Ya know, the more I think about this, the more I think, we're gonna do fine

 So....the GOP...they have nothing. They literally have nothing to campaign on but racism, islamophobia, and red scare tactics. Trump's calling El Sayed a communist. Mike Rogers is talking about helping hunt down Bin Laden and how El Sayed said we deserved 9/11. Like...what the actual fudge? Let's face it, we've known for a while that the GOP is intellectually bankrupt, but it's like they can't go 12 hours without showing their butts here. Seriously, we're not even 24 hours after the race was called and they're already going THIS unhinged. This is gonna be a fun election season if this is the best the GOP has. I thought they mightve actually been a threat. After all, Mike Rogers was relatively silent through the primary. He was sitting there with a poker face hiding his hand and now he's coming at us with a 7 high. It's like...wtf even is this?

Really, I'm tired of acting like the two sides are somehow equal to each other in terms of validity. The GOP has NOTHING. Like, they're barely stringing sentences together over there. And I aint saying you have to like El Sayed's politics, but holy fudge, if this is the best they got, we got this in the bag. The only thing we gotta worry about is the American people themselves being stupid here. Which...is...admittedly....a concern.  But....again, I'm just here like....really? That's all you got? I thought the republicans were actually gonna be scary. I swear, high school me could've come up with a better offense against El Sayed. Or maybe not. Idk. College me maybe? This is embarrassing. I'm embarrassed FOR you guys on the right. Holy crap. It's like your whole strategy is to scream about crap and lie and hope it works. To be fair, that's all they really got...

This is why I spend so much more of my time discussing the party infighting amongst democrats. I might not like the third way, but at least they have an intellectual framework for their ideas and it's worth engaging with. These guys, it's like that "why cant you just be normal" meme I saw recently. 

Mom: "I just want you to have food and healthcare!"

Kid: "Screams racial slurs"

That's where American discourse is honestly at right now...seriously... 

Republican infiltrators in the democratic primary?

 So....I have a friend from Michigan who explained to me that Michigan apparently has an open primary system, and given Mike Rogers was uncontested, there was apparently an effort by republicans to vote for Haley Stevens, and then abandon her for Mike Rogers in the general. Im not sure how reliable this is. It might not be reliable at all. But it would explain some things. Things like why the polls were off by like...9. Seriously, we're OUTSIDE of the margin of error now. El Sayed was expected to win by 10, won by 1. Like something is off there. But what if the pollsters measured actual democrats' responses and republicans showed up and skewed the results? That would explain some things. Like why the polls were off so much. As for the general, does this mean we're screwed? THe reason I was freaking out is if El Sayed was supposed to win by 10 and MASSIVELY underperformed, if he does the same in the general, that could be devastating to his numbers. Like he needs to OVERperform as it stands just to win. He has no comfortable buffer to underperform, and 8-9 points isnt an insignificant underperformance. That could be a sign of general election weakness. At the same time, if this is what happens after the GOP AND democrats AND AIPAC throw everything they have at him, well, there's hope. 

Anyway we're already seeing how the republican general election campaign is shaping up and it's just screaming about him being an Islamist and a communist so far. This party has no valid arguments so all they can do is the same fear mongering they've already been doing. If this was their best shot....we'll be fine. See you guys in November on this one. 

Abdul El Sayed wins; thoughts

 So....at around 2 AM they FINALLY called the race for Abdul El Sayed. What was supposed to be a roughly 10 point margin of victory was turned into a 2 point one, with lots of people saying polls were wrong. Well...yes and no. 

Again, polls have ERROR. In my own forecaosts, I assume a 4 point margin of error. Given that this applies to BOTH candidate, this gives a massive 8 point range the polls can be off in either direction. So we can expect the margin of victory for El Sayed to be between 2 and 18 with a 95% degree of confidence. When I said that I gave him around a 99% shot at winning, that's because the probability of the polls being off by 10 is about 1%. And as it turned out...that didn't happen. We just ended up at the extreme end of the 95% range roughly speaking. This was like a 2nd-3rd percentile margin of victory for Abdul El Sayed, a small margin of victory, but a victory nevertheless.  

Now, my big concern is where this leaves us with the general. As things stand, Haley Stevens was leading Mike Rogers by around 1.7%, giving her around a 66-67% chance of victory. El Sayed trails Rogers by 0.3%, this gives him a 47% chance of victory. This is not fatal to El Sayed in and of itself. Stevens is not super strong here, but El Sayed is not super weak either. Still, Stevens WAS the better candidate for the general, despite my own preference for El Sayed, and if El Sayed is gonna underperform by 8 in the primary, does that mean he stands a chance in the general? Hard to say. Quite frankly, the general looks very competitive, and once again, error will determine who wins in all likelihood. If democrats overperform, El Sayed wins. If they underperform, Rogers wins. It's that simple. But El Sayed's underperformance was significant here. We had a very comfortable margin and El Sayed only won BECAUSE he had that much of a buffer. If it were within the margin of error, El Sayed would have lost here. Because again, we got just about the worst possible outcome in that 2-18 point possibility range. We ended up only winning by 2. 

Now, to be fair, polling was funky here. After McMorrow dropped out, polling was all over the place, but then consensus polling in the weekend leading up to the election seemed to coalesce around El Sayed in a way that gave him a double digit lead. It was sudden. But with multiple polls showing similar outcomes, plausible. Well....again, while he won...it was close. It is possible that the error happened because lots of people had to make up their mind last minute and they went in favor of stevens. Maybe the sampling was off. Who knows. But yeah. Again, this just shows how funky polling can be and how imprecise these forecasts really are. Still, the model TECHNICALLY held up. El Sayed won, so...yeah. 

Anyway, I just hope this doesnt mean anything for the general. Michigan is strangely in play for how blue of a year 2026 is shaping up to be, and El Sayed is admittedly the weaker general election candidate. If we get a similar underperformance in the general, we're screwed. of course, given Haley stevens was only 2 points better here, she'd be screwed too. D+1.7 actually means R+6.3 to D+9.7. R+0.3 means D+7.7 to R+8.3. Ya know? Again, this is why i didnt sweat El Sayed's electability in the primary, but if he underperforms like this, I got a bad feeling about the general. I guess we'll have to see though. El Sayed was my favored candidate so I'm glad he won, but yeah. This was nerve wracking and the general is too. Not only could this race decide the control of the senate, but also is a test balloon for the viability of progressive left candidates in a swing state. if El Sayed screws this up, centrists will just hold this over us to push electability arguments and we might end up with more moderate candidates in the future. So yeah, let's see where this goes. Challenge 1 over, but challenge 2 is about to begin. 

Still, I feel better about El Sayed than I do Hong in Wisconsin. If you notice I didn't endorse her. Yeah, it's her electability or lack thereof. Nothing against her, but uh...YIKES, her numbers are bad. Even I dont wanna touch THAT. El Sayed though? As you can tell, it will only matter if the race is super close. If El Sayed loses by less than 2 points in November, Stevens probably would've won. otherwise it wouldnt have mattered. 

Navigating the divide between centrists and leftists...again....

 *sigh*, it's a big topic these days, idk what to say, but Kyle Kulinski is kinda having it with Bill Maher and I wanted to give my thoughts. 

On the one hand, Kyle has a point. If you're willing to vote for the republican party in this day and age, you're on the right, period. Even more so, for all the talk of how illiberal the left is, the right is basically fascist. I don't care if you think the left is too far left, holy crap, the right is a bigger problem NOW. 

The problem with the left is if socialists and communists take over the democratic party 10-20 years ago, THAT'S a threat. And LONG TERM, maybe it is. I certainly am leery of DSA for that reason these days. A little bit of them is good, and will give us social democratic goals. Most DSA candidates are running on social democratic priorities, and even if further left, yeah, we're gonna see good results short term, even if a few of them are far left.

The problem comes as they gain more power. What if they become a majority of the democratic party? or a majority of the government? Well, then we literally got blue MAGA. yeah, Again, if this is our tea party moment, we do gotta worry that maybe in 10-20 years from now, we'll have a MAGA moment if these guys gain TOO much power, and start throwing out ALL moderates. We need SOME. I mean, keep in mind my overall philosophy. Conservatives (as in, conserve the status quo, not the whackjob "regressives" we call "conservatives), progressives. The two need to operate in harmony against each other. Progressives try to change things, but conservatives stop it from being too much too fast. Right now, we got conservative democrats and regressive republicans. That's a HUGE problem. We want the democrats to be progressive again. We just can't afford for them to be TOO progressive where they start changing too much, too fast, and too irresponsibly. It's a balance. And ideally, we get it right. But right now, we need more progressive politicians. If some of them are DSA, well, a little DSA won't kill us. It's when they start becoming more than 50% of the government that we begin having problems. 

And, keep in mind, unlike what Bill Maher says, many progressives, even DSA ones, aren't full on seize the means of production.  Most of them want goals aligned with social democracy, at least in the short term. Higher wages, medicare for all, free college, public housing, a green new deal. hell, Darializa Avila Chevalier, for for all of her faults, is pro UBI of all things. Bill Maher is freaking out about Zohran Mamdani and his socialist grocery stores. it's just wild. There's red scaring over literal communism, but then there's crapping on good things.

I ain't saying we all have to agree with every left wing proposal. Im not big on a green new deal. I thought Biden's BBB framework was better on that. I ain't even die hard on medicare for all these days. I'm actually for an aggressive public option instead. On the flip side, a lot of other people don't like my UBI ideas. We're not gonna all agree. But we should agree that things are fundamentally fudged and we need the biggest recalibration of the economy since the original new deal, and we should pass a suite of progressive legislation to get that done. If you wanna be on the team, we at least need to agree that broadly. I dont want centrist liberalism. Nor do I want communism. I want social democracy. But, at this point, it seems like to get that, we need a broad tent, with some to my right, and some to my left. That I can accept. 

In this moment, if you freak out over the mere thought of social democracy, like people like Bill maher are doing, feel free to leave the democrats and never come back. Really. I'm done with centrists who oppose even social democracy. If youre concerned about literal communism that's one thing, but if you just hate the idea of all progress, you're not on the team, get out. Likewise, if you're so far to the left nothing but literal communism will satisfy you, well....go have fun voting for a third party that gets <1% of the vote, you're not on the team either. 

If we can agree on social democratic goals now, you're on the team. We need to move left of where we are. That doesnt mean we need to go FAR FAR left, and again, we need to restrain the coalition from doing that long term. But that doesnt mean we moral panic over people who want socdem priorities. Seriously, this is MY beef. If you look at mere SOCDEM priorities, and you cant agree on THAT? Feel free and vote republican, you're not on the team. Like seriously, if trump's fascism is more acceptable than you than say, zohran mamdani's leadership in new york, or abdul el sayed in michigan, or troy jackson in maine, well....idk what to tell you, you're tastes suck and youre pretty much a republican to me. So go have fun with that. 

And for people who wonder what the hell I'm thinking calling people republicans and telling them to vote that way, thinking that that's a suicidal strategy, no, it's not. It's actually genius. Here's the thing. Centrist democrats demotivate the base. For all the talk of how we need swing voters, we bring them in by giving them something to vote for. The answer isnt to always moderate to the point we get this bland flavorless politics made in a lab (which is what mainstream democratic politics is). It's to enthuse people to get them to vote for you. And to basically reverse uno chuck schumer, for every moderate republican we alienate, maybe we'll bring in 2 working class voters who would otherwise sit it out or vote republican. Seriously, elections are won by enthusiasm. over the course of my life, the side that panders to annoying centrist types almost always loses. The only election in the past 30 or so years I've seen a plainly uncharismatic candidate win was 2020, and that's because trump governed so badly anyone could win. Even then, he only barely won. In 2008, I was part of that centrist demographic, and you know what? The democrats didnt need me, they needed millions of enthused young people who wanted change. And they lost subsequent elections because they couldnt maintain their momentum, because centrism is a massive momentum killer in politics. No one LIKES centrists. They tolerate centrists. And centrists create low energy coalitions that lose elections.

Hell, if we throw those centrists out and they vote republican and republicans pander to them, it kills two birds with one stone. First of all, it moderates them and their priorities, which neutralizes the fascism threat. Second of all, it shrinks their coalition because more conservative values voters will stay home if they dont elect crazies. And that's what we want. A more moderate republican party and a more progressive democratic party is exactly what we need. If we neutralize MAGA by demotivating them and flooding them with centrists who moderate everything they do, then that's a win. If we move the overton window to the left with a progressive populist coaliton, that's a win. So no, it's not stupid to tell these guys to leave the democrats. I'm fully convinced whatever side gets stuck with these losers won't win elections, and that voters will vote for progressive candidates, at least in the short term.

I do think voters will eventually tire of populism and change, but only after the first big wave of change, which fixes many of the issues. The coalition that was fired up for change in the 1930s and 1940s was significantly more divided by the 1960s when Kennedy and Johnson were in office. The reagan coalition that was fired up in the 80s and 90s became divided by the 2000s and was becoming anemic in the 2010s until trump came around. And even then, I'm convinced trump is the final hurrah of that coalition unless they can radically change our democracy to run by permanent minority. Which is why it's so openly fascist. This is the last gasp of the reagan coalition fighting for its life. If we can form a new coalition around social democracy, that will hold for a while, and then eventually fall apart as well, while politics returns to "normal" for a time. But we gotta get through this change wave first. 

And yeah, that's my strategy. Have a huge wave of change. Maybe a second smaller wave 20 years from now. And have some normalcy in between. Keep the leftists from fully taking over the democrats, but keep it progressive at the same time. Really. The threat of DSA and their illiberal tendencies are a problem in the long term. But right now, the big threat is trump. I aint concerned about DSA taking over government and doing anything radical any time soon. And if we get to that point, well, it means we succeeded with social democracy, and the rest of the overton window will hopefully be hard against them. Even I'll become conservative by that point, pulling us back to sanity. 

But yeah. It's like worrying that the heat will cook us alive one day when we're currently freezing to death. That's what all of this feels like. It's stupid. Let's raise the thermostat to a comfortable level before we worry about whether it will eventually get TOO hot.  

Best GPUs for low end gamers?

 So....after seeing a dude buy a GT710 and being like THIS SUCKS! I wanted to look at what the best deals are on the extreme low end for GPUs. Now, a big factor here in this. I'm only looking at NEW. At the price ranges we're talking, you're probably better off buying used. BUT, given the unreliability of the used market in terms of pricing, possible issues with used GPUs, etc., I understand why some might want used. For the record, I would probably recommend you save up, as we will soon see (and I'll tell you the cheapest GPUs remotely worth the cash), but yeah. All of this data will be derived from PCpartpicker. 

So the bottom end of the market seems to start around $60 and has a lot of GT710 and quadro video cards. I dont know much about quadros, I'm under the impression they're workstation cards and people rarely bought them for gaming. I guess that does set the baseline. The big problem with them is they seem to lack drivers for games, so game compatibility and optimization is gonna be iffy at best. 

For $60 you can get the quadro 2000D. It's on par with a 9800 GT, which was a high end card when I got into dedicated PC gaming in 2008. Integrated wise it's comparable to, say, an intel UHD 620/630 or thereabouts. It's half as powerful as modern integrated and IN THEORY, can play like, gen 7 games up to around 2011-2013. They might play low end games past that, but take note of the flaws with drivers. 

For $75-80 you can get a Quadro P600/620. Those are twice as powerful, approaching a GT 1030 level of performance. Just keep in mind the lack of gaming drivers. In theory, they should be able to run games through 2014-2015ish, and lower end ones past that. But yeah. This is on par with modern integrated solutions like a intel UHD 770 or RX vega 11. Again, if you have a modern PC with modern integrated, you got this level of performance already. It literally comes with your computer.

At $100, you get the GT 1030, which IS a gaming card and will have gaming drivers. Again, we're talking 2014-2015 being the limit for actual decent performance in modern games of the time, with older games past that still working. If a game requires something like a HD 5850/HD6850 or GTX 460/650 ti style card, this is on par with THAT. 

Id probably buy the 1030 over the quadro just to get actual software support. Pascal was supported until fairly recently so there should be lots of game ready drivers for it.

At $140 there's a GTX 1650 super available. It is 4x as powerful as a GT 1030, and should run games through 2022. It's a solid choice, although it's disappointing given this was a $160ish card in its heyday. 

There's also the Arc A380, which is weaker at the same price. I wouldnt recommend it vs the 1650 super due to intel drivers being iffy and it being worse, but it is an alternative if the 1650 super dries up. 

There's an Arc A580 available at $200. Again, drivers are iffy, but this thing pulls in performance up to around a RX 6600, which used to be the king of the $200ish range until the supply dried up. 

For $10 more at $210 there's the RTX 3050 6 GB. The 6 GB is gonna cripple it and its performance is weaker than the A580, but nvidia generally has better software support. 

At $260 there's the RTX 3050 8 GB which is WTF, this one WAS $230-240 not long ago. Anyway, if you want something for MODERN gaming, this is what gets you in the door if you dont wanna risk it with the A580. It's the bare minimum, dont expect much from it, but at least every game will RUN on it...for now at least. Kinda sad THIS is what you get. A few years ago, you could get RX 6600s and 6650 XTs for less which were more powerful than this and had better drivers than intel cards. Disappointing.

RIght now there's a deal for $260 for the RX 7600, this takes precedence over the 3050, and basically at where I'd say the minimum for a comfortable experience is. Normally, this is $280-300 these days, but for $260, dang. I know its not that impressive, given it launched at $250 3 years ago, but that's the market. I dont make up the rules here. And i hate the rules too.

The 5050 is available at $300. This is on par with the 7600, but has better (nvidia) tech. Again, its kinda bad this is STILL $300ish. This is basically on par with a 3060/4060 which has been around this price point for years now. 

Anyway above $300 youre not really at the low end anymore. Heck, by rights you shouldnt be above $200 but again, market is market. Still, I'll keep going.

$310 there's the Arc B580, which is on par with the 7600/5050 but has 12 GB VRAM. I wouldnt really recommend it due to drivers. 

At $350 there's the 5060, which still has 8 GB VRAM but is 50% better than the 5050 roughly. Worth the upsell there (yeah this is why Im still going). 

At $360 theres the 9060 XT 8 GB, which i wouldnt recommend over the 5060 given all things being equal: Nvidia > AMD > Intel > workstation cards. 

Theres a 5060 ti 8 GB for $400, although Im not sure id buy the 8 GB version at that price.

At $410 theres the 7700 XT which is roughly as powerful but with more VRAM.

And finally at $450 theres the 9060 XT 16 GB, which I'd say is the most expensive card I'll cover. Has similar performance as the 5060/5060 ti/7700 XT but the 16 GB VRAM makes it more futureproof. 

And yeah. At the end of the day, which of these would I say are the BEST deals? Probably these:

GT 1030 (MAKE SURE YOU GET DDR5)- $100

GTX 1650 Super- $140

Arc A580- $200

RX 7600- $260

RTX 5050- $300

RTX 5060- $350

RX 7700 XT- $410

RX 9060 XT 16 GB- $450

Yeah....

Surprised the 3050 didnt make it in there but the Arc A580 was so good and the 7600 was cheap enough to supplant it. Often times the 3050 8 GB is my bare minimum recommendation for new games around $230, but the A580 was significantly better for less, the 3050 was $260, and the 7600 was ALSO $260, so...7600. 

Anyway, make sure you further research ALL of these cards before you purchase if you take my advice. Especially the intel cards and workstation cards here. Seriously. I normally go Nvidia or AMD gaming cards and dont trust anything else in practice. ANd yeah. Make sure you buy what you want. Dont buy something and then be like "this sucks". Basically anything lower then the A580/7600/5050 wont run new games well. I aint even sure about the A580 there. But yeah, if you want a quality modern experience thats your baseline. The lower you get the crappier it gets. Low end GPUs is like boots theory, you spend less, you get WAY less, sometimes its better to spend a little more to get something a lot better. THis is also why I went up to $450 because sadly....that theory is true up to that point. And even beyond it. once you get into the $500+ range youre dealing with 4070/5070, RX 9070 tier cards, and yeah. It just keeps going. 

But yeah this is why i always complain. The sub $200 market is dead. $200-300 is on life support, and most modern releases cost over $300 and sometimes into the $400 range and yeah this is ridiculous. I remember when $100 was low end, $250 was midrange, and $400-500 was high end. It's crazy. And we cant just say "but inflation" on this one. Inflation has only been like 40-50% since 2010ish? Yeah. So no excuses for this. Just corporate greed. 

ANyway, that's basically what I came up with, and yeah, I wanted to do this so people dont buy fricking GT 710s or even worse 210s. Seriously, theres A LOT of ewaste i skipped here. If it aint on here, suffice to say its probably not a good value. 

Discussing FiftyPlusOne's midterm model

 So, FiftyPlusOne (previously FiveThirtyEight) released their midterm forecast and it's looking....pretty reasonable. I largely concur with it in broad ways, although I may differ on details. They give the democrats a 56% chance of winning the senate, a mere point off from my 55% forecast (and theirs was 55% earlier). On actual senate predictions, we vary, they tend to think Michigan has a much higher chance of going blue, whereas they seem to think Nebraska is more likely to go red. Their probability for each race seems far more....likely than my forecast. I tend to be more likely to reach extreme outcomes more easily (like 97% certainty, whereas they'll be at 85%), but these are all methodology issues. 

As discussed in 2024, my model is more simple. It's polling only (outside of placeholder data where I estimate the outcome based on previous cycles), and merely represents a snapshot of where the race IS, not where it may be several months from now. Meanwhile, 538/50+1 likes to do things like do long term forecasts based on fundamentals. I guess if you do a fundamentals model, yeah, youll be more likely to make michigan blue and nebraska red. If anything, that might even be more correct. I just let my model model. Sometimes the data picks up on things that seem counterintuitive, but end up happening, like the blue state weakness in 2024 in states like new jersey, illinois, and new york. So who knows? And I guess you gotta temper certainty when the election is months out and technically anything can happen. Im fine with adjusting things on the fly, but yeah these guys just do things differently.

My own house model is currently more fundamentals based given the sheer lack of polling. They come up with 231 house seats and an 87% chance for democrats. Again, willing to split the difference is this is a long term forecast and not a snapshot. My current model is like 233 with a 97% chance. It was 231 with a 96% chance this morning but RCP updated their GCV polling average and plugging it into my model boosts dems chances. 

I will say that with the lower probability, they account for a higher range of outcomes than mine. In the senate, they seem to think that democrats will get between 47-55 seats, with their median outcome at 51. My own model agrees with 51 being the median (technically 51-52 due to iowa being a tossup), but and my range of outcomes is 46-54. Not a huge difference but it is weird seeing up to 55. Do they really think states like south carolina, montana, or florida can flip? Well, they have a higher probability than my model so I guess they do.

THe house is where this really gets funky. They seem to have outcomes ranging from like 211 on the low end for democrats to around 253 on the high end. My own model has a 95% confidence interval between 220-244 currently. Even if we account for the sudden 1 point shift we're still talking 217-244. This isnt to say outliers outside of these ranges cant happen, but I tend to try to stick to around 95-96% confidence (two tailed). Still looking at their charts, it's the same. If we include extreme outliers they got senate outcomes with 58 dem senate seats and 280something house seats. No way that's gonna happen. My model doesnt even account for extreme possibilities like that, since once we get beyond 99.8-9% or so I'm just like "let's just say it's 100%." 

Again, interesting to see the methodology differences here. I'll stick to my own model out of pride but yeah. We'll see. I find my model tracks pretty well in practice. Aint perfect, but i aint expecting it to be. Again, it's the AK47 of election models. Simple, easily accessible, it just works. Might not be the most accurate or sophisticated in the world but it gets the job done. Sophisticated models are a double edged sword, the additional complexity allows more accuracy in theory, but given the raw noise of probability, it can backfire. We'll see who is more accurate on election day. At least it's better than their 2024 "50% no matter what" forecast they seemed to have. 

Speaking of 2024, let's look at their final forecast.

So, they had it 50-50, and the deciding factor was polling error. That's about where I was. Funny how I can have a simple model, they have a complex one, and they end up in the same place more or less. Goes to show how even the best models are gonna have error and inaccuracies, same as mine. On the state level they seemed to do what my model did, with MI and WI leaning left, but they also though PA leaned slightly left too. So they technically had harris winning. I know it's being really nitpicky, given a 0.6% difference between theirs and my model, but mine was actually ever so slightly more accurate in that regard (although I was personally even more bullish toward harris where i thought the error would go in her favor). Still, they knew that polling was gonna be inaccurate, and estimated it being off by 3.8 points in either direction. And yeah....that would lead to either 226-312 as we saw.....or 319-219, depending the direction it went in. 

In the house, they came to roughly the same conclusion I did. Slight dem advantage but virtually a dead heat. In the senate they gave the republicans a 92% shot whereas my model was at 87%....and yeah. Very minor differences. Again. Really goes to show how my model punches above its weight. Only slight differences from theirs as of election day. 

So interesting model, let's see how ours compare in 2026. 

Discussing the decline of Halo

 So...Halo "Campaign Evolved" released recently to mixed reception and there's been a lot of talk about the decline of Halo. The new game is basically combat evolved (Halo 1) again, but remade. While the game comes off as a cash grab, and some aspects of it like the cut scenes and voice acting are mid, it doesn't look bad. My big issue with it is I don't have an interest spending $50 on a remake. I'm gonna just play MCC and if I want to recommend halo to people, I'll still recommend MCC as you get 6 games for the price of one. While there were some awesome sales of it and those sales have dried up since the older version directly competes with the remake, Id still recommend MCC full price for those who wanna get into the series. 

But yeah. A lot of people are saying the series isn't what it once was. And after listening to Asmongold watch some weirdo anti woke right winger going on about how halo went woke and how 343 hates the military and religion or something, I wanted to discuss it myself. Because that opinion? Well, let's just say its really really dumb. 

The deevolution of single player

 A lot of people really point to the handing off of the franchise to 343 studios after Halo Reach as the beginning of the fall of the series, and while 343 certainly isn't innocent, I am of the opinion decline was inevitable. As I see it, the OG trilogy was perfect. Halo 1-3 had a complete story arc that was coherent, made sense, and was 10/10. The series was complete after that, and Halo 3 was the zenith of the series. There was no going back after that. 

While Halo 4 and 343's takeover of the series did bring a lot of negative changes. The art style was grittier and felt off. The lore was heavily retconned to allow for the new forerunner enemy, and it just generally missed the mark. The real problem began soon after Halo 3. You see, after Halo 3, the series was complete, it was perfect. And I'm not gonna lie, i think the decline started with ODST and Reach. 

 ODST felt mediocre. It focused on these ODST marines and not chief, and I just generally found the story uninteresting. The environments were bland and felt repetitive. The lack of flood and ONLY covenant made the game feel one dimensional. While most halo games feature battlefields in different biomes against different factions of enemies, ODST represented a shift toward one bland biome more or less, and one faction. This made the campaign feel more one dimensional.  

Halo Reach was also controversial for me. While the environments had more variety than ODST, it just felt like the same problems, and while people blame 343 and 4 for retconning the canon, Reach's story line seemed to contradict the book "The Fall of Reach" and I really didnt like that. After Reach, I stopped caring about Halo for a while. I got bored with the series. 1-3 were amazing, ODST and Reach felt mid, and I kinda skipped 4 until I found it in a bargain bin years later. 

4 did butcher the canon further. But at this point, i didn't care. I started checking out at the tail end of Bungie's control of the franchise, and I honestly believe ODST and Reach were the beginning of the decline. However, 4 clearly continued that direction. 

Honestly? I blame capitalism for this one. With a commercial success like Halo, the franchise had to continue putting out games and expanding. Even if the game was complete. Now, ODST and Reach were somewhat logical expansions. ODST was a short story between 2 and 3, Reach was a prequel. They had material for new games. But going on into a new arc beyond 3 was probably a mistake. The flood were taken care of, the war with the covenant was over. It was a good time to just end the franchise. But again, money machine had to make more money, so they persisted with new games. And 343 just wasn't up to the task of bringing the franchise into the future. 

Despite this, 4 wasnt even a bad game. The forerunners were a crime against halo lore, and not as fun of a faction as the flood, but they did add some variety to the game. And the environments were good, the campaigns were good. There's a reason halo 4 is my 4th favorite halo campaign ahead of ODST and reach but behind the trilogy. It wasnt bad. Wasnt amazing, but wasn't bad. 

Now 5...5 was bad. I didnt play it since I didnt own an xbox one and they never ported it to PC, but I did watch a full play through of it. And it was kind of a crime against the franchise. It just suuuuuckkkkkeeeedddd. Like, wtf were they thinking? Game play looked okay, but yeah, I can see why this one flopped. 

And infinite....well....5 sucked so bad that arc off screen, fast forwarding to the aftermath of untold events not directly seen in game. Again, did I mention 343 are terrible story tellers? They are. Anyway, infinite kinda had some of the same issues as ODST and reach. Mostly fighting a single faction. This time in an open world...where the world felt mostly like a bunch of the same. The game played like halo far cry edition. The open world was mildly fun, the actual campaign sucked. The story kinda sucked. The environments were boring and repetitive. It was mid. And yeah. Halo infinite is a game i struggle to play in the hierarchy because its just so different than the others. Based purely off of the traditional campaign it feels awful, but i did enjoy the open world and some moments here and there. I cant hate it, but I dont particularly love it, now that I've sat on it for a few years now. It's okay. Somewhere in the tier with ODST and reach IMO maybe. 

And now we got this remake that no one asked for, that while not terrible from what I've seen of it, seems lacking in the delivery, and it seems clear that the creators are so creatively bankrupt they're in the "let's recreate our own best hits because anything else we do just pisses people off", not realizing how the community is a bunch of whiny people stuck in the mid 2000s and who hate on anything new, even if it's just the old repackaged (there, I said it). To me it just screams that they have no idea what they're doing, they wanna make money, but their actual own ideas suck, seem to destroy the lore and make the franchise worse and worse, so they're playing it safe and still somehow fail. 

But yeah, to sum it up....343 taking over the franchise with 4 marks where the public acknowledges decline, but again, I kinda fell out of love with the series with ODST and Reach. Even those games, which are very revered by the community, just felt mid compared to the original trilogy. I'm of the opinion that the series probably should have stopped and had nowhere to go after 3. It was complete, it was perfect, and trying to expand it was a mistake. Even I was like "why dont they do reach?" at the time, but even that ended up kinda butchering the franchise for me. It just didn't land.

Multiplayer

 So I didnt play multiplayer at the time. i didnt get into it until 2019 with MCC on PC. But tracing what happened, my opinion kind of follows my single player logic as well. 

Honestly, here's an unpopular opinion. Halo was never actually good. like most early FPS games, it was actually rather awkward and didn't age well. It took off because it just happened to be in the right place at the right time, coinciding with the rise of console online multiplayer, and halo 2 just happened to be the face of xbox live at the time. Halo 3 ended up continuing that trend, and while neither 2 nor 3 were BAD, I mean...were they really good? In retrospect, no. But again, right place at the right time. 

So why did they decline? Because they were darned if they did and darned if they didnt. Because the OG games werent really good, they needed to evolve and modernize. but because the halo community is rather...conservative to the point that they see the introduction of sprint as a cancer on the franchise, any innovations to try to improve it end up being divisive. So adding power ups like sprint and armor lock ended up alienating the purists, meaning reach was the beginning of the decline. Again, 2 and 3 were seen as perfect on the eyes of the community, but as the series tried to evolve and modernize with reach, the chances ended up dividing the community.

4 tried to make the series more like call of duty, which caused the purists to lose their crap, because many online FPS communities think emulating COD in any way is evil and causes insane derangement syndrome. But yeah, loadouts? People lost their crap, even though i didn't think they were bad. ANd of course, sprint. OMG WE CANT HAVE SPRINT IN A HALO GAME! THATS HERESY! Like, really, wtf are we doing here? I really hate the halo community sometimes, they're so dumb. But at the same time, that's the problem. The series struggled to adapt and bring in new audiences, and old audiences freaked out over changes made to the game.

5 overhauled the game and added insane movement mechanics. It seemed to be an overcompensation of 4 being "too casual" so they made 5 a hardcore sweatfest. Which just alienated the casual half of the community. Fun fact, I DID play some halo 5, as 5 has a PC version that can only play custom games. So I have played it. Feels like crap, it's a total hot mess partially due to poor optimization and partially due to the game genuinely kinda sucking, but yeah, suffice to say I was impressed and it's by far the worst single player experience barring maybe CE's multiplayer mode. 

Actually I skipped one. Halo 2 anniversary remade parts of halo 2 in halo 4's engine. It's in MCC, it was fun, arguably the best halo game prior to infinite MP wise, but again, community freaked out. Apparently because it didnt play EXACTLY like 2004 halo 2 it was bad. Like, really, halo purists are something else. Hell half of them complain about MCC halo 2 and 3 because the netcode is slightly different than the xbox live versions of the OG games or...something. Idk. Again, the community is one of the most miserable I've ever met. Nothing makes them happy, not even remakes. 

Halo infinite was decent IMO, it attempted to modernize the series, and it hit all the right notes, but then the devs mismanaged it horribly in the early years due to sheer laziness and incompetence, and new content was painfully slow to the point that by the time the game got new content in meaningful amounts like 95% of players were gone for good by that point. I remember BTB went down like a month after launch and the devs took TWO MONTHS to fix it. They literally put the game out the door right before christmas and went on vacation until january and if the game went to hell in the mean time, well...so be it. Make do with what it was. And then they took a month to fix it after. yeah, they did that. Again they butchered it.

Still, there were a lot of aspects outside of their control too. The fact is, by 2021, gaming changed. Multiplayer changed. Everything was battle royales and soon extraction shooters (the new big thing recently), and traditional multiplayer shooters are dying. And halo just....is no longer the name it was back in the 2000s. People want something different. They want hyper competitiveness. Large worlds, streaming. I mean, as a millennial, i hate those changes too. But yeah, Halo just cant adapt to the modern era well. It was by far the best, most modern feeling halo game after playing all of MCC and finding it dated, but does that save it?

And the community. OMFG the community. It reminds me of the UT4 days and how THAT series imploded. They're so miserable they make the battlefield boomers look sane. They complain about sprint, they complain about the game being free. They complain about cosmetics. They just find tons of reasons to complain. Dont get me wrong, there were legit criticisms of infinite. But the criticisms that often got heard and repeated were often just....sheer stupidity. Seriously. This series is basically unreal tournament at this point. It's DOA and doesnt even realize it. They cant bring in new audiences, the old audience complains about everything they do. They cant win. The series had its moment back in the 2000s, it probably should've ended gracefully back then, and the fact that they keep making game after game that has the same core issues with failing to make the community happy while failing to bring in new audiences is just evidence that it no longer has the sauce and should probably just be abandoned like UT was. I hate to say it, I like halo itself, BUT....yeah, its way past its prime and its never gonna be the cash cow it was back in the day. 

And now we got campaign evolved, a remake of 1. It has no multiplayer, but yeah...same issues on the SP side. The purists hate it, picking it apart for not being exactly like the 2001 version. IM not sure new audiences are interested. I dont think it looks terrible but having watched a few hours of it it looks cringe. I dont feel motivated to buy it at all. It feels like a cash grab, and yeah. Again, I just feel like the series is dead and people dont even realize it yet. There's no salvaging it. i guess remakes to make money machine go brr is the best they can do. But that's about it. And even then....it's not like the remake is superior to the original in every way either. 

So...yeah. That's my view. I just wanted to share it.