Okay, this could cause a bit of anger amongst the community. I am not trying to be a fire-starter, and I hope responses will at least be somewhat civilized and not rants. I should also state that this is not a rant either. This is just something I have been pondering as I do my homework. Here goes nothing.
Halo is a great series. For the past fourteen years (almost as many years as I’ve been around), Halo has been a powerhouse in the video game world. Master Chief is as iconic as Mario, the music is so good that Ohio State’s marching band played it in their video game show. Needless to say, it’s important. However, there is no debate that Halo is shrinking. Halo 3 was the peak of the series, and population has dropped since about 2009 for all subsequent games. It is also apparent to anyone who frequents this site or the subreddit or anywhere else Halo is discussed that there is a very stark split amongst us. There are pro-343 people, anti-343 people, pro-sprint, anti-sprint, etc. etc. All of these people have differing views about what the cause of this decline is. Some say sprint, others say no content, more say it’s an incompetent developer, even more who say it’s all of the people who constantly bash anything and everything they can. Now I am not saying that anyone here is wrong; there is a lack of content in Halo 5, I will not deny. Sprint is alienating some of the older community. 343 doesn’t exactly have the best reputation. And there is no shortage of complainers on here, and I should say that I don’t mean people who constructively criticize, I mean people who complain about things like the armor color choices not having the EXACT shade of blue they want and then acting like it ruins the game. Halo has plenty of flaws, but so do many other games. So why, then, is Halo dying while games like Call of Duty survive? Ladies and gentlemen, I propose that you think about this: Halo is dying because it can’t do anything to stop its inevitable decline.
“Gasps Halo has an inevitable death and there is nothing anyone can do about it? How dare you say that? You need to leave now!” You exclaim at your screen as you begin furiously smashing a rant into the keyboard so hard that it makes your fingers bleed. I know; I don’t want to think about it either. But there is reasoning behind it so go get band--Yoink!- for your fingers, turn off caps-lock, and let me explain. Halo has always been a unique shooter. Even Halo 4, arguably the most deviant from the original formula, was still easily distinguishable from other FPS titles due to power weapons, vehicles, and a story that makes at least a bit of an attempt to be interesting. Halo does things that other shooters never do, and that’s what we, the people on this forum, like. We want a shooter that is about more than just shooting. We want a story with character development and emotion, interesting settings, challenging levels, interesting conflict, and don’t forget the expanded universe that is still canon (eat THAT Star Wars… I still love you). We want a multiplayer experience that is about strategy, skill, balance, difficulty, and making us get creative with the sandbox and mechanics. Unfortunately, that is not what 5 million people want out of a video game, at least not anymore. Call of Duty became really successful starting with MW2 in 2009. It is successful because it allows people to always feel like a badass by lowering skill gap, throwing out strategy, and replacing it with killstreaks and custom classes. People play games to feel awesome when they succeed. It used to come from getting an invincible on the warthog gun or blowing up a scorpion with rockets; now, because it is easier to do, it comes from getting unfair insta-kills with a harrier strike or whatever the overpowered killstreak is this year. This happened because most people don’t want to work for success, so they don’t buy Halo, which makes you work to be really good. Halo is losing population because it doesn’t make people feel like a badass as well as other shooters, but that is not the only reason.
Another reason about which you should consider is, unfortunately, Halo’s age and release schedule. Halo is fourteen years old. That’s older than the majority of people who play Call of Duty. That’s also older than almost every other game series still on the market save a few like Fallout, Madden Football, and Mario games. Halo falls behind new games because the new games follow the Call of Duty format of giving you easy success and overhyping like Titanfall and Watchdogs. These games are designed to draw money out of you and then die. There is a reason why Call of Duty releases annually. Now you might say that Mario does the same thing and it has been relevant since the 1980s. I would respond by saying that its extreme age is why people play it so much. Parents who played the original Mario Bros. as a kid buy their children Mario Party 3000000, or whatever, because they are familiar with Mario. Halo is old, but it hasn’t reached that age, and even if it were, it still wouldn’t be as popular because Mario is more inviting, as Mario is a lovable plumber who jumps on things while Master Chief is a stone cold soldier who kills things with guns, not exactly kid-friendly. Madden is still around because it requires no effort to make and is based off of real life, so they have justification for making a new game. Thought process goes something like this: Joe Shmoe is on the Broncos now; I have to get the new game so my experience is up-to-date. That leaves only Fallout to explain. How can a game that first released in 1997 still be around when there are only FOUR GAMES EVER RELEASED (New Vegas is the equivalent of ODST so it doesn’t really count)??? You see, the answer is in the question, four games is nineteen years. That’s an average of over five years between releases, and there was a ten year split between Fallout 2 and 3. That is a long time to make a game with more content than Halo can in its usual three year dev cycle, and more time for the fans to grow nostalgic towards it. Battlefront is so popular because it has been ten years since its last release. It doesn’t matter how good the game is; people have bought Battlefront because of nostalgia and the new movie (which is also getting hype because of nostalgia, but I digress). Halo doesn’t have enough time between launches for people to be dying for the next one like they do for Fallout.
So where does this leave us? Halo could either lengthen its development cycle to more than three years, release annually, or change its mechanics so you always feel successful. We have tried the last option and it doesn’t really seem to be working. Releasing annually would lower the quality and it would likely lead to people criticizing it for not innovating enough between games… because there isn’t enough time for developers to innovate. A long development cycle could work, but people don’t want to wait that long. We’re stuck. Honestly, I don’t see a way out of this. Now that may sound bad, but maybe we are making a mountain out of a molehill. Halo doesn’t have to be the biggest game ever right now. Maybe Halo can become a more condensed population. Heck, maybe it can spend this time trying to work out kinks and maybe it can return to its original place at the top someday. So let’s work with 343; be constructive with your criticisms. Don’t fanboy or hate. Love Halo. Eat Doritos. Be kind to 343. That simple. Thank you.
