Why Halo is called innovative?
- Thread starter Art Axiv
- Start date
I've been watching this one from the outside, and it's very amusing.
I'm sure there are probably a few others just like me watching it all unfold... and trying to suppress the thin smiles....
This thread illustrates absolutely everything that people dislike about the "fanboy" in communities... and the "Halo Fanboy" in particular:
(Not that I have anything against Fanboy Culture - I am one of them... just not for Halo.)
Widespread flaming and posting claiming everything from that it was the first to use the 'Starship Trooper' idea, armor, melee weapons, dual weapons, and just about everything else under the sun.
It's not really Halo's fault either; in all likely hood, it is just because of the simple demographics associated with the game.
It is immensely popular, and the majority of players were (are) at an age where they are too young to know anything else.
And so it seems like gold.
And it seems like the first one to have all the game play elements it has.
But popularity does not equate to innovation.
I don't like Halo, I'll put that right out there.
I had no interest in it because I didn't have much interest in 'fantasy' games (then, as now) and it pretty much looked like it was just a Half-life-in-the-future game.
I had been gaming for long enough that I was pleased to see physics and game engines evolving to the point where we could begin to have games that emphasize realism, and another "Space Marine" FPS wasn't what I was looking for.
I will lay one big news-flash out there for those blindly defending Halo as somehow innovative in the FPS genre: It wasn't.
There is not a single thing in there that hadn't been done before.
I honestly had a long think about it, and I can't think of anything, aside from perhaps more refined vehicle control - I'm certainly not suggesting it had vehicle sections first!
The only possible caveat to this is that it probably can lay claim to the first to have what is close to the 'the complete PC gaming package' on a console system.
But to suggest that it changed everything in the FPS genre is revisionist.
To understand the frustration of the older folk, please review the following list, and then you will begin to see where we come from when we try to gently correct you and tell you that it wasn't particularly innovative.
So, to answer the "didn't Halo do ________ first?" :
Doom
Wolfenstien
Quake
Blood
Skynet
Duke Nukem
Golden Eye
Perfect Dark
Soldier of Fortune
Rainbow Six
Delta Force (And one little plug here: The original Delta Force still probably had the best multiplayer of any game to date: up to 64 players on 32 Novalogic dedicated servers, with a central online interface to find both the Novalogic rooms, and the player rooms in one place, on completely open outdoor maps with great view distances, encrypted & changing coding via small KB patches to prevent it from ever being hacked.... oh the good old days. Makes me wonder how companies like Ubisoft (Far Cry 2) can miss the boat... and the water, for that matter...)
SiN (another not so widely known, but incredible game... SiN probably is the game I would pick as first to break the Brown-Castle-Green-Temple Quake style of FPS.)
Tribes
Deus
I'm not saying that Halo wasn't good.... I'm just saying the belief that it was somehow vastly different than all else that came before is misplaced.
And if anyone wants to really get into the "Game X is soooo much better than Game Y"....
Blood II wipes the floor with Duke Nukem 3d.
There.
I said it. It's been bottled up all these years.
I'm sure there are probably a few others just like me watching it all unfold... and trying to suppress the thin smiles....
This thread illustrates absolutely everything that people dislike about the "fanboy" in communities... and the "Halo Fanboy" in particular:
(Not that I have anything against Fanboy Culture - I am one of them... just not for Halo.)
Widespread flaming and posting claiming everything from that it was the first to use the 'Starship Trooper' idea, armor, melee weapons, dual weapons, and just about everything else under the sun.
It's not really Halo's fault either; in all likely hood, it is just because of the simple demographics associated with the game.
It is immensely popular, and the majority of players were (are) at an age where they are too young to know anything else.
And so it seems like gold.
And it seems like the first one to have all the game play elements it has.
But popularity does not equate to innovation.
I don't like Halo, I'll put that right out there.
I had no interest in it because I didn't have much interest in 'fantasy' games (then, as now) and it pretty much looked like it was just a Half-life-in-the-future game.
I had been gaming for long enough that I was pleased to see physics and game engines evolving to the point where we could begin to have games that emphasize realism, and another "Space Marine" FPS wasn't what I was looking for.
I will lay one big news-flash out there for those blindly defending Halo as somehow innovative in the FPS genre: It wasn't.
There is not a single thing in there that hadn't been done before.
I honestly had a long think about it, and I can't think of anything, aside from perhaps more refined vehicle control - I'm certainly not suggesting it had vehicle sections first!
The only possible caveat to this is that it probably can lay claim to the first to have what is close to the 'the complete PC gaming package' on a console system.
But to suggest that it changed everything in the FPS genre is revisionist.
To understand the frustration of the older folk, please review the following list, and then you will begin to see where we come from when we try to gently correct you and tell you that it wasn't particularly innovative.
So, to answer the "didn't Halo do ________ first?" :
Doom
Wolfenstien
Quake
Blood
Skynet
Duke Nukem
Golden Eye
Perfect Dark
Soldier of Fortune
Rainbow Six
Delta Force (And one little plug here: The original Delta Force still probably had the best multiplayer of any game to date: up to 64 players on 32 Novalogic dedicated servers, with a central online interface to find both the Novalogic rooms, and the player rooms in one place, on completely open outdoor maps with great view distances, encrypted & changing coding via small KB patches to prevent it from ever being hacked.... oh the good old days. Makes me wonder how companies like Ubisoft (Far Cry 2) can miss the boat... and the water, for that matter...)
SiN (another not so widely known, but incredible game... SiN probably is the game I would pick as first to break the Brown-Castle-Green-Temple Quake style of FPS.)
Tribes
Deus
I'm not saying that Halo wasn't good.... I'm just saying the belief that it was somehow vastly different than all else that came before is misplaced.
And if anyone wants to really get into the "Game X is soooo much better than Game Y"....
Blood II wipes the floor with Duke Nukem 3d.
There.
I said it. It's been bottled up all these years.
How as Halo innovative? All it did was take an old Mac game called Marathon and make it 3-D and added some changes. I guess if you were some underprivileged kid that never played a decent shooter in your life, then maybe you'd enjoy Halo and ignore the obvious fact that it is it a over-rated piece of junk. If you want to take about innovative...it's quite innovative in the way it sticks itself so far up its own ass and even more innovative in the way it brainwashes fanboys to think its the best game in existence.
I couldn't help look over my 10 year old nephews shoulder the other night while he was on his pc. Playing in his opinion "the best game ever". Halo. Right. After about no joke 1 minute watching teammates turn on each other nonstop, bigotry, all sorts of namecalling, and 3 dudes with N00b in their name, i thought to myself....damn this shits innovative.
Actually I found the whole sailing bit of Wind Waker to be really innovative, I just wished it was popular so that more games would incorporate systems like that.
Thankyou. I don't know my complete list of pc fps games but as i look I continue to find gems or games I would like to play on the pc that I hadn't known about.AfricanSwallow said:
I am a fanboy as well but like I say that doesn't mean that my series gets a free ride. If it is crap I will call it out on it first. I don't suffer from over hyping. I am disapointed when a game doesn't match what they say it is going to be. IE 25 to life. (GTA like game my arse.)
Blood 2 never heard of it. I will have to check it out.
Funny how no one is contradicting my last post of ps2 games that did what halos claim to fame is and better in some case. Nice try for trying to burning me. Failure maximum.
I will now tell you all what the best game of all time is. Hands down can never be beaten by any other game. That game would be video gameing itself as honestly there will never be the best game of all time. Only favorite games of all time. Cause in about five years the current best game will be dwarfed.
it probably has somehting to do with it's being one the launch titles on the XBox. i guess it took the consoles' capability to the max? i dunno.
it's probably just better remembered than its counterparts from the same period.
it also sparked several religious groups off because of the title (there are still some of those nut-job activists prowling the internet and trying to digitally hand out flyers).
i'll go with; "it's remembered, and people think that therefore it MUST have been innovative, or why should we still care?"
it's probably just better remembered than its counterparts from the same period.
it also sparked several religious groups off because of the title (there are still some of those nut-job activists prowling the internet and trying to digitally hand out flyers).
i'll go with; "it's remembered, and people think that therefore it MUST have been innovative, or why should we still care?"
I think it had to do with the fact that you could lob grenades without switching weapons. To me that doesn't seem too special. I think I'll stick with MoH: Frontline and switch to grenades, at least it had cook and you knew where it would go based on throw power. Here its just touch the button and hope for the best.
I really should know better than to jump into a trainwreck of a thread like this one, what with the rampant ignorance of both the meaning of innovation and the basic facts of the matter. Note to self: add Halo to the list of things never to discuss on the internet, right after religion and politics.
Hope this helps!
It only takes a minimal amount of research to avoid making yourself look foolish with such blatantly false assertions. If I were to reference, for example, Halo's release date in a post, I'd take a few seconds to look it up on Wikipedia, both to make sure my memory hadn't failed me and to get the exact date, which I personally am unlikely to remember. I have Wikipedia set as a search engine in Firefox, with a search keyword of "w", so all I have to do is open a new tab, type "w halo", and click the right article [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo:_Combat_Evolved]. There we find that "Halo: Combat Evolved ... was released on November 15, 2001 as a launch title for the Xbox ...", which we can then use to support whatever point we're trying to make. You can even make your use of that fact a link to the Wikipedia article (or wherever else you found the info in question), if you want, say, because it might help avoid needless quibbling if others in the discussion have forgotten how to do basic research.Kevin7557 said:
Hope this helps!
I don't really feel like reading everyone's post so some people might have already said this.
Halo CE was innovative for a variety of reasons.
1. First off it brought system link to the consoles. It's the first console game that I ever remember doing this, though there were many that followed afterward.
2. Secondly it had the regenerating shield system. Every FPS, or any game for that matter that I played before halo had a health bar system and you had to search for health packs to heal yourself. This allowed halo to have larger and more difficult battles because the player didn't have to worry so much about getting shot every now and then.
3. Another thing with halo that I thought was innovative was the way that it incorporated vehicles relatively seamlessly with the FPS elements. Before Halo I had never played a console FPS that had done this.
4. Halo was also the first game that I could remember that didn't allow players to pick up every weapon they came across. You had to choose between two weapons only. With that being said each weapon was good for something and none were completely worthless. Unlike other games at the time where weapons from the beginning of the game would be completely obsolete against later enemies halo's weapons were pretty useful throughout.
5. Lastly grenades and melee. In every game that I played before halo you had to switch to another weapon to use grenades or melee, but in halo it's all one and the same, this was big for me, I don't know why I forgot this at first.
That's all I can think of right off the top of my head. But I grew up when the NES was out (I never played computer games by the way) and Halo was definitely different than all the other FPS's that I had played before it.
To the people saying that it is only the hype that made halo big, I completely disagree. If anyone remembers when the xbox first came out they remember that no one really wanted to like it. No one thought that M$ had any business being in the console gaming scene, the only thing that really proved the worth of M$ was halo. Sure many games have come out now that are good for the xbox, but at the time it was only halo. If my memory serves me right at least.
Halo CE was innovative for a variety of reasons.
1. First off it brought system link to the consoles. It's the first console game that I ever remember doing this, though there were many that followed afterward.
2. Secondly it had the regenerating shield system. Every FPS, or any game for that matter that I played before halo had a health bar system and you had to search for health packs to heal yourself. This allowed halo to have larger and more difficult battles because the player didn't have to worry so much about getting shot every now and then.
3. Another thing with halo that I thought was innovative was the way that it incorporated vehicles relatively seamlessly with the FPS elements. Before Halo I had never played a console FPS that had done this.
4. Halo was also the first game that I could remember that didn't allow players to pick up every weapon they came across. You had to choose between two weapons only. With that being said each weapon was good for something and none were completely worthless. Unlike other games at the time where weapons from the beginning of the game would be completely obsolete against later enemies halo's weapons were pretty useful throughout.
5. Lastly grenades and melee. In every game that I played before halo you had to switch to another weapon to use grenades or melee, but in halo it's all one and the same, this was big for me, I don't know why I forgot this at first.
That's all I can think of right off the top of my head. But I grew up when the NES was out (I never played computer games by the way) and Halo was definitely different than all the other FPS's that I had played before it.
To the people saying that it is only the hype that made halo big, I completely disagree. If anyone remembers when the xbox first came out they remember that no one really wanted to like it. No one thought that M$ had any business being in the console gaming scene, the only thing that really proved the worth of M$ was halo. Sure many games have come out now that are good for the xbox, but at the time it was only halo. If my memory serves me right at least.
The original Halo was the first large-scale FPS for a console. Up until then, the vast majority of FPSs had been on the computer, and Halo was the first game to shift developers' attention to the consoles. Also, Halo's enemy AI was extremely advanced for its time (not the allied AI, though--they were pants-on-head retarded).
Yeah your right. I was looking at the PC version. I went to gamespot and I was sure I had grabbed the right title but was mistaken but it still wasn't innovative. I had been playing FPS for years before Halo and Still do now. Halo is only inovative if you don't play vidoe games as someone else said. As the things done in Halo have been done before. As to an argument I read somewhere that halo made popular the FPS on the Concols which is true, but there were plenty of console fps. Even on the PS1. Your point is that Halo is a great game which it is. It accomplished much. It had great features that went together greatly. But it was not inovative. Sorry but that is the reality of it. It may have been to you but to the history of games in general it still wasn't. Features it had have been done before. Things it accomplished have been done elsewhere and better.
My history of games that did what Halo did and better still stands.
And the Allied AI still is. Agreed on the Console part though. I have always been a console gamer, so I have always played my FPS on the console cause I didn't have a good computer. So I basically missed out on all the great FPSs of the PC. When I played Halo it was good but not the best game I had ever played nor was it innovative. I get you Halo Fanboys feel strongly about this as I do RE. There is a difference between New and Innovative.
Halo was New but not innovative.
My history of games that did what Halo did and better still stands.
And the Allied AI still is. Agreed on the Console part though. I have always been a console gamer, so I have always played my FPS on the console cause I didn't have a good computer. So I basically missed out on all the great FPSs of the PC. When I played Halo it was good but not the best game I had ever played nor was it innovative. I get you Halo Fanboys feel strongly about this as I do RE. There is a difference between New and Innovative.
Halo was New but not innovative.
That's pretty strong, especially considering that Half Life was in the last console generation.thetoad said:
Personally, I've never thought that Halo was very innovative, even the first game. It played more like a rehash of some of Bungie's earlier work, at least to me.
Halo seems to derive most of its storyline from the older Marathon games, which play very similar. You'vve got the AI ordering you around, and revealing the story [which is MUCH deeper than Halo's storyline]. You've got the evil aliens who want to take over the universe, even going as far as trying to let out a demon that will kill everyhting in the universe by destroying a star. You've got the idiot NPCs, known as BOBs. All said and done, the story and the setting of Halo is more of a derivative work than original work, kinda like all these suprehero reboot movies we are seeing here recently.
I think it's funny that people mention Forge and the Theater capabilities of the newest Halo game. These are very similar to FRAPS and... well Forge, for the Marathon Engine. There is nothing new in either of these concepts.
The only thing that would really be considered 'innovative' is that these features were somewhat new to the general population on consoles. Apart from that, it's really just a rehash of other FPS technology
The pistol WAS unbalanced in Halo 1 and if you think otherwise you are a fool and have probably never played other FPS's. It was so powerful that using other weapons seemed pointless at times. A pistol is a secondary weapon, it should NEVER replace primary weapons...EVER. Halo 2 and 3 did a better job re balancing the thing, it has nothing to do with skill. And if you were implying I suck at the game with the "you cant aim" comment...then that doesn't help the argument. I still enjoy playing Halo 1 but i can see how horribly unbalanced the thing is. Only a few weapons in the first one were ever implemented well.mastertang said:
Simply put, halo wasn't innovative. It didn't bring anything truly groundbreaking to the genre. The reason for its success, however, is that it's very similar to World of Warcraft and other Blizzard games. Conservative, simple, easy to play and very, very, very well polished.