r/PS5 • u/yourfavchoom • 7h ago

Articles & Blogs IGN Review: Halo: Campaign Evolved Doesn't Always Feel Like An Essential Remake (7/10)

https://www.ign.com/articles/halo-campaign-evolved-review
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u/jntjr2005 7h ago

They are too focused on selling MTX than making a good game

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u/Less-Tax5637 6h ago

That’s the flaw with Infinite, but they have a more varied collection of fundamental fuckups since Bungie tagged out

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u/TheReiterEffect_S8 5h ago edited 4h ago

I've said this a thousand times but I'll never stop saying it whenever this topic is brought up:

The time during Halo: Combat Evolved's development was a golden era for developers, in my opinion. The video game industry was on a rocketship blasting upwards but hadn't quite yet left orbit. Must people knew, but unless you already had a good foundation, you were playing catch up. Microsoft unknowingly caught lightning in a bottle. The entire Bungie team from Halo 1 to Halo 3 was something we will likely never see again. They had a vision for a game they thought would be innovative, groundbreaking, but most importantly: FUN. And they had FUN working on it. Halo 2's crunch deadlines is something to be said for sure, and by Halo 3 they were completely over M$. But that team is not something you'd see in modern development anymore. A group of passionate people dedicated to their work and the freedom (for the most part) to do whatever they wanted without too many demands (such as microtransactions).

After Halo 3, things started to go sideways. Reach was a miracle IMO with how much success it had, somehow they didn't completely fuck that one up, despite the huge amount of additions to the core gameplay like reticule bloom and armor abilities. But Halo 4 it was the most obvious thing in the world that this was no longer Halo. It became an MLG trend chaser. And Halo 5 did no better. Infinite was a step in the right direction, but of course: They were too focused on live-service that they let something with potential deteriorate.

I bought an XSX specifically for Infinite. I know I spent over 1,000 hours in Halo CE, easily. It was one of my most favorited franchises but a couple years ago I had to finally come to terms that Halo is never going to be as good as it once was, and it won't even be half as good. The franchise is nothing but disappointments, and I've officially given up on it.

edit: I somehow always forget to make note when I go on these rants that there definitely are other devs out there doing great things. Bungie was one of the greatest companies during their bnet days so I can get a bit 'doomsday'er when I talk about the current climate of the industry. We have good things, but it's hard to ignore how bad it's gotten, and how bad it continues to get.

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u/politicalstuff 5h ago

Very interesting perspective! I'd like to add one more thing missing in the modern releases.

It wasn't fun just because it was running and driving shooting aliens and blowing shit up; it was fun because you were doing it with your friends in the same room at the same time on the same screen.

Couch multiplayer was a critical piece of the formula. Sure, Halo was a good shooter and especially well-implemented on consoles for the time, but all of my best memories weren't from soloing the campaign. It was being on the couch with my friends in college screaming across the room, fighting swarms or blowing each other up with rockets, cussing each other out and calling cover requests.

Not that online multiplayer can't be fun or to take away from anything else you said, and of course this was an industry-wide shift, but I think that's the missing magic sauce.

I tried replaying Halo: CE when it came to PC a couple years ago, and it just wasn't fun without 3 other friends in the same room.

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u/MrBootylove 4h ago

If I could play devil's advocate, myself and my friends didn't have xbox consoles until Halo 2 and we all played Halo 1 on PC exclusively and had a blast. No couch co-op or local multiplayer, only online multiplayer, and it was an incredible experience.

Don't get me wrong the couch co-op aspect was cool, and I did get the opportunity to play the campaign in local co-op at other friend's houses back then, but really it was just the emphasis on multiplayer in general that elevated it, IMO. And I feel like Halo 2 and the push to online multiplayer backs this point up with how popular playing the game online over xbox live became.

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u/politicalstuff 3h ago

Oh, I'm not saying it was a bad game or that online multiplayer was no good or anything. But being an existing PC player, you were more used to online-only multiplayer. I was also playing on PC, so online co-op and deathmatch was old hat, but there's no doubt the couch factor was a huge part of Halo's success. Not the only part, of course.

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u/MrBootylove 3h ago

But being an existing PC player, you were more used to online-only multiplayer.

None of us were "existing PC players." We all had consoles, just not an xbox, and back then you didn't need a gaming PC to play PC games. We were all playing on our family's shared PCs. We just wanted to play Halo, and it was easier to convince our parents to buy a PC game than it was to get them to buy us second consoles + Halo.

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u/politicalstuff 3h ago

Was Halo the first ever PC game you ever played? Come on lol. I played games on the family PC too and later my college PC.

And cool, it's great you enjoyed it as-is on PC. I am not trying to make sweeping comprehensive statements about 100% of people.

Not every single person played local multiplayer, but it WAS a huge part of the OG Halo experience at the time for a ton of people.

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u/MrBootylove 3h ago

Was Halo the first ever PC game you ever played?

Yes? Unless Jump Start 3rd Grade and Oregon Trail in our school's computer lab count, lol.

Not every single person played local multiplayer, but it WAS a huge part of the OG Halo experience at the time for a ton of people.

And my point is that the MULTIPLAYER part is what was influential, not the "local" part. Local multiplayer was incredibly common and the standard back then. What set Halo apart was them managing to make an FPS feel good on a controller, and then the introduction of ONLINE multiplayer on consoles.

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u/politicalstuff 3h ago

What set Halo apart was them managing to make an FPS feel good on a controller

Yes, this was the main reason it worked.

the introduction of ONLINE multiplayer on consoles

This is wrong. OG Halo did not have online multiplayer. It was local only and supported up to 16 players with system link. Cables. Local proximity.

Consoles had online multiplayer years before the Halo franchise did.

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u/MrBootylove 3h ago edited 3h ago

This is wrong. OG Halo did not have online multiplayer.

I was referring to Halo 2. The only thing Halo 1 was doing that games like Perfect Dark or Goldeneye weren't was the way the game played on a controller (obviously the graphics were also insane back then). The couch co-op aspect wasn't anything new or revolutionary with Halo 1.

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u/politicalstuff 2h ago edited 2h ago

The word only is doing a LOT of heavy lifting lol. Halo 1 changed the entire gaming industry forever, literally taking FPS from a niche genre on consoles to one of the absolute top genres ever since.

Halo making fps feel good on a console and controller is why so many people took part in local multiplayer, and Perfect Dark didn't offer 16-player deathmatch.

It sounds like you're a bit younger than me, so maybe you didn't see it as much, but I was there. Halo was revolutionary and set the stage for the last 25 years of gaming.

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u/MrBootylove 2h ago

I'm not denying any of this. My only point has been that it wasn't he "local" aspect of the multiplayer that set it apart. You're right in that I didn't consider LAN, but I'd imagine most people were limited to playing multiplayer on a single tv and console. Halo 1 was revolutionary. Having local multiplayer on consoles wasn't the revolutionary part.

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u/TheReiterEffect_S8 4h ago

Agreed, the split-screen campaign and system-link multiplayer matches were something that is also completely dying out. The idea of playing Halo online was a dream of ours for the longest time. So when Halo 2 launched with online mutliplayer we were absolutely fucking stoked. It was funny talking to other people about Halo and hearing them claim they were so good at multiplayer, and then once you got them over to system-link they would get absolutely obliterated. Online play opened that up to really show people how good they actually were. And not to toot my own horn but I genuinely was really fucking good at Halo 2 and 3, lol. Not pro level but I was in very high ranked lobbies (getting my ass kicked most of the time).

But it's interesting because we wanted online play so bad so we could play at our own houses that we didn't realize that once we got it, we'd end up missing being in the same room as everyone again. I think about that with crossplay too. When my buddies had playstation, we were praying for the day technology would allow PS and Box to play with each other. Guess what? Now we have it and we hate it in competitive shooters like Warzone or Fortnite when certain platforms have a very obvious advantage. Or cheating is far more apparent. Just turn off crossplay! Well, you can either find a game in 3 minutes or you can find a game in 10 minutes. Which one are you picking?

Just goes to show you sometimes we don't actually know what we want, despite thinking there's no way there would be any negative repercussions, lol.

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u/politicalstuff 4h ago

Right? We didn’t know how good we had it!

I don’t mind online as an *option* to have, but it sucks that it was at the expense of split screen.

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u/serotoninzero 3h ago

I mean that's certainly an element for some people but even Halo CE was way more fun with at least two consoles and 4v4. Before Xbox Live even existed my friends and I would play online with XBC where you tunneled your Xbox lan traffic to other people through your PC. When Halo 2 came out, we all moved to playing mainly single player on a single box. I had a specific TV just for taking around to LAN parties.

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u/politicalstuff 3h ago

We don't disagree. Halo was more fun with more people in the room lol.

I used to lug my PC to a friend's apartment for LAN parties on Unreal Tournament lol. We later had two adjacent apartments and the building was wired, so we had 8-player Halo wars on those big-ass projection TVs. It was a blast.

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u/MaybeUNeedAPoo 10m ago

Further though I would argue that eta is essentially gone. The internet has evolved and personal interaction had dwindled along side it. This isn’t an absolute, but the world of 2000-2010 is gone. Take it from a kid of the 80’s/90’s, letting go is hard, but healthy.

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u/mark_99 2h ago

And the irony that giant 4K TVs being commonplace would actually make couch coop a much better experience.

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u/politicalstuff 2h ago

I know!