Before There Was Halo

[theklng]

Halo's shield was ground breaking. You could go a long way on one health bar, whereas with other shooters before then you'd have to just give up.

'

haha, that's the most inane thing i've ever heard. so you're saying that you'd just have to stop playing shooters at some point before halo because you didn't have health enough to continue? ridiculous.

i will have to disagree; halo didn't do anything that hadn't been done before, and certainly nothing that wasn't outside an arm's reach in the days of creating shooters.

 

[ZetaAnime]

Halo will be one of the top games everyone will remember 20-30 years later. weather you hated it or loved people will remember it for a couple of reasons. One it introduced people to more of a tactical shooter game. Like in Legendary you wont be a complete idiot and run into a group of covenant with barely any shield, you would wait kill some, hid and recharge your shield and repeat unlike other games where you would go in kamikaze hoping to live. And the biggest one was in Halo 3 where they introduced a new way to play using custom games and on maps people created in Forge. It gave people the ability to make a game variant (of the main options) and a map for that variant they were able to make in a standard map.
TIMBAP_AJR

 

[StriderShinryu]

I like in this thread how people are blaming Halo for the downfall of all original ideas in the video game industry, going as far to say Bungie are bad people for it. Halo was a great game, it's why it got popular, but you can't blame Halo for what OTHER PEOPLE are doing.

Ding, ding ding! We have a winner!

That's the part about Halo Hating that irks me the most. We get it, you don't like Halo. But how is it Bungie's/Halo's fault that unimaginative developers just out chasing an easy buck do nothing but try to make lower quality Halo clones?

 

[SilverUchiha]

I'll be honest. I never could dig Halo and never understood what all the appeal was. Everytime I pick the damn game up, I just can't get into the controls. Dual-analog controls just don't work for me. For me, it has to be on PC if its an FPS. No question.

 

[Danpascooch]

Love it or hate it, Halo re-invented the shooter genre for the better.

Sorry Shamus, but that's not what you seem to say. Your point is about how

Bungie made the right game for the right hardware at the right time.

The word I'd use was re-invigorate.

Re-Invention seems to pre-suppose that it was the progenitor of shooters from that day on, but there was still life in the old twitch-fire mechanics.

Halo brought in a new way to play shooters, but it didn't change every shooter from then. Some of the things Halo does/did aren't great. Some are.

It changed the game to suit the people it was being sold to, as you say, but was that for the better? I'd be hard pressed to come down on either side of that argument.

Re-invigorated, not re-invented. (IMHO)

Didn't you read the part about it being about timing instead of aiming? That is the reinvention, it was a whole new way to design a shooter game

 

[Danpascooch]

I'll be honest. I never could dig Halo and never understood what all the appeal was. Everytime I pick the damn game up, I just can't get into the controls. Dual-analog controls just don't work for me. For me, it has to be on PC if its an FPS. No question.

Not that you have to like Halo of course, but did you try Halo for the PC?

 

[Sonic Doctor]

Halo didn't invent anything and indeed pushed things into the mainstream that are just bad. The regenerating health model is the bane of modern gaming, which encourages you to never be thinking beyond the current guy you are pointing at, and particularly it means there is very little reason not to just run at things. Basically it makes stealth and planning worthless. Scavenging for health kits sucks, and the idea is that you get better at fighting, or find ways to not fight directly, or use stealth to even the odds (See Deus Ex and Theif).

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you haven't played a Halo game, or maybe you just played it in easy or normal mode. Now I'm going at this from a Halo 3 perspective because I came to the party late in the game (about a year and a half ago, when I bought my XBox 360 Elite as a package with Halo 3 and Fable 2{Best money I ever spent.})
The reason I criticize is that if you played in Heroic or Legendary and you tried to run and gun and not think about the next guy, then you died. Legendary actually has the warning that you will die a lot. You have to take cover, you have to figure out which guy is firing the most powerful weapon and take him out. And in some situations you can us stealth; I have snuck up on baddies and planted a grenade and ran like hell.

Then you have to look at the game when you play with different skulls activated. I'm not going to name them directly, just say what they do. You got the one that makes it so that ammo is scarce. On that removes the hud, meaning you can't see the health bar, radar or your firing reticule. One where your shields don't regen unless you melee a baddie. One where they have more health, or one where they aren't hurt as much by projectile weapons as much. There are more but I will leave at that, but one of my favorite ones is the silly one that activates "grunt birthday party", head shot grunts to get colorful confetti to come out and hear children enthusiastically shout "Yeaaah!!!" My friends and I always have that one on when we play firefight in ODST.

 

[karpiel]

If Halo made FPSes better, how come there has never been a better shooter than Deus Ex, which was released prior to Halo?

 

[oktalist]

I think Halo gets far more flack than it deserves. "It's popular so I must bring it down a peg" mentality.

The problem is that it is too popular for what it is. If we expect games to grow as a medium, then to borrow a phrase from Extra Credits, we cannot afford to confuse competence with brilliance. That the most popular shooter is as generic as they come, only encourages publishers to make more generic shooters.

Haters only exist because fanboys are so vocal. It's the fanboys that they hate, not the game itself. Unfortunately, the only effect of haters is to make the fanboys louder.

Well, it certainly was above other shooters of the time in terms of plot.

Halo has a plot?

Like it or not, if it wasn't for Halo we'd still be stuck on FPS tournament games

In what way is Halo multiplayer different from "FPS tournament games"?

 

[matrix3509]

The only good thing Halo brought was Red Vs Blue. The FPS genre was evolving anyway and it has swung way too far to the "Brown Realistic Multiplayer First" side of things. if that was because of Halo, it certainly did not change shooters for the better. Its just the case of the biggest thing at the time taking credit for the overall evolution of a genre that had begun before it came out.

If you wanteed to by picky, you could say that Quake was the game that started the "Brown-fest". To quote Yahtzee, "What was your favorite level, the brown castle, the greenish-brown temple or the other brown castle?"

 

[-|-]

Halo's shield was ground breaking. You could go a long way on one health bar, whereas with other shooters before then you'd have to just give up.

'

haha, that's the most inane thing i've ever heard. so you're saying that you'd just have to stop playing shooters at some point before halo because you didn't have health enough to continue? ridiculous.

i will have to disagree; halo didn't do anything that hadn't been done before, and certainly nothing that wasn't outside an arm's reach in the days of creating shooters.

No, I'm saying that if I was playing goldeneye (for example) and I had very little health left there are points where I knew I'd pretty much have to give up and restart the level - especially on 007 difficulty.

Maybe Halo did copy the sheilds - I'm not going to debate the point, but as far as I'm concerned it did it properly and well. For it's time it was one of the best console shooters out there. Halo 2 was awful though and I have no further interest in the franchise beyond enjoying the first one quite a lot.

 

[Ravek]

Bungie history: Marathon, some RTS games, Halo? Why no mention of Oni? Yes, no one knows about it, and it has a few massive flaws, but it is still the best thing they made since the Marathon series.

Also, the console-ajusted gameplay is probably the only thing that's not wrong with Halo. Far more jarring are the cliché plot, nonexistent characters and atrocious level design. The basic mechanics are good, the music is good, and the graphics are good.

Of course, even at the things it sucks at it was still miles better than Quake, Unreal and Doom.

 

[Necromancer1991]

What are you babbling about? Defined what? Halo established the xbox as a gaming platform with a good game, I can recall several times where when I asked someone, why should I get an xbox their only real reason was to get it for Halo. Halo I do admit was a fun game that I had a blast doing LAN parties with, but, I wouldn't say it's the FPS king, and if anything, it lowered the gaming standard with regenerating shields and now health too. If anything Counter Strike is the predecessor of current realistic shooters, PS and Xbox just opened the door for the now popular use of the current controller scheme.

Personally I prefer halo to those crappy "I have a sniper rifle, I win!" kind of "Realistic shooters", so....

Halo is what cemented my love of FPS as a genre and you'd be hard-pressed to say I was the only one. As far as the "shields vs health:" debate goes I prefer shields.

P.S. for those of you Call of Duty fantards (Idiotic fanboys) who think Halo sucks, STAY OFF THIS THREAD!!

 

[JugglerPanda]

What annoys me is that everyone imitated and made clones of Halo, while ignoring all of the innovation and style of Perfect Dark, which only came out a year earlier.

 

[Shjade]

Also, the console-ajusted gameplay is probably the only thing that's not wrong with Halo. Far more jarring are the cliché plot, nonexistent characters and atrocious level design. The basic mechanics are good, the music is good, and the graphics are good.

Pretty much have to agree with this. The gameplay was alright, things looked good for the most part and the recharging shield mechanic was interesting (though often made things seem a little too easy), but the story just couldn't compare with Marathon - the series I always think of with a nostalgic sigh whenever Halo comes up in any context. I mean, hell, Cortana had fair voice acting, some personality and is visibly female and still didn't interest me as much as Durandal's crazy rant-segue-into-dear-god-was-that-a-joke-no-he's-really-dropping-me-into-a-volcano-oh-crap terminal messages. (Though, to be fair, the level design in Marathon: Infinity made me want to take a hammer to my computer more than once.)

Halo's not a bad game, but I can't help thinking it could have been better whenever I think about it with the natural comparison in the background.

Now I have to go play Marathon 2 again.

 

[Testsubject909]

Without any care to the past 4 pages of comments.

"If you charge out into the open like the Doom Marine you're going to get blasted back to the Game Over screen faster than you can say Larry Niven."

I did this, often, and won. I was only one difficulty level under legendary, and my weapons of choices are always the shotgun and the assault rifle.

That said, I don't care much about Halo, I find that the difficulty is relatively low (but then again, the only time I play it is when my friend pulls me into playing co-op), the enemy A.I. is nothing impressive to me, even during that time, but I wasn't a big FPS fan to begin with, though did enjoy Quake, Duke and Unreal Tournament.

I can see where Halo did good, but it nevertheless was nothing overtly special in my eyes, it wasn't by any means bad, it was an excellent game... But then the fans came in, in throves, in freaking hive ships. And they couldn't let it go, kept bashing into everybody about how this was the absolute bestest of the best and continue to this day to plague us all with constant ramblings about how this is the best game ever, similarily to Final Fantasy 7 fanboys.

It's painfully annoying. I've no trouble with a person saying that Halo is a good game, but it's heavily irritating and annoying how much constant praise, to the point where it isn't praising a good game, but insulting every other game that came before it and that exists alongside it.

Which in turn, discourages people in general from being favorable to said game since it only feeds these fanatics who can find nothing better to do but ramble on about how Halo is the perfect shooter of all time.

At least, until they finally find a new game series to obsess over and go "This is the best thing ever, of all time, unsurpassable and makes everything else pure shit and every non-players of this game non-gamers!"

Yeah... I'm gonna go take a rest now.

 

[Tsaba]

Personally I prefer halo to those crappy "I have a sniper rifle, I win!" kind of "Realistic shooters", so....

Funny, I think of halo as one of those games.

Halo is what cemented my love of FPS as a genre and you'd be hard-pressed to say I was the only one. As far as the "shields vs health:" debate goes I prefer shields.

first off, from this sentence I can tell you haven't been around for the long haul of gaming, though, halo did bring a lot of gamers into the fold, it doesn't make it "God of games," and all "shields" are, is a second health bar that regenerates outside of combat. /end "age old debate of shields vs health."

P.S. for those of you Call of Duty fantards (Idiotic fanboys) who think Halo sucks, STAY OFF THIS THREAD!!

Odd, I haven't really read people praising COD in this thread, if at all, I think most of these people like halo, even love it, I mean shoot, I do. The only issue is that "we" (the older gamer community) who played quake, doom, duke nukem, Golden eye, Perfect Dark, and WHAT EVER ELSE I MISSED, are upset with the direction of current FPS's, games have just copied what works because it sells, and are tired of people referring to Halo as the game that started gaming, no sir, we have pong to blame for that. We have super mario bro's 3 to blame for the selling of game consoles. If at all, I think, people who are commenting are bringing up points about GAMES BEFORE THERE WAS HALO, HENCE THE THREAD NAME and the general things that they "feel" could of made a good game better. So please quit being a fanboy for master chief let the adults do the talking.

 

[Testsubject909]

Personally I prefer halo to those crappy "I have a sniper rifle, I win!" kind of "Realistic shooters", so....

Halo is what cemented my love of FPS as a genre and you'd be hard-pressed to say I was the only one. As far as the "shields vs health:" debate goes I prefer shields.

P.S. for those of you Call of Duty fantards (Idiotic fanboys) who think Halo sucks, STAY OFF THIS THREAD!!

Shields were nothing new. Self-renewable shields though were and by many standards, pretty much made a game rather relatively easy to deal with. Enabling a character to play more rambo-style, to which I'll go back to my first post stating that I've often gone out in the open shooting everything kamikaze style and came out with barely a scratch. It's cute at first, but it tends to get a bit... beh. Of course, having only health is also rather irritating at times.

Oh and, as for your "I have a sniper rifle, I win!" argument... Apparently, you've not played Halo multiplayer against skilled opponents much have you? The pistol and the sniper rifles are two horribly grossly powerful gun. Actually the pistol could be argued easily as the broken gun of the first game.

I've also got many bones to pick with it. It's a sci-fi setting, so why all these stock recolored human guns? Aside from the needler, all the guns were very regular-y earth-y non-alien-y. Unreal Tournament has a far more appealing set of alien guns. The multiplayer in there is also far more entertaining, I feel, in part due to these more alien guns.

And also, you know these Call of Duty fanboys that are annoying you? You'd never guess it, but the Halo fanboys started the trend of irritating annoying FPS fanboys... Rather, they helped cement that trend today.

Before pointing the finger at the irritable fanboys of other games, first, put a handle and a leash on the fanboys of your own prefered game. THEN deal with the others, why? Because often time, counter-fanboyism is in response to the primary fanboyism. You don't deal with the consequence, you deal with the cause, because dealing with the consequence will do no good as you incidentally feed the cause that only causes said consequence to grow.

So you know what I say to guys and gals who don't think much before attempting to piss off and obviously easily fail at driving off counter-fanboys of their own game's fanbase?

Kiss my I'm-tired-it's-2AM-I-can't-deal-with-this-shit-and-all-these-things-you-say-that-comes-flying-out-of-your-ass... ass and grow a brain.

.... Yeah, it's 2AM, I'm tired and irritable.

 

[Testsubject909]

Personally I prefer halo to those crappy "I have a sniper rifle, I win!" kind of "Realistic shooters", so....

Funny, I think of halo as one of those games.

Halo is what cemented my love of FPS as a genre and you'd be hard-pressed to say I was the only one. As far as the "shields vs health:" debate goes I prefer shields.

first off, from this sentence I can tell you haven't been around for the long haul of gaming, though, halo did bring a lot of gamers into the fold, it doesn't make it "God of games," and all "shields" are, is a second health bar that regenerates outside of combat. /end "age old debate of shields vs health."

P.S. for those of you Call of Duty fantards (Idiotic fanboys) who think Halo sucks, STAY OFF THIS THREAD!!

Odd, I haven't really read people praising COD in this thread, if at all, I think most of these people like halo, even love it, I mean shoot, I do. The only issue is that "we" (the older gamer community) who played quake, doom, duke nukem, Golden eye, Perfect Dark, and WHAT EVER ELSE I MISSED, are upset with the direction of current FPS's, games have just copied what works because it sells, and are tired of people referring to Halo as the game that started gaming, no sir, we have pong to blame for that. We have super mario bro's 3 to blame for the selling of game consoles. If at all, I think, people who are commenting are bringing up points about GAMES BEFORE THERE WAS HALO, HENCE THE THREAD NAME and the general things that they "feel" could of made a good game better. So please quit being a fanboy for master chief let the adults do the talking.

Lemme go search something just for you...



And I mean it.

 

[Urthman]

It's silly to try to argue that one style kind of game is definitively "better"; some people like one, some like the other.

But personally, I think mouse-based precision aiming makes for a much more fun game than console controller-based timing and tactics. And I think regenerating health is less fun than limited health.

And I think limited weapons is much less fun than having a wide variety that gives you lots more options. I'd much rather be able to switch from sniper to rocket launcher to chain gun to melee weapon to laser in response to various situations than having to choose a couple weapons and stick with just those few options. I think it's much more fun to have a whole arsenal to choose from as you approach each encounter.