Halo: the flagship game of the Xbox brand. The #1 reason to buy an Xbox. The game that inspired countless clones and purported “Halo killers.” All of this was true once upon a time. But the reality is that Halo’s place in gaming today is not what its legacy would suggest.
Consider this–Halo has been irrelevant for longer than it was ever relevant. This realization dawned on me amid the Xbox “reset” news, and while it felt surprising to think about in those terms initially, it’s true. Halo’s peak lasted for about a decade: Combat Evolved released in 2001, and Reach closed out the Bungie era in 2010. It was around then that things started to go downhill.
The exact point at which things started to turn south differs from person to person: Was the brand diluted and beginning to become overexposed with the release of the exceedingly fine Halo Wars in 2009? Was it the mediocrity of 2013’s Spartan Assault bearing the Halo name? The shoehorned-in Kinect support of Combat Evolved Anniversary in 2011?
For me at least, the cleanest answer is the departure of Bungie from the franchise, and more specifically, the moment that Halo 4 leaned into Call of Duty-style loadouts. (Reach introduced them, but 4’s customization options made them more of a focal point.) It’s at that point Halo felt cooked, as it began to imitate other games and follow trends rather than continuing to define its own identity (see: a major component of Halo 5 basically just being a multiplayer online battle arena game, and the numerous indications of a Halo battle royale mode being in the works over the years).
Halo 5’s Warzone mode was a MOBA in all but name
It’s hard to fathom now, but there was a time when Halo wasn’t playing catch-up with its contemporaries and instead revolutionized first-person shooters, right down to the notion of only being able to carry two weapons at a time. Its sandboxes and multiplayer felt revelatory back in the early 2000s.
When’s the last time you felt that way about anything in Halo? Infinite was the clearest vision of what a Halo game could be, with a fun campaign that tried to rethink the standard linear FPS format in an open-world setting–and even then, that structure was more reminiscent of other games, not something novel. Infinite’s reworking of the battle-pass model to ditch the FOMO aspect was also nice–if somewhat of an indictment of the quality of the uninspired rewards, which wouldn’t be worth a purchase if restricted to a limited-time window–but the mere presence of a battle pass in Halo in the first place felt, again, like trend chasing.
In retrospect, it’s no surprise that Infinite, and every other post-Bungie Halo game, failed to resonate as much as the earlier entries in the series. In that time, Modern Warfare catapulted Call of Duty clearly ahead of Halo and the franchise never looked back; battle royale games and extraction shooters came along and carved out significant markets of their own; Counter-Strike continued to do its thing; various games in the mold of Battlefield tried to nail that formula to varying degrees of success; classic shooters like Doom and Wolfenstein reinvented themselves to become better than ever; and Bungie again reimagined the first-person shooter with Destiny 1 and 2.
What has Halo done in that span? What even defines a Halo game at this point? Would you recognize it without the name or Master Chief attached?
No doubt much or all of this can be traced back to poor management. Despite a 15-year span composed of far more disappointments than highlights for Halo, as someone who has adored the series, I am sorry to see Halo Studios gutted and the franchise handed off to Activision. Given Xbox’s shifting focus, it’s easy to worry that the next Halo game will feel more like Call of Duty than ever before, and the 343/Halo Studios era has amply demonstrated that Halo can only succeed by being its own thing.
It might be unfair to stack up the number of years in which Halo was relevant against those in which it was not. The impact of Halo extends well beyond the 2000s. But the days in which Halo was Xbox’s flagship franchise–let alone something that felt special or worth looking forward to–are a thing of an increasingly distant past.