As of the time of writing this sentence, Halo Reach released 14 years ago today. That’s a… long time for the last game in a more than 2 decade long franchise to be commonly regarded as “good”, but even then you won’t get a straight answer from a lot of people on whether Halo Reach is actually “good”, and, whether or not you believe that, its hard to deny nothing was really the same after Reach’s release. That comes in both an objective and a subjective sense, with the company making Halo games changing from Bungie to 343 Industries [UPDATE: This took me so long to write that while I was writing it 343 Industries rebranded to Halo Studios. I really don’t want to go and change every instance where I say 343, so just make the connection that 343=Halo Studios if you are from the future] and the prestigious quality of Halo kinda being thrown in the dumpster after this point. It’s not as simple as “Bungie games are good and 343 games are bad”, although, yeah, people tend to agree on that. But if you line up Halo 4, 5 and Infinite all together they aren’t even bad in the same ways, other than an umbrella term of “SHIT WRITING AND LACK OF CONTENT” but even that’s not that same brand of shitty across the board. Point being, they all manage to be sloppy and incompetent both on their own and within the context of being sequels to some of the best FPS games ever made, even with improvements and cool ideas being present in all of them.
So things changed. Got it. You probably already know that, making a comparison from what the cultural census around Halo was around the 2000s and 2010s and comparing it to now. So why am I writing about it?
The truth on that matter is, frankly, I love Halo. It has been, is and possibly always will be my favorite game franchise, and as its gotten harder to ignore the reality of where this franchise is heading and my thoughts on it, I found myself bored and wanted to write about it. While lazy hit pieces on 343 Industries are a dime a dozen these days and are an easy way to generate clicks, I don’t want to contribute to that. It seems easy to take the role of a bashful critic. The role of a critic in any context should be to give their honest thoughts, both the good and the bad with the thing they are critiquing, even if the critic is an amateur, stupid one.
Hey what’s up, my name is Owen. I spent the last few days of my free time drinking and writing about a franchise nobody cares about anymore in a medium which no one takes seriously, and if you think that’s going to be an indicator for the tone I’m setting with this piece you’re right; I am going to be mean to these games. If I wanted to, I could probably cut down on some time by just making a hit piece on all the things I hate about these games and the company that makes them, ignoring all the cool and interesting ideas brought to the table. That was the original plan. It would’ve been really fun! It’d be bullying, but it would be fun.
The theme of this post is not a theme of hate, but a theme of love. I’m going to be mean to these games in a way that only someone with love in their heart can be, because even at the end of playing all the Halos, good and bad, and writing this, I still love this world, warts and all. I love the games, I love the books, I love the shitty comics that retroactively ruin stories, I love the art and I love the fan works by a community that refuses to admit defeat and die even after more than a decade of abuse and disappointment. Because, even after defeat after defeat, one of the main messages of Halo is hope; that even with our backs up against the wall, with the world crashing in around us, humanity can still find a way to win. I’m going to be mean to this world because I know it can take the punches, and hopefully put out something good in the future.
I’m going to be mean because I care.
Halo’s Narrative Structure and Writing
Alright, for this section I’m going to assume you’re at least familiar with Halo’s overall narrative. This is going to be, by far, the longest section of this piece I’m and I really don’t want to spend time explaining events. I am also going to start it off with a statement that could get me killed in some circles.
Halo’s story has never been good.
What I mean by that is Halo’s mainline games have never had an especially good plot if you just list the events that happen one after the other. Its compelling if unremarkable at best, and generic at worst. What Halo ALWAYS excelled at is PRESENTATION. The art style, the sounds, the voice acting, the music, by god that MUSIC. Halo’s presentation always gave it this grand sense of scale and importance, getting the player invested in this world through showing, not telling. Halo CE felt like exploring a strange alien world, Halo 2 felt like the world was coming down around you, 3 was this epic conclusion of biblical proportions, and Reach effectively conveyed the desperation and hopelessness that an alien invasion brings.
I don’t think 343 Industries really understood that when they inherited the license, if I’m being honest. People never remembered Halo characters because they had this great character arc where they learned something valuable and changed for the better by the end, unless your name was The Arbiter. People remember Sgt. Johnson because he was always witty, had a great voice actor and was a supporting character for 2 games. People remember Cortana because she was literally in your head for most of the trilogy, always talking to you and backing you up. People remember the Master Chief because he’s the coolest guy in the galaxy. These characters all have well written moments and lines, but their actual character progression is next to naught for most of the story here.
A lot of criticism has been levied at 343 for trying to turn Master Chief from “badass player stand-in” into an actual character. This is obviously a stupid critique; different interpretations and evolutions of the same character are fine as long as they’re well written and not too out there. Their first game, Halo 4, really seemed to wanted to flesh out the man behind the Mjolnir suit and focus on the consequences living your entire life as the ultimate badass has on your psyche and life. This is a cool idea in my opinion–as far as games to rip off themes from, Metal Gear Solid is a pretty good place to rip off, and Solid Snake and Master Chief are certainly similar in more than a few ways; having a stupid code name is just one.
The difference in MGS and Halo exploring these themes of the nature of soldiers, PTSD, and other very serious topics is by the time MGS really rolled around Snake had 2 whole games where he was an actual character exploring both his and others’ sanity and duty as soldiers under his belt, while when Halo thought it was time to dive into the Man behind the Mjolnir, the only character progression he really got was just getting cooler over time. There’s also the problem of… well, putting it as nicely as I can, Master Chief wasn’t really a “character” as much as he was a slab of meat for the player to inhabit during the Bungie days, and his backstory as far as expanded media goes is pretty much “he had the character beaten out of him”. John-117’s story is sad not because of what he says, or those around him or the circumstances of his character, its sad in a way that a man who got MKUltra’d by the government and lost his mind is sad.
Halo 4 does try to make Chief’s character tragic and sad, but not in any way that is compelling for anyone who isn’t a huge loser nerd. Now, being a huge loser nerd, I will admit I kinda like Halo 4’s narrative, minus the Prometheans and Didact being underused and stupid and Jul M’dama going from the main antagonist of a really good book into being relegated to the background in this game and killed unceremoniously in the next game (And if you thought we weren’t going to talk about the books later, you are dead wrong). The ending, however fantastic in the moment, leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth as its so beautiful and fitting for the story Halo 4 tries to tell only to be retrooactively made stupid and useless with Halo 5. Halo 4 is emblematic of what 343’s entire writing style going forward with the franchise, where they have a lot of big, interesting ideas for the setting but can’t execute on very many of them and leave them as awkward loose threads whenever they don’t succeed. Big ideas are fine, but they don’t make a good story on their own; I bet you, the reader have tons of “big ideas” whether you consider yourself a writer or not. Hell, I have tons of big ideas and I’m a terrible writer, not matter what my mom says. If I was a good writer I wouldn’t be here, writing on a game series nobody cares about in a medium that no one takes seriously!
Narrative: Halo 5
Lets go back to the weird Metal Gear Solid comparisons for a sec and move onto what seemingly wanted to be Halo’s Metal Gear Solid 2: Halo 5.
Now comparing Metal Gear Solid 2, a game which essentially predicted the future and is lauded as one of the greatest games of all time, to Halo 5, a game which sucks, seems like a bit of a crime, but walk with me for a second.
Halo 5 features a player-character that changed from the last game, sets up a plot in which the previous protagonist has gone rogue and one of our main character’s tasks is to bring him in for the dominant intelligence agency, and only allows you to play as the old main character for limited amounts of time. Sound familiar? Alright, good.
Another point of the comparison is the fact that the marketing leading up to the game was intentionally misleading, leading those buying to the game to believe that they were buying a narrative that was completely removed from what they actually got. The marketing for Halo 5 was all about espionage, conspiracy, ONI doing CIA deception and proxy war antics, and it was BRILLIANT. It painted the Master Chief as killed in action, missing, fleeing, AWOL, all these different stories and with the Hunt The Truth podcast in tandem it really felt like unraveling a conspiracy and figuring out what happened to our boy. It also portrayed Spartan Locke as this badass spook set to his mission and his ideals, even if he’s being mislead (Metal Gear Solid comparisons continue).
And I really wish I got to play the story I got sold!
While MGS2 uses its sudden switch up of protagonists to make a point about how you’re not Solid Snake, the coolest guy ever, you’re you, and you have to accept that, Halo 5 uses its duel protagonist just to set up an awkward Spartan slapfight halfway through the game and give the plot contrived reasons to move forward. You figure out that Master Chief is alright and he isn’t a bad guy now less than halfway into the game, which is fine, but there’s not real conflict after that. Chief and Locke have a weird slapfight, Chief runs away, Locke catches up with him 3 missions later and they’re just best buds now. They had something really interesting for a bit, and then just dropped it 60% through the game so we can chase this awful “Cortana is back” plotline that, retrospectively, irreversibly cooked the writing for this franchise, backing us into a narrative corner of which there were very few ways out.
The ending to this game is, to put it plainly, fucking awful. Its sloppy, its boring, its lazy, and it de-legitimizes Halo 4’s incredible ending by bringing back the one character that you probably shouldn’t have. Evil Cortana sucks, along with the entire other part of the Forerunner plotline in this game. I don’t care about the “domain”, I don’t care about The Reclamation no matter how many times you say those words at me, and I especially don’t care about the Warden Eternal, even after I’ve killed him 10 times. I wish I could bitch more but, frankly, this section is already enormous and we’re still not done.
We still have one more game to go.
Narrative: Halo Infinite
The astute Halo fans in the audience might notice that I’ve neglected to discuss Halo Wars 2 in this piece so far, and the reasons for that are twofold: one, this piece is going to be extremely long and I frankly do not have the time or energy to devote an entire section to a spinoff RTS game nobody played, and 2, most of the narrative in that game (minus the Flood comeback) gets its payoff in Halo Infinite.
Kind of.
Halo Infinite’s story is fascinating to me because it attempts to move in the right direction but does all the wrong things trying to move in said direction. Its a hard reset for the series, which was probably needed after Halo 5’s ending, but it resets it in such a way that it completely removes the interesting ideas presented in 4 and 5 in favor of ideas much blander and, frankly boring than its predecessors. It wants to be a gateway for newcomers, but it can’t go all the way on actually being a good entry point for the series when the phantoms of previous games cling to it. It wants a return to classic style Halo, but also wants to be something the series hasn’t done before. It can’t commit to anything in its narrative that seems interesting, and somehow chooses all the wrong things to commit to.
Lets start with the opening and keep in mind that this is meant to be an entry point for brand new people to the Halo universe. In the intro, we are shown The Banished, the UNSC Infinity, a Halo Ring, and the names Atriox, Cortana and the Forerunners are all mentioned and presented as if we should know these things already, but don’t have any explanation before or after to flesh these things out for new players. Now, being thrown into the middle of a conflict for which you have no prior knowledge is very in the spirit of the original Halo, which Infinite wants you to remember REALLLLLY bad. But Combat Evolved gives you context as you go on about the war and its masterstroke is once you have that conflict figured out, it flips the war on its head by introducing a newer, even bigger threat. 343 wants to have that twist and the same effect of uncovering mysteries as you go on, but you never actually learn anything of substance about the Banished as a new player that makes them super interesting other than they’re motivated by loyalty to their supposedly dead leader who was the antagonist of an RTS game nobody played, and who isn’t even dead!
There’s also the issue of not fully committing to the complete scrapping of Halo’s state at the end of Halo 5, and instead trying–and, in my opinion, failing– to retool previous narrative concepts into something new and interesting. This game reuses a lot from other games, which is fine, but what isn’t fine is trying to do a complete reset of the setting but still keeping threads hanging, whether on purpose or by accident. As far as we know, all of the main characters from Halo 5 are dead or missing, Evil Cortana somehow died and her yoke on the galaxy is broken, and we somehow ended up at a Halo ring for reasons that aren’t really explored in the game. This seems fine for what is supposed to be a scoreboard reset, cutting the threads of Halo 4 and 5 that didn’t work and resetting the playing field to where we were at the start, but the context surrounding this reset is so huge and the implications so massive that its really, really hard for me to accept that we can just sweep this all under the rug and call it a day.
Let’s recap the end of Halo 5 before we move back into Infinite; when credits roll in Halo 5, Blue Team and Fireteam Osiris escape to fight another day and Cortana basically becomes Space Hitler and starts to wrangle the galaxy under her new, tyrannical rule. Now when Infinite starts little more than a year after these events, we are supposed to believe that all of these problems were just magically solved off screen to make way for this new problem. I hate to be the guy who goes “this is how I would’ve done it” because I’m not a game creator, I’m a loser who sits in his room and complains about games, but there is genuinely cool things you could do with that premise, even if I do think Halo 5’s ending is stupid. You could have a guerilla war across multiple planets and installations fighting Cortana and whoever swore loyalty to her, making allies along the way, but instead we cut all of that to set ourselves up for an unwinnable 3rd match that has to both acknowledge what came before while sweeping it all under the rug. Its weird, its wrong, and, frankly, its very uninteresting. Its the same thing Rise of Skywalker did, and guess what? That movie fucking sucks! Stop trying to get rid of the controversial elements from your previous work and start using them to create interesting ideas and try to spin them into something positive!
I know we’ve only talked about the intro and the context for Halo Infinite, but, really, that’s the most interesting thing to talk about in regards to its story apart from “The Twists”. I like The Pilot, although its weird you have to dig around in the menus to learn his real name. I like this take on Master Chief’s human and emotional aspects, but its not enough to save the story from being a victim of its gameplay style. We can get a bit more into the weeds on this later but for now, if you didn’t already know, Halo Infinite is an open world game taking place entirely in one environment; grassy hills. First of all, the only one environment is super lame. Part of what gave the Halo rings this grand sense of scale is that there were multiple environments on every one, there were mountains, fields, oceans, deserts, underground areas. It lead to them feeling like they really were this massive ecosystem. Constraining this game, which seems to want you to explore, to only one type of environment is very telling that this game’s development was rushed, and it stops being interesting to look at about 20 minutes after you step out onto the ring for the first time. There’s nothing visually striking here, it looks like fucking Green Hill Zone from Sonic. Second, due to the nature of this game’s gameplay loop, most of the missions are very cookie cutter; destroy this area, get this thing, liberate this outpost. There’s no interesting set pieces, no “Halo 2 tank on the bridge” or Scarab fight section to really get the blood flowing and make this war feel like a real war (which is also something we’ll get into later)
Regarding the twist of “The Endless”, yeah its stupid, everyone knows its stupid, and there’s not much more to say on it. Trying to ape the iconic Flood reveal from Combat Evolved but not making it interesting at all and not adding a new enemy to really hammer home the impact is pretty embarrassing, especially when the design is so lame and it’ll likely join the ever growing list of loose threads that 343 has been propagating for the past decade. This section is already really long and there are even more things I want to talk about so I’m going to tie the narrative portion up here so I’m just going to leave it at this. Halo Infinite’s story is a step in the right direction, but mismanagement and confusion over what this game was actually going to be likely led to to the haphazard state it is today, and it isn’t a big enough set to save it from 343’s tendencies to leave what doesn’t work on the cutting room floor at the end of the day. I guess we’ll see if that’s a good or bad thing.
Alright, we’re finally done with the narrative. These next sections are going to be shorter and explore mostly single player stuff, touching on multiplayer in some areas but mostly a generalization of gameplay and other stuff that makes Halo, Halo.
Expanded Media
Alright, I admit I tricked you when I said we were done with the narrative because I want to take an opportunity to talk about my lame nerd books.
Halo has such an expansive universe to play around in. It has the scale of Star Wars, the potential for political intrigue of Star Trek, the aesthetics of Starship Troopers, the rule of cool factor of Warhammer 40k, but yet is focused enough to avoid the pitfalls of any of those series. It simultaneously knew what it was and played around with its core pillars to make interesting expanded media, usually coming in the form of books (Although we did get that kick-ass anime a while back). And for a while, the expanded media did just that; expanded the world so we could see new perspectives of it. We got stories from the POV of Chief and friends, of course, but we also got stories from the first contact with the Covenant, perspectives from different ranks, professions and species and even a 3-part series about ONI arming ex-Covenant terrorists to spark a civil war, a not-so-subtle allegory to the real life act of the CIA funding and arming the Taliban back in the 80s. These are all interesting ideas! So why did we stop getting them?
Did all of these talented writers simply move on? I find that hard to believe at first, since damn did these books sell and they probably got some fat checks from Microsoft, but it could be they just got sick of the situation at Microsoft/343. Did they all die under mysterious circumstances? Whatever the case, we now get less expanded media than ever and the ones we do get are pretty hilariously bad. I’ll admit, I haven’t read a ton of the newer books–most of their premises just didn’t seem too interesting– but “Intel”? Those 2 paragraph “stories”? The atrocious TV show that got canned after 2 seasons? This is what we’re settling for now? These are lazy fan fictions at best and feel like they are personally mocking me for having an investment in this franchise that started when I was 8 at worst.
I really hope a shakeup in the media team at 343 was part of the deal when the big restructuring happened, because I want to see this world fleshed out in ways that aren’t spritually destroying. Maybe that means pressing a hard reset and decanonizing a lot of the trash, but if that’s the price to pay, I’m willing to take it if we get more quality out of this world.
Tone, or Why I Hate the T Rating
This is going to be a short follow up, as I couldn’t find a place to fit my qualms with the overall tone of this franchise in the narrative segment, but I really miss when these games were rated Mature. It provided an air of “realism” to this fantastical, military sci-fi setting and really sold that this was a WAR, because that’s what Halo is about. It is a WAR where the consequences of losing usually involve the extinction or subjugation of the entire human race. So why are we not acting like it? Completely removing most of the blood, gore, environmental destruction and swearing not only downplays the tone of the setting but also reduces the perceived effect of weapons in gameplay. It doesn’t sound like a big deal but unloading a full assault rifle magazine in Halo 3 vs Halo 5 actually feels way different in no small part due to the lack of visible feedback from the enemy; it doesn’t look like you’re doing the damage you’re causing, therefore it doesn’t feel like you’re doing the damage you’re causing. Not even mentioning that having a T rating completely cuts out using the Flood as an enemy, since that would surely be too grotesque to fly. And that’s really damn sad!
This decision likely came as part of a long line of decisions 343 made to “appeal to a broader audience”, likely meaning children, but I can’t help but feel like this is a misguided one not just on the principal of the franchise, but also from a business standpoint as well. Kids think blood and swearing is cool, no matter how vain; its part of the reason war crime simulators like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto sell so well. Also, going back to tone, this is, at the end of the day, a story about a child soldier fighting a genocidal alien threat that humanity has been continually losing to for 25+ years. I’m not saying Halo has always been this super gritty war story, its always been very colorful and lighthearted in the mainline games. But it had an edge. Yes, marines had goofy Australian accents, but there was genuine vitriol when they cussed out “those alien bastards”. People swear, especially in distress. Animals bleed, especially when they get shot at. This is a war. Can we at least try to act like it?
Live Service Woes
You remember Infection? Its been in a ton of FPS games, you’ve probably played some version of it or another throughout the years, but it actually started as a custom game in Halo 2 back in 2004. The premise of Infection is simple: Everyone except one guy is a “human” with normal equipment and health, while one person has reduced health and spawns with a one-hit kill sword. If you die to the “zombie”, you become a “zombie”, and the game ends if all the humans die or survive until time runs out.
It took 343 Industries, a large company owned by one of the wealthiest corporations on Earth, 18 months to add a game mode where if you die to a guy with a sword, you switch to the team who has the swords.
This type of missing, basic content that old Halo games had isn’t even unique to Infinite: Neither Halo 5 nor Infinite launched with a functional Forge mode a good ranked system, a functional playlist, and Infinite in particular really struggled to both launch with enough content and keep up a decent pace. I can only really put this down to managerial incompetence as far as I can see as an observer, as teams with less money, time and people have managed to very easily launch games with more content and add more content as it goes on than Infinite has managed over its lifespan. Hell, Infinite LAUNCHED with 10 maps, the same amount of maps Halo 3 launched with in 2007!
“Live Service” is not the way forward for Halo. It has brought nothing but pain to a series that has already suffered enough. The free to play model has been one of the only experimentations of the 343 Era that has been a 100%, complete, no redeeming qualities failure. It has led to a content drip feed that barely even drips, mismanagement across several teams, customization options being locked behind ridiculous paywalls, and this awful “seasonal narrative” in an attempt to emulate Fortnite. You can’t emulate Fortnite. You aren’t Fortnite. You’re Halo. And that should be good enough.
In conclusion, the next Halo game should be sold as a full $60 package campaign and mutliplayer +whatever else they add and bring back Reach’s customization system to avoid this bullshit.
Last One Out, Shut The Door
This is running long. I realize that. This isn’t everything I wanted to talk about, but frankly, I’ve already spent a lot of time writing something that isn’t even that good and I want to get this done. If I could keep going knowing you’d still be engaged, I honestly would, but short of strapping you up to the Clockwork Orange machine and forcing you, you probably aren’t going to read through how I think the Golden Triangle of Halo combat was messed with or how the new art style is inferior or how contractor-reliant work led to a rushed product, or how Esports is a plague that is ruining modern FPS games, so on so forth, you get the idea. So lets wrap this up
I love Halo. I always have, and, despite how I might’ve come off, I always will. Even Infinite, which is probably the most disappointing of the Halo games I’ve played, has its merits; the gameplay in general is really solid, and nowadays the multiplayer is pretty fun even if it took us a while to get there. I do believe that, eventually, even if it takes another decade, the franchise will find its footing again. Maybe that’s just me wanting to believe in people a bit too hard, but I do believe that; Halo has, somehow, managed to stay culturally relevant throughout more than a decade of disappointments. Everybody knows who Master Chief is, everybody recognizes iconography from the games. Halo, like the Spartans we play as, simply refuses to die despite the odds.
After all, Spartans never die. They’re just missing in action.
If you got this far, thank you, this took a lot out of me to write in the midst of college. Maybe there’ll be a part 2 if this gets enough attention, since there’s still a lot more I’d like to talk about. I know this came off as a rant, not really that organized, but I thank you for indulging me. If you liked it, share it with a buddy, if you didn’t like it, DM me on twitter telling me how much it sucks and then share it with a buddy. I’d appreciate it. I’m gonna try to have a more consistent posting schedule, but since this is a solo project now, we’ll see how that goes. For now, I’ll see you starside.
