I've been saying this for a while now but I don't know if I have here. The development model of Halo 2 onwards was basically two games (or rather two
experiences) in one, and this is what Call of Duty adopted, and then it became an industry standard without anybody really understanding why and how it originally happened. Old Bungie were nerds. Their interest was in pushing tech to realise fictional worlds. They were autists interested in how much stuff they could render and have interact in a lively fashion in real time, and they were culture nerds with an interest in creating strong and intricate genre fiction.
Their early fps games were very high concept. Execution of finer points was largely limited to textwalls, but they were interested in pushing what was possible and acceptable. Their interests were writing elaborate science fiction, and creating lively and reactive worlds to play through. Their first big FPS 'Marathon' has friendly and talkative NPCs who don't really do much of anything in a mechanical sense, they're around because it's cool to see more autonomous behaviour in a game and because they contribute to the experience with their presence. Like the writing this part has no direct influence on the "game" part, because Bungie didn't make purely mechanical "computer games". They were always more like experimental multimedia artists incorporating heavy game elements into their genre fiction.
After Marathon they made Myth (and sequel), which has some cool if generic fantasy lore, and is more interesting for how you can see them pushing the 'living environment' fascination. The intention is clear. 50+ guys on screen all behaving largely autonomously. Before Lord of the Rings Bungie already understood the appeal of fantasy battles. And that's what this game is. There's some mechanical challenge involved, and room to exercise skill, but the primary focus is clearly 'violent fantasy world in your computer'. Wikipedia knows better than to call it a 'real time strategy' game. But it's still not right. It settles for 'real time tactics'. But the experience isn't fundamentally tactical. This game is not Combat Mission. There's heavy attention to fidelity in how the moving parts of the world interact. But this isn't done with an aim towards creating more tactical depth, even when that does happen. The aim is to make it feel alive. Physical matter collides and interacts, intelligent actors respond to their surroundings and make comments. It's all about selling that there is a little fantasy world in your computer.
There are many 'competitive' oriented games in which players will strip off the aesthetic dressing of the world because they believe that it gets in the way of the competitive mechanical challenge they're focused on. It's not what they're there for. Here is what this looks like in Age of Empires 2.
Obviously nobody has thought to do this with Myth. If you can understand why, you should be able to understand why I believe the language we use to describe games and sort them into genres is completely wrong and awful.
The fine details of Myth cannot 'get in the way' because they're the point. It's more likely that more players believed that the game's mechanical challenge was 'in the way'. And Bungie understood this. It's why their games come with 'Easy' settings.
With this in mind anybody should be able to understand how this ties into Halo. Halo has
a lot of old Bungie DNA. The lore is a kind of less wordy spin on Marathon, while the mechanical workings and vision were originally based on Myth. Halo started out life as a science-fiction Myth using Marathon-like lore. It couldn't have been further from an 'fps' driven by concepts like 'meta' and 'weapon balance'. It was another 'world in your computer' work. With the fairly elaborate lore and production values coming together to create a sleeker Marathon-like multimedia experience. If Myth was the coolest parts of Lord of the Rings playing out in your compute, Halo would be the coolest parts of Aliens.
While looking for footage to show off how Halo originally looked I actually found this video. Very handy, I can just leave the finer details to this guy:
I hope you get the point. Halo was not an 'fps'. Halo was a living science fiction action world experience. Bungie ultimately decided that it should be experience from a mostly first person perspective, and personal action taken during the game's events would be mostly shooting, but this was not their idea of
the point. Again, this game has an Easy mode, and I believe that Bungie would prefer that you appreciate the finer living workings and intricacies of their world than that you master the game's combat systems. They put an extraordinary amount of work into controls and movement to make mechanically interacting with the game world as smooth and easy and seamless an experience as possible. But this was not to facilitate challenge. It was actually the opposite, to make the game as easy and unimposing as possible. If mechanical engagement is natural and thoughtless, one can better lose themselves in the greater experience. Halo CE has ultrapolished industry-defining controls for the same reason Myth has physics interactions. Fidelity and smoothness make the world feel real.
Halo: CE was an enormous success, but it had a rather mixed and confused reception which haunts us to this day. Like all good art/media that becomes popular a minority of customers really appreciated the intentions and vision of the creator, and everyone else was just kind of along for the ride and admiring the general craft and novelty of it of the thing and the social phenomena around it. The good thing about popularity is that all of them give you their money. And rube money is just as good as high-brow money. Halo was popular and beloved. But was Bungie's vision of Halo popular and beloved? In my opinion nowhere near as much.
It's easiest to explain this particular point while still on Halo CE. Halo CE had 'multiplayer' features. It had a co-op campaign, which was just two people getting the full main experience at once on one console, and it had what Bungie called 'party mode' while working on it. Party Mode of course was the player versus player battle modes. The lack of online play limited the value of this, but it was still enjoyed by a lot of people. Key point is that Bungie called it 'party mode'. It wasn't what they were making Halo for. It was a fun little side thing they could assemble mostly out of the parts they had already made for the campaign, the real Halo experience.
The success of Halo prompted Halo 2. Bungie had other projects in the works too, but Halo eventually consumed them all. Halo 2 was more of the Halo vision. Reactivity, scale, spectacle. But you can see normalfag influences bleeding in over the nerd sensibilities. The guns and armour look 21st century military rather than anime science fiction, and perhaps more due to the xbox and halo engine being pushed to their limit than style or taste, the scale of certain technical elements is smaller. There's lots of cool and ambitious stuff like next-generation feeling spectacles playing out in real time, the space station intro is still impressive. But there are generally fewer friendly characters incorporated into action sequences and the game feels a bit more linear and constrained.
More importantly, the game is now running on Xbox Live. Multiplayer is still 'party mode', but it's gotten a lot more work. More people will be putting more time into it and Bill Gates is counting on them being
the reason to get Xbox Live. Online gaming was still new to a lot of these people so it wasn't
the appeal. But it was a big factor. Between the hype factor and Xbox Live I think it's safe to say that the Bungie vision was being overshadowed.
You see where I'm going, by Halo 3 Xbox Live is
the thing Halo is for. The Multiplayer still resembles what it was when it was a side-project made out of recycled parts from the main single player Halo experience, but it's now what most people are here for. I loved Halo growing up and didn't have Xbox Live. For me Halo was the Bungie vision. I loved that it was a game that felt alive. Other games felt sterile and static by comparison. I liked the world, the story, the look and feel. I didn't get an Xbox 360 right away so I kind of missed out on Halo 3. But a lot of other people I knew were getting it. And most of them had never really played Halo before. Halo was something a bit different to everyone who played it, but to most of these people it was clearly nothing like what it was to me.
I remember playing a bit of the campaign with a friend, who didn't really care for it. I remember he found my fascination with stuff like the behaviour of marines, and my desire to observe the game at work frustrating. He just wanted to smash through it like he was playing Goldeneye or something. To him it might as well have been. Everything about Halo that was essentially Halo and essentially Bungie was more or less lost on him. He was about moving forward and shooting. The thing I really remember is that at the point in the game where the frigate 'Forward Unto Dawn' pulls up and lands near you he called it 'The Mothership'. Nobody in the game calls it that, nothing really happens to suggest that it's anything but a military vessel in a fleet of many. But to him it was 'The Mothership'. This wasn't to say he had some elaborate worked out unique meaning of this ship was in his head. More that it meant so little he didn't even bother working it reasonably into the context of its surroundings. He just mentally smashed it down into a simple generic video game fiction form. Thinking back I wouldn't be surprised to learn that at the time he thought Master Chief's name was 'Halo'. We were about 12 at this time, not 5.
Again, I think you see where I'm going. Around the days of 'Myth 2' Bungie's audience was probably mostly composed of people who
got it. People who knew what they were going for and appreciated their games because they liked the same things as Bungie. And this was enough to keep them going. By Halo 3 Bungie are well and truly bouncing right off the skulls of most of their audience. Halo CE feels like a true piece of multimedia and is best appreciated as one, as the multimedia vision is just about all there is. There's a masterfully assembled "game" in there making up the core mass of the experience, but it's given greater meaning by what it's embedded within. Halo CE is truly about everything that it is start to finish. It is a complete whole of which every part is important. Halo 3 feels like a game. A computer-game made to simulate movement and shooting for the excitement of people who enjoy movement and shooting. In CE the parts of Halo CE are used to make a party game. In Halo 3 it might be more appropriate to say that the parts of a party game are used to finish Halo 2's story, which is the main focus of Halo 3's campaign. Halo 3 was mostly enjoyed by people who just wanted to strip the mechanical 'game' element out of the greater vision. That's how the party mode won.
Of course the series held on a bit, the money was still largely going to Bungie. But they had largely expressed themselves and were done. To wrap up their contractual obligations with Microsoft they gave us Halo: ODST and Halo: Reach. I see this last stretch as them attempting to fit as much expression and soul as possible into what only needed to be iterative multiplayer releases, for the few people who actually cared. ODST in particular is very indulgent in that old bungie way. It feels like it was built to be a museum of Halo lore that you play as much as an action game. The self-driven exploration sections were extremely Bungie, and completely unlike anything that has happened to Halo since they left.
Halo is of course still here, but its creators have little idea what they're doing. The situation is not helped by how ignorant most Halo fans are of what it is they even want. Halo is now a mechanical action "game" about moving and shooting at other people who are also moving and shooting at you. Almost completely stripped of the original vision, setting, and framing that Bungie created these mechanics to serve. I see this situation as a kind of cultural equivalent to post-apocalyptic cavemen taking the wheels off of cars to use them as frisbees. And this isn't even enough to succeed now as the series has been hit by the double blow of losing original talented and creative Bungie staff, the games are now made by Microsoft's contract-serfs, and the market share has been diluted to hell by massive competition in this 'online move and shoot' field.
In response to this shitshow Microsoft tried to bring back some Bungie factor for the latest instalment, Halo Infinite, but between a lack of driven talent and a lack of coherent direction this of course failed too. The game's 'campaign' isn't a creative and expressive vision. It's a cry for help. I believe that a lot of people did kind of half-get the bungie factor, but not enough and not clearly enough to make coherent demands. It's only because of vestigial Bungie management calls that the game even has friendly marines running around here and there. Halo Infinite is not a living science fiction world in your computer. If it wanted to be it could probably do so incredibly due to increased computing power available. But that's not what 343 made. They took cues from Doom: Eternal and basically made a Halo themed Quake level pack about moving and shooting at retarded things that move and shoot back at you. You can now move insanely fast because there's nothing around you worth stopping to look at (despite the insane investment in visual fidelity compared to CE) and nothing of real interest to engage with for organic reasons beyond the next thing to shoot.
Bungie made a rather particular type of game for a rather particular kind of person (me). And most of its degeneration, and that of "fps" in general, is just an inevitable sink to the standards of the mass consumer after the original driven creators drift away. These games used to be made by and for the kind of person who would find the 'party game' fps boring. Halo, like Call of Duty, was not made to facilitate running around in circles shooting your friends or strangers in the back for 10,000 hours straight. You could do that within them, but they aspired higher, and once customers wanted higher.
(Source:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xwqjg3/t...tory#ulf-1 )