10.03.23 - Halo

Introductions are hard.

I don't know how I feel about Halo as a whole. I guess I'll start by saying I loved the older ones, as most people do.

My first exposure was Combat Evolved, at a childhood friend's place on his Xbox, going through the co-op and having fun blasting each other to bits, playing around with what the game had provided us, be it actual enemies or our Marine allies (yes we shot them too, who didn't), trying to fit the Warthog into caves Bungie clearly built for foot traffic only, and generally having the best multiplayer fun I've ever had on a tiny CRT telly.

I don't remember much about the story back when I first played it, and Halo 2 even less so. To be honest, it wasn't really until Halo 3 launched that I went back and paid attention to the narrative, and got to enjoy the games all over again. I don't think I will ever be able to replicate the feelings I had while playing Halo locally, be it 1, 2, 3, or Reach with my friends and family all those years ago. I am able to look back and confidently say those days were the best. Undefeated memories.

I should mention this isn't meant to be a hit piece or whatever, but in order to conclude how I feel about the state of the franchise today, I have to go through a bit of history to get there.

I enjoyed Halo 4. I even enjoyed Halo 5 (Guardians). I will not rank them. I didn't like the stories of Reach, or ODST. I've heard them before. I know what war is. It just feels like monetised fictitious misery porn to me. I'm not much of an RTS guy either. I'm not particularly a fan of how Cortana has been treated from game to game, and I'm in two minds about it; I either wish she stayed dead in 4 or perhaps people don't have to die in order to serve the main character's progression. 

So how do you continue a franchise about a militarised human faction exploring the stars and what-not? An easy answer comes to mind; you don't. I guess from a corporate stand point you have to keep the big money maker alive and kicking to shoot more guys every 3-4 years. But with everything I've heard and experienced from 6 (Infinite), what went wrong? I still scratch my head to this day.

The story has been muddled with so many different things (see 4, 5, Spartan Assault, Spartan Strike and 6) you absolutely need to read expanded media outside of the main games to keep up with what the fuck is going on in later sequels. There is an entire movie (Nightfall) dedicated to explaining why there's a new dude with his own team in 5, instead of learning about him through the gameplay. There's an entire trilogy of novels and a retroactively fitted sub-narrative in the Combat Evolved Anniversary edition dedicated to explaining why there's this old-ass dude being evil in 4. There's also a post-credits scene in Halo Wars 2 that explains why there's even a Halo 6.

I am sick of the thing where you point at the screen and ask "Who's that?" and the only answer you get back is "Oh, didn't you read this? Didn't you watch that?" instead of learning who they are through the very game you chose to play. It's very tiring, and I know I'm not alone in that sentiment. There's a bit of both in 6, for better or worse.

I was very excited to hear a whole "return to roots" thing for 6, so I jumped into the multiplayer beta testing. You get to be called an Insider, yay. It felt strange. Assuming the bad netcode was just my internet being bad and assuming the hit registration would be fixed in the final build, was a fool's gambit. I don't think I'm being hopelessly naïve in thinking that when a game launches, it should be without cracks. Yet the game launched broken anyway, despite the delays to release it. 

To this day it remains as I played it when it wasn't fully done yet. Even going to a state of the art internet gaming café place I still ran into the same problems with hit registration. Older games had this issue too, but having a better internet connection solved that. Never mind the crunches the developers had to do to get the games out on time, the games still worked, and everyone that wanted to could play them.

I think the main problem is that they've made 6 completely inaccessible to the general audience outside of the United States, unless you have super-duper-ultra-mega Fibre Optic speed internet, or you're the one who complained about the graphics in older titles being not up to scratch, or you're on the periphery and generate content around and about the game. There's also no split screen either. There hasn't been since 5, and they dropped it to maintain graphical fidelity and big TV resolution and framerates. People who don't have the best hardware are lost to the developers and publishers. Perhaps there wasn't any money there to begin with?

The franchise as a whole has been stained with the mere knowledge about the inner workings of a triple all caps A gaming studio. Despite this, it will always be a part of me, it's fuelled my artistic inspiration over the years via drawings and fan fiction, and will continue to do so. If we're talking about money however, I'm putting my investments elsewhere.

In other words, the Microsoft endorsed Hyperkin Duke Cortana Limited Edition controller crapping out in one month of buying it was the straw that broke the camel's back.