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The intro cinematic still kicks ass.
I get why people didn’t like the story much, but many of the actual levels themselves were really fun. Some really good combat areas/flows between different types of encounter.
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Speaking of Halo, TIL Don Mattrick did more damage than I could possibly imagine.
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Terrible campaign. Excellent multiplayer
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One couldn’t agree more. Like to add this game was also a wonderful showcase for the Xbox One X the 4K patch made it look like a brand new game 
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That sounds awesome and gives SWTOR vibes. Halo as a universe does a really good job of expanding in the books, but that’s it; Halo does desperately need to expand outside of the same general story in more games and TV media. Kinda like that one Japanese Halo animated anthology a while back. Like it would have been amazing if the Halo TV show had nothing to do with Master Chief and was it’s own thing.
Ugh, I hate how that goes in the corporate world though. I get the idea is to incentivize leadership to work hard to meet targets, but in reality the system benefits them cutting corners and making decisions that hurt long term sustainability for the short term instant bonus. Balancing a for profit capitalist business and art/entertainment is always a tightrope except it’s never the people on top of the tight rope that have to deal with the consequences when the whole thing crashes down.
Halo Infinite was my first real Halo experience. Maybe I should play backwards in prep for 2026. I am interested in trying Halo 5 and 4 as someone who didn’t play Halo growing up.
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I’d recommend all of them. Start with the MCC and work your way forward from there.
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I’ll always be grateful for the work 343 have done on this franchise. After Bungie departed to work on Destiny (a mistake in my eyes) someone had to pick up the pieces, and it was Bonnie Ross who stepped up to the plate and kept Halo alive. Without her we wouldn’t have anything at all. 343 have had their struggles, but at least part of that is directly because of Microsoft refusing to allow them to grow and evolve as a studio, instead choosing to keep a constant stream of interns and temporary contract workers cycling through so as to avoid having to pay out the benefits that come with being a full-time employee. Between these ridiculous practices and having to build a new engine from scratch during a global pandemic, it’s no wonder they’ve never manged to hit the mark each time. I’m hoping the studio being reorganised again and switching to a new engine going forward will be enough. I’d love the next Halo to be a smash hit.
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Not sure I’ve seen a bigger backlash to a game’s misleading marketing campaign than this one, you just had to be there, I remember the amazing hunt the truth audio logs, my God they were amazing and I remember the walking dead commercials, one with Master Chief and one with Locke (whatever happened to him anyway?) and then the game comes out and the story has nothing to do with anything in the marketing campaign and it has one of the worst plot twists I’ve ever seen, still don’t understand how that was ever approved at 343i, this is the game that should’ve gotten Phil Spencer himself, since he was in charge of Xbox Game Studios directly at the time to remove and replace anyone at 343i in charge of making decisions for this franchise right then and there, right after this game came out, there should have been no more opportunities for 343i’s leadership back then to continue working on Halo.
I think it’s insane that Frank O’Connor and Bonnie Ross lasted another 8 years with this franchise after the release of this game, just franchise malpractice, this should have been the game that made the studio rebrand and basically start over with a new name and a new engine, which they tried to do with Slipspace but it should’ve never been under the same leadership that gave us Halo 5, they couldn’t even get that right either since the new people in charge had to move to UE5.
I hope Halo’s future is in good hands now, still a little skeptical but I really hope the people managing the next one know what they’re doing.
Some positives were good gameplay, some of the campaign levels were good, Sanghelios looked amazing and overall it had better level design than Halo 4 from what I remember at least and the multiplayer was way better than Halo 4 too in terms of gameplay, requisitions were awful.
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I didn’t pay attention to Halo 5, I wasn’t caught up with Halo (started with Reach and CE1 Anniversary) and didn’t have One with me while living near the university (I was catching up with 360 mostly).
But I was looking at TLOU2 and that was a shitshow.
Honestly TLOU2 shitshow doesn’t come close to Halo 5’s, I can’t explain in detail why right now but they were for very different reasons, TLOU2 wasn’t nearly as misleading from what I recall.
Hunt the truth was so amazing that it was the number one podcast on Apple podcasts when it was ongoing, I think it was Apple podcasts but it might have been something else, sorry it’s been 10 years, it also won many awards and had nearly 7 million listeners, they even had great actors on it, Michael Keegan played the main character of Hunt the truth and he did an amazing job, the whole thing had the entire Halo community and even people who weren’t into Halo interested in the game, then the game comes out and is something totally different lol
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There’s a lot to unpack but Destiny 1 was legitimately in my opinion an absolute blast and a brilliant evolution of Halo. I had a great time in that first year. The critical reception was ridiculously harsh considering it was hands down the best console shooter in terms of pew-pew bang-bang sensations with the gamepad we’d had. It’s afterwards that Bungie’s greed towards their own player base emerged and soured the whole experience.
Halo 5? I actually like it as a shooter. But it’s so barebones and the real issue was the story was going absolutely nowhere. Chief and Cortana need to be retired because it was just ridiculous how they kept on shoehorning them into every plot twist imaginable (let’s make Cortana a villain because melodrama reasons).
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Wait, what if they had retired Chief and Cortana for Halo 4 (or at least shifted the focus to a new main cast)? I feel like from what I’ve seen of this Fandom they’d have lost their minds. But at the same time it IS a good idea in theory and it’s true that franchises get stale when you focus on the same main character and setting and story beats for too long. But at the same time franchises are more and more afraid of changing things up these days. Feel like it’d be quite difficult to “move on” from Chief and Cortana at this point. I really do wonder what the next proper mainline entry will do. It’s somewhat adjacent, but Gears is another interesting one for this same reason. Like to a certain level even as an outsider (not a major Gears guy) it feels like they don’t know how to carry the story forward and their new focal character didn’t super go over well (like they aren’t as popular), so here we go with the prequel. Not that that’s bad, but it is a problem I’m noticing more and more with franchises and long running IP especially in this era of remakes and remasters and live action adaptions and reboots and revivals and re-everything else.
I remember playing Destiny for about 4 hours when it launched and just dropping it completely.
The entire game was so empty and boring to me compared to other MMOs, I still to this day don’t understand the hype for it on launch.
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Reach and ODST were very popular so I feel like they had a blueprint for going forwards. Noble Six had charisma in Reach and tbh I got way more emotional depth in that game than the Chief-Cortana games which seem to not know where to go (is it a romantic relationship? Who knows but the writers always presume it’s the focal point of the entire Halo universe for some reason).
It’s the co-op aspect where Destiny was excellent. I spent many late nights running through to early hours of the morning doing Raids with people.
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I like the Raids in Destiny, although I prefer full on MMO raids, which are obviously hard to do in a console FPS.
I will always, always, always fight on the hill that Destiny have full ADS etc means Halo has always, and will always, play far better. They had the weird idea to make players more agile (double jumps! Dashes!) and then decide to reduce hip fire utility massively. Spartans are smoother and slicker than any whatever-the-Destiny-people-are-called. This is a personal crusade and there are not even dozens of us.
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