This is an IGN opinion piece from Matt Purslow, who was brought up on the golden era of Halo and Half-Life. He loves story-driven FPS campaigns and wishes there was more of them (but perhaps not quite as many as there were in the 2000s - that was pretty excessive.)
Of course, thanks to a $69 billion acquisition, Call of Duty is now Xbox’s Call of Duty. But I think you get the idea: Halo should be massive. It should be the premier first-person shooter on Xbox. It should be delivering stellar campaigns and phenomenal multiplayer on a regular basis. It should be among Team Green’s most-played games on any given day.
But it isn’t. And perhaps the reason why is nothing more than the passage of time and the shifting of trends. Can any game sit on the popularity throne forever? The simple truth may be that Master Chief is an artefact of the original Xbox and 360 days, and that 2010’s incredible Halo: Reach was a natural end point that should have been respected.
But while that may indeed be the case, that story doesn’t reflect Microsoft’s uneven handling of the series. Bungie delivered lightning in a bottle five times in a row over the course of a decade. Its successor, the purpose-built 343 Industries (now Halo Studios), found it all but impossible to replicate those achievements. Across 15 years, it struggled to hit a regular cadence; the development pipelines of yesteryear allowed Bungie to deliver a new game every couple of years or so, but there was a six-year gap between Halo 5 and Infinite, and very soon another six years will have passed without a mainline entry. Halo simply isn’t in the public eye in the way it was during the 360 era, nor the way Call of Duty is today.
With this in mind, it’s entirely unsurprising to see that Xbox’s CEO, Asha Sharma, has assigned Activision the task of developing the next Halo. If nothing else, Activision is an unrelenting video game factory; a colossal machine of rotating studios that assembles high-budget shooters year in, year out. If Sharma wants to ship Halo games – lots of Halo games – there’s no better Microsoft division to rectify that issue.
But cadence hasn’t been the only problem that Halo has had to contend with over the past two console generations. Simply put, there hasn’t been a must-play Halo since Bungie called it quits. The days of 90+ on Metacritic are a distant memory. That’s not to say Halo Studios’ games have been anything close to a disaster, but every one of its projects suggests a studio struggling to stay true to a formula it didn’t invent. It’s an odd situation, because (at least in theory) it followed the Bungie playbook to the letter; each of its games honors the past, maintaining traditions established way back in 2001, while also attempting to push the series into the future with brand new ideas and reworked mechanics. The Bungie era never stood still, each new game building atop its predecessor with new playable characters, new enemies, new abilities, new multiplayer modes, and even entirely new approaches to campaign design. All of this can be said of Halo Studios’ games, yet none of them ever successfully captured the magic.
Perhaps that was the biggest problem – should it have even tried to? Halo Studios was given the arguably impossible task of maintaining and continuing the legacy of one of the most important series in FPS history. Of course it tried to make games that felt like Bungie projects. But in doing so, it never successfully established a coherent new identity for the series’ next era. Halo 4 felt like a true continuation of Bungie’s work, a natural successor to the triumphs of Reach, and while I think it’s by far the best game the studio made, there’s no denying that it’s confined by pre-existing parameters and fan expectation. Halo 5 attempted to escape those rules, but its miserable campaign is the absolute worst version of something that could still be considered Halo. 2021’s Infinite was positioned as the course corrector, but turned out to be a collection of modern trends – an open world campaign, battle-pass and daily-quest-fueled multiplayer – embedded in all the iconography of a “return to roots”; the verdant green fields, blue-lit tunnels, and tight PvP arenas of Combat Evolved.
Together, the studios’ attempts make for a fractured trilogy; united by their attempts to continue the past, divided by a lack of shared direction. These troubles are only emphasised when contrasted against its Xbox stablemate, Gears of War – The Coalition’s continuation of Epic’s macho shooter similarly hasn’t lived up to the high bar of the original trilogy, but the duology of Gears 4 and 5 undeniably has its own coherent identity (which, yes, as far as the campaign goes is a bit Gears-imitating-PlayStation’s-single-player-schtick, but it’s an identity nonetheless) and that approach appears set to continue in the upcoming E-Day. Halo’s 15-year quest to stay true to Bungie has been its albatross – a lack of a truly fresh perspective dulls its edge in the modern era, while its struggle to balance the old with the new frustrates long-time Halo fans who simply want to play more Halo. It’s hard to think of another studio for which “doomed if you do, doomed if you don’t” is more applicable.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/activisions-halo-must-go-beyond-bungie
