It saddens me that I can no longer play Halo. The Master Chief Collection is still very much so broken, and since the launch was so terrible, the population is quite small, so don’t tell me to “go play MCC”.
I was hesitant when buying Halo 5, but I have bought every installment in the series since 2001, so I did anyway. I was living with some friends in Manhattan when Halo 5 launched, and everyone wanted to get their hands on a round of matchmaking. Two of them are big Halo fans, but one stopped playing after Halo 3 and the other with Reach. The one kid said it was a good game, but certainly didn’t feel like Halo. The other stopped playing after the first few minutes of the game because he couldn’t get a hang of the button layout. Now, he was certainly a bad kid in the classic Halos, but he still knew how to play the games, and they were his favorite games.
If the fundamental rules of baseball or soccer (any sport) were changed, millions of people would be outraged. Some people play sports for a living, some do it as a hobby, but either way, if they found out that the game was now played a different way to modernize it and accommodate a different audience, people would be outraged. This is why tens of thousands of fans have stopped playing Halo 5 (this happened with Halo 4 also).
When Halo became an international hit with CE, Bungie made the decision to keep sprint and other (then) popular game mechanics out of Halo 2 to please returning fans. They must have done something right here since Halo continued to be the top selling XBOX title throughout Halo 3 and Reach. The classic games (not saying Reach was a classic but this fact applies with Reach as well) had higher player counts than Halo 4 did only a few months after Halo 4s release.
When a formula is so acclaimed, it shouldn’t be changed. Halo needs to go back to its roots for it to become relevant again. Call of Duty, Fallout, and all of these other popular franchises are staying close enough to their roots so that when fans -who haven’t played for 5+ years- buy the newest game, they can immediately play to a similar caliber as they used to.
In future posts I will go into the terrible art style, inexcusable spartan models which look like toy action figures, poor campaign design, lazy writing, and of course, more changes that need to be made about gameplay. One of my old buddies, Phil, was a Halo 2 pro player and he said that once he saw the gameplay for Reach he knew the franchise had strayed too far from its roots. I touched base with him recently regarding the competitive appeal of Halo 5. He hasn’t played Halo in years, but he said the game looked like Call of Duty with longer kill times which would probably often seem like a big game of cat and mouse, which to me, it does.
I respect that most of you love Halo 5, I really do, and I don’t think it is a bad game per se, but its not a true Halo game. The new Porsche 911 is probably a great car, but thousands of 911 fans are up in arms because it is turbocharged. The value of older 911’s (not necessarily classics) are going up because the experience of naturally aspirated 911’s is so revered. This is just another analogy, but I hope some of you understand why the fundamental gameplay of Halo is so important to a lot of people.