Playing Halo

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I was laying in bed. My body was tired but my mind was not. There was only one thing to do...play Halo.

I am not big on open world games as most of them seem cookie cutter. The overall layout just seems, cut and paste. As in enemies just spawn over and over and marines just seem to teleport into battles, things teleport in and out of existence, and I am not referring to actual teleports in the game. I guess the best way to explain it is like this: At an amusement they have the real rollercoasters and gokarts, and then they have the kiddie karts and kiddie rollercoasters. And this game feels like one of those, like the game is treating you like a 4 year old always holding your hand, even though the game is openworld, it somehow feels linear and like everything is part of cookie cutter presets.

And even this doesn't really explain it. The classic metroid games were open world, yet linear, and had enemies that spawned unnaturally. Yet they were much better games than this game. I guess you'd just have to play Halo to understand it.



It feels almost as though gaming is dead. There is no sign of moore's law and it feels like we've reached a deadend in graphics progress. The game struggles to render large scenes with trees and foliage constantly popping in and out of existence. The overall textures and materials remind me of those Megablocks Halo sets. Not very realistic looking. It feels like we've reached the limit of consumer graphics.

Unfortunately I don't see what audience this game is designed to appeal to. It wouldn't appeal to competitive gamers because the difficulty is usually far too easy. But if someone is just looking to chill out, relax, and casual game, it wouldn't appeal to them either, due to the lack of graphics immersion and due to the occasional random deaths from nowhere.

But what actually made me put down the controller was when I was finally getting in the groove of the game and the game presented me with a challenge. I was finally getting into the gameplay and then a giant covenant cruiser just disappeared instantly. Not like a fadeout with camouflage, but just straight up instantly. And then other covenant cruisers just kept doing the same thing. I realized this is total dev degeneracy and we are living in a dystopia. You pay devs half a billion dollars and they still can't code basic things. I realize this is more than just a gaming issue but it has transcended into an effigy of our entire cultural climate and society itself.

I assume you're playing the remake on the Halo Collection. I pictured your experience and I don't blame you. 343 and Microsoft have been selling out lately with the newer Halo titles.

I made an attempt at working through the Master Chief Collection a couple of months back; I'd only ever played the first game and I thought I should at least experience the series in full given that it was a popular phenomenon.

The first game chronologically is Halo Reach and it's widely regarded as having the best campaign, so I figured it was my best choice to sell me on the series.

For some reason, every enemy in Reach takes a full clip of ammo to down. They're all bullet sponges that do not react to being shot. Perhaps the game is balanced around co-op, but it's not difficult to change HP totals for single-player. I always thought Half Life 2 was bad for this, but it's nothing compared to this and it kills the game.

The original Halo game is fine for enemy HP, but it suffers from bad level design and repetitive layouts. So many levels are clearly the same two or three rooms copy-pasted ad nauseum. I dropped the game when the Flood are introduced – each encounter at that point felt like a chore to complete.

OP seems to be playing with a controller so I'll point out that I'm playing with a mouse & keyboard. Playing an FPS with a controller would be a miserable experience regardless of the game, in my opinion.

Anyway, I think maybe Halo was fun for people playing co-op back in the day, and obviously the multiplayer was very popular, but the campaigns that I played don't really hold up. When I think of great FPS campaigns I think of Half Life (or Black Mesa but not HL2) and FEAR.

e: also I'm not sure what the point of talking about the graphics in Halo is. It's a remaster of a now very old game, it'd be strange if it looked state-of-the-art. Though I'll admit Crysis Remastered definitely gives me thoughts about graphical improvements hitting a brick wall. The original came out in what, 07 maybe? And still with a touch-up looks as good as any modern game. (And there's another great FPS. Not on par with the aforementioned but still a good time. I wish FPS campaigns weren't dead and buried. Titanfall 2 was the last good one.)

No I am playing Halo Inf. It is at least playable, unlike Halo 5 which is unplayable, so at least 343 has improved compared to Halo 5. People like to blame 343 but this is entirely Bungies fault. Bungie quit Halo so Microsoft had to hire a bunch of incompetent devs and call them 343 studio.


Bungie really dropped the ball with Halo ODST. Halo Reach is playable but seems to difficult, it takes too much ammo to kill enemies. I am not convinced Bungie would have made a better Halo 4 than 343.

HL2 had a better campaign. HL1 campaign started out strong but seemed to become low effort and they ran out of energy near the end of the story. In fact this can be shown in the HL1 demo being better than the full game.


Halo 1 campaign started out strong but quickly became meh when they introduced the flood. I think due to the mostly terrible, low effort level design with giant open spaces, moreso than the story itself. I guess the devs figured that covenant attacking would get stale so they had to introduce something new. And this is also the problem with Halo 2: it feels too new instead of a continuation of Halo 1.


Halo infinite is the flag ship game of the next gen Xbox console. If it has underwhelming gfx its an indication that gaming is doomed and we need some new form of computing, perhaps piezo electric computing or something else. Quantum computing is never going to happen.

That is simply not true. Xbox supports mouse and I prefer controller. A lot of shooter games are better with a controller because it has autoaim, for example goldeneye or rogue company. Perfect dark without a controller wouldn't have been perfect dark, it would have been some weird amalgam like Perfect Dark Zero or something.

I do not like Crysis and I never have. It feels like a bunch of bloated hypermasculine consumer crap. Meh graphics and meh gameplay.

Oh, it's Halo Infinite. I don't know. Most people say the 343 games are bad. Also the game is like 120GB large so when I had Game Pass there was a zero chance I was even gonna try it out. On that note I'm FINALLY getting fibre internet in a few days. Anyway.

Perfect Dark and Goldeneye always sucked and were a form of heavy N64-owner cope. I'm sorry. But sure, some games are designed for a controller. Resident Evil 4 is best with a controller, for example, because precise aiming isn't really the focus and there's more of a tactical element, and the balance would be broken by being able to aim quickly & precisely.

But designing an FPS around controller aim means limiting it to a specific type of game where quick & precise aiming isn't necessary, either because the player doesn't 'need' to use it in the game design, or because the game takes aiming out of the equation with auto aim. These games can be fine if they compensate for the vapid shooting with other gameplay elements, but these are compromises which have to be made because controller aim is an inferior solution. Auto-aim isn't a way that aiming is made better on a gamepad; it's a way that aiming is made irrelevant.

It's my opinion that a game like Halo doesn't do enough to make the game fun on a controller, despite its heritage as an Xbox flagship series. It's not really a twitch shooter, so using a mouse isn't too beneficial either, but there are other benefits to using a mouse. With a mouse, you're can make exactly the movements you want to make at exactly the speed you want to make them, and the result of that is that you feel that you are in the game. You are the character. It's immersive. With a controller you physically cannot do the same: you're operating a character rather than playing as one.

If you just find a controller more comfortable for some reason then that's fine, it's a subjective argument, but controller aiming is strictly inferior in the functional sense.

Strong disagree on Half Life, I think the sequel is one of the most overrated games of all time. The combine are too spongey and the gravity gun was a lame gimmick weapon. The vehicle sections are boring. The first level of the game is a sewer level! Like, come on. I don't like the level design and I don't like all the unskippable cutscenes (remember when people praised the cutscenes for being in-game?) and I don't like all the gimmicks and the physics puzzles... it's all chaff.

Also, you're only saying that Crysis has bad graphics if you played the console ports after the fact. It's fine if you aren't fond of the realistic style or the militarism – I typically don't like those things either – but it undoubtedly was a milestone for video game graphics and in many ways looked next-gen compared to contemporary Xbox 360 and PS3 games. The sequels were bad though. Crysis 2 was so ugly compared to the first game.

Hearing Crysis graphics getting smeared made me want to take some beautiful screenies... (for some reason you have to click on the "image resized" text to get the full image, idk)






But besides that it's the rare open level FPS where the designers don't just expect you to drive over an expanse with nothing interesting happening. There's always enough enemy intervention and unpredictability to make it interesting. The third level is amazing for its ability to always have me find myself taking some different route that I didn't know existed. And on a fundamental level, the weapons feel powerful and enemy AI is good. The destruction is amazing and makes me wish game developers put more focus on physics interactions. I'm not saying the game is an all-time masterpiece either, to be clear, but it's definitely up there as perhaps the last good AAA PC-focussed FPS.

I actually like Half-Life 2 and Black Mesa.

That's fine, I can see why people do like Half Life 2 but I personally think it's much weaker than the original (and Black Mesa). Maybe I could replay the game some time and see if my opinion changes. It's been a while. Probably there will be a ray tracing mod when RTX Remix releases so maybe I'll do it then

Funny enough HL2 was the game that made me build my first gaming PC back in 2004. A friend showed me it running on his computer and the water shaders were so cool-looking that I needed it for myself. Probably the lamest reason to get into PC gaming, but there it is. Got a 6600GT, some presumably low-end Athlon and the cheapest, crappiest power supply I could find (never do this. I've seen PSUs pop and I've even seen fan splitter cables combust possibly from unstable voltage)

You literally don't need to download the game because it is on cloudplay.


This is actual blasphemy. I originally played Goldeneye illegally on PC but wanted to be legal so I actually bought the game IRL. It did suck on N64, but its an objectively good game. With no lag and good resolution its objectively good.

There is still aiming, there is still an equation, its just more simplified.

In my opinion what they did wrong with Halo was change the story way too fast but did not change the gameplay fast enough. Although arguably Halo 2 mixed things up with the dual wield and sword addon, but then later Halos regressed and got rid of the dual wield, so the gameplay felt like it was being downgraded and not innovated at all.


There is no scientific research indicating controllers interfere with immersion, there are a lot of immersive shooter games that use a controller.


No because someone might want to make the aiming more balanced between players.


Half life enemies were always sponge, it was normal to have to shoot unarmored soldiers 5 times in the head. If anything the 357 in HL2 is too powerful and not realistic at all.

Subjective and that's your problem. They were exciting for many people. Objectively one could say that a vehicle addon adds more features and functionality to the game, thus is an objective benefit.

So what? That's not a valid criticism.

The only valid complaint you have is unskippable cutscenes. The whole shebang of HL1 was physics puzzles, same with Portal, why would HL2 not have physics puzzles?

I was talking about the sequels. I have no problem with generic military stories if the gameplay is good, although the story of Crysis saga seemed exceptionally unappealing.


Screenshots are invalid for discussion. For instance, I wanted to show some Halo screenshots earlier to prove my point, but they all look good (or at least the ones recommended in search engines) when resized and put in posts this way. You have to actually play the game to get a good sense of the actual graphics.

None of those on paper sound like good arguments, seems like its subjectively dependent on the game itself. For instance, I could say all of those arguments are valid for Halo infinite, yet it is not a great game. In fact, some of the weapons in Halo infinite are too powerful and make the gameplay very boring. And the combat is too unpredictable and it detracts from the game.


Objective arguments.


Valorant is better though but they are different genres of games.

Half-Life 2 with unskippable cutscenes? Only cutscenes were the beginning and end. Everything else was just character interactions. At least you could walk around and mess with stuff.

I have the PC release of Halo 1 but never really got into it.

They're essentially the same as cutscenes. You can make no meaningful interactions during them and, if anything, mashing the space key to hop around only accentuates how boring it is to have to wait about on repeated playthroughs. It'd be fine if they were skippable, but they aren't.

Such as life interacting with real people.