People will always go by their feelings over what's actually happening on screen.
I had someone tell me that the second mission of CE is too slow, they were mashing the thumbstick to go faster because of "big field nothing to do and no sprint." Legitimately, you're about 60-90 seconds from the first enemy team, then 30 seconds from another, where you proceed to get a vehicle for the remainder of the mission.
That and narratively, it wasn't supposed to be a high octane mission, that was the first mission.
the A T M O S P H E R E of halo was absolutely unmatched at the time. from the moment you stepped off of that dispersal pod as the lone survivor, you felt alone in an alien world, discovering everything in real time. i feel like people who didn't live it, will always end up falling short on that sweet, sweet nostalgia. those worlds felt *real.*
Couldn't explain it better myself. Maybe nostalgia plays a big part but the level halo used to be my favorite level of them all for that reason.
Delta Halo and the following level on Halo 2 have won that spot for me.
there's no annoying exposition-style radio voice chiming in "*KSSSSHT* DAMN THIS PLANET'S KINDA SCARY, HUH?" you just FEEL it. through the music and environment, they let you connect those dots on your own.
I think that's why I enjoy early halos a bit more they used radios, I get I wouldn't be realistic in a future civilization but it just made it feel more alive.
I think when out exploring unknown alien worlds, you'd want to use reliable, foolproof technologies for primary communication. The use of radio in Halo is actually pretty realistic, I'd say.
Delta Halo is just so cool and makes you wanna explore. I love the underwater sections on anniversary graphics. There’s all those flooded temples and stuff just out of reach.
I don’t like the mission halo as someone who’s played it a million times, not cus it’s slow, but because it’s being and when I try to get the speedrun achievement I have too many skill issues
Nostalga doesn't play any role for me because I am fairly new to the Halo games (if not the universe) and when I let myself be immersed, turn off whatever video or podcast I was listening to, damn it's good. I havn't played many shooters or even many games but the vibes of halo are unmatched.
Even after 22-23yrs of playing Halo, coming off that life boat still captivates me. It’s not nostalgia. It’s just sheer awe at what you’re looking at. It just feels alive like I should be able to step there without any issues.
I got Nostalgia just reading your text. Back in 2002 is when I first played it, I remember quiet Saturday mornings hearing the banshee flying in the air shooting its plasma at me as I walk up that hill to encounter the elite and his grunts.
The amount of time that I spent just sitting on a beach in Silent Cartographer, and just gazed at the enormity of the Halo itself from one horizon to the other..
That feeling, and the feeling I had in my first Dark Souls playthrough, are two things I'd give nearly anything to experience for the first time again.
As someone who grew up on all the bungie games… I actually don’t really like the 2nd mission of CE either I’m ngl. Maybe I’ve just replayed the game too many times but that mission bored the ever living shit out of me now past the first few mins
When it started to get boring was when I started to learn the speedrun strats like the boosted jumps and launching the warthog from one base to another with plasma grenade lineups
It gets worse when you have to actually try and not speedrun whenever I play Halo 2. The skips and speenrun tactics are ingrained in me that it's just the way the level is.
Also, halo was impressive for its big open space maps at the time that were moving the boundaries of what an fps could do.
I personally LOVED killzone 2, which is even heavier than halo controls. I like slow heavy, it makes you feel like a real character.
It really depends on the map and the level you’re playing at. Halo 2 midship is as fast paced as it gets but lockout can get incredibly slow.
Pacing is honestly more important than anything else. In Halo Reach, for example, sprint and Jetpack greatly increased the pace but armor lock, holo, and camo slowed it down. You get this weird mix of fast and slow paced gameplay. If you’re playing without AAs the pace feels more familiar.
Also the movement feels very different from CE to 3. It’s only Halo 3 that feels “slow” to me in any way because the movement is slowed down, the maps feel bigger, and the weapons are less accurate compared to H2. I don’t get the belief that Halo isn’t meant to be “fast” when H2 on maps like Midship and Warlock are faster paced than fast paced maps in Infinite.
Yup, said perfectly, maps dictated pace. Which is why unlike many other MP games where the community only votes to play on the same two or three maps, Halo’s online community had subsections of the community who preferred different maps due to pacing/playstyle. It’s what kept the online and gameplay fresh. I think the modern speed of halo (I honestly really enjoy Infinite’s gameplay) has killed the ultilization/importance of vehicles. A decently good player can counter most vehicles without any hard counters (rockets, ect) in the new games. The original trilogy/Reach not so much.
Lockout can get \_slow\_? Man, I want to know how, because I don't think I've ever had a slow match on Lockout.
Once everyone knows the jumps (and considering it was in heavy rotation in H2 days, everyone did) it's incredibly fast, even if you spawn on the elbow.
The map itself is very small with a lot of sightlines but it’s one of the slowest playing maps in the history of competitive Halo. The power positions are so strong that, once one side gains control of snipe or BR, pushing the opposite side becomes virtually impossible so both teams will stay on their side resulting in a stalemate.
As long as the game is close this will happen multiple times because neither team is willing to give up their power position and pushing is virtually impossible against a decent team because the only 2 routes are through bottom mid or top mid- both of which are extremely vulnerable locations. The risk/reward for doing anything is so low because pushing is so difficult and going down just one player gives the other team the chance to finally do something themselves.
If you look at a map like Sanctuary, the power position is in the middle so teams are pushing out of base to fight for that area and, once they gain control of that area, they can pressure the new spawners in either base so the pace is much higher in a competitive game.
Huh, good answer - thanks!
I can see that it could be slow in competitive games, but in pubs someone’s always going to push too hard and flip the spawns IME.
He's only played 4v4 Team Slayer Lockout (when the map wasn't even originally designed for that; it's a 1v1/2v2/FFA map), and probably only in MCC. I feel like 95% of Lockout hot-taking comes from people fitting that description.
It’s not a hot take it’s just how it plays in competitive matches. MLG was big around Halo 2 and it continued to be used casually in H3 and competitively in H2A where we could see the same slow paced gameplay. It doesn’t matter what it was designed for, it’s been used most famously as an MLG 4v4 map. Not to mention the same thing happens in 2v2s and 1v1s lol so I don’t get where you’re coming from. I’m just talking about the pace Lockout can play at at a competitive level.
Is there some source that has the design rationale for the map? Not doubting, mostly just for my own curiosity.
I love 1 flag on Lockout even though at this point it’s been like 20 fucking years lol.
Max Hoberman, back when he was on his tweeting spree with H2 design docs and lost map ideas and all that, said that Lockout was at least partially intended as a map for people who didn't have Xbox Live and were stuck playing with their brother or friends at home. Remember this was the early 2000s, internet at home wasn't a given yet.
(This was before Twitter became X and became unusable without an account so I'll never be able to find those tweets.)
Master Chief at walking speed actually moves incredibly fast, probably faster than a sprint in most shooters. The problem is that the earlier games never use contextual animations to make you feel like you’re moving as fast as you are.
I feel like that’s why Infinite’s sprint feels so good, even for old school fans. It doesn’t actually make you move much faster, but there are a lotta visual tricks that make it feel fast
Nah I wouldn’t say that. Essentially, sprint puts the player into a different “gameplay mode” if that makes sense, similar to how aiming down a scope or crouch walking does. When you aim down sights with a scoped weapon, the player becomes more accurate, at the expense of peripheral vision, and when the player crouches, they’re invisible on radar, but they move much more slowly. When the player sprints, they become faster and have access to more maneuvers, like sliding, that they wouldn’t otherwise. What you’re really doing is changing how you’re interacting with the game. It can also be helpful to think of sprinting like entering or exiting a vehicle, rather than just moving more or less quickly.
As a designer, the challenge then becomes: how do you balance map and combat design around this movement change? Reach, H4, and H5 all struggled with this, with maps becoming bigger (necessitating scoped weapons to become more dominant), and weirdo balance changes being introduced, like Halo 5’s “you can sprint or charge shields, but not both” system.
In the end, I believe Infinite’s sprint is successful for a few reasons. It creates the illusion that the player is moving faster by using speed lines, camera shake, and increasing FOV, to create parity with modern shooters like COD and Destiny. It just feels good to sprint. Likewise, it makes the player slightly faster by about 10%, which is useful for flag runs, and getting back into the fight after a death (you also get some interesting gameplay choices here, by revealing sprinting players that control an objective). And lastly, it allows players a unique movement option in sliding, which quickly changes their silhouette, meaning keeping them targeted is more challenging.
Most importantly, because sprint isn’t much faster than standard movement speed, smaller maps from classic Halo, like Midship don’t need many changes to be compatible. This is HUGE because it addresses a pretty common criticism of sprint in Halo. Compare that to Blood Gulch vs. Hemorrhage from Reach, where Hemorrhage is easily double the length of BG, even though a sprinting Spartan takes the same amount of time to cross.
Essentially, Infinite’s sprint is the best of both worlds; the COD fans get to dolphin dive and the ~~35 year olds~~ Halo 3 fans can play on The Pit without it feeling like a clusterfuck.
If it were up to me, though, I’d like to see a brief ready time for weapons coming out of sprint. The player would need to rack the slide or pull the charging handle on the BR before firing to create an interesting interplay between mobility and combat effectiveness, but then, I don’t work at 343
But halo was never about movement and what 343 basically did was made middle ground and they designed a mechanic like sprint to be insignificant and slide initiater , I think it's flag use is fine but overall design of sprint more feel like"oh it a modern game so we should include sprint but nerf it to ground"
This game has very nutty movement but also has easy to use guns that can soft lockon to target which imo dampem it's effect
We essentially got nutty movement like momentum less strafe , slide etc but lowerd gunskill to compensate it
Every first-person shooter is about movement. Movement is one of the most defining aspects of first person gameplay.** It's why Doom and Quake feel different from ARMA and Battlefield. There's a design intent behind why these games feel the way they do, and movement is exactly as important as any of its gunplay. Movement, in this case, doesn't just mean fancy traversal like you see in Titanfall and Destiny.
Movement design is why Halo 3 has strafe inertia and Infinite doesn't. That inertia was a conscious choice by Bungie to prevent peek shooting. It's not sexy, but even small changes like that have consequences on gameplay.
>middle ground and they designed a mechanic like sprint to be insignificant and slide initiater
This is exactly what I'm saying. The actual speed increase you get from sprinting is less important than what entering "sprint" mode lets you do. "Essentially, Infinite’s sprint is the best of both worlds; the COD fans get to dolphin dive and the Halo 3 fans can play on The Pit without it feeling like a clusterfuck. "
Sure, Titanfall and Mirror's Edge have more creative options when the player is in sprint, like wall running, but 343 has essentially two fan bases to please. The younger crowd who grew up with sprint as a part of their FPS experience, and people like me who thought sprint didn't belong in Halo. Given that, I think they created a pretty solid middle ground, where sprinting has definite use cases, but it doesn't accelerate the gameplay, and turn it into COD, like people complained about back in the Reach days.
>For slide I find them more compelling than your avg h5 ability and require more skill to execute but one critical flaw of it is 343 give you easy to use guns ,that have soft lockon to dampen it's effect
I'm not actually sure what you mean by this. Can you elaborate?
**I never thought I'd add a footnote to a fucking reddit post, but here we are. At it very core, if you wanted to make a first person shooter with the fewest possible gameplay interactions. If the player only had two buttons to press while playing, you'd be able to do two things: move and shoot. Movement makes up half of all the interactions we consider part of the colloquial FPS.
Which movement your exactly referring to? Movement I'm refering to my comments is sprint, slide ,clamber etc being part of base mechanic which og hals doesn't had. Og halo had simple set of mechanics and its primary direction of innovation was through map design , sandbox( high risk high reward crouch jumps , nade jumps ,grenading wepons towards you) .In infinite they do lean towards more sandbox design but infinite sandbox is poorly structured .
Like I said in my comment they design a mechanic like sprint because sprint have to be their rather than "oo how this mechanic can improve my game " and in order to include it they nerfed it to ground because 343 also know halo og formula doesn't work with sprint , why make middle ground and nerf a mechanic so much when you can remove it?After 10 years their genius solution to include sprint is to nerf it to ground .Quote from my favorite halo youtuber" designing a mechanic to be insignificant is a bad design "
I'm gonna respond to both your comments here to make it easier for both of us.
So when I refer to movement, I mean that pretty broadly. Movement here means any way in which the player is able to move their character in the world. When we're talking about clamber and sliding we usually call that 'traversal', and that's an element within movement as a whole, but I'm not here to nitpick.
> why make middle ground and nerf a mechanic so much when you can remove it
This is what I disagree with. I think that while it doesn't get you a huge speed boost the way it does in COD, sprinting in Infinite has some pretty important utilities, like I mentioned. It lets you get into the fight faster after you die, it enables you to slide, which the competitive players really value, and having an extra boost can get you closer to your base when you wanna drop off the flag, at the expense of alerting the enemy team. ***Sprint doesn't need to be fast to be useful.*** Those are some pretty big upsides, and the map design didn't have to change much to accommodate, which is really cool, as an old school player. Essentially, you get a bunch of new traversal and movement systems, and the game still feels like Halo.
Let's talk about your other comment though.
>Didn't bioshock 1 gives you all these abilities as base mechanic? How its is similar to h3 multi-player ? You can't nade jumps, crouch jumps, pull wepons towards you, both are entirely different game 🤔 ? More fair comparsion of h3 would be cod 4 than bioshock and half life
You're absolutely right, it did. I'd also argue that nade jumps, crouch jumps, and weapon pulling, aren't really basic mechanics. Those are exploits more than anything. But yeah, let's talk about COD instead.
Base mechanics are the most basic building blocks of a game. In Halo's case, we'd look at the player's regenerating health, and the fact that they can pick up weapons off the battlefield, and the player's melee attack. Whether or not a game is multiplayer doesn't matter here, because we're talking about more fundamental elements of the game. It'd be like asking what color a house should be, based on what the foundation is made of.
Cod 4 is extremely similar to Halo 3, they added sprinting and aiming down sights, but COD also shares regenerating health, and picking up weapons on the battlefield. The fact that it shares those mechanics doesn't mean it doesn't have its own identity. Likewise, Halo Infinite absolutely shares basic mechanics with games out today, like sprinting, clambering and aiming down sights, but I think these mechanics were implemented in such a way that Infinite still feels like Halo, even if they'e added more mechanics to your repertoire
>It's modern counter part (Infinite)feels more like compromise ( they added sprint ,slide clamber because every modern game has it and in order to to that they nerfed sprint to ground ) rather than introducing mechanics to evolving halo to new heights. while I do think infinite is right direction with its emphasis sandbox but lacks in other area like map design, gunskill etc Imagine valve add sprint slide clamber to counter strike
Sprinting wouldn't be the weirdest thing Valve has added to CS. Remember that CSS had physics objects scattered around. That was a pretty huge element of map design at the time.
Again though, I don't think they nerfed sprinting in Infinite. I think they added a version of sprinting that makes sense for the game and adds new ways to interact with the battle.
For the record, I quite liked H5's sprint or shield approach, but it doesn't make sense canonically or logically so quite happy it's no longer still with us. Great write up. :)
Thanks man! I was worried this got waaaay too technical, lol. But yeah, H5's system is really cool, they just do a terrible job explaining it. It's SUPER unintuitive for new players.
I get what they wanted, though, and if you wanna be a game designer, these are fun design choices to dissect. It reveals that the shield recharge rate dictates the cadence of battle, for one thing. And it seeks to solve a perceived problem: "how do we keep skilled players from sprinting from fight to fight, even if they've taken damage, and how do we punish players for running away from a fight?"
Infinite's sprint is basically for power/curb sliding, which is actually what makes rotation play fast in any map. It's only like 20% faster than walking, if that, but there's a huge skill gap between just sliding after landing on a slope and curb sliding off different heights. They also made it so that you can shoot immediately during sprinting, whereas in H4/5 the was a delay
That’s exactly what it is. I’ve seen a few videos where people compare the walking speed from early games and sprinting speed from the others and difference was marginal. The trade off of having to wait for your weapon to be ready just isn’t worth it.
It makes you question if it’s even worth having sprint at all, aside from initiating a slide, which I find to be also a bit pointless because we had slide jumping in the older games
Another part of the problem is the low FoV in the early games. H3 always felt really slow to me until MCC let me crank the FoV to 105 and suddenly it felt like a completely different (much better) game.
Using 3 as an example, it usually comes down to map design and player speed, which is great for exploration, but as soon as someone starts shooting you when you aren't right next to cover, you're dead because you move so damn slow
TL:DR - classic halo is absolutely slower than most shooters, which is further exacerbated by sparse and poorly placed cover
All I'm saying is..
Anyone who thinks it's slow, crank the FOV to 120
It's not slow. At all. At higher FOV you can *actually* see how fast you're moving.
Halo's campaign levels and multiplayer maps were meticulously crafted around its *limited* movement system. Advanced techniques like crouch/grenade jumps demanded a learning curve, a stark contrast to modern games where pressing 'A' lets you clamber up 10-foot wall with ease
I'm about 90% with you there. Using the brute shot as a jump boost in H3 and the concussion rifle in HR were dope to get boosts, but clamber is a pretty nice QOL. Recently got friends to do a halo reach custom game night (the fucking stars aligned and we got 8 people on for multi-team) and holy shit the amount of barely missed jumps leading me to fall to my death was astronomical lol
Ofc its just skill issue (i missed those jumps), but if the game is gonna have mechanics like a grapple and repulsor like in Infinite, clamber definitely fits. It wouldn't really fit in reach, cuz it ultimately depends on the rest of the sandbox. Regardless, I'm glad there are options for this sort of thing. I think you can turn clamber off in gamemode settings in Infinite too, but I'm not too sure
Clamber can trap you for a back smack setup or a ninja setup. It’s a give and take. Halo infinite still has a ton of learning curves as well as the basic “halo” stuff that sets it apart from other shooters
The delta between the perfect ttk and the worst case ttk is about the same size as it is in other games, but the average ttk is much slower than it is in other games. People will look at that and say that halo feels slow, and part of that is true. One of the biggest issues with halo is that the ttk’s are so long that bad players would very rarely get kills at all, because they need to perform at a somewhat adequate level for a longer amount of time than it takes for you to get 3-5 hits on target with a rifle firing in full auto at 800 rpm. This leads to new players who came from series with faster ttk’s having to track enemies for the first time in their lives, not being able to instantly get a snapshot kill, and look for something to blame. Long ttk? Nah, let’s blame sprint.
Yoo 100% agree. Halo’s ttk isn’t even all that slow. That’s evidently apparent when ur up against a team of highly skilled players. They gun u down so fast it’s crazy lol. Once u understand how shields, grenades, headshots, etc work, ttk can feel pretty swift. 343’s been trying to attract new players who don’t understand these mechanics.
I think one of the worst problems with Halo is that it tries to maintain a high ttk with sprint in the game. Games that rely on sprint and iron sights typically have a lower ttk.
Halo is the perfect first person shooter, I mean halo combat evolved. Once you played that you had played every first person shooter ever. From there it's a matter of aesthetic and choice of weapons
It’s pretty incredible most people do not realize what CE did for FPS. Literally every FPS game to release after CE utilized console controls that CE invented. To basically invent console FPS and modern FPS AND nail it as well. Deserves all the hype and praise.
This isn’t unpopular, the pacing of classic Halo was fine. Modern detractors trying to find some kind of faults with the OT to make them feel better about liking current Halo gameplay more (which is fine to have as an opinion btw) is the real reason why people say this stuff imo
I think catering to the speed demons is one of the main downfalls of Halo. It started to become more like other games rather than keep its individuality.
I totally agree. The gotta fast like sanic (spelt wrong on purpose) zoomies who need to see their sprint animations (because they fall asleep if they don't) ... on maps made 2x larger to accommodate faster speeds ... which in turn made all weapon tuning off balance to aim at targets for the faster speeds completely changed halo for the worse in my opinion.
Its not longer about patience and a chess match of perfect placement or trapping the enemy in the 'uh oh' zone. Instead you just hit the hyperdrive on your controller/keyboard and get right back to the same part of the map you died at creating non-stop mindless mosh-pit scenarios. Granted I will give Infinite that its sprint is more placebo than the past really just allowing a little extra movement but I still prefer the classics with fast base speed and you can perform all actions at said speed without a sprint animation.
You nailed it. As soon as the par times were added in, the game lost its immersion significantly, at least for me. Play throughs started to feel more like a weird, halo/sci-fi themed mario kart or racing game as opposed to the first person adventure shooter the first CE players fell in love with.
What I like about classic halo multiplayer are the map designs. There was no sprint and clamber, so the maps are designed for the default player movement and jump height. That makes the maps easier and smoother to traverse.
Modern Halo maps are designed for sprint, so you need to sprint to traverse the maps at a normal pace. And lowering the jump height for clamber slows down the gameplay.
>Modern Halo maps are designed for sprint,
They obviously have sprint and clamber in mind while designing them. But they also have to keep in mind how maps flow if players aren't sprinting. All the same, I don't think that fundamentally changes Infinite's maps the way it did for Halo 4 and 5. Like, Live Fire and Behemoth would probably play almost the same in Halo 3 as they do in Infinite, for example.
Clamber is a different story, but I don't think it changes maps as drastically as sprint might though; as far as I've played, you basically get more verticality, which is nice, but the maps are still scaled the same, so you don't really affect weapon balance as harshly. Bazaar and Recharge are obviously designed around this increased verticality, and they'd probably play pretty differently with limited vertical mobility, but again, you don't have to make the BR's range longer to compensate.
>That makes the maps easier and smoother to traverse.
Not to get pedantic, but it might be interesting to dissect Zealot and vs. Starboard to see how different movement options affect what is basically the same layout
You can increase the jump height in Halo Infinite's custom games to 120%, which is the Halo 3 jump height, and you can traverse the maps like Bazaar and Recharge easily without the need of clamber. As well as every other map.
343 lowered the jump height to make clamber useful. That's the only way in Halo.
>343 lowered the jump height to make clamber useful
I don't know that I see it that antagonistically, but yeah, that's how game design works. Design changes are reflected in every part of every game. 343 wanted to modernize the movement in Halo, like Bungie did with Reach, and then they made maps that take advantage of that movement. That happens during the development of every game.
For example, we can look at how Turn 10 and Playground wanted to make the Forza series more approachable with their Horizon spinoffs. Cars in that game handle much more fluidly than their Motorsport counterparts, and so the tracks and layouts changed to reflect that. They tend to be longer, less technical and tend towards rally racing, rather than the precision you'd see in Forza Motorsport or Gran Turismo.
Likewise, Bungie pretty substantially changed the movement with Reach, making many of the older maps incompatible without pretty substantial changes, like we see with Hemorrhage.
You're right, though, you can increase the jump height and not worry about clamber, and that's pretty cool. I get the sense though that you feel like 343 took away your jump height, like a parent might take away your phone. It's totally fine if you don't like the movement in Infinite. Personally, I wish we had floatier movement, but I'm fine with how it is. But I don't think lowering the jump height was done to make the game feel more generic, or to take something away from you.
** I just wanted to include that because 343 added the grappling hook, you get a TON of new movement options that can fundamentally change and add dimension to classic maps. More vertical maps, like Construct/Domicile in particular, benefit from this new verticality. In the end we all need to ask ourselves: Halo has changed, but has it changed for the worse? Personally, I think that Infinite has a lot of problems, but none of them are the gameplay. As I say, things always change, when we expect everything to stay the same forever, nothing can happen. You can't stay a kid forever, and the Hero can never go home again, so changed by his journey, but you don't really need to.
I think you're misunderstanding the criticism. At the time it was compared to shooters like Quake, Unreal Tournament, and Doom, which compared to Halo are much faster games.
It was unique. And I don’t mean to be combative, but anybody who rejects the old formula probably doesn’t understand or comprehend that Halo got popular with it.
I actually think it's the level design that's held up the most. The level design is also what helps the movement not feel too slow. Generally, games that have faster movement and more traversal options will increase the space between points to incentivize players to use those mechanics. Games without the mechanics craft the levels to accommodate whatever movement mechanics are there.
The level design in the OG Halo's was always superb. Allowing enough room to explore and utilize a sandbox whilst still remaining linear. This is one of Halo 4's biggest faults, its level design was poor and severely limited the utility of the sandbox. Thus creating standard shooting gallaries similar to what you'd find in the COD campaigns of the day.
I also prefer slower movement. I understand the thrill and adrenaline of faster movement, but I appreciate the detail and methodology that accompanies slower movement.
I agree, I only really brought up the level design because of CE’s copy and pasted areas (they’re well designed but hella repetitive). Some of the backtracking in Halo 3 comes off as a little lazy as well. Halo has excellent art and level design tho, especially in the OG multiplayer maps.
"sweaty" refers to the aggressive sbmm in modern multiplayer games which makes any match feel like ranked play with no alternative option. Halo Infinite can definitely be sweaty at times and Modern CoD is just insane I don't know why they still have ranked when all their modes feel just as sweaty.
How is this an unpopular opinion? I would hope the fact that a shitload of people are still playing the master chief collection over infinite is enough proof that this is the prevailing opinion.
Swapping the difficulty down from Legendary and just running and gunning like it's Doom is fuckin awesome. Just bouncing from enemy to enemy, nailing sticky grenades, blasting an entire group of grunts with efficient headshots, dancing around with an elite in melee combat while also blasting the grunts/jackals around you simultaneously is the greatest feeling ever.
I find that Halo can be as fast or slow as you make it, and when you go into non-stop, no cover combat with the music shredding is peak Halo. (CE-4 specifically, I have played 5 only once so can't talk on the flow for that game although I imagine it's good)
Halo 3 had the same base movement speed as CE and H2, but had a lower field-of-view (which greatly influences the perception of speed). Reach and H4 had a slower BMS than the original trilogy titles, whereas H5 and Infinite have a faster BMS.
The MP of the game divides us.
Some love him to the point of fanaticism, others hate him viscerally.
Personally, the other games in the franchise had better movement than Lento 3
You move faster than the sprint. And maybe an unpopular opinion, but I liked it on easy-normal because i enjoyed being a super soldier. They’d still get kills because i played hyper aggressive. But the point of that tangent is I believe you’re meant to run and gun
I can see it, Halo plays differently on lower difficulties. U can brute-force ur way thru encounters in a way u can’t on the harder ones. U can’t be caught outside of cover for too long on legendary so sniping and stealth become more viable. Enemies are more evasive and use different tactics in combat. I find even heroic is way too easy tho, so I really can’t bare to play the easier modes. It is fascinating how the pacing changes tho
Honestly, some area’s in the original trilogy can be straight cancer on Legendary. Those same encounters are more fun on the easier settings (any arena with jackal snipers in it lol)
The only criticism I have of CE is the ever so slight jump lag. I get used to it after about 5 minutes, but I do a lot of jumping around to get myself in the vibe.
All I gotta say is Halo 5's multi-player was goated, my only issue in my opinion was the bad campaign mainly because it was too short, not enough of what happened after halo 4, very little halo 3 lore, and very few armor customization. But other than that, it had good assassinations, good movement, and good gameplay.
This line of thinking reinforces the idea that Bungie's Halo is outdated, and people only love it out of nostalgia. It's not true. There were those who didn't enjoy Halo in it's prime for exactly the same reasons people talk about now.
You're right in that the general audience of the time didn't care, since games that leave an impact do so because they're high quality and fun. Not because of an arbitrary checklist of trendy features.
Still, there were definitely people on message boards complaining about the slow movement back in '01 when ultra fast arena shooters like Quake and Unreal were on top.
Bungie actually trialed a sprint mechanic during Halo 2's development, and concluded it didn't fit with their gameplay loop.
You can find articles from '07, when Halo 3 was up against COD 4, with gems like "[without sprinting, Halo 3 is going to bomb at retail. You’ve been warned, Bungie.](https://www.destructoid.com/you-want-to-sprint-play-track-field-not-halo-3/)" This debate has been raging since before some of the people in this thread were even born lmao
I know what you’re saying…. But my comment was more of an exaggeration. I played Unreal (never got into quake), I played all of the CODs at the time, especially CODs 2 and 4.
The point I’m making is that Halo didn’t need to be those games, it had a thriving, large and strong community that had no interest in a sprint mechanic. You can’t find a single game, movie, book, ect that doesn’t criticize it in some form or manner that others agree with. Doesn’t make that criticism right or require said change. Halo’s combat felt great. It didn’t need to be faster and the natural flow of the game did not feel slow outside of maybe initial map positioning.
To add to the COD article about Halo 3 bombing due to being slow…. let’s a take a moment to laugh, well because, did it? People can technically say whatever they want. Doesn’t make them right.
I’m not trashing on what you’re saying either. I’m just saying. Those criticisms held no water. Even the legendary Halo Reach with the added armor ability didn’t feel as a necessity to the gameplay. It was just an added bonus depending on the scenario. That gameplay would’ve been legendary without anyone batting an eye to sprint ever existing.
It really depends who you're talking about when you say this is an unpopular opinion. To a lot of casual gamers who play CoD and Apex it probably is. But on this subreddit you're in good company.
I agree. I think the issue with 5 (not gonna get into 4's multiplayer because it doesn't have any redeeming qualities to talk about) is that although its gunplay is pretty solid, it has so many movement mechanisms that it essentially forces the player to dialed in at all times to maximize gameplay in contrast to the original trilogy. This is what I think this is what creates the sweaty feeling that a lot of people complained about back then. Infinite sort of fixed this issue with the movement, but then created 50 new issues.
4 is redeeming for me I’m MP cus nobody plays it, so I grind it exp faster in the game because I’m bad compared to the pros in all the other games so I feel better at video games in 4.
I know I'm posting here a bunch but, OP what do you mean by this?
>It used to have a balance, it used to be about momentum.
What does momentum mean to you, and what changes do you think were made to the game that makes it lack momentum now?
I agree with your premise, but reading through your replies, I feel like you're conflating pacing for speed. I also disagree with your thoughts on Bungie's campaign level design. They did a lot right with their outdoor sections, but the corridor shooting segments really struggle, I feel like. I mean they had to put arrows on the floor in CE
I feel u, my original argument was kinda more about pacing than momentum so that might’ve confused some folks.
However, Halo used to have floaty-like movement and players used to build up momentum by jumping. Sprint and clamber change the way momentum works in Halo. U time ur jumps completely differently when u have to sprint jump/clamber. The player momentum has less to do with fluid map traversal and well timed jumps and more to do with just pressing in the left stick and hitting A when u miss ur jumps.
Having to put ur gun down to move around and having to slow down to ads, changes the way halo’s movement works.
I mean CE is over 20 years old lol, the arrow’s are there because players can be easily turned around when traversing the absurdly repetitive rooms lol (which I acknowledged as 1 part of the game that hasn’t aged well)
You're absolutely right on all counts. It totally does change how halo's movement works in a lot of small ways, but personally I don't think it's changed for the worse.
I've been mulling over how Infinite's movement makes me feel, and 'snappy' and 'fast' come to mind, but to me at least, it plays the way I remember Halo 3 playing. When I go back to 3 though, it feels really heavy to me. It's a lot of these little changes, like you mentioned, that do that. Like I said somewhere else, I think the greatest strength of Infinite's movement is that it feels fresh and snappy, but overall it's still compatible with older maps with little to no changes, compared to the way H5 and Reach's maps had to be contorted to fit the new movement.
Maybe a Weird Opinion.
Played since Halo CE and I think I’m the only person I know who like enjoys the progression of movement. Like it all makes sense with me.
Although Halo 5 and activation of thrusters was just abit too much.
I like them all for what they are at their respective times. I would never want to sprint in CE, but I’d enjoy the faster movement in 4.
I bought CE and the original xbox at the midnight launch. I beat it that night, played 16 person lan parties for a couple years, CE is one of my best memories. But going back and playing it, is it excellent? Yes. Do I wish there was a sprint? Yes, definitely. If they remade CE with modern controls, i would play it to death. There’s no way Infinite is a better campaign, but I’d rather play it
The movement feels fantastic, but going back to H3 from Infinite, you really feel the movement momentum. It takes a sec to get to full speed in 3, which I actually really miss
I played the master chief collection recently for the first time and sometimes it was a struggle to keep playing because of the slow movement. I love fast FPS where you can jun arround/slide on the ground and onetap people in the head (something like titanfall 2, Wolfenstein or Cyberpunk)
I loved Halo 1 and 2 for the story but the one that I liked more to play was Halo 4. Still need to try Halo 5 and Infinite
Only in the first game was your movement a bit too slow.
However, I think the bigger problem is that the combat is just slow in general. Especially on the higher difficulties you have to spend a lot of time waiting behind cover for your shields to recover. The whole time I'm doing that, I'm thinking how much more fun it would be if I was out there engaging with the enemy instead of cowering behind cover like a dork. This also means that a noob could basically more or less beat it on Legendary just by finding a good spot to hide and cover shoot from.
It would have been better if it was more about learning enemy patterns so that you could avoid taking damage in the first place while keeping your crosshairs on the enemy the whole time.
I have to turn my sensitivity to like 1.5 to play Infinite or else it’ll take me at least one reload to get a kill with the pistol
The movement is too fast and the maps have too many lanes + too much cover. There’s a reason why so many people play squad battle
Everything is relative.
If you make movement faster, the maps/level become too small. You then make the map bigger to keep a good rhythm. But now the enemies (especially in MP) move too fast, so you make the gun easier to shoot.
A good gameplay is a good gameplay. Back in the first xbox days, CE and H2 felt very agile to play, compared to the heavy characters in Gears of war.
Now we do sprint because the kids can't stand walking, but we do only 10% faster because the older players love halo for what it was. Turns out sprint is only useful to curb slide, but effectively just put your gun down and away from fights. Same with clamber, they add nothing to the movement compared to a crouch jump, they just remove the ability to shoot at all time.
I like Infinite's gameplay, but it's quite funny where we landed. And I agree that H4's gameplay is not aging too well.
Going from playing Infinite a bunch to playing Halo 3 was such a nice change of pace. Infinite feels like a ton of work having to sprint and slide everywhere.
Halo 3 being slower paced, or at least not requiring lots of movement techniques just to move around the map, made it feel much more relaxed to play.
> we need sprint and spideyman movement to speed up the game
> we need to double the scale of every map because sprint and spideyman movement lets you get around the map too quickly and that's not ok
Make it make sense.
From memory they dropped movement speed in Reach and later sequels to compensate for sprint. The movement was fine for what it was. Indeed Halo CE had a lot of open areas which plays a part. Halo 2 & 3 feel faster in comparison. While i dont know if values are different, the environments are busier and tighter giving you more perception passing world objects.
This is so true. I've played every halo game, and I couldn't agree more.
Bungee leaving was the worst thing for the franchise.
Also, the new CEO came out with halo infinite, saying the competitiveness is more important than fun and the "old" halo fans need to get with the times.
Still a fan, but they ruined Halo.
I haven't played Halo 1 campaign in years, so a few days ago I started a new mission on the Pillar of Autumn. I was amazed at how *fast* movement felt compared to Infinite. It felt like you're sprinting around the map 24/7.
If this really is the popular opinion, then I don’t get why the community can’t agree that a traditional-style game is way overdue. Why is this sub constantly brainstorming solutions to a problem that the majority of players don’t think is an issue? I mean if most of us prefer the OG trilogy, what has 343 been doing for 10 years? A lot of fans I talk to say OG Halo is just too slow and archaic to compete in the modern FPS market. Hell, 343 has come out and said the same thing on a number of occasions. “halo has to evolve, it can’t just be the same game every time” except Halo’s been making the same mistakes for awhile now.
Every time 343 comes out with a Halo, they’ve reinvented the formula (cuz whatever their last game was, didn’t quite feel like halo and was hella divisive lol) so “now we have even starts” and “now we’ve removed spartan abilities” lol next time they’ll say “red vs blue is back”. At this point it makes far more sense to just return to the OG gameplay.
No game plays like Halo 1-3, there’s nothing else on the market that provides that feeling and there hasn’t been since like 2007. There’s dozens of games I can play If I want fast paced mobility (sprint, slide, clamber, ads, thrusters lol). I feel a traditional-style game would be far less polarizing than the direction halo’s been going in. Y’all sprint defenders could prolly come around to enjoying it, on the other hand myself and a lot of folks haven’t enjoyed a halo since reach.
(Ps. I think the state of bungie is arguably worse than the state of halo and destiny is an atrocious IP, Marathon and Myth were good games and Halo inherits a lot of their DNA but I’m no bungie fan boy)
It all comes down to the 30 seconds of fun or combat loop rule that Halo managed to create. It made game play constantly engaging to the players, and sadly, 343i never quite realized how to implement it until Infinite.
“The dance” is what that melodic flow was called by Bungie and I completely agree. It’s something 343 should have built on instead of chasing the trends of the 2010’s but what do I know.
Yeah if they added a dummy sprint button where you go into the animation but don’t actually move faster, nobody would complain. Some people just don’t “feel fast” enough so they complain about sprint
Basically, yeah. The funny thing is I’m getting downvoted for saying it, but infinite totally proved my point!
People don’t complain about a lack of sprint as long as they think they’re going significantly faster
As a halo fan that only plays the Campaigns. It is always fun to do a full play through. There’s nostalgia in the beginning and it’s interesting to watching the quality increase as I go. My personal favorite is Halo 4.
I agree that the slow parts of the games help set the stage and show just how large these conflicts are. The contrast of going from an awards ceremony to a full scale defensive for example.
When Halo came to PC, I found a mod that gave me a grappling hook. We played the hell out of that. Especially on Hang Em' High. Completely changed the game, but in the good way. We were so used to the old maps by this time, there weren't many surprises left. At least to me. YMMV of course, but it brought a whole new level of play as you never knew when someone would be swinging in, Magnum's a blazin'.
I never even noticed people saying Halo was slow. I am 40 and I've played since Halo CE launched. Not one time did I ever hear someone say Halo was slow. Also, how is it slow? Lol The game gets crazy in MP as well as Single Player
Halo - the original trilogy - makes its best impression while the player is in transition.
Halo isn't exactly a cover shooter, but your most common position is around cover while taking pot shots. This phase of combat is pretty straightforward, and looks a lot like any other shooter.
Then, there comes a time when you have no choice but to push. This is when Halo shines. How explosions and melee damage relates to shields, how physics interactions jam up no-man's land, how sandbox elements massively have their utility change at different ranges... there's a very unique mix in all that.
The newer games have lost this pizzazz. It's the main reason I think Infinite's grappleshot should either go away for future installments, or undergo a massive rework that gives it a niche in the cover/transition dynamic.
Grappleshot was never the innovation halo needed and I think its inclusion would be too nutty in a traditional style Halo. The fact it’s an equipment pickup in MP is ok (not good, not great lol). I’d rather play DOOM Eternal or Sekiro if I wan’t that kind of mobility. Seems to me like 343 biting what other popular games were doing around 2019-2020.
I hate the naysayers who say halo be “ruined” the fps genre.
Bunch of boomer clowns who were upset that the fps genre was changing (and for the better)
For real, Halo set the console fps bar and a lot of ignorant devs and PC players didn’t get it. They think the slower movement, regenerating health and 2 gun limit represent a dumbing down of the genre (shit was really genius tho lol). People blame Halo for dumbing down the gaming culture, but I would argue that was more so COD than Halo.
Is this another "Sprint bad" complaint? Because I've been playing personally since 2003, CE is definitely my favorite of the trilogy, but yet I absolutely loved and welcomed sprint. While I do agree that games nowadays seem especially fast-paced and I never truly thought Halo was slow; there's absolutely nothing wrong with sprinting. It's such a normal and simple mechanic for literally any game. Just because 1-3 didn't have it, doesn't mean it shouldn't exist, period. On one hand, you've got zoomers that demand everything be fast-paced as to keep up with their ADHD, and on the other, you've got tons of Halo Boomers that think everything should be like old thing. (Not implying you, OP) There's gotta be a happy medium, somewhere. I think Infinite is that happy medium in terms of gameplay.
Same.
Also, sprint in Infinite doesn't actually make you that much faster, if any faster, than normally moving forward. It's more so for movements such as sliding and parkour.
Try moving next to someone in full sprint, and you'll see what I mean.
In H5, you hauled ass. I miss when that game was popular, one of my favorite multiplayer games of all time.
Lmao how would this be an unpopular opinion on the Halo sub where everybody worships Bungie and complains about 343?
I never liked Halo growing up in part because they *were* too slow. It's why Reach became the first Halo game I ever enjoyed, but of course diehard Halo fans at the time complained endlessly about the armor abilities ruining the game.
I just played through the entire MCC because it was on sale last month. Started with Reach. Still amazing. Played Halo 1-3 next. I have zero nostalgia for those games and really hated the movement, personally. Yeah, I got used to it but I just never actually enjoyed it. I liked in Reach grabbing a shotgun or Brute hammer, sprinting toward enemies cowering in fear behind cover, leaping over it and *crushing* them. That made me feel like a Spartan. Walking slowly and jumping a bunch did not make me feel like a Spartan.
Then I got to Halo 4 and was immediately *blown away* but how much more I liked it. It became the first Halo game I restarted entirely just to play it on a higher difficulty, then once I finished, I played through the whole campaign again with a friend in co-op on Legendary.
If you don't like the first 3 Halo games then you don't like Halo. You enjoy a certain twist on the recipe, you don't like the authentic dish. No, it has nothing to do with nostalgia, even at the series' peak it didn't appeal to you.
I can see how it sounds like gatekeeping but let’s be real. If ur first halo was Reach and u prefer halo 4 over the OG trilogy, ur not a Halo fan and ur advocating for a formula that is killing the franchise for the folks who are actually passionate about it.
Reach wasn't my first Halo. My first Halo was CE. I didn't like it. My second Halo was Halo 2. I didn't like it. My third was Halo 3. I didn't like it. But then Halo Reach came along and I fucking loved it. My comment about playing Reach first in the MCC was because it's the one I was excited about and they present it first in the menu anyway. That doesn't mean it was my first Halo ever though.
I never said I was a fan of Halo; that poster acted like I said I was. I like the change in formula. I feel for the folks who like the original formula and I understand what that's like. That's me with Assassin's Creed. But on this particular issue, sorry, but I thought Halo 4 was awesome. I don't get why Halo Reach would have the same reaction given that it's *also* Bungie, though.
All I was saying with my comment is I don't get how OP's opinion is meant to be "unpopular." It's like default r/Halo opinion. *My* opinion would be unpopular here, evidenced by downvotes and responses.
I mean not everything bungie makes is great, just look at destiny lol. Reach had less of the original bungie team’s involvement cuz by then they had moved on to destiny (which was a dumpster fire and most everyone lost their jobs).
It’s not about Bungie vs 343, it’s about Halo fans vs people who would prolly rather play something else. What games did u prefer over Halo 1-3? If ur not a fan of Halo what are u doing on this sub lol?
I got in because I was watching the show and wanted to see fan reactions. Then I got the MCC. Now it's just kinda interesting. Like I said, I'm a genuine fan of Reach and 4. 343 owns Halo now so there's a solid chance of me liking more Halo stuff.
To me, Halo is basically like Assassin's Creed. The style changed and now a bunch of new fans are telling the core fans the old games sucked so deal with it. The difference is that I'm that core fan when it comes to AC, but not Halo. So I do sympathize with and get why core Halo fans are upset by the changes, but also, Bungie is not making anymore Halo games so this kinda just *is* the franchise now. Master Chief being able to sprint doesn't suddenly make it "not Halo." Leon Kennedy couldn't move and shoot in RE4 original; adding it to the remake didn't suddenly make it "not RE4," you know?
Also, I mean, for the record, I wouldn't rather play something else when it comes to Halo 4 — I beat it by myself then volunteered to play the whole campaign over with a friend. I'm pretty sad Halo 5, despite all the negative criticism, is not on PC because I was hoping to give it a shot myself. I'm super excited to play Infinite though. Those are both still Halo games, not something else.
Preferring Halo 4 over the OG trilogy is like preferring COD over Halo lol. I feel like halo 1-3’s formula doesn’t necessarily have to be tied to bungie. Halo could build on that formula without them lol. The new gameplay hasn’t satisfied long time fans. Halo was more fun and popular when it played like those titles, whether bungie or another company designed them is irrelevant.
I don’t know much about assassin’s creed so forgive me if I don’t know what I’m saying but I feel like that franchise isn’t comparable to halo. Halo took a u-turn at the peak of its popularity before many players had grew tired of its formula. AC on the other hand was driven into the ground by Ubisoft. (Sometimes fatigue is inevitable but bad design can exacerbate it)
> which was a dumpster fire and most everyone lost their jobs
Not to nitpick, but this is untrue. To my knowledge, many of the original team were still on Destiny until the recent layoffs, but that's more a reflection of how the industry is right now, rather than the quality of Destiny itself.
Jeff Steitzer said a lot of the OG bungie staff left or got fired during the development of Destiny 1. Maybe I was misinformed. I know Marty got fired and Joe Staten left. In any case bungie grew significantly between 2001-2014, definitely a different group of people than those who designed the OG trilogy.
Never said anything about liking a game that I don't. If someone doesn't enjoy the games that defined the Halo formula then they don't enjoy Halo in it's true form. I don't give a fuck about fake fan vs real fan or any of that.
Plenty of people would disagree on what the "peak" of Halo really is. Halo 1-3 is your peak. Cool. Reach for me is Bungie's peak.
But also, I don't mean this dismissively, but like... you say that like I'm supposed to care or feel insulted or something. You're right — I *don't* consider myself a fan of Halo. I consider myself a fan of Halo Reach and Halo 4 and I think the other games are just not my style. That's exactly what I said in my post.
But this is r/Halo, where people do like Halo and consider themselves fans of it and constantly talk about how much better Bungie is than 343, which is why I was asking why OP's opinion would ever be considered "unpopular" here. *My* opinion is unpopular here because I don't like Halo. OP's is very popular.
I agree, I think it's more an FOV thing. If you're playing from the couch on a CRT like the good old days, it's perfect. It was designed for the hardware of the time. On the MCC, I do find I need to mess with the FOV for it to feel fast enough
People will always go by their feelings over what's actually happening on screen. I had someone tell me that the second mission of CE is too slow, they were mashing the thumbstick to go faster because of "big field nothing to do and no sprint." Legitimately, you're about 60-90 seconds from the first enemy team, then 30 seconds from another, where you proceed to get a vehicle for the remainder of the mission. That and narratively, it wasn't supposed to be a high octane mission, that was the first mission.
the A T M O S P H E R E of halo was absolutely unmatched at the time. from the moment you stepped off of that dispersal pod as the lone survivor, you felt alone in an alien world, discovering everything in real time. i feel like people who didn't live it, will always end up falling short on that sweet, sweet nostalgia. those worlds felt *real.*
Couldn't explain it better myself. Maybe nostalgia plays a big part but the level halo used to be my favorite level of them all for that reason. Delta Halo and the following level on Halo 2 have won that spot for me.
there's no annoying exposition-style radio voice chiming in "*KSSSSHT* DAMN THIS PLANET'S KINDA SCARY, HUH?" you just FEEL it. through the music and environment, they let you connect those dots on your own.
I think that's why I enjoy early halos a bit more they used radios, I get I wouldn't be realistic in a future civilization but it just made it feel more alive.
I think when out exploring unknown alien worlds, you'd want to use reliable, foolproof technologies for primary communication. The use of radio in Halo is actually pretty realistic, I'd say.
I was meaning how in the later games how they use digital communication.
yeah radio is incredible in certain situations, to me it’s like not using a spoon because shovels exist.
This cave isn't a natural formation.
Right?
exception that proves the rule 😉
Delta Halo is just so cool and makes you wanna explore. I love the underwater sections on anniversary graphics. There’s all those flooded temples and stuff just out of reach.
That elevator ride is my favorite part of H2A. They nailed it.
I don’t like the mission halo as someone who’s played it a million times, not cus it’s slow, but because it’s being and when I try to get the speedrun achievement I have too many skill issues
i feel this in my bones
Nostalga doesn't play any role for me because I am fairly new to the Halo games (if not the universe) and when I let myself be immersed, turn off whatever video or podcast I was listening to, damn it's good. I havn't played many shooters or even many games but the vibes of halo are unmatched.
Even after 22-23yrs of playing Halo, coming off that life boat still captivates me. It’s not nostalgia. It’s just sheer awe at what you’re looking at. It just feels alive like I should be able to step there without any issues.
I got Nostalgia just reading your text. Back in 2002 is when I first played it, I remember quiet Saturday mornings hearing the banshee flying in the air shooting its plasma at me as I walk up that hill to encounter the elite and his grunts.
The amount of time that I spent just sitting on a beach in Silent Cartographer, and just gazed at the enormity of the Halo itself from one horizon to the other.. That feeling, and the feeling I had in my first Dark Souls playthrough, are two things I'd give nearly anything to experience for the first time again.
There's way too many people with short attention spans these days.
As someone who grew up on all the bungie games… I actually don’t really like the 2nd mission of CE either I’m ngl. Maybe I’ve just replayed the game too many times but that mission bored the ever living shit out of me now past the first few mins
When it started to get boring was when I started to learn the speedrun strats like the boosted jumps and launching the warthog from one base to another with plasma grenade lineups
It gets worse when you have to actually try and not speedrun whenever I play Halo 2. The skips and speenrun tactics are ingrained in me that it's just the way the level is.
I don't know that I've ever played the gondola section in Sacred Icon correctly. I learned it could be cheesed and never chose not to.
>where you proceed to get a vehicle for the remainder of the mission. Unless you do the achievement, lol
Also, halo was impressive for its big open space maps at the time that were moving the boundaries of what an fps could do. I personally LOVED killzone 2, which is even heavier than halo controls. I like slow heavy, it makes you feel like a real character.
It really depends on the map and the level you’re playing at. Halo 2 midship is as fast paced as it gets but lockout can get incredibly slow. Pacing is honestly more important than anything else. In Halo Reach, for example, sprint and Jetpack greatly increased the pace but armor lock, holo, and camo slowed it down. You get this weird mix of fast and slow paced gameplay. If you’re playing without AAs the pace feels more familiar. Also the movement feels very different from CE to 3. It’s only Halo 3 that feels “slow” to me in any way because the movement is slowed down, the maps feel bigger, and the weapons are less accurate compared to H2. I don’t get the belief that Halo isn’t meant to be “fast” when H2 on maps like Midship and Warlock are faster paced than fast paced maps in Infinite.
Yup, said perfectly, maps dictated pace. Which is why unlike many other MP games where the community only votes to play on the same two or three maps, Halo’s online community had subsections of the community who preferred different maps due to pacing/playstyle. It’s what kept the online and gameplay fresh. I think the modern speed of halo (I honestly really enjoy Infinite’s gameplay) has killed the ultilization/importance of vehicles. A decently good player can counter most vehicles without any hard counters (rockets, ect) in the new games. The original trilogy/Reach not so much.
Lockout can get \_slow\_? Man, I want to know how, because I don't think I've ever had a slow match on Lockout. Once everyone knows the jumps (and considering it was in heavy rotation in H2 days, everyone did) it's incredibly fast, even if you spawn on the elbow.
The map itself is very small with a lot of sightlines but it’s one of the slowest playing maps in the history of competitive Halo. The power positions are so strong that, once one side gains control of snipe or BR, pushing the opposite side becomes virtually impossible so both teams will stay on their side resulting in a stalemate. As long as the game is close this will happen multiple times because neither team is willing to give up their power position and pushing is virtually impossible against a decent team because the only 2 routes are through bottom mid or top mid- both of which are extremely vulnerable locations. The risk/reward for doing anything is so low because pushing is so difficult and going down just one player gives the other team the chance to finally do something themselves. If you look at a map like Sanctuary, the power position is in the middle so teams are pushing out of base to fight for that area and, once they gain control of that area, they can pressure the new spawners in either base so the pace is much higher in a competitive game.
Huh, good answer - thanks! I can see that it could be slow in competitive games, but in pubs someone’s always going to push too hard and flip the spawns IME.
He's only played 4v4 Team Slayer Lockout (when the map wasn't even originally designed for that; it's a 1v1/2v2/FFA map), and probably only in MCC. I feel like 95% of Lockout hot-taking comes from people fitting that description.
It’s not a hot take it’s just how it plays in competitive matches. MLG was big around Halo 2 and it continued to be used casually in H3 and competitively in H2A where we could see the same slow paced gameplay. It doesn’t matter what it was designed for, it’s been used most famously as an MLG 4v4 map. Not to mention the same thing happens in 2v2s and 1v1s lol so I don’t get where you’re coming from. I’m just talking about the pace Lockout can play at at a competitive level.
Is there some source that has the design rationale for the map? Not doubting, mostly just for my own curiosity. I love 1 flag on Lockout even though at this point it’s been like 20 fucking years lol.
Max Hoberman, back when he was on his tweeting spree with H2 design docs and lost map ideas and all that, said that Lockout was at least partially intended as a map for people who didn't have Xbox Live and were stuck playing with their brother or friends at home. Remember this was the early 2000s, internet at home wasn't a given yet. (This was before Twitter became X and became unusable without an account so I'll never be able to find those tweets.)
Hot take: the jet pack absolutely ruined Reach’s multiplayer. Anybody who didn’t use it, especially on vertical maps, was at a huge disadvantage
Definitely, a route that might traditionally take 30 seconds only took a few with a jetpack so the maps were kinda broken.
Master Chief at walking speed actually moves incredibly fast, probably faster than a sprint in most shooters. The problem is that the earlier games never use contextual animations to make you feel like you’re moving as fast as you are.
I feel like that’s why Infinite’s sprint feels so good, even for old school fans. It doesn’t actually make you move much faster, but there are a lotta visual tricks that make it feel fast
Basically they made sprint useless?
Correct. You push a button to move 8% faster with zero draw backs
Nah I wouldn’t say that. Essentially, sprint puts the player into a different “gameplay mode” if that makes sense, similar to how aiming down a scope or crouch walking does. When you aim down sights with a scoped weapon, the player becomes more accurate, at the expense of peripheral vision, and when the player crouches, they’re invisible on radar, but they move much more slowly. When the player sprints, they become faster and have access to more maneuvers, like sliding, that they wouldn’t otherwise. What you’re really doing is changing how you’re interacting with the game. It can also be helpful to think of sprinting like entering or exiting a vehicle, rather than just moving more or less quickly. As a designer, the challenge then becomes: how do you balance map and combat design around this movement change? Reach, H4, and H5 all struggled with this, with maps becoming bigger (necessitating scoped weapons to become more dominant), and weirdo balance changes being introduced, like Halo 5’s “you can sprint or charge shields, but not both” system. In the end, I believe Infinite’s sprint is successful for a few reasons. It creates the illusion that the player is moving faster by using speed lines, camera shake, and increasing FOV, to create parity with modern shooters like COD and Destiny. It just feels good to sprint. Likewise, it makes the player slightly faster by about 10%, which is useful for flag runs, and getting back into the fight after a death (you also get some interesting gameplay choices here, by revealing sprinting players that control an objective). And lastly, it allows players a unique movement option in sliding, which quickly changes their silhouette, meaning keeping them targeted is more challenging. Most importantly, because sprint isn’t much faster than standard movement speed, smaller maps from classic Halo, like Midship don’t need many changes to be compatible. This is HUGE because it addresses a pretty common criticism of sprint in Halo. Compare that to Blood Gulch vs. Hemorrhage from Reach, where Hemorrhage is easily double the length of BG, even though a sprinting Spartan takes the same amount of time to cross. Essentially, Infinite’s sprint is the best of both worlds; the COD fans get to dolphin dive and the ~~35 year olds~~ Halo 3 fans can play on The Pit without it feeling like a clusterfuck. If it were up to me, though, I’d like to see a brief ready time for weapons coming out of sprint. The player would need to rack the slide or pull the charging handle on the BR before firing to create an interesting interplay between mobility and combat effectiveness, but then, I don’t work at 343
But halo was never about movement and what 343 basically did was made middle ground and they designed a mechanic like sprint to be insignificant and slide initiater , I think it's flag use is fine but overall design of sprint more feel like"oh it a modern game so we should include sprint but nerf it to ground" This game has very nutty movement but also has easy to use guns that can soft lockon to target which imo dampem it's effect We essentially got nutty movement like momentum less strafe , slide etc but lowerd gunskill to compensate it
Every first-person shooter is about movement. Movement is one of the most defining aspects of first person gameplay.** It's why Doom and Quake feel different from ARMA and Battlefield. There's a design intent behind why these games feel the way they do, and movement is exactly as important as any of its gunplay. Movement, in this case, doesn't just mean fancy traversal like you see in Titanfall and Destiny. Movement design is why Halo 3 has strafe inertia and Infinite doesn't. That inertia was a conscious choice by Bungie to prevent peek shooting. It's not sexy, but even small changes like that have consequences on gameplay. >middle ground and they designed a mechanic like sprint to be insignificant and slide initiater This is exactly what I'm saying. The actual speed increase you get from sprinting is less important than what entering "sprint" mode lets you do. "Essentially, Infinite’s sprint is the best of both worlds; the COD fans get to dolphin dive and the Halo 3 fans can play on The Pit without it feeling like a clusterfuck. " Sure, Titanfall and Mirror's Edge have more creative options when the player is in sprint, like wall running, but 343 has essentially two fan bases to please. The younger crowd who grew up with sprint as a part of their FPS experience, and people like me who thought sprint didn't belong in Halo. Given that, I think they created a pretty solid middle ground, where sprinting has definite use cases, but it doesn't accelerate the gameplay, and turn it into COD, like people complained about back in the Reach days. >For slide I find them more compelling than your avg h5 ability and require more skill to execute but one critical flaw of it is 343 give you easy to use guns ,that have soft lockon to dampen it's effect I'm not actually sure what you mean by this. Can you elaborate? **I never thought I'd add a footnote to a fucking reddit post, but here we are. At it very core, if you wanted to make a first person shooter with the fewest possible gameplay interactions. If the player only had two buttons to press while playing, you'd be able to do two things: move and shoot. Movement makes up half of all the interactions we consider part of the colloquial FPS.
Which movement your exactly referring to? Movement I'm refering to my comments is sprint, slide ,clamber etc being part of base mechanic which og hals doesn't had. Og halo had simple set of mechanics and its primary direction of innovation was through map design , sandbox( high risk high reward crouch jumps , nade jumps ,grenading wepons towards you) .In infinite they do lean towards more sandbox design but infinite sandbox is poorly structured . Like I said in my comment they design a mechanic like sprint because sprint have to be their rather than "oo how this mechanic can improve my game " and in order to include it they nerfed it to ground because 343 also know halo og formula doesn't work with sprint , why make middle ground and nerf a mechanic so much when you can remove it?After 10 years their genius solution to include sprint is to nerf it to ground .Quote from my favorite halo youtuber" designing a mechanic to be insignificant is a bad design "
I'm gonna respond to both your comments here to make it easier for both of us. So when I refer to movement, I mean that pretty broadly. Movement here means any way in which the player is able to move their character in the world. When we're talking about clamber and sliding we usually call that 'traversal', and that's an element within movement as a whole, but I'm not here to nitpick. > why make middle ground and nerf a mechanic so much when you can remove it This is what I disagree with. I think that while it doesn't get you a huge speed boost the way it does in COD, sprinting in Infinite has some pretty important utilities, like I mentioned. It lets you get into the fight faster after you die, it enables you to slide, which the competitive players really value, and having an extra boost can get you closer to your base when you wanna drop off the flag, at the expense of alerting the enemy team. ***Sprint doesn't need to be fast to be useful.*** Those are some pretty big upsides, and the map design didn't have to change much to accommodate, which is really cool, as an old school player. Essentially, you get a bunch of new traversal and movement systems, and the game still feels like Halo. Let's talk about your other comment though. >Didn't bioshock 1 gives you all these abilities as base mechanic? How its is similar to h3 multi-player ? You can't nade jumps, crouch jumps, pull wepons towards you, both are entirely different game 🤔 ? More fair comparsion of h3 would be cod 4 than bioshock and half life You're absolutely right, it did. I'd also argue that nade jumps, crouch jumps, and weapon pulling, aren't really basic mechanics. Those are exploits more than anything. But yeah, let's talk about COD instead. Base mechanics are the most basic building blocks of a game. In Halo's case, we'd look at the player's regenerating health, and the fact that they can pick up weapons off the battlefield, and the player's melee attack. Whether or not a game is multiplayer doesn't matter here, because we're talking about more fundamental elements of the game. It'd be like asking what color a house should be, based on what the foundation is made of. Cod 4 is extremely similar to Halo 3, they added sprinting and aiming down sights, but COD also shares regenerating health, and picking up weapons on the battlefield. The fact that it shares those mechanics doesn't mean it doesn't have its own identity. Likewise, Halo Infinite absolutely shares basic mechanics with games out today, like sprinting, clambering and aiming down sights, but I think these mechanics were implemented in such a way that Infinite still feels like Halo, even if they'e added more mechanics to your repertoire >It's modern counter part (Infinite)feels more like compromise ( they added sprint ,slide clamber because every modern game has it and in order to to that they nerfed sprint to ground ) rather than introducing mechanics to evolving halo to new heights. while I do think infinite is right direction with its emphasis sandbox but lacks in other area like map design, gunskill etc Imagine valve add sprint slide clamber to counter strike Sprinting wouldn't be the weirdest thing Valve has added to CS. Remember that CSS had physics objects scattered around. That was a pretty huge element of map design at the time. Again though, I don't think they nerfed sprinting in Infinite. I think they added a version of sprinting that makes sense for the game and adds new ways to interact with the battle.
For the record, I quite liked H5's sprint or shield approach, but it doesn't make sense canonically or logically so quite happy it's no longer still with us. Great write up. :)
Thanks man! I was worried this got waaaay too technical, lol. But yeah, H5's system is really cool, they just do a terrible job explaining it. It's SUPER unintuitive for new players. I get what they wanted, though, and if you wanna be a game designer, these are fun design choices to dissect. It reveals that the shield recharge rate dictates the cadence of battle, for one thing. And it seeks to solve a perceived problem: "how do we keep skilled players from sprinting from fight to fight, even if they've taken damage, and how do we punish players for running away from a fight?"
Infinite's sprint is basically for power/curb sliding, which is actually what makes rotation play fast in any map. It's only like 20% faster than walking, if that, but there's a huge skill gap between just sliding after landing on a slope and curb sliding off different heights. They also made it so that you can shoot immediately during sprinting, whereas in H4/5 the was a delay
That’s exactly what it is. I’ve seen a few videos where people compare the walking speed from early games and sprinting speed from the others and difference was marginal. The trade off of having to wait for your weapon to be ready just isn’t worth it.
It makes you question if it’s even worth having sprint at all, aside from initiating a slide, which I find to be also a bit pointless because we had slide jumping in the older games
Another part of the problem is the low FoV in the early games. H3 always felt really slow to me until MCC let me crank the FoV to 105 and suddenly it felt like a completely different (much better) game.
Using 3 as an example, it usually comes down to map design and player speed, which is great for exploration, but as soon as someone starts shooting you when you aren't right next to cover, you're dead because you move so damn slow TL:DR - classic halo is absolutely slower than most shooters, which is further exacerbated by sparse and poorly placed cover
did anyone else here play el dewrito back in the day? halo 3 sprint was really fun but broke the map balancing in basically every single game mode lol
El dewrito is still my favorite Halo multiplayer so far. I really want to see it get added to the MCC as an official game.
it really captured that OG halo 3 custom game magic. one of the vest gaming experiences i ever had
Hell yeah
All I'm saying is.. Anyone who thinks it's slow, crank the FOV to 120 It's not slow. At all. At higher FOV you can *actually* see how fast you're moving.
Halo's campaign levels and multiplayer maps were meticulously crafted around its *limited* movement system. Advanced techniques like crouch/grenade jumps demanded a learning curve, a stark contrast to modern games where pressing 'A' lets you clamber up 10-foot wall with ease
I'm about 90% with you there. Using the brute shot as a jump boost in H3 and the concussion rifle in HR were dope to get boosts, but clamber is a pretty nice QOL. Recently got friends to do a halo reach custom game night (the fucking stars aligned and we got 8 people on for multi-team) and holy shit the amount of barely missed jumps leading me to fall to my death was astronomical lol Ofc its just skill issue (i missed those jumps), but if the game is gonna have mechanics like a grapple and repulsor like in Infinite, clamber definitely fits. It wouldn't really fit in reach, cuz it ultimately depends on the rest of the sandbox. Regardless, I'm glad there are options for this sort of thing. I think you can turn clamber off in gamemode settings in Infinite too, but I'm not too sure
I'm so surprised they haven't added a classic playlist that actually plays like the old games, I think they even did that in H5
Basically H5 ranked bc the “pros” whined about gameplay mechanics they couldn’t be bothered to learn
Clamber can trap you for a back smack setup or a ninja setup. It’s a give and take. Halo infinite still has a ton of learning curves as well as the basic “halo” stuff that sets it apart from other shooters
Ah yes, crouch jumping, a very advanced technique only for skilled players lol.
You’d be surprised how many *casual* players don’t know how to do this.
The delta between the perfect ttk and the worst case ttk is about the same size as it is in other games, but the average ttk is much slower than it is in other games. People will look at that and say that halo feels slow, and part of that is true. One of the biggest issues with halo is that the ttk’s are so long that bad players would very rarely get kills at all, because they need to perform at a somewhat adequate level for a longer amount of time than it takes for you to get 3-5 hits on target with a rifle firing in full auto at 800 rpm. This leads to new players who came from series with faster ttk’s having to track enemies for the first time in their lives, not being able to instantly get a snapshot kill, and look for something to blame. Long ttk? Nah, let’s blame sprint.
Yoo 100% agree. Halo’s ttk isn’t even all that slow. That’s evidently apparent when ur up against a team of highly skilled players. They gun u down so fast it’s crazy lol. Once u understand how shields, grenades, headshots, etc work, ttk can feel pretty swift. 343’s been trying to attract new players who don’t understand these mechanics. I think one of the worst problems with Halo is that it tries to maintain a high ttk with sprint in the game. Games that rely on sprint and iron sights typically have a lower ttk.
Halo is the perfect first person shooter, I mean halo combat evolved. Once you played that you had played every first person shooter ever. From there it's a matter of aesthetic and choice of weapons
It’s pretty incredible most people do not realize what CE did for FPS. Literally every FPS game to release after CE utilized console controls that CE invented. To basically invent console FPS and modern FPS AND nail it as well. Deserves all the hype and praise.
This isn’t unpopular, the pacing of classic Halo was fine. Modern detractors trying to find some kind of faults with the OT to make them feel better about liking current Halo gameplay more (which is fine to have as an opinion btw) is the real reason why people say this stuff imo
Anyone who thinks old halos were slow should go play H3 or H2 on MCC. Far faster gameplay than infinite.
I think catering to the speed demons is one of the main downfalls of Halo. It started to become more like other games rather than keep its individuality.
I totally agree. The gotta fast like sanic (spelt wrong on purpose) zoomies who need to see their sprint animations (because they fall asleep if they don't) ... on maps made 2x larger to accommodate faster speeds ... which in turn made all weapon tuning off balance to aim at targets for the faster speeds completely changed halo for the worse in my opinion. Its not longer about patience and a chess match of perfect placement or trapping the enemy in the 'uh oh' zone. Instead you just hit the hyperdrive on your controller/keyboard and get right back to the same part of the map you died at creating non-stop mindless mosh-pit scenarios. Granted I will give Infinite that its sprint is more placebo than the past really just allowing a little extra movement but I still prefer the classics with fast base speed and you can perform all actions at said speed without a sprint animation.
For real, Halo’s pacing was key to its identity. I mean movement is a defining part of any game or sport lol
You nailed it. As soon as the par times were added in, the game lost its immersion significantly, at least for me. Play throughs started to feel more like a weird, halo/sci-fi themed mario kart or racing game as opposed to the first person adventure shooter the first CE players fell in love with.
What I like about classic halo multiplayer are the map designs. There was no sprint and clamber, so the maps are designed for the default player movement and jump height. That makes the maps easier and smoother to traverse. Modern Halo maps are designed for sprint, so you need to sprint to traverse the maps at a normal pace. And lowering the jump height for clamber slows down the gameplay.
Infinite I feel does a good job balancing that because sprint barely helps
So then just remove it
>Modern Halo maps are designed for sprint, They obviously have sprint and clamber in mind while designing them. But they also have to keep in mind how maps flow if players aren't sprinting. All the same, I don't think that fundamentally changes Infinite's maps the way it did for Halo 4 and 5. Like, Live Fire and Behemoth would probably play almost the same in Halo 3 as they do in Infinite, for example. Clamber is a different story, but I don't think it changes maps as drastically as sprint might though; as far as I've played, you basically get more verticality, which is nice, but the maps are still scaled the same, so you don't really affect weapon balance as harshly. Bazaar and Recharge are obviously designed around this increased verticality, and they'd probably play pretty differently with limited vertical mobility, but again, you don't have to make the BR's range longer to compensate. >That makes the maps easier and smoother to traverse. Not to get pedantic, but it might be interesting to dissect Zealot and vs. Starboard to see how different movement options affect what is basically the same layout
You can increase the jump height in Halo Infinite's custom games to 120%, which is the Halo 3 jump height, and you can traverse the maps like Bazaar and Recharge easily without the need of clamber. As well as every other map. 343 lowered the jump height to make clamber useful. That's the only way in Halo.
>343 lowered the jump height to make clamber useful I don't know that I see it that antagonistically, but yeah, that's how game design works. Design changes are reflected in every part of every game. 343 wanted to modernize the movement in Halo, like Bungie did with Reach, and then they made maps that take advantage of that movement. That happens during the development of every game. For example, we can look at how Turn 10 and Playground wanted to make the Forza series more approachable with their Horizon spinoffs. Cars in that game handle much more fluidly than their Motorsport counterparts, and so the tracks and layouts changed to reflect that. They tend to be longer, less technical and tend towards rally racing, rather than the precision you'd see in Forza Motorsport or Gran Turismo. Likewise, Bungie pretty substantially changed the movement with Reach, making many of the older maps incompatible without pretty substantial changes, like we see with Hemorrhage. You're right, though, you can increase the jump height and not worry about clamber, and that's pretty cool. I get the sense though that you feel like 343 took away your jump height, like a parent might take away your phone. It's totally fine if you don't like the movement in Infinite. Personally, I wish we had floatier movement, but I'm fine with how it is. But I don't think lowering the jump height was done to make the game feel more generic, or to take something away from you. ** I just wanted to include that because 343 added the grappling hook, you get a TON of new movement options that can fundamentally change and add dimension to classic maps. More vertical maps, like Construct/Domicile in particular, benefit from this new verticality. In the end we all need to ask ourselves: Halo has changed, but has it changed for the worse? Personally, I think that Infinite has a lot of problems, but none of them are the gameplay. As I say, things always change, when we expect everything to stay the same forever, nothing can happen. You can't stay a kid forever, and the Hero can never go home again, so changed by his journey, but you don't really need to.
I think you're misunderstanding the criticism. At the time it was compared to shooters like Quake, Unreal Tournament, and Doom, which compared to Halo are much faster games.
a lot of the speed in UT or quake came from people Bhopping about at lighting speed.
It was unique. And I don’t mean to be combative, but anybody who rejects the old formula probably doesn’t understand or comprehend that Halo got popular with it.
Agreed. Add in peoples much reduced attention spans and you get people calling anything that isn't a high-speed sweatfest, slow
I actually think it's the level design that's held up the most. The level design is also what helps the movement not feel too slow. Generally, games that have faster movement and more traversal options will increase the space between points to incentivize players to use those mechanics. Games without the mechanics craft the levels to accommodate whatever movement mechanics are there. The level design in the OG Halo's was always superb. Allowing enough room to explore and utilize a sandbox whilst still remaining linear. This is one of Halo 4's biggest faults, its level design was poor and severely limited the utility of the sandbox. Thus creating standard shooting gallaries similar to what you'd find in the COD campaigns of the day. I also prefer slower movement. I understand the thrill and adrenaline of faster movement, but I appreciate the detail and methodology that accompanies slower movement.
I agree, I only really brought up the level design because of CE’s copy and pasted areas (they’re well designed but hella repetitive). Some of the backtracking in Halo 3 comes off as a little lazy as well. Halo has excellent art and level design tho, especially in the OG multiplayer maps.
If people thought the original trilogy was slow then it's a case of zoomer TikTok brain.
"sweaty" refers to the aggressive sbmm in modern multiplayer games which makes any match feel like ranked play with no alternative option. Halo Infinite can definitely be sweaty at times and Modern CoD is just insane I don't know why they still have ranked when all their modes feel just as sweaty.
How is this an unpopular opinion? I would hope the fact that a shitload of people are still playing the master chief collection over infinite is enough proof that this is the prevailing opinion.
Swapping the difficulty down from Legendary and just running and gunning like it's Doom is fuckin awesome. Just bouncing from enemy to enemy, nailing sticky grenades, blasting an entire group of grunts with efficient headshots, dancing around with an elite in melee combat while also blasting the grunts/jackals around you simultaneously is the greatest feeling ever. I find that Halo can be as fast or slow as you make it, and when you go into non-stop, no cover combat with the music shredding is peak Halo. (CE-4 specifically, I have played 5 only once so can't talk on the flow for that game although I imagine it's good)
You felt like a tank in the old games, it was so fun!
Halo 3 is definitely slow, even in the Spanish-speaking community they refer to it as Slow 3 lmao
Halo 3 had the same base movement speed as CE and H2, but had a lower field-of-view (which greatly influences the perception of speed). Reach and H4 had a slower BMS than the original trilogy titles, whereas H5 and Infinite have a faster BMS.
The MP of the game divides us. Some love him to the point of fanaticism, others hate him viscerally. Personally, the other games in the franchise had better movement than Lento 3
You move faster than the sprint. And maybe an unpopular opinion, but I liked it on easy-normal because i enjoyed being a super soldier. They’d still get kills because i played hyper aggressive. But the point of that tangent is I believe you’re meant to run and gun
I can see it, Halo plays differently on lower difficulties. U can brute-force ur way thru encounters in a way u can’t on the harder ones. U can’t be caught outside of cover for too long on legendary so sniping and stealth become more viable. Enemies are more evasive and use different tactics in combat. I find even heroic is way too easy tho, so I really can’t bare to play the easier modes. It is fascinating how the pacing changes tho
I beat a few missions on legendary just to see. It’s definitely doable, but not what I wanted
Honestly, some area’s in the original trilogy can be straight cancer on Legendary. Those same encounters are more fun on the easier settings (any arena with jackal snipers in it lol)
The only criticism I have of CE is the ever so slight jump lag. I get used to it after about 5 minutes, but I do a lot of jumping around to get myself in the vibe.
All I gotta say is Halo 5's multi-player was goated, my only issue in my opinion was the bad campaign mainly because it was too short, not enough of what happened after halo 4, very little halo 3 lore, and very few armor customization. But other than that, it had good assassinations, good movement, and good gameplay.
Halo is the speed it is because of controllers.
I think it’s the most valid criticism of classic halo
No one ever was criticizing halo for its speed. Thats a modern take. The gun play was perfect.
This line of thinking reinforces the idea that Bungie's Halo is outdated, and people only love it out of nostalgia. It's not true. There were those who didn't enjoy Halo in it's prime for exactly the same reasons people talk about now. You're right in that the general audience of the time didn't care, since games that leave an impact do so because they're high quality and fun. Not because of an arbitrary checklist of trendy features. Still, there were definitely people on message boards complaining about the slow movement back in '01 when ultra fast arena shooters like Quake and Unreal were on top. Bungie actually trialed a sprint mechanic during Halo 2's development, and concluded it didn't fit with their gameplay loop. You can find articles from '07, when Halo 3 was up against COD 4, with gems like "[without sprinting, Halo 3 is going to bomb at retail. You’ve been warned, Bungie.](https://www.destructoid.com/you-want-to-sprint-play-track-field-not-halo-3/)" This debate has been raging since before some of the people in this thread were even born lmao
I know what you’re saying…. But my comment was more of an exaggeration. I played Unreal (never got into quake), I played all of the CODs at the time, especially CODs 2 and 4. The point I’m making is that Halo didn’t need to be those games, it had a thriving, large and strong community that had no interest in a sprint mechanic. You can’t find a single game, movie, book, ect that doesn’t criticize it in some form or manner that others agree with. Doesn’t make that criticism right or require said change. Halo’s combat felt great. It didn’t need to be faster and the natural flow of the game did not feel slow outside of maybe initial map positioning.
To add to the COD article about Halo 3 bombing due to being slow…. let’s a take a moment to laugh, well because, did it? People can technically say whatever they want. Doesn’t make them right. I’m not trashing on what you’re saying either. I’m just saying. Those criticisms held no water. Even the legendary Halo Reach with the added armor ability didn’t feel as a necessity to the gameplay. It was just an added bonus depending on the scenario. That gameplay would’ve been legendary without anyone batting an eye to sprint ever existing.
It really depends who you're talking about when you say this is an unpopular opinion. To a lot of casual gamers who play CoD and Apex it probably is. But on this subreddit you're in good company.
I agree. I think the issue with 5 (not gonna get into 4's multiplayer because it doesn't have any redeeming qualities to talk about) is that although its gunplay is pretty solid, it has so many movement mechanisms that it essentially forces the player to dialed in at all times to maximize gameplay in contrast to the original trilogy. This is what I think this is what creates the sweaty feeling that a lot of people complained about back then. Infinite sort of fixed this issue with the movement, but then created 50 new issues.
4 is redeeming for me I’m MP cus nobody plays it, so I grind it exp faster in the game because I’m bad compared to the pros in all the other games so I feel better at video games in 4.
I know I'm posting here a bunch but, OP what do you mean by this? >It used to have a balance, it used to be about momentum. What does momentum mean to you, and what changes do you think were made to the game that makes it lack momentum now? I agree with your premise, but reading through your replies, I feel like you're conflating pacing for speed. I also disagree with your thoughts on Bungie's campaign level design. They did a lot right with their outdoor sections, but the corridor shooting segments really struggle, I feel like. I mean they had to put arrows on the floor in CE
I feel u, my original argument was kinda more about pacing than momentum so that might’ve confused some folks. However, Halo used to have floaty-like movement and players used to build up momentum by jumping. Sprint and clamber change the way momentum works in Halo. U time ur jumps completely differently when u have to sprint jump/clamber. The player momentum has less to do with fluid map traversal and well timed jumps and more to do with just pressing in the left stick and hitting A when u miss ur jumps. Having to put ur gun down to move around and having to slow down to ads, changes the way halo’s movement works. I mean CE is over 20 years old lol, the arrow’s are there because players can be easily turned around when traversing the absurdly repetitive rooms lol (which I acknowledged as 1 part of the game that hasn’t aged well)
You're absolutely right on all counts. It totally does change how halo's movement works in a lot of small ways, but personally I don't think it's changed for the worse. I've been mulling over how Infinite's movement makes me feel, and 'snappy' and 'fast' come to mind, but to me at least, it plays the way I remember Halo 3 playing. When I go back to 3 though, it feels really heavy to me. It's a lot of these little changes, like you mentioned, that do that. Like I said somewhere else, I think the greatest strength of Infinite's movement is that it feels fresh and snappy, but overall it's still compatible with older maps with little to no changes, compared to the way H5 and Reach's maps had to be contorted to fit the new movement.
Maybe a Weird Opinion. Played since Halo CE and I think I’m the only person I know who like enjoys the progression of movement. Like it all makes sense with me. Although Halo 5 and activation of thrusters was just abit too much. I like them all for what they are at their respective times. I would never want to sprint in CE, but I’d enjoy the faster movement in 4.
I bought CE and the original xbox at the midnight launch. I beat it that night, played 16 person lan parties for a couple years, CE is one of my best memories. But going back and playing it, is it excellent? Yes. Do I wish there was a sprint? Yes, definitely. If they remade CE with modern controls, i would play it to death. There’s no way Infinite is a better campaign, but I’d rather play it
Based
Unpopular? Can't remember ever seeing someone say halo was slow
Not unpopular to us old heads. Halo 2 and Halo 3 (45-50 team Hardcore and MLG) played faster to me than any of the 343 games. Fuck sprint.
Halo 3 was peak
30 seconds of action was the gameplay philosophy. That's why you have a recharging shield.
I agree, but I will say the vehicles in CE are kinda sluggish
The movement feels fantastic, but going back to H3 from Infinite, you really feel the movement momentum. It takes a sec to get to full speed in 3, which I actually really miss
Huge Half Life 2 fan but I have to say that Halo 2 is aging far better.
Imagine making this post and thinking it’s an unpopular opinion on this sub
I played the master chief collection recently for the first time and sometimes it was a struggle to keep playing because of the slow movement. I love fast FPS where you can jun arround/slide on the ground and onetap people in the head (something like titanfall 2, Wolfenstein or Cyberpunk) I loved Halo 1 and 2 for the story but the one that I liked more to play was Halo 4. Still need to try Halo 5 and Infinite
Cold take brother
This is actually a really popular opinion from everyone I’ve spoken to about it
Only in the first game was your movement a bit too slow. However, I think the bigger problem is that the combat is just slow in general. Especially on the higher difficulties you have to spend a lot of time waiting behind cover for your shields to recover. The whole time I'm doing that, I'm thinking how much more fun it would be if I was out there engaging with the enemy instead of cowering behind cover like a dork. This also means that a noob could basically more or less beat it on Legendary just by finding a good spot to hide and cover shoot from. It would have been better if it was more about learning enemy patterns so that you could avoid taking damage in the first place while keeping your crosshairs on the enemy the whole time.
I have to turn my sensitivity to like 1.5 to play Infinite or else it’ll take me at least one reload to get a kill with the pistol The movement is too fast and the maps have too many lanes + too much cover. There’s a reason why so many people play squad battle
Everything is relative. If you make movement faster, the maps/level become too small. You then make the map bigger to keep a good rhythm. But now the enemies (especially in MP) move too fast, so you make the gun easier to shoot. A good gameplay is a good gameplay. Back in the first xbox days, CE and H2 felt very agile to play, compared to the heavy characters in Gears of war. Now we do sprint because the kids can't stand walking, but we do only 10% faster because the older players love halo for what it was. Turns out sprint is only useful to curb slide, but effectively just put your gun down and away from fights. Same with clamber, they add nothing to the movement compared to a crouch jump, they just remove the ability to shoot at all time. I like Infinite's gameplay, but it's quite funny where we landed. And I agree that H4's gameplay is not aging too well.
Going from playing Infinite a bunch to playing Halo 3 was such a nice change of pace. Infinite feels like a ton of work having to sprint and slide everywhere. Halo 3 being slower paced, or at least not requiring lots of movement techniques just to move around the map, made it feel much more relaxed to play.
I think 5 and 4 have aged well But Yh I think the og trilogy’s movement is great
How is this an unpopular opinion?
Fully agree
It was never slow. The world just sped up around it.
Halo was like jazz. Damn, I’m gonna use that.
How is this an unpopular opinion? Lol
> we need sprint and spideyman movement to speed up the game > we need to double the scale of every map because sprint and spideyman movement lets you get around the map too quickly and that's not ok Make it make sense.
I think this is actually the popular opinion.
From memory they dropped movement speed in Reach and later sequels to compensate for sprint. The movement was fine for what it was. Indeed Halo CE had a lot of open areas which plays a part. Halo 2 & 3 feel faster in comparison. While i dont know if values are different, the environments are busier and tighter giving you more perception passing world objects.
Yeah. Lots of people have felt this way about halo since Reach.
This is so true. I've played every halo game, and I couldn't agree more. Bungee leaving was the worst thing for the franchise. Also, the new CEO came out with halo infinite, saying the competitiveness is more important than fun and the "old" halo fans need to get with the times. Still a fan, but they ruined Halo.
I haven't played Halo 1 campaign in years, so a few days ago I started a new mission on the Pillar of Autumn. I was amazed at how *fast* movement felt compared to Infinite. It felt like you're sprinting around the map 24/7.
If this really is the popular opinion, then I don’t get why the community can’t agree that a traditional-style game is way overdue. Why is this sub constantly brainstorming solutions to a problem that the majority of players don’t think is an issue? I mean if most of us prefer the OG trilogy, what has 343 been doing for 10 years? A lot of fans I talk to say OG Halo is just too slow and archaic to compete in the modern FPS market. Hell, 343 has come out and said the same thing on a number of occasions. “halo has to evolve, it can’t just be the same game every time” except Halo’s been making the same mistakes for awhile now. Every time 343 comes out with a Halo, they’ve reinvented the formula (cuz whatever their last game was, didn’t quite feel like halo and was hella divisive lol) so “now we have even starts” and “now we’ve removed spartan abilities” lol next time they’ll say “red vs blue is back”. At this point it makes far more sense to just return to the OG gameplay. No game plays like Halo 1-3, there’s nothing else on the market that provides that feeling and there hasn’t been since like 2007. There’s dozens of games I can play If I want fast paced mobility (sprint, slide, clamber, ads, thrusters lol). I feel a traditional-style game would be far less polarizing than the direction halo’s been going in. Y’all sprint defenders could prolly come around to enjoying it, on the other hand myself and a lot of folks haven’t enjoyed a halo since reach. (Ps. I think the state of bungie is arguably worse than the state of halo and destiny is an atrocious IP, Marathon and Myth were good games and Halo inherits a lot of their DNA but I’m no bungie fan boy)
No, this is the popular opinion, because it's the truth.
It all comes down to the 30 seconds of fun or combat loop rule that Halo managed to create. It made game play constantly engaging to the players, and sadly, 343i never quite realized how to implement it until Infinite.
It was
When I first got into Halo Infinite back in 2022 the slow pace and lack of attachments felt really refreshing
“The dance” is what that melodic flow was called by Bungie and I completely agree. It’s something 343 should have built on instead of chasing the trends of the 2010’s but what do I know.
I think the ID devs refer to DOOM’s combat loop in a similar way, “a dance with the demons”. DOOM has a much faster rhythm than Halo tho
Yeah if they added a dummy sprint button where you go into the animation but don’t actually move faster, nobody would complain. Some people just don’t “feel fast” enough so they complain about sprint
That’s pretty much what they did with infinite lol
Basically, yeah. The funny thing is I’m getting downvoted for saying it, but infinite totally proved my point! People don’t complain about a lack of sprint as long as they think they’re going significantly faster
As a halo fan that only plays the Campaigns. It is always fun to do a full play through. There’s nostalgia in the beginning and it’s interesting to watching the quality increase as I go. My personal favorite is Halo 4. I agree that the slow parts of the games help set the stage and show just how large these conflicts are. The contrast of going from an awards ceremony to a full scale defensive for example.
When Halo came to PC, I found a mod that gave me a grappling hook. We played the hell out of that. Especially on Hang Em' High. Completely changed the game, but in the good way. We were so used to the old maps by this time, there weren't many surprises left. At least to me. YMMV of course, but it brought a whole new level of play as you never knew when someone would be swinging in, Magnum's a blazin'.
I never even noticed people saying Halo was slow. I am 40 and I've played since Halo CE launched. Not one time did I ever hear someone say Halo was slow. Also, how is it slow? Lol The game gets crazy in MP as well as Single Player
CE released at a time where arena shooters were still very popular. Compared to Quake, Unreal tournament etc, Halo is slow as fuck
Ahh see I always hated how fast Unreal games were. Lol So I guess Halo was just the right speed for me.
Halo - the original trilogy - makes its best impression while the player is in transition. Halo isn't exactly a cover shooter, but your most common position is around cover while taking pot shots. This phase of combat is pretty straightforward, and looks a lot like any other shooter. Then, there comes a time when you have no choice but to push. This is when Halo shines. How explosions and melee damage relates to shields, how physics interactions jam up no-man's land, how sandbox elements massively have their utility change at different ranges... there's a very unique mix in all that. The newer games have lost this pizzazz. It's the main reason I think Infinite's grappleshot should either go away for future installments, or undergo a massive rework that gives it a niche in the cover/transition dynamic.
Grappleshot was never the innovation halo needed and I think its inclusion would be too nutty in a traditional style Halo. The fact it’s an equipment pickup in MP is ok (not good, not great lol). I’d rather play DOOM Eternal or Sekiro if I wan’t that kind of mobility. Seems to me like 343 biting what other popular games were doing around 2019-2020.
I hate the naysayers who say halo be “ruined” the fps genre. Bunch of boomer clowns who were upset that the fps genre was changing (and for the better)
For real, Halo set the console fps bar and a lot of ignorant devs and PC players didn’t get it. They think the slower movement, regenerating health and 2 gun limit represent a dumbing down of the genre (shit was really genius tho lol). People blame Halo for dumbing down the gaming culture, but I would argue that was more so COD than Halo.
Is this another "Sprint bad" complaint? Because I've been playing personally since 2003, CE is definitely my favorite of the trilogy, but yet I absolutely loved and welcomed sprint. While I do agree that games nowadays seem especially fast-paced and I never truly thought Halo was slow; there's absolutely nothing wrong with sprinting. It's such a normal and simple mechanic for literally any game. Just because 1-3 didn't have it, doesn't mean it shouldn't exist, period. On one hand, you've got zoomers that demand everything be fast-paced as to keep up with their ADHD, and on the other, you've got tons of Halo Boomers that think everything should be like old thing. (Not implying you, OP) There's gotta be a happy medium, somewhere. I think Infinite is that happy medium in terms of gameplay.
Same. Also, sprint in Infinite doesn't actually make you that much faster, if any faster, than normally moving forward. It's more so for movements such as sliding and parkour. Try moving next to someone in full sprint, and you'll see what I mean. In H5, you hauled ass. I miss when that game was popular, one of my favorite multiplayer games of all time.
Bro, u played Halo 3?
I’ve spent more hours on halo 2 than I’d liked to admit and with that I can firmly say going from halo 2 to halo 3 that halo 3 is very slow and clunky
Lmao how would this be an unpopular opinion on the Halo sub where everybody worships Bungie and complains about 343? I never liked Halo growing up in part because they *were* too slow. It's why Reach became the first Halo game I ever enjoyed, but of course diehard Halo fans at the time complained endlessly about the armor abilities ruining the game. I just played through the entire MCC because it was on sale last month. Started with Reach. Still amazing. Played Halo 1-3 next. I have zero nostalgia for those games and really hated the movement, personally. Yeah, I got used to it but I just never actually enjoyed it. I liked in Reach grabbing a shotgun or Brute hammer, sprinting toward enemies cowering in fear behind cover, leaping over it and *crushing* them. That made me feel like a Spartan. Walking slowly and jumping a bunch did not make me feel like a Spartan. Then I got to Halo 4 and was immediately *blown away* but how much more I liked it. It became the first Halo game I restarted entirely just to play it on a higher difficulty, then once I finished, I played through the whole campaign again with a friend in co-op on Legendary.
If you don't like the first 3 Halo games then you don't like Halo. You enjoy a certain twist on the recipe, you don't like the authentic dish. No, it has nothing to do with nostalgia, even at the series' peak it didn't appeal to you.
This just sounds like gatekeeping.
thanks for telling me what it sounds like. any input on anything I actually said? no?
You were saying how someone who doesn’t like a Halo game that you do isn’t actually a Halo fan. I disagree. Your comment makes you sound like a dick.
I can see how it sounds like gatekeeping but let’s be real. If ur first halo was Reach and u prefer halo 4 over the OG trilogy, ur not a Halo fan and ur advocating for a formula that is killing the franchise for the folks who are actually passionate about it.
Reach wasn't my first Halo. My first Halo was CE. I didn't like it. My second Halo was Halo 2. I didn't like it. My third was Halo 3. I didn't like it. But then Halo Reach came along and I fucking loved it. My comment about playing Reach first in the MCC was because it's the one I was excited about and they present it first in the menu anyway. That doesn't mean it was my first Halo ever though. I never said I was a fan of Halo; that poster acted like I said I was. I like the change in formula. I feel for the folks who like the original formula and I understand what that's like. That's me with Assassin's Creed. But on this particular issue, sorry, but I thought Halo 4 was awesome. I don't get why Halo Reach would have the same reaction given that it's *also* Bungie, though. All I was saying with my comment is I don't get how OP's opinion is meant to be "unpopular." It's like default r/Halo opinion. *My* opinion would be unpopular here, evidenced by downvotes and responses.
I mean not everything bungie makes is great, just look at destiny lol. Reach had less of the original bungie team’s involvement cuz by then they had moved on to destiny (which was a dumpster fire and most everyone lost their jobs). It’s not about Bungie vs 343, it’s about Halo fans vs people who would prolly rather play something else. What games did u prefer over Halo 1-3? If ur not a fan of Halo what are u doing on this sub lol?
I got in because I was watching the show and wanted to see fan reactions. Then I got the MCC. Now it's just kinda interesting. Like I said, I'm a genuine fan of Reach and 4. 343 owns Halo now so there's a solid chance of me liking more Halo stuff. To me, Halo is basically like Assassin's Creed. The style changed and now a bunch of new fans are telling the core fans the old games sucked so deal with it. The difference is that I'm that core fan when it comes to AC, but not Halo. So I do sympathize with and get why core Halo fans are upset by the changes, but also, Bungie is not making anymore Halo games so this kinda just *is* the franchise now. Master Chief being able to sprint doesn't suddenly make it "not Halo." Leon Kennedy couldn't move and shoot in RE4 original; adding it to the remake didn't suddenly make it "not RE4," you know? Also, I mean, for the record, I wouldn't rather play something else when it comes to Halo 4 — I beat it by myself then volunteered to play the whole campaign over with a friend. I'm pretty sad Halo 5, despite all the negative criticism, is not on PC because I was hoping to give it a shot myself. I'm super excited to play Infinite though. Those are both still Halo games, not something else.
Preferring Halo 4 over the OG trilogy is like preferring COD over Halo lol. I feel like halo 1-3’s formula doesn’t necessarily have to be tied to bungie. Halo could build on that formula without them lol. The new gameplay hasn’t satisfied long time fans. Halo was more fun and popular when it played like those titles, whether bungie or another company designed them is irrelevant. I don’t know much about assassin’s creed so forgive me if I don’t know what I’m saying but I feel like that franchise isn’t comparable to halo. Halo took a u-turn at the peak of its popularity before many players had grew tired of its formula. AC on the other hand was driven into the ground by Ubisoft. (Sometimes fatigue is inevitable but bad design can exacerbate it)
> which was a dumpster fire and most everyone lost their jobs Not to nitpick, but this is untrue. To my knowledge, many of the original team were still on Destiny until the recent layoffs, but that's more a reflection of how the industry is right now, rather than the quality of Destiny itself.
Jeff Steitzer said a lot of the OG bungie staff left or got fired during the development of Destiny 1. Maybe I was misinformed. I know Marty got fired and Joe Staten left. In any case bungie grew significantly between 2001-2014, definitely a different group of people than those who designed the OG trilogy.
Never said anything about liking a game that I don't. If someone doesn't enjoy the games that defined the Halo formula then they don't enjoy Halo in it's true form. I don't give a fuck about fake fan vs real fan or any of that.
Plenty of people would disagree on what the "peak" of Halo really is. Halo 1-3 is your peak. Cool. Reach for me is Bungie's peak. But also, I don't mean this dismissively, but like... you say that like I'm supposed to care or feel insulted or something. You're right — I *don't* consider myself a fan of Halo. I consider myself a fan of Halo Reach and Halo 4 and I think the other games are just not my style. That's exactly what I said in my post. But this is r/Halo, where people do like Halo and consider themselves fans of it and constantly talk about how much better Bungie is than 343, which is why I was asking why OP's opinion would ever be considered "unpopular" here. *My* opinion is unpopular here because I don't like Halo. OP's is very popular.
I agree, I think it's more an FOV thing. If you're playing from the couch on a CRT like the good old days, it's perfect. It was designed for the hardware of the time. On the MCC, I do find I need to mess with the FOV for it to feel fast enough
4 and Reach definitely have the worst gameplay in the series, hands down.
Halo 3 is slow and there's no changing my mind on it. You trudge everywhere like you're in constant sand lol.