Microsoft has gutted Halo Studios and will relegate future Halo titles to a studio without the word Halo in its name. That feels like one too many insults to this once universally revered series. Bizarre behavior, as fans have always shown what to do with it.
We recently learned that one fan made Halo: Combat Evolved playable in any browser with support for up to 128 players online. Halo, on the go, for over one hundred people at a time. That’s the kind of megalomaniacal event modern Halo should be giving players on the regular. Instead, the past decade of Halo has seen Microsoft making the once-beloved series turn less and less approachable with each new game.
I recommend you try browser Halo right now, because Microsoft might just nuke it like it did ElDewrito, a Halo 3-based Halo hub that combined multiple series assets to create the best and most fun online Halo experience ever. Its success inspired the release of The Master Chief Collection, but even the contents of that official release still paled in comparison to what we got from the original ElDewrito.
There are a lot of hands that could handle Halo properly out there, but Microsoft seemingly just wants it to become Call of Duty, unaware that CoD already exists, and that it’s theirs, anyway.
Halo: Combat Evolved became a massive hit for combining a scale never before seen in FPS titles with, as the title rightfully suggested, better gameplay mechanics and also tried and true multiplayer options. Though it had a nice story, people liked it because it provided countless hours of fun, whether by yourself or via split-screen. Then came Halo 2, which added an entire world’s worth of enemies to face via Xbox Live, and then Halo 3, which perfected both the campaign and online aspects of previous titles. Then, after the success of Halo: Reach, Microsoft parted ways with Bungie and relegated the development of Halo 4 to another team—foreshadowing much?—that started shaving off some of the elements we loved about the series.
Halo was the gold standard of console shooters, and there was no excuse for a megacorp to release a sequel featuring less cool stuff to do than the previous game. And Halo 4 wasn’t even the worst offender. I like it, though it’s definitely inferior to 3 and features a bizarre story that requires you to read books that don’t even come with the game to understand, but it marked the beginning of a downward trend. Then, with Halo 5, they did away with split-screen entirely, which is just an inexplicable bummer. I actually had a lot of fun with Halo: Infinite, because it added a lot of cool stuff, but it didn’t add back many of the things we loved from the past.
I understand that Halo is never going to be what it once was, or, worse, make me feel what I felt when I first played it. Still, I’d at least like it if Microsoft could, just this once, avoid a very costly mistake everyone else is foreseeing from miles away.
Tiago is a freelancer who used to write about video games, cults, and video game cults. He now writes for Destructoid in an attempt to find himself on the winning side when the robot uprising comes.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.destructoid.com/microsoft-should-give-halo-fans-free-rein-with-the-ip-after-serving-up-slop-for-so-long/
