25 Years After First Blowing Our Minds, Halo Is Having an Identity Crisis

The Halo franchise has had its ups and downs, but it’s hard to feel like it’s in at “up” point right now. The once-iconic franchise and leader in the FPS space has taken a back seat in mainstream gaming, but more than that, mainstream culture, and that’s a devastating blow, as Halo has the potential to remain a pillar of the industry.

For many fans, the Halo downturn began when Bungie left the franchise behind. The developer that had crafted the first three Halo games, alongside Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach, decoupled from Microsoft and its exclusivity and published Destiny, a game that, while not perfect, was a natural evolution of the studio’s vision at the time. Meanwhile, the Halo IP was entrusted to 343 Industries, a development team formed by Xbox specifically to steward the franchise in Bungie’s wake. While 343 would add value to Halo in its original entries, especially mechanically, it’s widely believed that the new studio has struggled to capture and develop the IP’s vision and character, which has diminished the franchise’s impact and appeal over time. But why exactly did Halo follow the trajectory that it did, and how is 343 Industries, recently rebranded as Halo Studios, supposed to bring it out of the mire?

Why Halo Was So Special in the First Place

It might not seem so revolutionary today, but Halo: Combat Evolved’s single-player campaign was a revelation when it first greeted the world in 2001. For some perspective, some of the biggest first-person shooters released before the first Halo were GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark, Turok, and DOOM 64—these were the experiences audiences had come to expect from the genre at that time. Make no mistake, those games and others are still special and impactful in their own right, but Halo took things to another level.

Combat Evolved’s shooting mechanics are quite different from contemporary shooters, including those under the Halo banner: basic mechanics like sprinting and ADS are nowhere to be found (with a few exceptions), cover is only occasionally useful in battles, and the guns players use are hardly consistent with real-world weaponry. If anything, the first Halo was less a reinvention of 90s shooting mechanics and more of a refinement of them. Halo’s gameplay, even today, is remarkably responsive, versatile, expressive, and open-ended, never locking a player into just one optimal playstyle.

More than this, Combat Evolved’s campaign was captivating and cinematic in ways that few other games of the time were. Bungie didn’t exactly approach the campaign as a movie, but it’s clear that a lot of thought was given to pacing, atmosphere, and drama, to the point where the story feels immersive and well-orchestrated, with twists and new ideas being communicated with effortless flair. This is something that future Bungie games would improve upon, with Halo 2 and Halo 3 in particular having some of the most memorable and awe-inspiring setpieces in gaming history.

Worth pointing out is the impact that the Halo games, particularly Halo 2 and Halo 3, had on online console multiplayer. These games were instrumental in building the early Xbox Live community, which paved the way for the online shooter boom of the 2000s.

The Pros and Cons of Recent Halo Games

Naturally, Bungie casts a long shadow, and Halo Studios has had trouble getting out of it. But I’ve always felt that gamers can be a bit too hard on the new Halo guardian at times, not recognizing or appreciating the value that the studio has added to the franchise since taking over. For one thing, the shooting mechanics of modern Halo games are much improved compared to their predecessors, with Halo Infinite having arguably the best gunplay of the series. And for better or worse, 343 Industries/Halo Studios has experimented with the Halo formula over the years, whether that be by making Halo Infinite open-world or by adding more traversal options in Halo 5. It would have been easy to just try and make Halo 3 again, so it’s respectable that 343/Halo Studios has tried to do new things.

At the same time, though, these new ideas haven’t been enough to keep Halo at the forefront of the industry. By adding mechanics like sprinting and ADS, Halo slowly started to feel too akin to something like Call of Duty, and has lost some of its original gameplay identity as a result. This conformity extends to other aspects of modern Halo as well, like its scenario design, setpiece design, and overall campaign structure. Perhaps most crushingly, newer Halo games feel rudderless from a narrative perspective, with new lore concepts and characters being introduced only to be forgotten about in the next entry. Storytelling is vital to Halo, and it often feels like 343/Halo Studios hasn’t been confident enough in this regard, regularly abandoning ideas it sets up.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the decision to remake the campaign of Halo: Combat Evolved. This is arguably the opposite of what Halo Studios should be doing now: Halo needs new ideas that work, not the rehashing of old ones. Broadly speaking, audiences want Halo to excite them again, and remaking one part of a classic game — a game that’s already more than playable via the Master Chief Collection — probably isn’t going to do that.

To be fair to the Combat Evolved remake, it does have the potential to create a whole new audience of fans thanks to its PS5 release, and starting PlayStation users off with the original game in the series does make sense.

How Halo Can Reclaim Its Former Glory

It’s easy to look at Halo, as we look at so many other depreciated classic franchises, and think that all hope is lost. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve felt pessimistic about the franchise for years now, and have often wondered how much time it has left. But then I think about what recent Halo games have gotten right, and I feel a renewed sense of optimism. Halo Studios just needs to focus on its strengths, like physics-based combat, and less on unnecessary or unnatural gimmicks, like the ever-frustrating Battle Pass system of Halo Infinite. Most importantly, Halo Studios needs to renew its vision of the Halo narrative, rather than just reacting to what it thinks audiences want. This might even mean leaving Master Chief behind, for good this time.

And even if future Halo games don’t quite reach the heights of their predecessors, it’s not the end of the world. There can still be room for Halo as an undulating legacy franchise, with some underwhelming entries, some good ones, and a few fantastic ones. Maybe that next fantastic Halo is closer than we think.