Let's Be Like Halo! Wait... what?

[Nikolaz72]

Ah I wouldn't worry about Halo getting compared to other games.

By the time "Call of Duty #784: The super ultra ops of the veteran snipers within vietnam" comes out, there won't be a Halo... or any other FPS... Just CoD, since "herp it be mainstream derp so I playz it cause evrybudy else do lolz!"

They could just bring out the exact same Call of Duty out every couple of freakin' weeks with a different box art and title and it would sell like hot cakes.

FPS's are as good as dead. Because somehow, somewhere along the line... gamers became idiots...

Idiots became gamers.

 

[garjian]

halo reach had non-regerating health with regenerating shield... and health packs... like the first.

just thought id point that out.

i disagree that games should copy anyone,
i agree that FPSs should at least copy someone else however... too many CoD clones.

They could just bring out the exact same Call of Duty out every couple of freakin' weeks with a different box art and title and it would sell like hot cakes.

(and with a new name (or Modern Warfare n+1))
and yes, it believably would. :/

 

[Netrigan]

2. Bring Back Health Meters:
Halo 1 has a shield meter and a health meter. It also features health packs that you walk over to trigger, just like the 'old school' FPSs everyone whines about. Halo 2 onwards also had the shield meter, which actually functions about the same as a health meter, and since you died very shortly after your shield went down it might as well have just been a health meter. Further, it had an in-story reason for the shield (your health) regenerating.

I recently decided to give Halo another shot after bailing less than half-way through the first. Halo: Reach has a health meter below the shields... and I'm mostly finding it functionally the same as just recharging health, at least on Normal difficulty. The shields are powerful enough that I'm never worried about my low health in the rare instances where it gets knocked down. When I die, it's pretty much insta-kills, where I go from full health and shields to death in under a second.

I mentioned this in another Halo thread and someone told me that's pretty much normal. Death doesn't come from a thousand cuts, it comes from a well-placed shot or two. Mostly I play the game in the same overly-aggressive manner I play all games with recharging health. Only when I encounter an enemy with the insta-kill ability to I play more conservative on the second play-through.

4. Stop Ripping Off Aliens:
Aliens features squads of grizzled marines of various ethnicities and grizzledness, all wizecracking their way through the various scenarios they find themselves in, like a lot of mainstream first person shooters these days. However, Halo featured a lone, silent protagonist (like Gordon Freeman) with very little personality assigned to him aside from what can be gleaned by the way the enemies react to him and his squadmates treat him. The closest Halo comes to Aliens is the crypod sequence but one shout out does not a ripoff make.

The whole space marine thing is the ALIENS rip-off. Doom was shameless about it, but has about as much in common with the premise as Halo does. Mostly Doom just tried to duplicate the lighting. But absolutely everyone knows why space marines are the go-to guys in FPS and it's all about how fucking cool they were in ALIENS. And quite a number of games utilize the face-hugger in some way, with a smaller monster visibly possessing regular characters. Halo has the Flood and Half-Life has the Head-Crabs. *cough*alien*cough*

The other movie that creeps up a fair bit (and whose novel most likely inspired ALIENS) is Starship Troopers. Pretty much every space marine cliche is from one of those two movies. Halo is a bit unusual in that they liberally borrowed from Ringworld, which is really only well-known in sci-fi fandom, which is more than most space marine stories ever bother to do.

 

[mad825]

But now I read again what you say at the bottom of your response "Halo is a good console FPS, so it does contain a lot of auto-aiming...", it makes no sense to say Halo has a lot of auto-aiming when only the three weapons, the needler, sticky launcher, and rocket launcher, have barely what could be seen as auto-aim. The other weapons in the game have absolutely no auto-aim.

So, taking in how many weapons there are in the game, Halo has hardly any auto-aim. Nothing but my own fingers and some luck has helped me get a few headshots with the sniper rifle or DMR.

You are assuming, in many cases Auto-Aim can be hard to notice and can only really be seen by looking at the raw code.

On the Halo wiki [http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Auto-Aim] there is a table showing what and how Auto-aim is determined.

 

[MelasZepheos_v1legacy]

snip

The whole space marine thing is the ALIENS rip-off. Doom was shameless about it, but has about as much in common with the premise as Halo does. Mostly Doom just tried to duplicate the lighting. But absolutely everyone knows why space marines are the go-to guys in FPS and it's all about how fucking cool they were in ALIENS. And quite a number of games utilize the face-hugger in some way, with a smaller monster visibly possessing regular characters. Halo has the Flood and Half-Life has the Head-Crabs. *cough*alien*cough*

The other movie that creeps up a fair bit (and whose novel most likely inspired ALIENS) is Starship Troopers. Pretty much every space marine cliche is from one of those two movies. Halo is a bit unusual in that they liberally borrowed from Ringworld, which is really only well-known in sci-fi fandom, which is more than most space marine stories ever bother to do.

I guess that's kind of the point though. 'One source is plaigarism, many sources is research.' Other bad FPSs (Yahtzee's example being Turok) only take from Alien, or Starship Troopers. They pick the one movie and stick with it. Halo references many, some quite obscure, and so is more an homage to science fiction in general rather than a rip off of one.

Maybe it's again just a matter of perspective but that's how I see it. Also, as you rightly mention everyone from Half Life to Haze has ripped off Aliens in some way, so you can hardly blame Halo for being the one game that did it worse than anyone else.

 

[Thaius]

I love you.

I really think the vast majority of the hate Halo gets comes down to impressionable sheep trying to be cool by disliking what's popular. It cannot be denied that Halo had a huge influence on console shooters, but 1) that makes it a good game, not a bad one, and 2) as you pointed out, most of the issues that people hate in shooters now really aren't present in Halo.

I love the series for its gameplay, its visuals, its music, and most of all its story. But people tend to look past all that in favor of bashing it for asinine reasons without ever giving the series a real look. Thank you for not doing that. You're awesome.

EDIT: Holy crap, I just noticed your avatar too! Basil of Baker Street! You are my hero.

 

[Jaime_Wolf]

Though then again Halo was one of the first games to have any form of auto-aim, which pretty much every FPS has in some way nowadays.

This is the kind of bullshit that gives Halo a bad name.

Halo is far from the first game to have a form of auto-aim. There were games on the N64 with auto-aim.

 

[NinjaDeathSlap]

I do like Yahtzee but he does tick me off sometimes and the Turok episode was one of those.

You see, there was something you missed OP. In his Turok review he made all these 'Let's be like Halo' assumptions, yet in his Halo 3 review he confessed to having NEVER PLAYED A HALO GAME BEFORE. So in his Turok review he was making an assumption based on having only played one game in the series by that point, the game that even most Halo fans confess to be the worst...

He's entitled to his opinions, so long as he's basing them on actual fact, rather than just half baked assumptions.

 

[Vrex360]

[HEADING=1]THANK YOU[/HEADING]

Seriously, I've been trying to say this for so many years now. To this day I still hear people telling me that Halo is a grey cover based shooter populated by big beefy dudes and rips off aliens. I honestly get sick of it.
I don't mind if people don't like it but they could at least do their homework before condemning it, half the things people accuse Halo of aren't even it's fault.

In fact it was after playing Halo: Reach, when I jumped something like eight feet into the air firing rockets at an alien tank, using the force of the rockets to keep me up while I fired it that I stopped and thought to myself:
"Man, the people who say Halo inspired gritty realism are completely full of shit."
I can't think of a realistic war situation where someone carrying the rocket launcher would jump eight feet into the air to blow up a tank on ground level. But in a match of Halo it's a common sight.

Thanks for being frank about this, I agree with virtually every point here. Halo is not grey (Halo 3 was one of the most vibrant and colorful shooters I've ever played), it is not gritty realism, it doesn't have messed up control sensitivity (it's actually the smoothest shooter I've ever played) and it being set in space doesn't automatically make it a rip off of aliens.

 

[Baradiel]

The blast radius of a hand grenade in Halo is ridiculously low in all installments.
I can't think of any game with grenades that have less splash damage than Halo's.

Halo: CE grenades were mini-nukes. If an enemy was in the same room as one of them, they were dead (slight exaggeration, but whatever)

Sorry to follow the crowd, but I always considered CoD grenades to have quite a small blast radius, and Bad Company 2 grenades need to be nestled against an enemy's foot to kill them.

Although I agree about the frags not actually fragmenting much. Spike grenades from Halo 3 were more fragmentation grenades than the frag grenades.

 

[Megacherv]

Keep in mind that this was waaaaay before everyone started copying Call of Duty, which seems to be the current standard

 

[Zantos]

Its pretty much generally accepted that the Halo series has poor characters and a crappy story, just like a lot of shooters.
You know somethings up when even the most hardcore Halo fanboys admit theres flaws in it.

There's nothing wrong with a game where the fans are willing to admit flaws. Besides, there's an astounding difference between what you're saying (poor, crappy) and what actually gets said (simple, unoriginal, cliche). Yeah there was plenty they could have done to make it a better game but everything more or less holds up and covers itself even if there are no gripping plot twists and deep relationships between characters.

[HEADING=1]THANK YOU[/HEADING]

Seriously, I've been trying to say this for so many years now. To this day I still hear people telling me that Halo is a grey cover based shooter populated by big beefy dudes and rips off aliens. I honestly get sick of it.
I don't mind if people don't like it but they could at least do their homework before condemning it, half the things people accuse Halo of aren't even it's fault.

In fact it was after playing Halo: Reach, when I jumped something like eight feet into the air firing rockets at an alien tank, using the force of the rockets to keep me up while I fired it that I stopped and thought to myself:
"Man, the people who say Halo inspired gritty realism are completely full of shit."
I can't think of a realistic war situation where someone carrying the rocket launcher would jump eight feet into the air to blow up a tank on ground level. But in a match of Halo it's a common sight.

Thanks for being frank about this, I agree with virtually every point here. Halo is not grey (Halo 3 was one of the most vibrant and colorful shooters I've ever played), it is not gritty realism, it doesn't have messed up control sensitivity (it's actually the smoothest shooter I've ever played) and it being set in space doesn't automatically make it a rip off of aliens.

Haha word. Also a special shout to the people that complain about it being too unrealistic. "That could never happen in real life" Yeah we know. It's a game about how 500 years into the future humanity goes to war with a giant collection of alien scientologists and Khan has to stop them and along the way they accidentally release The Flood (I can't even think of anything for that). Realism wasn't top of the list in the first place. Now watch as I launch this ghost into that elite after attaching a grenade to the front and heroically diving out.

 

[Ironic Pirate]

Mostly agreed, except for auto-aim. I hate auto-aim with a passion I'm not articulate enough to describe, so at least include the option to turn it off.

 

[Neverhoodian]

I just think it's amusing that while Yahtzee likes to pick on the Halo series, when push comes to shove he'll admit it's not as bad as he makes it out to be.

If you go back and watch his Halo 3 and Halo Reach reviews, he doesn't say the games are bad at all. He found Halo 3 to be average, and he thought Reach was kind of fun with a good ending. Sure he disliked Halo Wars, but that can be chalked up to the fact that it was an RTS game, a genre he's never been interested in.

 

[repeating integers]

Is it just me, or is the Halo hatedom on the Escapist quietly fizzling out?

Because all I've seen in the past few Halo threads is reasonable, intelligent discussion between people who like the games and people who don't. A far cry from the old "You like Halo, therefore you suck and so does your dog" threads I'm used to. I'm liking this change.

I suppose this is because the hatedom's now almost completely shifted focus to Call of Duty.

 

[nexekho]

They copy Call of Duty today, but I don't feel there were ever any TRUE Halo clones

Nova for iOS. Not played it but seen my brother playing it, looks like a crossbreed of Halo and Metroid.

4. Stop Ripping Off Aliens:

http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_References_to_Aliens_in_Halo

 

[bue519]

I love when people say games copied Halo. They didn't.

They copy Call of Duty today, but I don't feel there were ever any TRUE Halo clones. Halo was Halo, you either liked it or didn't. Nothing looked like it was straight stealing from it. Developers took some ideas (just like every hack and slash action game cribs from DMC and God of War to some extent), and games moved on. The only "Halo" trends I see are regenerative health and the idea of holding two weapons at a time. Both of these aren't even copied wholesale in most games (Gears lets you hold four weapons)

Totally in agreement with you, Mr. Topic Creator

True, I thought Halo kind of reminded me of the Unreal Tournament series (talking about UT 2004, not the "Unreal 3") Both of those games had the crazy jumping, decent vehicles, and weapons that take a couple hits to kill.(granted, there are no throwable nades in UT04) I just remember feeling those games were mildly simliar when as I played them when they first came out.
As of the OP, I think that these suggestions are great, but Halo has really more Call of Duty in it than it's first release.(a sign of the times I suppose)