were a part of even some of the best shooters of the 90s. Blood, the pinnacle of the build engine, had infamously shotty looking FMV cutscenes at the end of each episode. Did it detract from the game? No. Back to Halo however, I think while cutscenes are more prevalent, they're implemented in a manner that still feels really seamless. It fit the momentum of the campaign, so it never felt like a hinderance on the gameplay, to me at least.

 

Regenerating shields, I agree, it's a rather weak mechanic in terms of game design, eliminating the need to find medkits. This is something I liked about Combat Evolved, because that game still had health management despite having regenerating shields since it had both a shield and health bar.

 

I can't speak much on all the Halo campaigns, as I'm most familiar with Combat Evolved's campaign levels. But based on that, I do agree that the level design is not great. While there are some pretty cool set pieces here and there, the gameplay flow is very, very linear, and gets incredibly repetitive about halfway through.

 

But the thing about Halo is that it's strongest suit wasn't really its singleplayer. You have to remember, Halo was at the forefront of when online gaming on consoles was going mainstream. Halo 2 specifically defined a new generation of competitive gaming and has an enormous legacy in its online play. Bungie Halo's multiplayer (except for Reach's MP imo) was lightning in a bottle, it was a perfect blend of console-friendly simplicity and fast action that, while its success was replicated in games like Modern Warfare and the like, it never really got better than those original three Halo games until the return of the neo boomshoot era starting in the mid 2010s. 

 

So while I don't really consider classic Halo to be part of the same breed of FPS as games like Quake or Unreal Tournament, it is far from being a bad game. It's a great trilogy of games that other games were taking the wrong design lessons from, unfortunately.

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I hated Halo because slow and generic it was. My views have softened since and after playing Halo Reach, I can say atleast that there are much more worse FPS game series to play. But Halo games are pretty boring and have just this low energy feel to them. I however would rank them above the Call of Duty games, atleast Halo has some enemy variety.

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My only personal experience with Halo was in high school; I played the first one at a friend's house for maybe 20 minutes and the most notable thing was that he was impressed by me already knowing how to use dual analog controls for aiming and moving. I think Max Payne was the first game I played with that layout, but it's hard to remember now.

 

Anyway we played a few rounds and I remember thinking I'd rather be playing Perfect Dark, and so I never played it again, and never played any of the other ones. The End.

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So i got a confession to make regarding halo.....I grew up with the first three halo games and reach and i still play them to this day (forgive my water foul mouth but fuck halo 4, 5 and infinite and a bigger fuck you to 343i for ruining a once great franchises). You see i never even knew what Doom 1 and 2 we're as a kid so i don't really have the same nostalgia fliter as the rest of you but i do remember Doom 3 and thinking "i wanna try it someday" thank god i didn't back then and i played it a few years ago....didn't care for it to be honest.

 

Anyways the point is i grew up halo and i still go back because i missed the old days of running around, fighting trying not to die (regen health) and doing some dom the multi player, yes i am talking about tea baggin' folks.

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I've always liked Halo personally, the major drop-off point was Halo 4 for me because 343 can't fuck their way out of a paper bag and every good design decision they make like Warzone (Halo 5 32 player PVPVE, very fun at launch) is immediately squandered by the literal worst decisions I have ever seen (Making said game mode pay to win through loot boxes).

 

I'm not particularly familiar with the scorn retro FPS enthusiasts had against Halo, I remember people complaining about Doom 2016 being like Halo (which is grasping at rather ethereal, non-corporeal straws) but not much else.

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21 hours ago, banjiepixel said:

I hated Halo because slow and generic it was. My views have softened since and after playing Halo Reach, I can say atleast that there are much more worse FPS game series to play. But Halo games are pretty boring and have just this low energy feel to them. I however would rank them above the Call of Duty games, atleast Halo has some enemy variety.

"low-energy Halo, very low-energy, the born loser of FPS games."

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I definitely remember the Halo hate, because I was part of it.

 

What changed? I got older, I gave Marathon a shot after bouncing off it a couple times (it helped that Aleph One had evolved tremendously in the interim and someone had finally properly ported the original game to it) and decided to try Halo again and loved it. I still think it has some level design issues (the sequel is worse in that regard) but in general it's a work of genius. "The Silent Cartographer" is one of the greatest FPS levels ever made.

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On 11/22/2022 at 12:43 AM, AlexMax said:

And speaking of multiplayer, Halo 2's multiplayer was better than anything you could find on the PC, and I don't say this lightly.  It was one of the first games to rely solely on matchmaking and private lobbies instead of server browsers, and it was a breath of fresh air.  For one, I was shocked that I was finally able to play all of the levels and game modes that shipped with a multiplayer title, instead of the community hyper-fixating on the same 3-4 maps and 1-2 game modes over and over.  I was even more shocked that pretty much all of the levels were fun to play, felt like they had actually been playtested instead of haphazardly thrown together to fill a quota, and even accommodated multiple game modes effortlessly.  It's a masterclass of multiplayer game design, and even today I would rather play Halo 2-3 multiplayer than Quake III or UT2004.

 

Halo 2's multiplayer was certainly great but the matchmaking model would eventually be the downfall of multiplayer FPS. Putting everybody into a single queue destroyed the flourishing communities of people, engendered toxicity, and overall eventually made online play a miserable experience.

 

All that said I definitely remember the distaste PC FPS fans had for Halo at the time. Personally I enjoyed Halo CE on my PC but I could understand why people didn't like it. Nowadays given about 20 years of hindsight it's pretty clear that Counter-Strike has much more in common with the modern FPS than Halo ever did.

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Yeah WTF is that take, matchmaking is one of the absolute worst things to happen to online games besides SBMM

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