Question About the Halo Franchise

I stopped playing Halo online a while back. Bunch of stupid little kids who figure out glitches is not my idea of fun.

But the single player is my favorite thing!!! Co-op is even better!!! I'd rank the single player campaign as only behind Zelda Ocarina of Time of all time.

 

here are some of my general thoughts

regarding the SP campaigns of all three Halos:

Halo 1 - honestly, I did not like the campaign too much, *mainly* because of the repeated levels...I'm sure you have heard about this issue before, since it's the main complaint people have about the game. well it's no joke, it really is incredibly drudging and boring when you hit those certain sections

I really don't understand people who say Halo 1 was the best game of the series, cause I don't see that whatsoever. keep in mind however, that I didn't play it until it came out for the PC, which was way after the initial xbox release. my feeling is that people who think Halo 1 is the best one are mainly saying that only because of the novelty factor...in other words, it was the first well-done blockbuster CONSOLE fps. there is no way Halo 1's campaign is actually better than Halo 2 if you exclude the novelty factor

Halo 2 - as you might have guessed, I feel Halo 2's campaign is way better than 1. the only bad thing about it of course is the ridiculously short cliffhanger ending

Halo 3 - I finished this late Tuesday night, and IMO it's the best campaign of the bunch. it's not super innovative or anything, but it just puts everything together the best. the action is intense and well-paced throughout most of the campaign, so it doesn't feel that 'short' to me as others may think. it does 'finish' the fight (story-wise), to answer that question

 

i bought the xbox for street fighter online, but it came with halo (the green xbox) so i gave it a shot. i really enjoyed the 1st campaign, some missions were boring but it got good near the end.

halo 2 - same as everyone else, you fight your way all the way to the end and u get pissed off at the ending

halo 3 - working on it, so far, its very good

 

as far as some of your other questions/comments...

music - well, the music in Halo is amazing and incredible, that's really all there is to it. nothing else needs to be said

story/setting - solid, but nothing spectacular. interesting enough

as far as your comparison to Unreal Tournament's SP campaign...uhh, there is no comparison. UT has no SP campaign or story whatsoever, it's just bot fights. completely different from Halo

misc - voice acting is very good overall, although not completely top-notch. dialogue is pretty good, but nothing mind-blowing. pacing in Halo 3 is excellent, it's the best of all 3 campaigns

 

sorry. i didnt wanna make another thread.

RC Cola, while your here.....Are they gonna make another Perfect Dark? (the greatest N64 game of all time. the 360 one was good too)

 

Well I love all three campaigns..but to be fair...

Halo 1: I'd liken this to a first movie in a superhero franchise, where you basically set up the story and the characters. And this campaign does an excellent job of that...the Master Chief is one of the best heroic characters you'll find and it's easy to develop an attachment to him...Cortana is the perfect companion to him and an addition that's missing from other games (Doom, Quake for ex)...she gives the chief someone to talk to (although she does most of the speaking) and their relationship helps to develop both of their characters. Her presence makes the Chief that more real and believable as a character and makes his mission that much more important...he's not just some mindless, faceless drone of a soldier. The covenant you get a feel for...but it's the flood that really steal the show...it's not that these characters are the most original...but it is an unexpected presence that reveals itself halfway through the game...and boy do they really kick your ass.
The only knock on this game is the repetition...you literally retrace your steps about halfway through the game. And then the Library...damn that level is endless and brutal. It can get tedious...but you know what...it's still very much worth it to play it through to the end.


Halo 2: From the first moment I felt like it wasn't just a game...but a cinematic experience...much like Metal Gear...they really raised the depth of the story; for the first time you're taken into the heart of the Covenant and see their beliefs, their motivations, their society and the fractions that begin to occur. The missions are a little hit and miss for me here...you play half the game as the Master Chief and half as the Arbiter...not a bad concept but honestly, fans want to play as Master Chief, myself included...so the Arbiter levels, while fun and engrossing just weren't as fun as the Chief's levels. That said, the game still rocked the whole way through...And some of the levels I play over and over cause they are just amazing (Delta Halo was my favorite by far). The Chief's and Cortana's relationship deepens; she's not just his AI companion...they really do care for each other. The supporting cast is top notch (esp. Sgt. Johnson). And the campaign is nowhere near as repetitive (still a little backtracking, but very minor). And while I didn't like playing as the Arbiter, his story was just as good as the Chief's.

Halo 3: Like the others I'm taking my time playing through the campaign, but already I'm seeing improvements over the 2nd. The brutes are no longer mindless beasts...they have a new design, new intelligence and class systems..much like the elites in the previous games; The environments are breathtaking and much more detailed; I really get a sense that I am on earth. The beginning cut scene isn't as cinematic as Halo 2...you're just kind of thrust into the action...probably cause it left right where Halo 2's cliffhanger ended. But again I feel just as immersed as the previous one; and as the game progresses I'm becoming more and more engrossed.


I've played my share of fps and I'd have to say the only game (among shooters) that equals Halo in it's story is Half Life 2...I'll be honest and say that HL2's story is better, but Halo isn't too far behind. It's one of those games, though, that isn't just a game...like I said before, it's a cinematic experience, like the MGS games, but w/ a lot less fluff in the cut scenes.

My take...it's definitely worth your time. If you can get past it's repetitiveness (mainly in 1), then you'll enjoy it.

 

the story/single player campaign is a joke.

however, the multiplayer campaign was always really fun.. go teamwork

 

I think when I mentioned HL2, maybe it was more of the immersion I felt than the actual story...it really felt like I was there living in that world...and the textures, environments and physics really helped to create that...I guess the story itself wasn't too deep, especially considering there were no cut scenes...kind of like Doom in the sense that you never see your character in the 3rd person view...which is a good and bad thing.

Never played Dues Ex... I think for me...of the fps I've played through... the Halos, HL2 and Metroid Primes offered the best experiences...Doom 3 wasn't half bad either...but it was light on story, though heavy on atmosphere.

It seems I remember reading something about Bungie wanted to make Halo 2 feel more like a movie than just a game...and when you watch the opening scenes, you definitely feel that...I actually found myself going through those cut-scenes (especially the beginning) time and time again because they were so well done. Halo 3 so far doesn't seem to have as long as scenes as 2 did...it kind of feels like...I guess you could say Matrix 3 in that it's a whole lot of action and the story comes at you in short bursts...but its well done. And the thing I like about 3 so far is that...I think I'm about halfway through and I'm still on earth...going through military bases being torn apart and what's left of highways and cities. That's something new for Halo...in the first two you spent more time on either a Halo ring or a covenant ship or fighting the flood...so this is definitely a little fresh.

 

To really get a feel of the Halo universe you should start with the Marathon games. That is where Bungie established the AIs. I would say the character development in Halo is kind of non-existent though. Master Chief really doesn't change throughout the first two games (I haven't played Halo 3 yet). I actually think the Arbiter story is much better than the Master Chief story. My favorite things in the Halo universe are the names though. The two ships in Halo, the Pillar of Autumn and the Truth and Reconciliation are maybe the best ship names I have ever heard.

 

I guess you can take this with a grain of salt, because I never played the original Halo, but I found the Halo 2 campain to be very dull and unspectacular. To me, it felt like I was just trudging through to "get it over with". The scenery changes were pretty cool, and it's pretty cool that you kind of have two converging story lines I guess, but the aliens and the humans fight exactly the same (except for the alien ability to cloak), so I didn't feel very enriched.

I don't know. It definitely didn't change my life.

 

Halo is just slightly overrated, if the SP was as fun as the MP then maybe it would be beyond awesome. Unfortunately it is not.

 

Halo 1: I liked the story here the best, but I like origin stories in general (Unbreakable is my favorite M.Night Shamalan [sp?] movie). The introduction to the flood is done very well to immerse you into the story. After fighting the elites for half the game in which you can use cover, it really feels like you are running for your life after the the flood's introduction due to the flood's aggressive nature. I like how you found out details about what's going on at the same time Master Chief is learning things as this really helps to immerse you into the master Chief character. Cortana is a great way to explain the story

Too bad the library level really kills the excitement after such a great level preceding it. Visually it was a little repetitive, but the repetitive areas would make sense considering Halo is an artificial structure.

Halo 2: The dialogue is better and you really find out the motivations of the covenant as a religious political body. I do get a kick out of being called a demon by religious fanatics! I also enjoyed the element of seeing the elites find out that the religion of the prophets is a sham. Stop the covenant from activating Halo and keep flood from leaving Halo are still the major plot points as they were in Halo 1, except this time it is packed with a lot of cut scenes to explain the motivations of what all the factions are doing and the gravemind has a chance to form more fully to give the flood a little more personality.

Earth levels do give it a great feel early in the game. Very much like Empire Strikes back in that the bad guys win round two. I was more upset about the game being short than it ending as a cliffhanger.

Halo 3: I haven't gotten far into it so far, but the gravemind has cortana. This makes the game seem empty at the start. The arbiter is a poor substitution of Cortana.

 

Let's get something straight right away, as a straight FPS, Halo is very good - however if you've played the gamut of PC FPS titles through the years, it may not catch you as 'the best ever'.

What it is, however, is the best the consoles have ever seen. Only Goldeneye can be put close to this. Halo manages to feel like a really good PC FPS (in terms of mechanics) on a controller. This, IMO, is one of the reasons it is such a big title and the main reason it works so well - even if some of its players (i.e. the ones who never touch PC games) don't even realize it.

As far as the story; it is a solid Sci-Fi story. One of the downsides is that to just pick up one of the sequels mid-stride kind of leaves you out of the loop. You have to be really into it to follow what's happening. Particularly when you get to the Arbiter angle and prophets and such.

2's cliffhanger kinda sucked. I think it was one of the only things from holding 2 to a higher general opinion. Especially if you like sci-fi stories. The Arbiter stuff was an interesting angle (unless all you wanted to do was blow **** up).

The one thing Halo does really well is make you feel like a major part of what's happening (kind of like how the good WW2 shooters want you to feel part of a 'war') and at the same time also like the baddest MFer in the room.

So if you're a big PC shooter guy, it's not going to blow you away. But it does it's job well, it's fun to play, there is an attempt to make it an interesting story, and gameplay wise it is very, very polished.


EDIT: Now that I said all that, I realize you are talking about the PC versions, which might not make you appreciate what it does on a console. So you kind of won't appreciate what I'm talking about in the comparison.

Maybe we should start an online petition to get you to buy a system with something other than Playstation on it.

 

I think the story is pretty good - for a video game. It's simply hard to create the kind of emotional connection with a video game character (where death is something that happens rouinely in the course of gameplay) that you could form in a book or a movie. VG

As such, there are many memorable, "cool" characters (Master Chief, Sam Fisher, Dante from Devil May Cry, Solid Snake, just to name a few) but as far as making you realy "care" about the individual characters it's hard to do when you've seen Master Chief get sniped a thousand times before. (actually the massive death/respawn effect of multiplayer games may be quite influential here). So, while Halo has a great story for an FPS, I can understand why some people just don't care entirely.

All of that said, Halo's storyline has basically been around since Space Invaders. However, it is clear that the Bungie guys have spent a LOT Of time and effort in structuring a richly detailed Halo-Universe, (I read an interview with the BUngie guy who keeps track of the Halo Bible, pretty interesting) with tons of background info, lots of symbolism and foreshadowing and allusions to mythological and literary rferences in the plots of their games as well as some modern cultural references, however most of these are very well hidden which makes it fun to hunt for them in the games and analyze them (they're really big into numerology). To me, this helps make the game fun to play, and while I enjoyed most of the Metal Gear storylines and plot twists, Bungie tends to skip the long half-baked lectures on current events that MGS likes to incororate. The Halo Story Page, over at halo.bungie.org, has literally several gigs of theory, speculation, etc dating back to Halo:CE's release, it's a pretty good place to start if you are interested in the Halo storyline and a testament to its appeal, though if you visit and you plan on playing beware of spoilers.

NOw not all games of course need a good storyline. Gears of War's narrative was very poorly done and bordered on incoherent in spots (they had a lot of important background in the game which they didn't get into (why did you start off the game in jail? e.g.), not because it wasn't known or a mystery, like in Halo, but because they didn't bother to explain it to us. Halo 1 and 2 leave a lot of holes to fill but purposefully so to keep you interested for the rest of the story arc. However, Gears of War was still pretty freaking sweet to play in campaing.

 

First, lemme say that this is my favorite game franchise...EVER. (2K a close second)

To me the campaign gets boring and uninspiring once you play Multiplayer at a highly competitive level(MLG style). The AI becomes wayyyy too predictable. I remember playing through the first campaign... I thought it was somewhat hard, but once I started playing Halo:CE online at XBConnect, it changed everything for me. I played the first three levels in Halo 2 and never finished playing that campaign... I haven't even touched the campaign for Halo 3.

I was reading in other threads that the game was overrated and blah blah... Overrated just means that Microsoft invested a lot of money in the marketing aspect and created this hype we saw the past week.

Tell me what game is gonna get played more online than Halo 3 in the next 2 years? What game is gonna sell more in the next 2 years? (Unless RC knows more info on a wii release or something... help me out here...) What game is funner if you have 4 buddies who play competitively online? As far as "real gamers" not liking it? That's BS. If you are a true gamer you will appreciate and respect Halo and all the elements it combines for the complete game experience. It is the best all around FPS. and it's on a console...

You basically got two types of gamers getting this game... The Halo fan boys (whether you like it or not they...errrr...WE... have a strong following!) and the "casual gamers" that buy any big release out like Gears Of War, BioShock, Forza, GTA, etc. and now Halo 3...

Graphically, I think Gears and Bioshock out do this game. but that still doesn't mean the game doesn't look beautiful. I think in the sound department, Halo has always had the nod. especially on a 5.1 system, but when it comes to the important factor which to me is replayability, HALO KILLS all other games out.