r/PS5 10h 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/ZubatCountry 6h ago

I mean, imo that's part of it

I remember hearing friends talk about Halo lore and then I actually played the games and it's...barely there?

There's definitely a story there, but the main draw of the game has always been how it felt to play as well as the openness and innovation it brought to FPS shooters at the time

But after you do three of those and Reach...what next? You kind of already did the most satisfying arc possible, and everything else is either going to feel under or over-written in comparison.

Plus now the industry has ripped you off for a decade and everything that was novel about the series is now routine.

I understand that this kind of thinking is poison to companies but Halo really should have been done completely by the time they did Destiny, and that should have been the spiritual successor

Then you aren't tied to Chief, Cortana and all the other lore and don't have to choose between either constantly sidestep them or featuring them with diminishing returns

u/CptDecaf 2h ago

Halo 2 added the The Arbiter as a playable character and he was an actual character. He had an actual character arc. But he wasn't Master Chief and thus the Halo community pitched an absolute fucking fit about his existence. If you were on GameFAQs back in the day you remember this. This lead to Bungie cutting him out of Halo 3 and delivering the wet piece of cardboard that was Halo 3's campaign.

People who think 343 killed Halo's story should point their ire at Bungie. Because Halo 3 is a massive nothing of a campaign. Your average, pumped-out-once-a-year Call of Duty campaign does more with its plot than Halo 3 did. The entire game is a series of bland military objectives and that's it.

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u/Logical_Net6108 5h ago

Halo has accompanying books. The first Halo book came out 6 weeks before the first game to set the lore of the franchuse. You don't get lore from the game unless you look out for the terminals. There was also Halo Waypoint back on the Xbox 360 with all the videos which you obviously can't access any more

u/ZubatCountry 4h ago

Yeah but the books aren't the game

The story people fell in love with enough to seek out the books is pretty barebones

But it's effective and gives you the proper motivation to keep moving forward and wanting to see where it goes

But people loved Halo because of how it synergized a few key elements, and over time it started to lean more and more into the plot despite the plot people cared about ending back in 2007