Playing Halo series for the first time.

[Dolemite]

Halo? You mean Destiny Junior?

 

[GlassesJacketShirt]

The Library, solo, on Legendary, was where men were made in.

Haha, I couldn't even be bothered. While Legendary difficulty is fun to play with friends, The Library is just not a fun level irregardless of difficulty, at least for myself. Not a huge Flood fan, and the level design is literally just one corridor section repeated ad nauseam. It doesn't fascinate visually, contains no vehicles to break up the monotony, and goes on for way too long.

I played Halo for the first time a few years ago, myself, and didn't like it enough to finish it. IIRC, I didn't like the sluggish controls, the aim accuracy or the recharging shield, among other things. I'm a PC gamer, though, and we've always been pretty particular about those things when it comes to shooters, so it was likely just a matter of the gameplay not being to my preference, instead of it not holding up.

I understand where the PC Gaming community is coming from here, though I gotta admit as someone who played through the Wolfensteins and DOOMs as a tiny person in the 90s, Halo's pace was actually a breath of fresh air. Plus, the entire Halo series remains the king of co-op shooting fun. I love the single-player campaigns for the most part, but the real magic is when you go through the levels with friends and modifiers on Heroic or Legendary difficulty.

 

[Osprey]

I understand where the PC Gaming community is coming from here, though I gotta admit as someone who played through the Wolfensteins and DOOMs as a tiny person in the 90s, Halo's pace was actually a breath of fresh air. Plus, the entire Halo series remains the king of co-op shooting fun. I love the single-player campaigns for the most part, but the real magic is when you go through the levels with friends and modifiers on Heroic or Legendary difficulty.

Just to be clear, I didn't criticize the pace and there may be a misconception that PC gamers want all shooters to be fast like DOOM. That actually started dying by the late 90s with games like Half-Life, Jedi Knight, Thief, System Shock 2 and Counter-Strike. Halo's pace wasn't new for the genre, but I can certainly understand why it would've been new to gamers who might've played more on consoles and missed most of of those titles.

 

[Frankie Blueberries]

Halo? You mean Destiny Junior?

The first Destiny was a pretty garbage game; Bungie definitely took a step back developing it. But I'm biased, I have no interest in the grind-fest, pseudo open world games that reward hours played over skill. It's nice to see Anthem fail so miserably.

 

[Warden of the North]

I know im in the minority but I though Reach had the best campaign of the whole series. It was Bungie's farewell to Halo and they introduced some really cool weapons and concepts that never were used again.

Is Reach in the MCC?

 

[Beau Knows]

I know im in the minority but I though Reach had the best campaign of the whole series. It was Bungie's farewell to Halo and they introduced some really cool weapons and concepts that never were used again.

Is Reach in the MCC?

It is coming out, along with a PC release. It sounds like it should be available by the end of the year.

I like a lot of what they did with the Halo Reach campaign, but I didn't enjoy the gameplay or art style in that game as much so it held it back for me. I still prefer the campaigns in Halo 1 and 3 - Halo 2's is a mess even if I still had tons of fun with it.

 

[Frankie Blueberries]

It is coming out, along with a PC release. It sounds like it should be available by the end of the year.

I like a lot of what they did with the Halo Reach campaign, but I didn't enjoy the gameplay or art style in that game as much so it held it back for me. I still prefer the campaigns in Halo 1 and 3 - Halo 2's is a mess even if I still had tons of fun with it.

Agreed, the colour palette was too grey. I wasn't a fan of the bloom or armour lock features as well.

 

[JaegerDice]

It was always a different feel. PC shooters were at their peak and were moving at the speed of light and then Halo came out and brought everything back to a snail's pace. It's just that people who played Halo when it came out didn't know any better because it was their first shooter.

Every shooter since then has just been... gradually trying to recover from what Halo did to the genre. They're still not back to where they were.

Yes and no.

The pace of Halo was in part a result of trying to make the genre work on consoles with a slower input method.

That said, the solutions to that problem led to mechanics that pushed the genre in a more interesting direction than bunny-hopping around maps like jack-rabbits on crack.

Halo was the first FPS that demanded you think out your approach tactically, prioritize enemies appropriately, bring the right tools for the job, use your environment to your advantage... and wasn't completely punishing if you failed any step of the way. The recharging shields mechanic encouraged players to try things, just so long as they were smart enough to retreat and reengage when it was clear their current strategy wasnt working.

By comparison, tactical twitch shooters on PC were offering an extreme response to the extreme speed of the Quakes and Unreal Tournaments, where they would bury players for even the smallest mistake as a way to try to break them of habits formed since Doom.

Halo’s systems were intuitive, the inherent balance of choices self-evident. Combined with great feeling shooting (a combination of visuals, sound, reticule friction, etc), Halo is still largely the game most console shooters are chasing. In place of actually reaching or surpassing its raw satisfaction, the genre has turned to filling exp bars and other carrots on sticks.

 

[Osprey]

That said, the solutions to that problem led to mechanics that pushed the genre in a more interesting direction than bunny-hopping around maps like jack-rabbits on crack.

Halo was the first FPS that demanded you think out your approach tactically, prioritize enemies appropriately, bring the right tools for the job, use your environment to your advantage... and wasn't completely punishing if you failed any step of the way.

If you had said that it was the "first console FPS" to feature those things, I wouldn't argue. There were quite a few PC FPSes in the late 90s to feature most of those, though: SkyNet, Half-Life, Thief, Rainbox Six, System Shock 2, Counter-Strike and others. Some were singleplayer only, but many also had multiplayer modes or were multiplayer only. Quake III and Unreal Tournament did maintain the popularity of ultra-fast, twitchy deathmatch gameplay into and through the 2000s, but it'd be a mistake to assume that that's what first person shooters on PC were all about. Some PC shooter fans preferred those, but many others (including me) preferred the slower, more tactical shooters, both offline and online.

What Halo did, IMO, besides just bring some of those features to consoles for the first time, was bring a lot of them together into one game for the first time. It had a singleplayer campaign with a story and that could be played co-op; it had multiplayer and several different modes; it had vehicles; it had good AI; it had slower, more tactical combat; and so on. None of those were new, but you put them all together into one game and you have a massive hit. I think that that's what Halo's legacy is.

 

[Osprey]

Since I was thinking about the history of shooters, I decided to look up Marathon, the game that put Bungie on the map. I discovered that it and its two sequels are available for free for Windows, MacOS and Linux, thanks to Bungie releasing the source code just before the Microsoft acquisition. The engine has also been updated to support high resolutions and most other basic modern features.

Aleph One - Marathon Open Source

Note that the games are from the mid 90s and more like DOOM than Halo (i.e. it's corridor combat with 2D sprites). I remember that I was all into DOOM and its clones on my PC in the mid 90s and a friend of mine was telling me that Macs had a shooter that was just as awesome. I never did get to try Marathon out because, by the time that it was ported to Windows a couple of years later, it was already outdated. I probably won't play through it, but it's interesting to play it for the first time 25 years later and see what I was missing.

 

[CokenoPepsi]

The bungie era Halo is probably the greatest FPS franchise ever