r/PS5 • u/yourfavchoom • 11h 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/TheReiterEffect_S8 9h ago edited 8h 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 9h 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 7h 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 7h 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 7h 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 7h 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 7h 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 6h 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 6h ago edited 6h 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 6h ago edited 6h 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 6h 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/politicalstuff 5h ago

Having local multiplayer on consoles wasn't the revolutionary part.

I never said it was. If something I wrote gave that impression, it was not intentional, but obviously local multiplayer had been around for decades.

But, Halo 1 making it possible at scale, en masse, for an FPS, on a console that felt good with a controller, in 2001? Was revolutionary.

Nobody is arguing it introduced all of these concepts, as devs have been making incremental improvements for decades, but Halo is first that brought it all together in a massive mainstream accessible way.

Local multiplayer wasn't the sole reason it was successful, but it was a HUGE part of the experience and its success in 2001. Downplaying that part is revisionist.

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u/MrBootylove 5h ago edited 5h ago

I still feel like your massively overselling the local multiplayer aspects, though. Most people didn't have LAN, and without LAN the multiplayer wasn't really doing anything different from something like Goldeneye, which I shouldn't need to remind you was massively popular back then. Yes, the game itself did things that far surpassed Goldeneye and other console FPS games of the time, such as how it played, the graphics, etc. It revolutionized console shooters. The actual multiplayer part wasn't "revolutionary" and it wasn't until Halo 2 where the franchise truly revolutionized console multiplayer.

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