'Halo': A Tragic Masterpiece in Gaming

The Halo franchise for me was, and still is to some extent, a huge part of my life. Having put countless hours into the gaming powerhouse, I have a relationship with the games I could only hope to replicate with real actual people.

To make things clearer, I’ll give a little of the history I share with these games. Picture the scene: it’s 2007, you’re an 8-year-old boy whose only gaming experience so far is hardcore Pokemon and I’m talking picking a fire starter when you know fine well the first two gyms are super effective against you, I was unstoppable, and because of my extremely useful talents as a Pokemon master, I was getting a little bored with Pokemon and needed something new to sink my tiny, still-not-adult teeth into, and that’s when my brother bought Halo 3. My life changed. At first I would only watch him play little snippets of levels but I was immediately engrossed in the fascinating world of life and death as humans battled it out with a far more advanced alien race with colourful, vibrant landscapes with compelling characters and story all the while being a badass 7 foot space warrior. I was sold, if you couldn’t tell, and thus started my journey into console gaming.

I bought an Xbox as soon as I could and with it my very own copy of Halo 3 and I will happily say that it is still one of my favourite games to this day and over the years some of my best friendships were made just sitting playing split screen and tearing into a few Covenant brutes.

I could talk for hours about Halo 3 but I can already see people clicking off so I’ll get to the bigger point. Halo isn’t Halo anymore. A huge reason for that is simply because it’s a completely different studio making the Halo games so there are obviously going to be changes but here’s my opinion on 343 Industries: they are excellent game designers, their UI isn’t clunky or difficult to dissect, and their games play smoothly and are easy to pick up. They have fun engaging gameplay that is fun for beginners but also challenging enough to keep professional sweats—as we call them—engaged as well. They have so many quality of life improvements like the addition of aiming down sights in Halo 5 that’s still a little sore to the Halo community but it is a fun mechanic, but here’s where the issue lies. You could argue 343’s games are good but they’re not good Halo games. We all know the controversy surrounding the addition of sprint which sent the Halo community into a meltdown and this is my point—sprint is an excellent game mechanic allowing for fast paced action; however IT’S NOT HALO! You’ll be hearing this quite a lot.

Let’s talk about the story. The first three Halo games at the core were really simple stories with a masterful artwork that complicated it just enough to have that balance. Here’s what I mean. The story is essentially crazy religious people worship massive artifacts and want to activate them for "the Great Journey" but it turns out those artifacts are just mad powerful weapons and good guys need to stop them, that’s it! So add a paint job and set it far into the future, add aliens and spaceships and that adds just enough creativity and complications that a simple story is all you need. This is a theme for all of Bungie’s Halo games, simple stories but this allowed for more focus on the characters and the world. That’s 343’s problem. So much happens in their story you never stop to understand what on Earth is going on. There are subplots and over complicated emotions leading to confusion to the player and you’re too busy trying to work out what’s going on so that you can’t appreciate the characters or world which is rather ironic because that’s what 343 set out to do in the first place.

The gameplay of Bungie’s Halo was unique but I think perfected in Halo: Reach. There was no real sprint—well sort of, I’ll address that—so you would walk everywhere and the shooting mechanics were fairly simple and very forgiving as only a few select guns had scopes so accuracy had to be a little forgiving but nonetheless it was an effective style that like I said was perfected in Halo: Reach. I loved that game. I mean the story was okay. It did what it had to but the multiplayer was fantastic to the point I could write a whole article about it, which is actually a good shout, but it was competitive, extremely fun, and did actually require some level of skill, unlike Call of Duty. Yeah I said it, but anyway it was great with the added armour abilities, one of them being sprint, dun dun duuun. It offered varied gameplay that was engaging. Now 343’s Halo is very different or rather more specifically, Halo 5 is very different. Sprinting is now just one of your abilities. There’s a clamber feature, ground pounds, aiming down sights, etc. All of the above are amazing gameplay mechanics. They offer a much faster gameplay style than any Halo before it and can be genuinely fun but again, IT’S NOT HALO! But here’s why I think it’s a problem: the reason I think Halo requires skill and CoD doesn’t is something called time to kill. In CoD it takes literally two bullets from any gun to kill anyone so basically, if you see someone first you will get that kill with little to no skill required usually, but in Halo there are over shields and a health bar. It takes ages to get a kill; therefore it takes skill but why is this important? Well I’ll tell you, in Bungie’s games the slow gameplay was perfect for the slow time to kill but in 343’s there’s an odd disconnect. You run around at crazy speeds dodging and weaving then have to stop, get a kill, then run off again—it doesn’t flow very well.

The last thing I’m going to talk about because it’s late and I’ve rambled for a fair bit now is the art style. Bungie’s Halo had a unique and absolutely gorgeous artwork. The detail and design of everything from the environment the armour the Master Chief wears—it was distinctly Halo. When 343 came along they changed everything! Now don’t get me wrong, as I said earlier, 343 knows how to design games but if you change an already established art style you’re damaging the game immediately and I’ll say it again, IT’S NOT HALO!

Okay I think I’ve rambled enough but thanks for taking the time out to listen to my opinion. It’s actually pretty awesome if you made it this far. This is my first article so I probably haven’t put my points across as well as I want to or included everything but to basically sum it all up: Halo has lost its identity and I’m sad about it, peace out.