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i'd really like to see some kind of indie fps that has similar design concepts to halo CE one day, in terms of how it treats player speed, encounter design, enemy AI and flow. It'd definitely be a long and difficult project but it feels like worthy one.

if we self contain to just Halo CE singleplayer campaign, i actually think it is approachable dev-wise. the game's design is alot more simple than one might realize. the 'issue' is that despite Halo's fame, the first games interactive sandbox design isnt popular... but i sure as hell love it.

The people crying doom and gloom about the activision thing confuse me because there hasnt been a good Halo since 2010

I think it's less about whether or not they can make a more appealing product than what remains of 343, and more about how Halo feels like/will be more of a Product™ than ever. Personally, it feels like a second or third death, (depending on how you feel like counting.)

I might also be being influenced by remembering the sense of finality Halo 3 had. 3 felt like an ending, ODST was dlc they made into a standalone game, then Reach was Seven Spartans, so they didnt feel like attempts to get the series moving again. Then 4 was bad and felt forced and desperate

halo is a grand epic vision of post 9/11 us militarism that was the biggest thing in the world for a hot minute. true american soft power asserting itself as the 360 stole games console dominance away from japan. all pissed away to nothing because microsoft cannot see its value it can only Extract

remember when they put master chief's digital clone of his abusive, adopted mother that helps him kill with greater efficiency and he is impossibly in love with inside everyone's windows start bar

Cortona is what now?

It became sonic.

there was an era thread the other day re: activision halo that became an argument about if Halo was already US propaganda or not and the reasoning for the push back included "it's about a religious war" and "the games spend more time in africa than the US"

Yeah this is a great point, the maps and vibes were ethereal, more Tanzania than Main St USA

Its the same with any franchise, they lock onto the simplification of the series without trying to explore it. Like they think halo is master chief and the covenant, se even when their stories are over they have to come back, somehow. Its so limiting

It was also turned into a shit tv show aired in the most obscure streaming service that was only hatewatched by the more mentally ill dorks

Just think there is another timeline where Halo got released where it was originally intended for, OSX and Apple dominates the FPS market

There was a period of time where I considered Halo's broader universe of tie-in media to be on, like... second tier of sci-fi. Like it obviously wasn't Star Wars or Trek, but I would've legitimately put it with Battlestar Galactica or Stargate. And then everything got fucked.

It really is crazy that they made the perfect post-9/11 setting out of the half-understood cultural osmosis around Desert Storm & the Mujahedeen, huh? Obviously by the time of H2 it solidified but it was all there in the first game!

but it was something else, really: a paring back of the Marathon storyworld, a reboot, which couldn’t help but become *the* defining fiction of post-9/11 jingoism in the process

(compare with The Elder Scrolls 4’s combined ‘setting simplification’, let’s call it, and introduction of a plot about ‘minority religious extremists threatening the imperial core as paramilitary vanguard for a nebulously-defined invasion force’)

That's not quite it, IME. Nylund write Fall of Reach as a treatment for the entire setting, & it's quite unlike Marathon, focused on grubby CIA vs USMC style grudges, ambivalent moralism about the nature of total war & MKUltra skullduggery, which are prescient of where the franchise would go.