I have never once understood the statement “Halo was/is supposed to be cartoonish.” It never was, once. Every Halo game before Halo 4 never had any “cartoonish” features. I’m going to say the direct opposite, Halo was at one point striving to be realistic. It’s obvious and proven that a game set in an awesome looking pushing the boundaries of hardware real looking environment is going to sell more and appeal more to a wider group of people than a good looking but heavily stylized environment does. Look all the way back at Combat Evolved and Halo 2. Both of these, especially Halo 2, pushed the limits of what the Xbox could do. Then look at Halo 3. I think Halo 3 often times looked as good or better than Crysis and those skyboxes and map sizes in campaign were impressive, more so than it’s given credit for being back in 2006 and 2007.Then ODST, New Mombasa was huge and once again the game looked great. Then of course Reach. Not one of these have anywhere near a “cartoonish” look or feel. The closest thing to that is Halo Legends and that, while yes, looking cartoonish has very, very mature ideas and story lines. I don’t see where this nearly insane idea comes from. Just because a game doesn’t have GoW or Doom level blood and such doesn’t mean it’s… ugh… cartoonish. I shudder when I hear fairly well known and respected members of the community say this, and all I can think of is them going through Halo with the TF2 Pyro goggles on… Even going as far as to criticize Reach.
If anything, Halo needs more realism that what it has. What’s really killing Halo is not delivering on the feeling of a super soldier in the kind of world established in the earlier Halos and books. Sadly, so much of the core community is so dearly hanging onto Halo 2 and 3 ideas (please don’t devolve this into ‘sprint vs. no sprint’ because that isn’t what this is about really) which to their credit did make you feel like a super soldier - in 2004 and 2007. But that’s pretty broad, and a good in-between is changing the art style. Not bad, right?
Art style, not entirely regardless of gameplay mechanics but still, changing to a more realistic appearance would help because none of this is attractive and as one that has studied more than my share of military tech and BDUs and such I gag at the Warzone bases and the new Marine armor(s). I was watching Roosterteeth’s The Patch’s interview with one of the CoD Infinite Warfare devs (please don’t freak out) and Burnie Burns remarked on the game’s art style and the dev said that for the interior of the space battleship thing some of the artists and what-have-you spent a day in a Navy destroyer to help design the interiors. Then go to Star Wars: Republic Commando, something H5G relates to in a few ways. Back when Lucas Arts could actually make a game, the devs went through multiple SWAT training classes, I believe it was, to perfect the movements and functions of the Commando squad.
There are a lot of benefits to this, excluding just making my OCD happy. One, there’s not a lot of research required, it’s already been done for a long time by professionals, and the possibilities with MoCap and this are pretty exciting. Two, I think this would attract more people. I think the modern male can’t find many things cooler than a team of highly trained soldiers checking corners and such moving down a hallway and things like that. After all, Halo began more as a military shooter that also had aliens in it. This comes from the large influence Aliens had on a large amount of people at 2000 ish Bungie.
I think a lot of people outside just look in at Halo now and don’t really take any interest because of its lackluster visuals in more than just 1080 at 60 FPS. Maybe a few sessions with Eric Nylund and some military servicemen would do the series some good.
Let the hate begin, I suppose.
