Halo Hate

The anniversary of Halo 4’s release is approaching, and we thought this would be a great time to examine and try to understand some of the hatred we’ve seen towards the Halo franchise. First, let’s look at the current trends on Halo hate:

• Halo 1 is stupid because the vehicles would never blow up and the story is shit.
• Generic space marine bullshit.
• So stupid.
• Master Chief is unlikable because he is monotone and has no emotions.
• Halo 2 is stupid because the events play out like a typical action movie.
• It is unrealistic that he can fall in space and blow up a huge ship by himself.
• There was also explosions in space which can’t happen and there was sound.
• Also multiplayer was shit because people can just use plasma gun and BR to kill you no skill involved.
• The vehicles are useless because the maps are so small.
• They introduced new aliens out of nowhere and made up Arbiter when he wasn’t even in the first game.
• The only thing Halo invented was rehash because this is all it does, like Madden.
• The story in Halo 3 was abysmal because they used deus ex and made earth connected to the story with a huge alien structure inside.
• It is highly unlikely Master Chief can survive falling through space but deus ex again because he magically came back to life.
• Halo 4’s ending was a garbage set-up to allow further milking of the franchise.
• Gameplay never changes.
• Halo has a shitty fanbase.
• It got way more attention than it really ever deserved.
• Every developer started making knock-offs of Halo that always turned out shitty because the source material wasn’t great to begin with.
• Caused an almost universal downturn in FPS quality.

I figured I’d go to our Editor-in-Chief, Jamal, and get his opinion on the Halo franchise:

I play Halo semi-regularly because my friends do, but to be honest, I literally feel nothing about the series. The multiplayer is… nice. Bungie supports the heck out of it, and gives it love, but… it’s just… flat. No interesting mechanics, turtle-slow gameplay, etc. It’s fun, don’t get me wrong, and the big vehicle maps are great, but otherwise the game is just mediocre. The weapons are boring to look at and use, other than the needler maybe. Maps are nothing special. The art direction is boxy and uninspiring (fantastic skyboxes though). Not to mention there are SO many things about the campaign that bother me. The environments always feel like they are thrown together in G-Mod or something, Bungie never utilizes set pieces or environmental immersion. Not to mention two weapon limit KILLS weapon variety. It’s a myth that Halo forces you to be tactical with weapon choice, since most of them are redundant and the power weapons are one-trick ponies you use at the beginning or end of a level.It’s good for a console FPS but underwhelming is the only word I would use to sum up Halo. My main problem with Halo, beyond the obvious things like the extreme sluggishness of the gameplay, dumbed down weapons, and poor plot and storytelling, is that Bungie CANNOT utilize environments correctly. Nothing interacts with anything. Static, flat buildings and obvious railroading everywhere. Illusion of freedom is incredibly jarring. You just wander around these poorly implemented areas with zero immersion or pacing, it’s like I’m still playing Quake 2.

 

Halo games in general are pretty colorful, have lots of large outdoor levels, have interesting weapons and aren’t concerned with realism. Even if you think the games are mediocre or bad, that’s all you can really say. Halo didn’t ruin the FPS genre. Most of the terrible aspects of modern FPS’ (grimdark, tacticool, hallways, etc.) aren’t present in Halo at all, so saying that it somehow killed everything fun about old shooters is ridiculous. The only argument you have is regenerating health, and if you honestly think that’s enough to ruin a genre you should get your head out of your ass and try to have fun for once in your life.

I don’t hate Halo. I think that when people say they hate it, they just hate what it’s become. The first FPS I played consistently was Unreal Tournament: GOTY, and I played it religiously for years. I’ve played Quake and Counter-strike, both 1.6 and Source, but UT:GOTY has always just felt right to me. After that, I played both Command & Conquer: Renegade and Battlefield 2, both gave me a newfound love for both team-based gameplay and a large array of vehicles to choose from. While few will dispute the rather awful balancing with these two games, they were some of the most fun I’ve ever had with first person shooters.

I saw Halo was coming out with a port to PC, and people were talking about how it had amazing enemy squad AI, a large amount of vehicles to toy around with and I thought, fuck yeah, this game is going to be amazing. 

When it actually did come out though, I felt like I had been lied to. The weapons were nice, the story was boring(I understand this is subjective), the vehicles were good, but it ultimately did nothing new aside from dedicated grenade and melee. That’s lovely and all, but nothing about the experience I had with Halo makes me feel like it warrants the ridiculous amount of praise and fanbase numbering in the millions that it has.

The ultimate truth about it is that the vast majority of Halo’s fanbase doesn’t know anything of first person shooters other than Halo. It’s not a bad thing, people need to stop acting like it is. To act like Halo actually revolutionized anything is illusory though, as all it did was set trends that really, really need to be done away with.