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.