Hamish Durie said:
People are always telling me why they hate halo but I want to know why and ill be very dissapointed if all of the complaints are the douches on the XBL (the douche comment is aimed at the 8 year old teabagers and people who rage and say what are you doing give me the sniper rifle and get out of the tank why did you shoot me) sorry to those who where offended
I'm quoting you because only one person in this entire thread has gotten it right so far, and there's a good chance you missed his response.
It's really a "you had to be there" kind of thing, and according to your profile, you were too concerned about preschool at the time to really have "been there." When
Halo came out, it gained a fan following that made the one for
Final Fantasy VII look sane. People would talk about how it was the best game ever non-stop. Now, the problem with that statement is it's only true if you ignore all of the FPSs that came out on the PC prior to
Halo. Anyone who had been playing FPSs on the PC prior to
Halo saw it as a solid but ultimately mediocre and non-revolutionary game, and it got really,
really annoying to hear people who had apparently never played
Doom, let alone
Quake,
Unreal,
Half Life, or even flippin'
Goldeneye talk like
Halo was the best game ever, or like it did anything that hadn't been done before in some other game.
To extend this, compared to PC shooters at the time, Halo was a slow, plodding affair with crappy jump mechanics leading to a very low mobility game. The two weapon limit was an annoying reaction to the lack of buttons on a gamepad compared to a mouse and keyboard, and what's more, it wasn't even the first game to do it -- the
Delta Force series, for example, had it as far back as 1998. However, that didn't stop
Halo fans from talking like it was the first game to ever do that, not to mention acting like it was a good thing in a game that wasn't trying to match the inventory of a real life soldier the way
Delta Force did.
All this goes to say,
Halo's fans gave so much praise to an overall mediocre game that fans of earlier FPS games couldn't help but hate it. It was made worse by the fact that
Halo managed to influence the vast majority of FPSs released after it came out -- even the modern CoD games have as much
Halo in them as they do
Call of Duty. That said, it's not a bad game -- in fact, as slow as it was compared to games when it came out, compared to the games that are out today, it's a downright old school game, with relatively high mobility. It's still not as good as the games that came before, but it's better than a lot of the games that came after.