This isn’t really something you usually see here, but wether you think about or not the main menu is a really important aspect of the game. It’s practically the first impression you get of the game, and where you’ll spend a lot of the time(even if it’s open world, you load in the menu every time you open the game, or when you play multiplayer.)
I’m using Reach as an example here: Halo: Reach had imo a near perfect menu. You load the game and you get blasted with some epic drums that when I hear they bring me nostalgia, but thats beside the point. Just by that time you get kinda pumped up by the epic feel of the beautiful shots and the majestic music, and at the end a big reveal of Reach. Once you load in you get this beautiful artwork of Reach that, again, perfectly sets the tone for the game. Its not in space, or with a ton of ships that don’t mean anything really, it’s down on the ground on a rainy mountain range, because that’s where the campaign is set for most of the time, down on the ground with your spartan team against overwhelming odds in a war you know you won’t win, it’s kinda deppressing really, but whatever, maybe I’m reading too much into it but it fits the theme. You also get these sound effects of a war or battle going on in the background which helps set the mood for the campaign and the game in general
You load into the main menu and you get this shot of covenant ships glassing the planet in another beautiful artwork It now shows more literally the destruction that the covenant do to Reach. And it’s all backed up by the amazing score for this game which I’m sure brings a lot of people at least a bit of nostalgia. I don’t want to continue saying the same stuff over and over but you get the point. Even each mission has it’s own little image. The menus IMO are just easy to navigate, and the armor customization, well, you know about the armor customization.
And it’s not only Reach, the screen where you enter Halo 4 is pretty amazing as well. It has great beautiful music, with a beautiful shot of what I think was Requiem, and it really captures the mysterious and “big” feeling of the unknown forerunner world, and the forerunner in general. Halo 3’s Main Menu music is, I really dont have the words to describe it, and I’m prettu sure it isn’t nostalgia. Back when I didn’t even have my own Xbox and had to go to my neighbor’s house to play Halo 3, or when The cool kid with his xbox came I was always blown away by the music, I could just sit there and listen to it endlessly and watch the covenant ships fly around the portal on earth to the ark. It was just amazing.
I never owned an Xbox One, So I can’t speak from personal experience abt Halo 5, so I won’t comment on it.
But again, all of these menus bring nostalgia and are the first impression for everyone. They are the key for setting the tone for the game, and the place where people are for periods of time. Even if you dont notice it, the main menu has a big role in the image and feel of a game, and I really hope they do a good job of setting the tone right and not just throwing some graphics together for a bland menu.