Just curious if I am the only one who feels this way, but I’m not a fan of how 343i is making Halo for “all audiences” and here’s why. From anyone who has seen my other threads I love Sgt Johnson, he’s my favorite. As I am a huge strategy game guy as well as Halo I got Halo Wars 2 pretty recently, also seeing Sgt Johnson being an available character, as happy as I was I got it before I even launched the game, then played a game with him and noticed right away that it wasn’t Scullys voice, but that didn’t bother me as much as his lines. Johnson is a voguer dude, it’s his personality and what makes him funny, so when I lose a game and he says “We got our butts kicked” I can’t help but cringe a little, to which this isnt the only thing. Even the cutscene with Jerome fighting the Brutes could’ve been even more bada** if they made it M for mature. The first Halo Wars takes the cake on it. Which Halo 5 also is victim to this, just anyone who knows the military lifestyle or military in general, they’re not always professional and it makes Halo seem more dull, but could just be me, what do you guys feel on it?
Hate it. Halo started as an M rated game, and it should stay that way. Leave the family friendly crap for nintendo, and kiddie shooters.
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Halo is a military shooter set in a dark science fiction universe. It should be aimed at mature audiences. That doesn’t mean that kids can’t enjoy it, but they should not be the target demographic.
I don’t think you really need M rated language for dialogue to be good but I don’t want them to actively avoid it either, making it feel unnatural, which is what it sounds like with Johnson in HW2.
You guys keep stressing that Halo was an M-rates game before, but if you cut the Flood’s body horror from CE, 2, and 3 then Halo would look pretty tame. I’m not saying Halo can’t be mature, but I’d also argue it never really stopped. Swearing doesn’t make something mature. Blood and gore don’t automatically make something mature.
Personally, I don’t want Halo to have swearing just because it’s rated M. Just because Halo is a military FPS, doesn’t mean that they must have swearing. That said, I’m not against more language, as long as they don’t overdo it. Some of the lines do sound a little stiff, such as the lack of anyone freaking out about the Flood in Halo Wars, it’d sound more natural to me if someone swore after seeing what happened to the marines.
Overall, just because Halo has a rating of “Mature” doesn’t mean Soldiers should be swearing every other sentence, but a bit more swearing would make it seem a bit more natural, dialogue-wise.
Halo has been quite clean for it’s rating even before but that doesn’t seem to be the point.
As to what comes to swearing in Halo, it could go back towards the level it was in original trilogy as it was pretty natural feeling pace for those lines, even though some people swear like truckers/sailors irl but I would be fine with the level what was before.
As for the rating itself, it definitely feels like someone would be aiming towards wider audience with lower rating, but let’s leave that here.
Obviously I think that no one should aim towards any rating but instead, just focus on artistic freedom and design aspects of the game so that they fit on the context without having to worry about restrictions.
As in, no publicity stunts with shock effects of higher rated game or toning down to achieve lower rating to get more parental approvements.
And definitely not all characters should seem like a model soldier from some textbook, private level marines definitely seem off if that is the case.
Needs to be less family friendly.
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> Personally, I don’t want Halo to have swearing just because it’s rated M. Just because Halo is a military FPS, doesn’t mean that they must have swearing. That said, I’m not against more language, as long as they don’t overdo it. Some of the lines do sound a little stiff, such as the lack of anyone freaking out about the Flood in Halo Wars, it’d sound more natural to me if someone swore after seeing what happened to the marines.
> Overall, just because Halo has a rating of “Mature” doesn’t mean Soldiers should be swearing every other sentence, but a bit more swearing would make it seem a bit more natural, dialogue-wise.
I’m not using sweaing as an overall term, but more as a reference to one problem, like I said with Sgt Johnson, his natural character does swear and is funny is a more vulgar humor, but that even goes with blood, theres like no blood in 5, the combat scenes are worse because of it, I feel it draws away from what Halo is. What made Halo so great was the impending threat of the Covenant and the Flood outbreak, you can’t expand on that when you have a T rated game, not only that Halos target audience is adults, I doubt kids can comprehend the story like Teens-Adults can, kids can enjoy the game, I did as a kid playing CE, but the T rating takes alot of the elements that made halo away
What’s to really stop any one from playing or not playing the game? As long as the new games cater to what the fans really want and enjoy, we should be happy. If the games good it’s good, no matter what the rating. And by good I mean on par with the overall quality of past games.
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> What’s to really stop any one from playing or not playing the game? As long as the new games cater to what the fans really want and enjoy, we should be happy. If the games good it’s good, no matter what the rating. And by good I mean on par with the overall quality of past games.
This is part of why 343 has been doing bad is because they’ve been changing Halo, I disliked Halo 4 in my opinion it sucked on all edges, Halo 5 though has good multiplayer the story lacks in narrative, because of a rating they make people seem dull
Rated M or not, the kiddies will still be playing.
I don’t think the original trilogy was characterized by it’s “mature” rating. Given that you were a kid when you first played Halo:
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> kids can enjoy the game, I did as a kid playing CE
it’s entirely possible that you were more sensitive to things like blood, language, and gore, given that kids tend to get more enjoyment out of these things than adults since they generally aren’t exposed to them in entertainment media. And thus, your feelings of what Halo “should be” sound framed around your childhood experience of Halo and what you enjoyed in it at that time. But for some players, what they enjoy or find important as adults is different than from when they were children. I don’t think Halo’s direction is catering towards kids now anymore than it used to be. Especially considering that kids have always played Halo games. You yourself admit to being a kid when CE came out, and you enjoyed it, despite now claiming that you weren’t the target audience at the time. The rating of a game is not a strict label for the target audience of the game. Adults can enjoy T-rated games just as kids can enjoy M-rated games. The rating is simply just a quick disclaimer of what kind of content one can expect to see in the game. In Halo’s, case, even the original trilogy was pretty tame in terms of content, and the ESRB at the time of rating those games was likely quite different than it is today. If today’s ESRB re-rated Halo CE, it’s entirely possible that they’d consider it a T-rated game simply because the people rating the games are not likely to be the same people rating games from 10+ years ago.
I’d like to see more blood and maybe a little bit of gore.
I don’t mind the language in Halo. Sargent Johnson’s dialogue were natural so this is not a problem. What I think they shouldn’t do is use violence and blood just for the sake of it. Rating it M with a teenager mindset and putting blood and swearing everywhere does not make sense.
It should be an M rated game like it always was. I’m not saying that Halo should be targeted to only adults, but it shouldn’t be family-friendly either
Well, about Halo Wars, I didnt feel it that savage, and those “Wars” spin-offs are mostly rated T. I understand you about that thing of making it family friendly, and i noticed that in Halo 5 too (assuming you´re taking out the garbage story), that it doesnt feel like Halo. I always liked that sarcastic tone that all games have until Halo 3: ODST (for me, although Halo Reach has bad words and some touches of comedy, its more formal and more militar that the other Halos), but think this, combining this with Halo 5´s story wont fit at all, because there are not interesting characters to make a conection (only the chief and Buck, but they never make jokes).
I assume any discussion that suggests 343 has watered down Halo’s mature content, is referring of course only to the games and not the extended universe. Because in the EU, 343’s lore has introduced horrifying lore about the Flood and the Forerunners that make Halo possibly the most disturbing sci fi universe I’ve ever seen…
To quote someone we all know and love…
"Men, here’s where we show those split-chin, squid-head, sons of -Yoinks!- that they could not have picked a worse enemy than the human race. We are going to blow the hell out of those dumb bugs until we don’t have anything left to shoot 'em with! And then, we are going to strangle them with their own living guts! Am I right, Marines?" - SGT. Avery Johnson
I think this needs to be a more widely accepted view of how Halo was meant to be played. Maybe not GoW style curbstomping and chainsaws through chests, but blood, gore, and just pure violence XD