My Halo experience, start to finish (no TLDR)

Games Halo 5: Guardians
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<mark>This post has been edited by a moderator. Please do not post comments that are discriminatory in nature.</mark>
*Original post. Click at your own discretion.

Long ago, I was just getting into the more mature games. I heard my brother talk about these magical lan parties with hours of fun with a game called Halo. I had no idea what it was, but he seemed ecstatic about the game. Fast forward 6 months, I was playing the demo 6+ hours a day, over and over. It was phenominal. The aliens, the simplicity, the mission. I had no idea what it all meant, but I was hooked. When I finally had the full game, I didn’t stop playing for a whole year of home school (I was slow back then), and I had to repeat 8th grade. Halo 2 was out, and I so longed to own it, but I didn’t have an xbox or windows vista.
I kept playing halo at high school. We would all play in the computer lounge. CTF on bloodgulch. I never played a game with less than 25 kills, and was even banned from playing for being so good. It was bliss. Friends, halo, fun.When I finally purchased my first xbox and played halo 2, halo 3 was already out. But oh man, halo 2 was legendary. Non stop campaign with friends. SWAT multiplayer. Nothing could be better, until I bought a used 360 from a friend. And then my life began. I got to finish the biggest fight, the biggest fiction in my life up to that point, the most existential story I had ever come across, and I would finally finish the story. It was glory. I got xbox live and played ever night after school with 12 of my high school friends. We played custom games, Bill Murray, house infection, Jenga, OMEGA FRIKKIN JOURNEY. I never knew what I had…Halo Wars came out, and it was great. A bit shallow, but still fun. By this time I had read most of the books, and I knew that the Brutes had no place in pre halo 2. They weren’t spotted until just before Chief returns to Earth. I was willing to let it slide.
Reach launched, and I thought, what is this crap? Oh well I’ll give it a try. I had major complaints with the direction of the franchise, and even most of the legitimacy of the story. But the multiplayer saved the game for me. Nothing but INVASION! To this day I still think it’s the best game type halo has produced. Up to this point, I knew all the maps. They were memorable, lovable (except for a few in H2) and all around fun. However, Forge took a HUGE nosedive. Certain affinity absolutely butchered it. Halo 3 was very accepting of whatever you wanted to do. Amazing game types came from it. Reach looked us in the eye and told us to go F ourselves, because we were gunna do things it’s way. No more custom awesomeness, no more gimmicky maps. No more OMEGA JOURNEY or JENGA. Invasion died off pretty quick too. To put the nail in the coffin, we were forced to play crap forged maps in regular play lobbies. NOBODY LIKED THIS. and even to this day, THE RETARD DEVELOPERS ARE STILL MAKING US PLAY STUPID FORGED MAPS IN REGULAR PLAYLISTS. Its a SERIOUS buzzkill.
Then the wait. Halo 4 announce trailer. We would finally find out what happened to Chief after the destruction of the smaller ARK. The forerunner saga was being published, and while it was a bit boring for a halo book, it had Gems of glorious backstory. The Precursors seeded the flood, and the forerunners hated that humanity was fit for the Mantle of Responsibility (IE becoming flood infection forms and creating overminds, which are basically precursors.) Aaaaaand then hell broke loose.
Halo 4 released. It followed the similar style of cut scenes as halo 2, and told the story quite well, however, the campaign design was WAY too symmetrical, and way too “push button, shoot, push button, shoot” and somehow, it didn’t feel like I was master chief anymore. I hated fighting the Knights, and the stupid dogs were TOO easy. With only 3 forerunner enemies, the game felt half baked. The covenant were there, but that was never explained. “OH HEY LOOK COVENANT, I THOUGHT WE HAD A TRUCE” end of story. There were so many things out of place that it just didn’t feel like a good game. My beloved childhood was now reduced to this money making husk of a triple A title. I still played it, and I still tried to have fun with it.
I moved on though.Halo had hurt me, starting with reach, and finishing with 4. I hated my halo cravings because I knew I couldn’t satisfy. I still play 3 campaign.
Then a new hope emerged, with a promise to deliver the experience that fans had been waiting for. Chief had gone awol! WHAT? WHOA! I GOTTA SEE THIS. I waited for a year. A new guy popped up. Didn’t much care who he was. The graphix engine looked spectacular. I was inspired. The game finally released and WOOO HALO 5 YEAH! I beat the campaign on normal in a day. What the crap did I just play? It was like getting hit with a Mccree stun. Sooooo… chief went awol, but that lasted like a whole hour… The detective work turned me off real fast. Didn’t give a sheet about black spartan man. And I hate buck…
The majority of the game I was playing as a team I didn’t care about, still fighting aliens that I didn’t know why they were there. AGAIN WITH THE BORING FORERUNNERS. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FLOOD? ISN’T THAT WHAT THE WHOLE STORY IS ABOUT? Don’t get me wrong, I hated actually fighting the flood, but the plot points they give the player and shijgasmic. WE HAVE TO DESTROY THIS SMALL GALAXY SIZED ARTIFICIAL FORGE FACTORY OR THE FLOOD ARE GOING TO KILL EVERYTHING EVER. Halo 4: OH NO A Didact? WTF does that mean? Wait, why are the covenant here? What am I doing here? Oh no I gotz tricksded woups. Cool the IMPENETRABLE WARSHIP JUST CRASHED, SO MUCH FOR INVULNERABILITY. Halo 5 was pretty much Locke and Chief having a slap fight because cortana is making chief psychotic. Then they kiss and hug and fight the COMPUTER PROGRAM. WOOOOO PLOT LINES.
Then there is Halo 5 multiplayer. Forgettable maps. I tried to play it, but it seems with each new halo, I seem to be getting out of practice. Other players are killing me way more than in previous games, and the wonky physics don’t help. Not to mention, every thing went long ranged. Halo is a mid to close range title, with options to go long, but not EVERY player. Being sniped cross map with a starting weapon is a MAJOR buzzkill, and also the reason I only played swat in halo 2. Not to mention that Warzone is bad. Not only are there no spawned items, you have to spend your req cards and ingame points to use other weapons. It feels like a transaction. In previous halos, you hop in a tank, banshee, etc, and it blows up, oh well, keep fighting. In warzone, you spawn, get blown up, and no matter how small the purchase, you feel cheated. Your now valuable item that YOU PAID FOR is in the enemy hands, all because the AI Decided to shoot you instead. No Bueno.
Forge was delayed, and what we got had infinite possibilities, except for the fact that a retard designed the controlls, and it takes 3 times longer to build ANYTHING.
Halo owns a piece of my heart. But with the way things are going… I’m not sure it’s worth buying the next halo, or even keeping the Xbox One. The only reason I ever bought an xbox in the first place WAS FOR HALO, and it has been the sole factor up until now. Overwatch is the new Halo 3 for me. 90 hours in 2 weeks…
Frank o Connor seems to be leading us away from good story telling and game design. The magic has stopped, and most of the original bungie team is all but disbanded thanks to activision. (poor marty).

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I hope that whomever reads this will be able to see the life of the halo franchise. How it has been reduced to mere profit margins. There seems to be no more passion in Halo. It seems as though they are just copying all the other games, which is ironic, because all the other games once copied halo. I will not buy halo 6 unless I am shown a developer who can release a full game full of the magic and the charm of halo 1, 2, and 3. Give us another trilogy. Bring back the flood as the focal point in the games. GET RID OF SPRINT AND ARMOR ABILITIES. And please try to limit the amount of precision weapons. Assault rifle gameplay is SO much more fun and engaging.

Thanks for listening.
TheSwarmLord36,
A die hard fan.

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I’m with you. The “faction” as i like to call it, is basically a outspoken minority of Halo players who believe the current way the franchise is going is “the best.” 343 Listens to these people, since they are the only ones who speak up. Unfortunately, the majority of Halo players like you and I, don’t know about this forum, or have given up on the franchise at this point. The faction fail sto understand that there are MILLIONS of people who aren’t buying Halo because the new way is not the right way. While 343 clearly is not putting in 100% into the franchise (MCC launch, Halo 5 "Free DLC-ahem launch content that should’ve been at launch-), the new fans shut down any criticism of 343i or Halo in general, because in their eyes, we are Halo haters. They don’t see us as more loyal fans than them, people who long for days when Halo was the one companies tried to top, not the other way around.

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I was once the most loyal fan EVER. I was completely immersed, and my room even reflected this growing up. But now, I try to play halo 5 and I cringe, and I get off, and I forget. Halo 5 is like a Nuclear submarine. Awesome setting out to see, but we get near our destination and the reactor gets breached and everybody abandons ship or died pretending they are fine. I read your other post and I agree 100% with what you say. We need to reflect back. The developers need to get their head out of the factions pants.

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Also it only took me 3 games to be 1st place in flood, so my disdain for the new style or failure to perform in warzone or arena is not a lack of skill. I am still the best halo player I know in person. Not online, but among friends.

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A pretty good read, I can relate to most of what you said, except for a few things.

The Brutes have been a part of the Covenant for a long time, so they do have a place pre-Halo 2.

Forge in Reach was not done by Certain Affinity, it was done by Bungie and, although I’m no forger, I feel it was a huge improvement over Halo 3’s Forge. Some would even say Reach has the best Forge of any Halo, especially when it comes to accessibility.

Reach also had tons of custom games, so I don’t know where you’re getting that Reach was such a bland game. The only complaints about Reach that I heard of were from the story not making sense with the book and established canon, and the gameplay (mostly multiplayer) being terrible due to bloom and armor abilities. Other than those two things, Reach was a pretty solid Halo game all around and a huge improvement from the previous games.

Your opinions of Halo 4 and 5 are pretty spot on, though. I felt Halo 4 was absolute trash and Halo 5, while being slightly better, was still a huge disappointment.

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> 2533274822234620;4:
> I was once the most loyal fan EVER. I was completely immersed, and my room even reflected this growing up. But now, I try to play halo 5 and I cringe, and I get off, and I forget. Halo 5 is like a Nuclear submarine. Awesome setting out to see, but we get near our destination and the reactor gets breached and everybody abandons ship or died pretending they are fine. I read your other post and I agree 100% with what you say. We need to reflect back. The developers need to get their head out of the factions pants.

Lol, good one. All they need to do is get rid of sprint and freebies. See what happens then. Personally either way, I will keep playing or move on, Halo 6 will be the judge of it.

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The Brutes were always a part of the covenant yes, but the Brutes were first discovered by master chief directly after halo 1. Chief infiltrated a covenant capital ship to find transport for him and some surviving marines. This is the first reported event. Halo Wars seeing brutes doens’t make any sense, because even cortana would have known what they were, but they didn’t, but it seems like bungie didn’t care about canon at that point. They were too busy making destiny.

Reach had a great multiplayer, and yes forge was easier to use, but you could do less things with it. You could only make regular type maps. Halo 3 engine used physics to make the maps more interesting (Breaking objects as a sort of temporary barrier, wooden pallets, etc) and that by itself is why I thought it was lacking. As for the blandness, we only had forgeworld. Green and Grey. They forced community maps on us in matchmaking. If I wanted to play a community map, I would play custom games.

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> 2533274819667356;7:
> > 2533274822234620;4:
> > I was once the most loyal fan EVER. I was completely immersed, and my room even reflected this growing up. But now, I try to play halo 5 and I cringe, and I get off, and I forget. Halo 5 is like a Nuclear submarine. Awesome setting out to see, but we get near our destination and the reactor gets breached and everybody abandons ship or died pretending they are fine. I read your other post and I agree 100% with what you say. We need to reflect back. The developers need to get their head out of the factions pants.
>
>
> Lol, good one. All they need to do is get rid of sprint and freebies. See what happens then. Personally either way, I will keep playing or move on, Halo 6 will be the judge of it.

I am done with H5. I am waiting for H6, and I won’t be buying it release night. I’ll be looking at reviews first. Honestly, the game is meant to be a thinking shooter, and 343 turned it into a run n gun. Sprint has no place in halo and never will. Part of the fun was thinking about a situation and finding a way to overcome it. Players these days are so brain dead they don’t want to have to think, and all of it is twitch based, hence why we have to use precision weapons for everything.

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> 2533274822234620;8:
> The Brutes were always a part of the covenant yes, but the Brutes were first discovered by master chief directly after halo 1. Chief infiltrated a covenant capital ship to find transport for him and some surviving marines. This is the first reported event. Halo Wars seeing brutes doens’t make any sense, because even cortana would have known what they were, but they didn’t, but it seems like bungie didn’t care about canon at that point. They were too busy making destiny.
>
> Reach had a great multiplayer, and yes forge was easier to use, but you could do less things with it. You could only make regular type maps. Halo 3 engine used physics to make the maps more interesting (Breaking objects as a sort of temporary barrier, wooden pallets, etc) and that by itself is why I thought it was lacking. As for the blandness, we only had forgeworld. Green and Grey. They forced community maps on us in matchmaking. If I wanted to play a community map, I would play custom games.

Brutes being in Halo Wars actually makes perfect sense. As you said, Master Chief didn’t encounter them until a little after the events of Halo: CE, but the crew of the Spirit of Fire did. At the time that they discovered the Brutes, they had already lost contact with the UNSC, so they couldn’t report back what they saw, which is why no one knew about the Flood until Halo: CE.

I’ll agree, Forge World was a little bland, but it was their first attempt at something like that. It was a pretty big achievement at the time, especially for a console game on the 360. I still don’t get what you mean by “you could do less things”. I don’t recall Reach’s Forge having any features removed.

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The majority of my time in halo 3 was custom games. Maybe it wasn’t forge’s fault, but the engine’s fault, but most of the fun gametypes such as omega journey and jenga tower simply weren’t possible in reach. They are in H5 now, but my old group doesn’t play anymore so it’s kind of sad. No split screen on H5 is also a contributing factor to why I no longer forge.

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To be honest, I didn’t read it all. But from what I did read it’s your anecdotal experience with Halo. Which is fine. Mine is that I got invited to some Halo parties here and there, but it wasn’t until the very tail end of Halo 3’s life that it finally clicked with me how Halo could be fun. Reach looked awesome and I bought ODST just to play the Reach beta. Turned out I ended up LOVING the ODST campaign. It’s one of my favorites. Then the Reach beta which I LOVED as well. I played a lot of Reach MP over the years. I loved H4’s campaign, but I didn’t like MP, so I didn’t play it much. The campaign is my favorite though. And I like H5.

Point is, we all have different opinions. And I think it’s a mistake to assume your opinion (or my opinion for that matter) represents the larger community just because you feel like it probably does. There is no way for you to know that. 343 makes the games and you play the games. That’s it. I honestly believe the only thing we can do is play or don’t play. That’s it. By all means voice your opinion, I’m not going to take that away from you, but please understand that it ultimately does nothing to influence the direction that Halo will take in the future.

Play or don’t play. 343 does the rest.

My two cents. Feel free to disagree.

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> 2533274837186882;12:
> To be honest, I didn’t read it all. But from what I did read it’s your anecdotal experience with Halo. Which is fine. Mine is that I got invited to some Halo parties here and there, but it wasn’t until the very tail end of Halo 3’s life that it finally clicked with me how Halo could be fun. Reach looked awesome and I bought ODST just to play the Reach beta. Turned out I ended up LOVING the ODST campaign. It’s one of my favorites. Then the Reach beta which I LOVED as well. I played a lot of Reach MP over the years. I loved H4’s campaign, but I didn’t like MP, so I didn’t play it much. The campaign is my favorite though. And I like H5.
>
> Point is, we all have different opinions. And I think it’s a mistake to assume your opinion (or my opinion for that matter) represents the larger community just because you feel like it probably does. There is no way for you to know that. 343 makes the games and you play the games. That’s it. I honestly believe the only thing we can do is play or don’t play. That’s it. By all means voice your opinion, I’m not going to take that away from you, but please understand that it ultimately does nothing to influence the direction that Halo will take in the future.
>
> Play or don’t play. 343 does the rest.
>
> My two cents. Feel free to disagree.

I completely agree with you. My opinion alone can’t do much. My intent was hopefully to add my voice to many others who don’t like the new direction since 2010. It may be that this new direction is better for new players, and not for veterans. Perhaps the vets are just out of luck. I give my history as an example of one man’s love and hate with halo, and hopefully, a bungie staff will see our collective voices and make a change for the better. People have different things they like, and, as sad as it pains me to admit, the new player base might outnumber us vets who have been with halo from the start. If that is the case, then I think it’s high time the vets move on. Halo 4 was a dissapointment to me, and halo 5 was my last hope. H6 is going to be the pen that I use to sign the letter of resignation. Don’t get me wrong, halo is still fun, but there are many other games I’d rather play than try to continuously try to play catchup with every new design element they come out with. My skill level has been out evolved, and as a loyal fan and player, I feel like I have been left in the dust of old memories.