Counter-Strike is indeed an example of a game series remaining popular without changing. However, this is not a rule of the industry and there are examples of games losing relevancy by staying too close to the original gameplay. Namely the Gears Of War franchise has completely faded popularity-wise despite all the new games closely following the gameplay of the original GoW.
That is to say not every game series can remain relevant without evolution. Halo likely would have maintained a sizable audience if it never started making bad evolutions (universal Sprint, ADS, enhanced movement, etc). Adding trendy mechanics to existing gameplay will often harm that original gameplay's integrity.
I will always blame 343industries for Halo's death first and foremost, while I'm definitely not blind to the hate Reach endured, but not being a pvp player/competive player, I did not experience it.
Some people like watching car crashes. Some watch fight video and some watch rekt compilations. I just enjoy listening to this guy shit on Nu- Halo and 343. 👍
They did make H2A along with Certain Affinity and Saber Interactive which was a classic halo you didn't mention in the video but obviously the game was destined to fail due to the MCC having a terrible launch.
Hey man, I don't think this is a bad video per se – I agree with a lot of what you're saying and how 343 has truly squandered the Halo franchise – but what you're talking about feels very half-baked. You make a lot of claims like how "abilities ruined Halo" or show how the populations of 343's games plummeted after launch, but you don't actually seem to try and rationalize or explain any of your ideas or try to drill down into understanding why these things happened.
For the armor abilities, for example, you bring up things like armour lock or jetpacks as an example of something that fundamentally changed Halo for the worse (which I agree with), but you don't take your discussion further than that other than to say that it is bad. You could've broken down how jetpacks completely threw map design and flow out the window by allowing people to fly and thereby break the intended and natural design of the map, or how it impacted how gun fights played out. You make a point of Halo 4's ordinance drops being bad for Halo, but again didn't offer any further points other than putting it as an example of 343's mistakes (e.g. ordinance drops remove the need to acquire on-map power weapons, thereby diminishing the importance of a team's map setup and control, and simplifies Halo's deep gameplay loop to better gun = you win (same can be said for loadouts/perks)).
There's also a big missing part about WHY all of this happened under later-Bungie and then 343. There's lots of interviews, articles, posts etc. out there from former Halo developers that shine an important light on the mindset behind the designs of these games and the environments they were made in. For example, there's a couple of interviews Bonnie Ross (I know, I know…) did, where she tells a story of how 343 showed a Halo 4 prototype to Microsoft, and it was admonished for being "too like Halo," or how former Xbox president Don Mattrick had forced 343 to launch the game early so it landed on the Xbox 360. There's also arguments to be made about how 343's incessant desire to capture a "broader audience" with their games has compromised and diluted Halo's identity, without 343 understanding how most Halo players already WERE the broader audience (before they drove them away).
It's easy to go on and on about how poorly 343 has handled Halo, but a lot of this video feels like you saying "Halo changed and is bad now" without trying to explain the point further. I dunno, again I don't disagree with your overarching claims, but I think a video like this one needs a lot more to it to actually support your points so that it doesn't come off as one of the unimaginative videos of "343 bad" that pessimistic Halo YouTubers churn out. No hate, I just think this video falls short of realizing itself and being a more worthwhile watch.
Also Halo Reach was more of a "fuck it" game spinoff so they pushed the engine to the limit and added so much shit into it without a care to probably test some stuff for destiny as well as to make a jampacked FUN game as a send off, it was all going to be handed over to 343i anyways…. BUngie knew a lot of Reachs stuff would piss people off but did it anyways for fun and it showed numerous directions on where the franchise could go. 343i got all the wrong stuff/lessons from Reach and applied it to all their games….
100% agree with you, reality is though, problem with forms of art like video games, some developers dont like pumping out the same kind of content for the entirety of their existence. Halo is a example of this, bungie wanted to move on from halo for so long but microsoft wanted them to keep pumping out the same content over and over again. After Halo 3, bungie made Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach as experimentation for the new game franchise they wanted to make, Destiny. This experimentation was the additions of a open world-like map in the ODST campaign and special abilities in Reach. Bungie was a developer studio that just didn't like doing the same thing over and over again.
My theory is 343 made a mistake by looking at Halo: Reach's success and instead of looking at criticism, looked at what was more popular than Reach, which was COD. Instead of looking at what people were saying, they pretty much made their own version of Reach's gameplay with call of duty-like features. The most recent game, Halo Infinite was probably 343's greatest attempt at mimicking the true halo "formula," and it actually ended up being fun gameplay-wise compared to 4 and 5, they just failed to keep their initial success. Infinite on the first week was doing so well, I remember playing on the multiplayer beta day 1, then it kindof turned into a rollercoaster. I think, using your points, a live service game was a good solution, having the same game for 10 years but with fresh content all the time, but they failed to do that so badly. Halo Infinite really reminds me of Halo 3 with the equipment system and gameplay-wise was a step in the right direction, problem is that they might have made good gameplay, but they couldn't keep the live service up, basically ruining the perfect opportunity for a comeback in late 2021 – early 2022.
halo infinite could ve been 343s chance for redemption. Personaly the gameplay is my favourite in the series. Had the game not been neglected this hard and cut so many features i think halo would ve been back. Imagine halo infinite with fortnite levels of live service. More equipment, more vehicles, firefight with campaign bosses on legendary, a decent anticheat, more weapons, cross core….. but instead amazing gameplay but no live service and an incomplete game 1 year later. People loved infinite at the start but the lack of content and fixes is embarassing.
The problem here is that it is not just gameplay that changed but just about everything changed, Story, Lore, Art Style, community features, and gameplay. You can't lay this all at the feet of the gameplay changing. They only kinda corrected art style for infinite.
Also Armor abilities (at least in Reach) were an awesome idea, the problem being that anyone could spawn with any they wanted and have unlimited use. If they were a map pickup like equipment in 3 and had a limited ammo supply there would be far few complaints. If they were map pickups that would have meant that the maps could have been designed around any of the abilities or non of them depending on what you place on the map and so many problems would have been solved.
What happened to Halo? 343s garbage ass decisions hiring people who genuinely HATED Halo CE, 2, 3. They also hired creative directors who were "HALO NEW COMERS" Frank O Conner got hired at 343 as the franchise creative director, and he knows nothing about the original Halo trilogy lore or story. Literally Sabotage
Honestly bro I'm at the point where the new kids can have Halo i just don't care anymore, I've been fighting the good fight for over 10yrs now and hardly anything has changed Halo's not even Halo anymore anyway so who cares. Every argument i have with a 343 fanboy it's like talking in circles, these people don't understand what a juggernaut Halo was when Halo was Halo and not some wanna be title.
It's always "Halo had no competition back then" even though Favyn's video disproves that, "Numbers don't matter" when it comes to player numbers/rank on Xbox's most played games but they matter when Halo 5 apparently "out sold" Halo 3 and Reach when it was stated that the number provided also included console sales. And the constant down play of the original trilogy by these people just to bring up 343's games is insane. I'll always appreciate you, Favyn, Roniboney, WpnsGrade, The ActMan, etc for making these videos but it just seems like its been all for nothing, i just don't think Halo will ever catch lighting in a bottle ever again.
Edit: Also i'd like to add that I've always wondered if Bungie did what they did with Reach knowing 343 would probably expand on that making Halo a non factor so Destiny would have a better chance. I doubt that's the case but it would have been a big brain move.
I'm pretty mixed on Counter-Strike. I think it's great that a game like it can be so popular even to this day, and while I don't think it's a terrible game by any means, I believe it is wholeheartedly the (probably second) worst series Valve has. Like honestly, Day of Defeat: Source even is a much better game than it. Counter-Strike has the worst gunplay of any of their FPS series.
Like I said, I still like CS and play it, but still, it's bottom of the Valve barrel.
This is the same argument I’ve been making to people for the best part of 10 years. Halo changed when it was at its absolute peak. It’s an unbelievable piece of self sabotage
Tf2 is also a good argument against games needing to "evolve". While yes it has changed alot from when it was first released it has been over 5 years since its even had a balance update. Yet its playercount peaked last year when it was abandoned by valve.
Tbh all of valves games show this. Like left 4 dead is still played a ton and it hasn't changed its core gameplay much at all.
OG halo is so unique it basically has its own spot in the market. There's not really any competition for a halo like game. If 343 just went back to the old formula they would make bank, even with an unfinished game.
Reach's only flaw was underserving the competitive community. Else to me and many others it was a sublime masterpiece.
If armor abilities are disliked, you could go into custom games and 100% remove ALL of the armor abilities. You could even design your maps to not factor in armor abilities whatsoever. And with TU settings, you could disable reticle bloom.
So basically – if you maintain the formula – you maintain, and grow ur fan base.
It’s not rocket science but wow. How 343 messed up halo.
>Take OG Halo 3
>Release it on steam as stand alone
>Give it the Counterstrike treatment
>Win
Me and my friends always say if 343 just copied halo reaches multiplayer almost identically it would have stayed alive for than a month
Gonna talk about Joe Staten and the rest leaving recently?
God do I fphing HATE 343 for changing and ruining halo.
I dont remember anyone asking them for modern changes. Sounds like some asshole idea from microsoft.
Counter-Strike is indeed an example of a game series remaining popular without changing. However, this is not a rule of the industry and there are examples of games losing relevancy by staying too close to the original gameplay. Namely the Gears Of War franchise has completely faded popularity-wise despite all the new games closely following the gameplay of the original GoW.
That is to say not every game series can remain relevant without evolution. Halo likely would have maintained a sizable audience if it never started making bad evolutions (universal Sprint, ADS, enhanced movement, etc). Adding trendy mechanics to existing gameplay will often harm that original gameplay's integrity.
Pulling your knife out in CS:GO is not sprint its jogging. LOL😊
I will always blame 343industries for Halo's death first and foremost, while I'm definitely not blind to the hate Reach endured, but not being a pvp player/competive player, I did not experience it.
Some people like watching car crashes. Some watch fight video and some watch rekt compilations. I just enjoy listening to this guy shit on Nu- Halo and 343. 👍
I've been saying have certain affinity develop a new modern classic game play multiplayer only title: Halo Classic.
"And it started with Reach" nah. You lost me. Dog shit take
Halo never had the chance to run its course with the formula that worked , now the community will be forever split.
They did make H2A along with Certain Affinity and Saber Interactive which was a classic halo you didn't mention in the video but obviously the game was destined to fail due to the MCC having a terrible launch.
Hey man, I don't think this is a bad video per se – I agree with a lot of what you're saying and how 343 has truly squandered the Halo franchise – but what you're talking about feels very half-baked. You make a lot of claims like how "abilities ruined Halo" or show how the populations of 343's games plummeted after launch, but you don't actually seem to try and rationalize or explain any of your ideas or try to drill down into understanding why these things happened.
For the armor abilities, for example, you bring up things like armour lock or jetpacks as an example of something that fundamentally changed Halo for the worse (which I agree with), but you don't take your discussion further than that other than to say that it is bad. You could've broken down how jetpacks completely threw map design and flow out the window by allowing people to fly and thereby break the intended and natural design of the map, or how it impacted how gun fights played out. You make a point of Halo 4's ordinance drops being bad for Halo, but again didn't offer any further points other than putting it as an example of 343's mistakes (e.g. ordinance drops remove the need to acquire on-map power weapons, thereby diminishing the importance of a team's map setup and control, and simplifies Halo's deep gameplay loop to better gun = you win (same can be said for loadouts/perks)).
There's also a big missing part about WHY all of this happened under later-Bungie and then 343. There's lots of interviews, articles, posts etc. out there from former Halo developers that shine an important light on the mindset behind the designs of these games and the environments they were made in. For example, there's a couple of interviews Bonnie Ross (I know, I know…) did, where she tells a story of how 343 showed a Halo 4 prototype to Microsoft, and it was admonished for being "too like Halo," or how former Xbox president Don Mattrick had forced 343 to launch the game early so it landed on the Xbox 360. There's also arguments to be made about how 343's incessant desire to capture a "broader audience" with their games has compromised and diluted Halo's identity, without 343 understanding how most Halo players already WERE the broader audience (before they drove them away).
It's easy to go on and on about how poorly 343 has handled Halo, but a lot of this video feels like you saying "Halo changed and is bad now" without trying to explain the point further. I dunno, again I don't disagree with your overarching claims, but I think a video like this one needs a lot more to it to actually support your points so that it doesn't come off as one of the unimaginative videos of "343 bad" that pessimistic Halo YouTubers churn out. No hate, I just think this video falls short of realizing itself and being a more worthwhile watch.
OMG he stole my video idea!
The change in art style in Infinite was their "Halos back to form!" message that grabbed so many people at launch….. They cant use that anymore lmao
Also Halo Reach was more of a "fuck it" game spinoff so they pushed the engine to the limit and added so much shit into it without a care to probably test some stuff for destiny as well as to make a jampacked FUN game as a send off, it was all going to be handed over to 343i anyways…. BUngie knew a lot of Reachs stuff would piss people off but did it anyways for fun and it showed numerous directions on where the franchise could go. 343i got all the wrong stuff/lessons from Reach and applied it to all their games….
This man spitting facts
It's the ol' adage "don't try and reinvent the wheel"
You beat me to it! I had planned on making a video about this very same topic!
Great stuff and solid points as well.
100% agree with you, reality is though, problem with forms of art like video games, some developers dont like pumping out the same kind of content for the entirety of their existence. Halo is a example of this, bungie wanted to move on from halo for so long but microsoft wanted them to keep pumping out the same content over and over again. After Halo 3, bungie made Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach as experimentation for the new game franchise they wanted to make, Destiny. This experimentation was the additions of a open world-like map in the ODST campaign and special abilities in Reach. Bungie was a developer studio that just didn't like doing the same thing over and over again.
My theory is 343 made a mistake by looking at Halo: Reach's success and instead of looking at criticism, looked at what was more popular than Reach, which was COD. Instead of looking at what people were saying, they pretty much made their own version of Reach's gameplay with call of duty-like features. The most recent game, Halo Infinite was probably 343's greatest attempt at mimicking the true halo "formula," and it actually ended up being fun gameplay-wise compared to 4 and 5, they just failed to keep their initial success. Infinite on the first week was doing so well, I remember playing on the multiplayer beta day 1, then it kindof turned into a rollercoaster. I think, using your points, a live service game was a good solution, having the same game for 10 years but with fresh content all the time, but they failed to do that so badly. Halo Infinite really reminds me of Halo 3 with the equipment system and gameplay-wise was a step in the right direction, problem is that they might have made good gameplay, but they couldn't keep the live service up, basically ruining the perfect opportunity for a comeback in late 2021 – early 2022.
Great video as usual
halo infinite could ve been 343s chance for redemption. Personaly the gameplay is my favourite in the series. Had the game not been neglected this hard and cut so many features i think halo would ve been back. Imagine halo infinite with fortnite levels of live service. More equipment, more vehicles, firefight with campaign bosses on legendary, a decent anticheat, more weapons, cross core….. but instead amazing gameplay but no live service and an incomplete game 1 year later. People loved infinite at the start but the lack of content and fixes is embarassing.
The problem here is that it is not just gameplay that changed but just about everything changed, Story, Lore, Art Style, community features, and gameplay. You can't lay this all at the feet of the gameplay changing. They only kinda corrected art style for infinite.
Also Armor abilities (at least in Reach) were an awesome idea, the problem being that anyone could spawn with any they wanted and have unlimited use. If they were a map pickup like equipment in 3 and had a limited ammo supply there would be far few complaints. If they were map pickups that would have meant that the maps could have been designed around any of the abilities or non of them depending on what you place on the map and so many problems would have been solved.
What happened to Halo? 343s garbage ass decisions hiring people who genuinely HATED Halo CE, 2, 3. They also hired creative directors who were "HALO NEW COMERS"
Frank O Conner got hired at 343 as the franchise creative director, and he knows nothing about the original Halo trilogy lore or story. Literally Sabotage
Honestly bro I'm at the point where the new kids can have Halo i just don't care anymore, I've been fighting the good fight for over 10yrs now and hardly anything has changed Halo's not even Halo anymore anyway so who cares. Every argument i have with a 343 fanboy it's like talking in circles, these people don't understand what a juggernaut Halo was when Halo was Halo and not some wanna be title.
It's always "Halo had no competition back then" even though Favyn's video disproves that, "Numbers don't matter" when it comes to player numbers/rank on Xbox's most played games but they matter when Halo 5 apparently "out sold" Halo 3 and Reach when it was stated that the number provided also included console sales. And the constant down play of the original trilogy by these people just to bring up 343's games is insane. I'll always appreciate you, Favyn, Roniboney, WpnsGrade, The ActMan, etc for making these videos but it just seems like its been all for nothing, i just don't think Halo will ever catch lighting in a bottle ever again.
Edit: Also i'd like to add that I've always wondered if Bungie did what they did with Reach knowing 343 would probably expand on that making Halo a non factor so Destiny would have a better chance. I doubt that's the case but it would have been a big brain move.
The issue always comes down to the creative vision and Microsoft
I'm pretty mixed on Counter-Strike. I think it's great that a game like it can be so popular even to this day, and while I don't think it's a terrible game by any means, I believe it is wholeheartedly the (probably second) worst series Valve has. Like honestly, Day of Defeat: Source even is a much better game than it. Counter-Strike has the worst gunplay of any of their FPS series.
Like I said, I still like CS and play it, but still, it's bottom of the Valve barrel.
This is the same argument I’ve been making to people for the best part of 10 years. Halo changed when it was at its absolute peak. It’s an unbelievable piece of self sabotage
Tf2 is also a good argument against games needing to "evolve". While yes it has changed alot from when it was first released it has been over 5 years since its even had a balance update. Yet its playercount peaked last year when it was abandoned by valve.
Tbh all of valves games show this. Like left 4 dead is still played a ton and it hasn't changed its core gameplay much at all.
OG halo is so unique it basically has its own spot in the market. There's not really any competition for a halo like game. If 343 just went back to the old formula they would make bank, even with an unfinished game.
CS GO is a f2p casino for third world poor players.
What is Halo's formula?? It's always been changed even with Bungie in charge
I don’t even play halo anymore.
Halo 3 is the perfect halo game it has little changes but it still feels like halo.
Reach's only flaw was underserving the competitive community. Else to me and many others it was a sublime masterpiece.
If armor abilities are disliked, you could go into custom games and 100% remove ALL of the armor abilities. You could even design your maps to not factor in armor abilities whatsoever. And with TU settings, you could disable reticle bloom.