So now that Master Chief Collection is slowly being added to Steam, and all the contrarians are coming out of the woodworks to shit on Halo again, I just have to say, it's hilarious how 19 years later there's still so many people who don't understand what made Halo special. 19 years later and people are STILL comparing it to DOOM, Quake, Unreal, etc. as if these games somehow did what Halo did but better.
Want to know what Halo did well? An immersive co-op story campaign. Something none of the other FPS games at the time did at all or even half as efficiently. In fact, most games released AFTER Halo didn't do it as efficiently either.
getting bored of underage contrarians here making low effort bait threads about older well regarded games on Yas Forums
Caleb Nguyen
ok zoomer
Sebastian Carter
Did either of you even read the OP? There isn't a shred about it that's "underage" or "bait."
Aiden Taylor
I don't particularly like the Halo games, but I will give it that. The co-op campaign was fun, and introducing my dad to it was even funner.
Hudson Thompson
Why the fuck are Halo fans like this? They can't accept people not liking the game and even go as far to defend the shitty ports to pc.
James Sullivan
Yes the dwindling player count speaks volumes of Halos famous legacy......
Landon Powell
You're the first to even bring up the port as a central topic to the thread.
Ryder King
>Want to know what Halo did well? An immersive co-op story campaign. Something none of the other FPS games at the time did at all or even half as efficiently. In fact, most games released AFTER Halo didn't do it as efficiently either.
Halo is actually quite boring of an experience, it's just shoot enemies as the come at you with vaguely interesting environments.
Sebastian Cruz
You probably overlooked all the nuanced design decisions in the game that exist for immersing players in the story if you think that.
Justin Ross
Story? Halo?
AHHHHHHHHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA
Gabriel Sanchez
>doesn't even know it has a story >thinks he can criticize it or the game design
William Gonzalez
It has a story, it's just banal as fuck.
Michael Fisher
not him but he's right that halo fans all over the internet are aggressively trying to defend the mcc port
Ryan Perry
Your point is banal as fuck. You think any other sci-fi FPS has a story even half as good? At least Halo combined ideas from various beloved sources: various novels, comic books, and movies that the science fiction community enjoyed. It has way more of a story and a way BETTER story than the vast majority of sci-fi games out there.
And it's not even about the story itself, but the fact that the game is designed really well to immerse the players in it. That's what makes it good. This isn't about being a good story, it's about being a good video game.
Nolan Carter
This, Half Life as a better story, and it's not even finished.
Luke Cruz
Half Life is not a co-op game and doesn't have nearly the same level of immersion.
Michael Reed
Half Life 1's story was well executed and self contained. The rest of the franchise should just be ignored frankly.
>doesn't have nearly the same level of immersion. Absolute nonsense.
Gavin Roberts
You really gonna try and argue that Half Life has AI as sophisticated and charismatic as Halo's? Is there a narrative reason for the UI? Plus, even if it did, it's still not a co-op game.
Benjamin Hughes
Halo? Immersion?
What the actual fuck
Daniel Wood
>Half Life is not a co-op game >he doesn't know
Brody Roberts
>Is there a narrative reason for the UI? Yes. Everyone who played the first 15 minutes of the game knows the reason. Thanks for confirming that you didn't.
Kevin Anderson
>AI as sophisticated and charismatic as Halo's
What the actual fuck I am I reading
Zachary Johnson
Not him, but Halo's AI is one of its few redeeming qualities. There are many varied enemy types and they respond in interesting ways to the changing battle.
David Reed
>There are many varied enemy types There's like 5, and you fight all but 2 the same way.
Alexander Allen
The look of Half Life's UI design doesn't have a narrative reason. The design of the UI in Halo actually makes sense besides the little bars for the health, which is the most far-fetched aspect of it. Everything else is organic though. There's basically nothing organic about Half Life's UI design, it's just numbers thrown on the screen, and very flimsily reasoned by the suit you wear.
Having exact numbers is much more useful than arbitrary bars.
Gavin Sanchez
Half Life is a GAME first everything second. Thats why its one of the best gaming experiences about.
And who gives a fuck about UI design, is that all Halo homos have?
Dominic Martinez
You're forgetting or ignoring the ally NPCs and how they and the enemy designs all interact with each other and the player and contribute towards affirming Master Chief's presence in the story and asserting the player's role as him.
Not for immersing the player in a story.
Halo is a simulation if you want to look at it that way. A much better simulation than Half Life.
Tyler Watson
>Halo is a simulation
low quality bait
Ryder Adams
>Not for immersing the player in a story. Yeah it does. Gordon Freeman isn't a supersoldier he's a scientist. His suit isn't sleek space tech it's gritty industrial equipment. The crude, function over form UI perfectly fits the context of the game on top of just being better for gameplay.
Imagine being such a brainlet that you don't understand this immediately.
Lucas Perry
This argument is almost always used to cherry pick and ignore the real point of other posts. Compared to Halo, Half Life's "narrative reason" for the UI is a poor excuse for one. Sure, compared to other FPS it may have had something of one, but they aren't relevant here because we're talking about Halo. Gordon's not even wearing a helmet.
Asher Reyes
I thought it was obvious that they were going for that since the second level takes you to the surface of a construct artificially simulating weather patterns and vegetation. Halo was always about pulling players as deeply into the story and its themes as possible.
>His suit isn't sleek space tech it's gritty industrial equipment. Doesn't mean the hard numerical values and the way they just float without a helmet is a convincing design.
Landon Cook
>Doesn't mean the hard numerical values is a convincing design. Uh, yeah it does. That's exactly what you'd want out of a piece of professional equipment. You want to get maximum information with minimum noise. Would a scientist want an instrument that just fills up an unlabelled meter rather than giving you an actual measurement? Half Life's UI is perfectly congruent with the rest of its world and the fact that you still can't see that is testimony to your autism.
Michael Miller
How do you quantify physical health with such rustic equipment?
Jose Parker
Dunno, how does Master Chief's armour quantify his health?
Jack Turner
It doesn't in later games.
Isaiah Campbell
Yeah, instead his broken ribs and haemorrhaging organs regenerate in a matter of seconds.
Jacob Evans
He's a cyborg wearing military grade equipment and even then the suit doesn't quantify it with a hard numerical value but with a rough visualization.
Jackson Powell
Guys, is it normal to suddenly be waiting for more than 5 minutes in the lobby? Was just getting straight games in Firefight till now.
Mason Jones
It still has one, it's just obtuse about telling you.
What's in the game's code doesn't matter. Obviously every game has hard numerical values behind it.
Jason Baker
explain to me how 343 fucked this up when they add almost 2 full decades to port those games devs really are worthless these days, its umbelievable
Robert Watson
It's obvious from playing the game. That's still how the game works mechanically.
Landon Parker
The devs still chose to represent it visually and obscure the numbers a bit for the sake of higher immersion.
Daniel Diaz
It doesn't make things more immersive, it draws attention to the fact that your character and how your character works within the game is not being precisely represented on the screen.
Zachary Lopez
Sounds like you care more about just winning at a video game considering you're giving next to no credit at all towards game design that creates a better suspension of disbelief and de-emphasizes that min-maxing element of previous games. I mean, wasn't the original point that Half Life made it easier to play? So yeah.
The UI is also a small point in this whole debate. The AI design is the bigger point.
Noah Taylor
To be fair, as a PC gamer first exposed to Halo through Master Chief Collection, I didn't like Halo Reach at all, campaign especially. Yet somehow I am having fun playing Halo CE campaign - although the levels are sometimes way too long. This fucking 343 Guilty Spark section gets really repetitive very fast. Still, can Halo be relevant on PC, especially after DOOM 2016 revitalized the genre?
Justin Perez
>Still, can Halo be relevant on PC, especially after DOOM 2016 revitalized the genre? It can be if 343 improves the netcode for the co-op.
Gabriel Smith
I've been playing co-op and honestly it's still very repetitive and uninteresting for the most part. The biggest problem with this rerelease however is not having a server list+community servers like the original gearbox port. Why gut such a PC-centric feature, to avoid people calling each other niggers in chat?
Gavin Sullivan
Honestly your point is just going to be lost on the vast majority of people here. Great co-op FPS campaigns are a lost art, and most people here revere the LAN days and think stuff like halo killed it off, when if anything it breathed new life into the concept and elevated it into a world with lore, story, and atmosphere.
Oh well, everyone's got to pick a side, don't they?
Michael Anderson
I'm not giving the credit because it's not due. It does not create better suspension of disbelief - it does the opposite. Immersion exists when there is no gap between you and the character in the game. If the character's experience is as close to your experience as possible, you are immersed. Like it or not, your character has hit points. You can suspend your disbelief over the mechanical quirks of video games like having hit points, but that's not nearly as toxic to immersion as trying to pretend they don't exist. This is why extremely unrealistic games like metroidvanias still manage to be highly immersive. >The AI design is the bigger point. Insignificant next to the way cutscenes are presented as far as immersion is concerned. There's a reason Half Life popularised the unbroken first person silent protagonist style of storytelling, for better and worse. It's because it's far more immersive to actually watch story twists take place in front of you than pulling the camera back to listen to some robot bark drivel about the dull circumstances in front of him.
Noah Ortiz
Halo CE co-op is pretty much the same campaign but with two dudes playing, story is ultimately window-dressing.
Caleb Myers
>Like it or not, your character has hit points. Real life doesn't have hit points like that. You seem to want to immerse yourself in a game rather than a world and this is why you're not getting me.
>Insignificant next to the way cutscenes are presented as far as immersion is concerned. The cutscenes in CE work perfect in terms of creating an atmosphere for the next part of the level. They aren't unimmersive. That's a criticism for later games in the series where the cutscenes become longer and diverge from simply creating atmospheric tensions in levels.
And you STILL didn't acknowledge how the AI design has an impact on all this.
Justin Stewart
Honestly just shrugging my shoulders at this point. What's the point of articulating why something resonated with you when the person you're talking to is only interested in discounting it and insisting that the other way of doing it is better. Different strokes for different folks.
Tyler Harris
Probably because 1-3 are universally praised and when people complain about them on Yas Forums it's always "it isn't like THIS predecessor"
Camden Stewart
Take your fucking meds and shut the fuck up. Nobody wants to listen to your fucking sermons about your childhood delusions.
Christopher Torres
>Probably because 1-3 are universally praised So is Call of Duty.
Ayden Harris
>Real life doesn't have hit points like that. Real life doesn't have aliens or plasma rifles either. Did you even read my post where I addressed this point?
Julian Garcia
Since when is 3 universally praised? I liked it but didn't think it got universal praise at all.