This is the first and foremost core mechanic of any First-Person shooter. If there is one thing you are doing from the moment you step foot into the first level until the last moment of the last boss-fight, it's moving. Halo comparatively to its brethren, feels as though you are really wearing 400 pound space-marine power-armor, so if realism was what they were going after, they nailed it. Maybe it's the expansive environments, maybe it's the fact that there are so many other entities around you that are moving passed you all the time, but for whatever reason, Halo feels like the fat kid trying desperately to run that 20 minute mile. You would think in that super-powered armor of yours, they'd have implemented some sort of technology to counteract the fact that you had to move while wearing it. Why do you think that all the Japanese power-armors have jets built in? In all seriousness, this is probably one of the fundamental reasons that people DON'T like Halo when compared to the quick movement speed of games like Quake and Unreal Tournament. It quite literally feels like playing Super Mario Bros. without the "run" button.
You moved at a fair pace. You never really felt like you were going to slow, because half the time you weren't moving at all. The game never demanded you to move faster than you could, and most of the time you were only traveling an incredibly short distance from fight "A" to fight "B". You could say that you prefer the faster speeds of other games (I do, myself) but if you're playing Halo, and only Halo at that time, then you don't even notice because you don't have anything to compare it to at that moment.
Jumping however, also felt like you were a mid-eighties plumber as you suspiciously launched and floated through the air with each button press.
Wait, weren't you
just complaining that it was unrealistic to move slowly because you're a super-soldier? By that standard, wouldn't it also be unrealistic to jump high? As a side note, it could often be used to counteract the slowness of your run if you were really that bothered by it.
If there's one OTHER thing you're doing besides moving from bell to bell in this genre, it's shooting; it is a First-Person Shooter after all. Being on a console, (i.e. playing by twiddling your thumbs), Halo does suffer from a unavoidable case of auto-aim-itus, but regardless, the shooting mechanic somehow became incredibly unbalanced. From the damage points on the enemies, to the strength and accuracy of the various weapons, the mechanics of shooting in Halo felt like a giant leap backward when compared to the more skill-oriented shooters of the time, even when stacked against other console shooters.
How so? You could adjust the damage points on your enemies and the damage your gun dealt by changing the difficulty. If your enemies were too strong/weak for your taste, that's not the game's fault. And I, personally, didn't mind the controls themselves, though I haven't played a PC FPS in a while (have yet to obtain another game-running computer) so I may not have a good reference. My point being, though, the controls may only seem poor to you because you seem like a person used to playing PC shooters more than consoles shooters. Not an insult, I'm just pointing out that there are multiple perspectives on this issue.
One of the fundamental aspects of shooters is weapon balancing, which either goes the path of "new weapon is better than the last weapon" or "new weapon is different but equally powered than the last weapon," and somehow, Halo does neither as the game comes down to "how good you are and how much ammo you can find for the pistol." The plasma-based weapons are rubbish and should only be used when other weapons aren't available, and some weapons ("Needler" anyone?) are downright useless.
I find this to be a baseless accusation. Each weapon has its own consistent strengths (except maybe the assault rifle, though circumstantially I have found uses for it). I will admit, some weapons are stronger than others, but this is balanced out in the game. I'm sure for any game you could claim that the rocket launcher is the strongest, but this is negated by lack of ammo. Thus, while every weapon has a role, some
are better by having more varied roles, but this is countered by lack of ammo. Remember this point for I intend to make another using it down the road.
This was also the first game to make grenades an annoying focus to the point of spending half your game watching your grenade count meter in the corner.
I don't mind a bit of variety. The grenades are useful, but you never get so many that they take up the majority of a fight (unless it's an incredibly small fight). This seems to be more of a personal opinion as a flaw with the game as a whole. I suggest mental help, seeing as you apparently dislike explosions.
Piggy-backing on the last concept, again, the weapons in Halo are totally unbalanced making most of them fall to the point of "useless." More important however, was the developer's decision to go for a more "realistic" (read: simple) feel by limiting the player to two weapons at once. While not only dumbing down the gameplay, this severely breaks the "super-powered space-marine" aesthetic.
I agree with you on one aspect, that a super soldier should be able to carry around more than two weapons at a given time. However, for gameplay, it works. I addressed earlier that weapons have a distinct strength/ammo ratio that keeps most, if not all, from being useless. However, the choice to carry two weapons at once is hardly "dumbing down" the gameplay. If anything, it increases thought. When selecting a weapon, you must consider the enemies you'll be fighting, the terrain you'll be fighting on, what sorts of weapons will be available to you in combat with these enemies, and you must also take into account any possible variation of these factors that may occur in order to choose wisely. Where it really shines in making you think and have more fun, however, is when something unexpected occurs, and you have horrible tools for the job. You must then use your brain to make do with what you have, planning out attacks and defenses on the spot, and using your wit more than your brawn to secure victory. More than once I've been backed into a corner, only to come up with a convoluted scheme that happened to save my life and get me through the game. It's that kind of gameplay that made Halo special, overall.
In a game where you pickup all your weapons and consistently carry them with you, not only would you most likely have them at full ammo by the time you went to use them (passively picking up ammo faster than you use it), meaning you could easily win any situation. You expect a garrison of infantry, but come across a tank? No matter, simply pull out that rocket launcher. You'd never be stuck in a "well, I guess I'm screwed" situation like that, removing an entire layer of fun. As well, the stronger weapons would truly shine now, because should you ever run low on ammo for one gun, just use the second best as you collect ammo for the first. You'd never face any real challenge if you came perfectly equipped for anything the game threw at you.
Off topic, but this point also applies to more recent games as well, like Modern Warfare 2. Because all the weapons are equal to each other instead of having their own uses for specific circumstances, then the entire game needs to be the same fight over and over, because you only can use the same weapon over and over. It's frankly dull and unimaginative.
There's nothing tactical about choosing between your two weapons when you really only need one.
I've never been in that situation. Each weapon has its ups and downs, both further displayed when you consider the ammo constraints. A pistol is great for dispatching little enemies, but you need other weapons for big guys; you simply can't take down a fully shielded Elite with only a pistol and expect to have enough ammo left for the rest of the fight.
However, the one reason that holding ten weapons in Halo would have been impossible is that the game literally only had eight weapons. Eight weapons; in the future?
I agree, there could have been more weapons, but there was enough to cover gameplay needs and enough to satisfy me thoroughly. They had the essentials, the most they could have done was add "spice" weapons like the Gravity Hammer (which they did later on), or add redundant weapons like the SMG
with the assault rifle (again, something they also did later on). I suppose you can complain here, but I don't really see the point.
Not only that, why would an advanced race of aliens with the destruction power to threaten humanity's existence create weapons that become useless after running out of batteries?
Why would we create weapons that become useless when they run out of bullets? The only difference between ours' and theirs' is that they have a way to regenerate energy on the battlefield (those purple canisters that made great cover happened to be charging stations, if I recall my Halopedia correctly) and we can't automatically make bullets.
Also, why do those batteries only last for approximately ten seconds of concentrated fire, and overheat after five? Are "covenant" soldiers really so expendable that they can send them into battle with a weapon that can only last them a few moments before being rendered completely ineffective?
The Plasma Rifle (I tended to avoid the Plasma Pistol as a weapon, rather using its overcharge shot as a tool to instantly down shields) lasted me a very long time in combat. It got me through multiple fights on half ammo, being variable enough to down shields effectively like the Plasma Pistol, crowd control like the assault rifle, and kill weaker enemies almost as effectively as the pistol. It was hardly useless. As well, I answered your "in-universe" question above, what with those purple canisters everywhere being recharge stations.
If any aspect of Halo were a mixed bag, it would be the level design. Ranging from brilliant to downright asinine and boring, as a player, you can nearly tell what the developer's spent there time on versus what was phoned-in to pad the overall gameplay time. The near fourth-wall breaking experience of subconsciously critiquing a game's level design as your playing it is incredibly jarring. If at any point you're playing a game and think to yourself, "wow, they really didn't spend much time on this level did they?" when you're supposed to be listening to the overly expository dialogue of a charming little blue floating orb robot janitor thing while fending off wave after wave of zombie like aliens and picking up the perfectly placed discarded weaponry allowing you to do so along the way... you have a broken experience. These moments of not-awesome are highlighted by the moments of awesome that swim around them. If there was one thing that Halo tried really, really hard at capturing, it was the "set-piece" aspect of story-based First-Person Shooters. The main problem with this is that games like Half-Life and Unreal had already immersed players with their (albeit smaller) set-piece single-player gameplay, so short of the expansive "war-oriented" battles in the more open environments, Halo didn't bring that much "newness" to the table. Still, faults aside, this (and the music) is probably the best aspect of what Halo should be credited for.
I realize I quoted a lot of text to make exactly no point, but I agree. Some of Halo's levels were quite annoying or dull, but a fair number of them were also incredible. They did fix this in later installments, with levels becoming even better and golden pieces becoming more common. As well, the music is utterly magnificent. Some of my favorite to date, and not just out of video games.
Any first person shooter experience, aside from more story driven games like System Shock and Deus Ex, better have its multiplayer up to snuff else it's going to start collecting shelf dust really fast. Oddly enough, this is the most confusing aspect of what Halo was praised for, and what "put the game on the map" in the gaming world in general. The game's split-screen 2 vs. 2 max, two-player cooperative campaign, and local "system link" (read: multiple consoles, games and TV's) gameplay were really the only aspects of Halo's multiplayer. The Vs. multiplayer mechanic only had five modes to choose from, and when compared to games like Unreal Tournament and Quake III: Arena, had literally a infants handful of multiplayer maps. No bots, no user-generated content, no online play, no game-changing modifiers (i.e. single shot kill, low gravity, etc.), no customizable game modes (no music!)... about the only thing that Halo multiplayer had going for it was the inclusion of the games few vehicles. It's confusing to figure out why Halo was so praised by the gaming world for its multiplayer aspect (even before Halo 2) when compared to other games, and even previous console games (read: Goldeneye 007), it had a paltry amount of gameplay and innovation.
I think it a little unfair to compare Halo with other games that had multiplayer instead of splitscreen (or system link). And you also have to take into account it
couldn't have full multiplayer; it was on a console with as-of-yet no online system to speak of. I guess you win here, but in the same way a body-builder with a baseball bat can defeat a sleeping infant in a cradle.
Mechanically, when you break down the Halo experience, it falls short in nearly every way (except the single-player music).
As evidenced above, I beg to differ.
Since then, developers have deduced that "less is more," when it comes to gameplay and instead have focused on set-piece aesthetics, multiplayer and getting the most amount of money for the least amount of thought and innovation.
This is a true point about
other franchises, like Call of Duty. However, Halo had a large amount of work put into it; it had a fully fleshed out single player experience unlike any other that I've seen in a game of the same shooter sub-genre, a lot of effort put into making the enemies fun to fight, making the guns fun to shoot, making the vehicles fun to drive, and making the overall atmosphere and experience something to behold. To even imply that Halo was a game born of laziness is ludicrous.
