Hello everyone, I’m going to write this as well as I possibly can, to avoid being marked as one of those many childish gamers who simply spam the ‘!’ button, and expect people to listen. I’m here with a different perspective (I believe) on the Halo 5 issue of new information that has been released.
You see, I’m a Halo machinima director. My channel is Starfall Studios, for those who know my content. And I want to talk about how Halo 5 will impact the creativity and community of Halo for years to come.
Halo 5 in very late 2014 to early 2015 has been shaping to be the best Halo game yet. Then here at E3, more information in addition to what they showcased was given, and we became wary, or at least many of us did. No playable Elites (for that community who enjoy that feature), no splitscreen save for 2-player on individual Xbox One’s, and none for Campaign. Warzone looks incredible, but the very slogan used to sell it, “Where Everything is Possible”, was immediately proven false by the fact that it is not playable offline, will not be available for customs, and the maps can only be played with that gametype, meaning no Forging on those maps simply for scale either.
So here, I want to talk about something which nobody ever seems to agree upon; what made the original Halo’s so great compared to Reach and 4. Too many people bring up the facts behind TTK, how competitive everything is, sprinting, how easy Halo games became rather than being based on skill (hardcore players vs the casuals), but honestly I don’t think it had anything to do with that at all.
See, Halo CE blew our minds because it was so new. Of course there had been projects similar to it before but never on the scale that Bungie created. We loved every second of it, and when Halo 2 came along, we were eager to have even more time with this revolutionary franchise. But the transition from Halo CE to Halo 2 was not one like recent Halo games; there wasn’t a feature that anyone loved that was taken out. The whole communtiy enjoyed Halo 2 because the only changes were things that were added; better graphics, new weapons, new vehicles, dual wielding, turrets, the ability to play online with friends, and an awesome story. Halo 3 was similar, with adding equipment and detachable turrets, even more vehicles, etc.
But Halo 3 added something new that no games had done before (save for maybe a few PC games); it added Theater and Forge.
The Halo community was in awe of these new tools given to us, and they immediately set to work. Machinima of course, had been done in Halo CE and Halo 2 before, but Bungie had seen this and despite the machinima community being a small one at the time, they didn’t care and dedicated a whole feature of the game to them, so that they could create machinimas even easier, have tools that they’d never had before. To make it usable for everyone, they also added taking pictures and film clips for the file share system, so that other users could be creative as well, or show off an amzing feat they accomplished. Let me tell you, looking at people’s funny pictures in File Share before a match was one of the most fun things I did in matchmaking, and it hasn’t been done properly since. Machinima directors were the ones who took Halo’s poularity to new heights, showing everyone how amazing creations could be with just the game and a capture card.
Forge was used to build your own maps. Never before had this level of community fun been accomplished with the combination of gametypes and maps in a Halo game. Halo 3 was the birthplace of Castle Wars, Close the Door, Ice Cream Man, Fat Kid, Hurricane, Duck Hunt, ODST Pods, Teacher, Lava Sacrifice, and thousands more. THAT was the heart of Halo 3, not the skill it took to be in matchmaking. I’m not saying it wasn’t a big part, I’m just saying it wasn’t the heart of it. Halo 2 and 3 were the games that you invited your buddies over to sit on the couch with you, to do 2v2 against each other with splitscreen and laugh together, fight together, and all in all just enjoy the experience. I remember having parties at my house of up to 10 people, and taking turns in custom game matches against each other, newcomers going up against winners. Possibilities seemed endless when you had so many options to choose from.
And then Halo: Reach came along.
Now, I understand that Halo: Reach screwed up BIG time on the matchmaking experience for many, and that the campaign’s story, though fun, was very poorly constructed, especially when considering it broke canon, and we already had an established storyline that many of us were excited for when we heard of the game from the novel, Halo: The Fall of Reach. But it was also a big success in a lot of ways.
I want everyone to watch This Video and then come back.
Some of the quotes there are, “What can we learn from Halo 3?”, “Anyone can build anything”, “Giving the fans the tools they can take, and run with it”, and this shows exactly what Bungie was thinking when they designed Forge in Halo: Reach. They only wanted to improve. They gave fans back everything from Halo 3 (save for a few options, and weapons), and then added abilities like Phasing in forge, snapping, allowing people to create even MORE stuff that helped the community of custom games. And while armor abilities and playable elites may not have helped a lot of the matchmaking experience, they were amzing for custom games with gametypes that required you to armor lock for Red Light Green Light, use a shield for Duck Hunt, use Evade to run off ramps with speed at 500% and gravity at 50%. All in all, it still was very fun for a large faction of players, and it’s the reason that Reach is running the most Custom Game players currently out of all Halo games.
Halo 4 came along and trashed everything. Forge added magnets, but removed key features for precision editing. More than half the gametypes were taken out of Halo 4, and the ones that were kept in were screwed up (unable to drop the flag in CTF, no options for infected weapons besides the sword in Flood, plus the forced neon yellow color, etc.), and once again armor abilities were back but this time most were unusable in either Custom Game creativity or matchmaking, save for Promethean Vision. The file share system, which had both ups and downs in Halo: Reach, was now completely unusable in Halo 4. Theater was a joke. No theater for Campaign OR Spartan Ops was a huge blow, plus having no playable elites made machinima stories very difficult to tell in Custom Games alone. Add in the sound errors, and the death notifications popping up on the left side of the screen, and I was furious with Halo 4.
And now we have Halo 5. Reach was phenomenal for me and others in the machinima community, but Halo 4 took away so many options. Lowered weapons couldn’t be kept in that position, once again problems with theater kept us from expressing our full potential. With the MCC being absolutely perfect for machinima in H2A, it cuts down on creativity with its limited mapspace. In addition, other features are still not even used anymore. When’s the last time you saw a funny picture in someone’s file share, or built a map not for competetive play, but just to have fun with social gametypes?
Considering how “in the right direction” H2A was, I can only hope that 343 learns that the heart of the Halo community lies within our own creativity. If Halo 5’s direction kills the machinima and custom game community, it may truly be the end of Halo.