So someone was like "Halo:CE doesn't hold up to modern games, so I looked at what Steams top FPS games are right now and, according to a panel of experts I made up in my head, they are objectively trash. Counter Strike is literally several years older than Halo and hardly constitutes a modern game. Apex Legends is Titanfall if you took all the cool Titanfall parts out. CoD:Modern Warcrimes is uniquely awful in such a perplexing way that I believe it is a modern art performance secretly performed under activisions nose. Siege is a game about poking holes in walls then shooting people you don't know. Rust is a man's inhumanity to man simulator. GTAV is about selling shark cards. The first four games on the list that are actually good in any sense are Deep Rock Galactic, Team Fortress 2, and Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

DRG is geuinely good and innovative. They made something cool, it's awesome, Rock and Stone.

Team Fortress 2 is a re-make of a Half-Life mod from 1997, and was itself released in 2007, only a few years after Halo:CE and Halo2. And Halo is, literally, Halo, still a top seller on Steam 22 years after it's release.

The last "Good" game on the list is the one my friend held up as an example of why Halo couldn't stand up to modern games. It's Destiny. And I said "But Destiny is Halo" and he said no, it's a totally different game, and i don't want to argue about it, and shut me down.

The left stick moves right stick looks around controller system that a considerable number of games use today was solidified and became an industry standard because of Halo.

The idea of a dedicated button for grenade and melee, instead of having them be another "gun" selected from the list of weapons every time you need to use them, comes from Halo.

The regenerating health bar, in Halo's case justified by shields, comes from Halo.

Destiny has all these things... because Destiny, in terms of it's core gameplay loop, is Halo. It's more Halo than a lot of the Halo games that came after three.

One of the biggest innovations in Halo, and one of the things that made it such a fun, successful game, was what I think they said at the time was something like the shoot-punch-grenade loop. They had set up the game around those three actions. They all had their own button, which wasn't really a thing at the time. The loop was that the player would shoot some things, then punch something, then throw a grenade to get breathing room, maybe go in to cover to regen shields, then repeat the loop. And the loop was fun. And the whole game was structured around that loop. Most of the guns were either inaccurate or had slow projectiles. Players would naturally try to move in to a zone where the guns would be most effective, able to consistently hit enemies. This also brought them in to a zone where enemy's could rush in to melee with them, or they could rush enemies, at which point they could punch something or even have a little boxing match. If they felt overwhelmed or saw an opportunity they could throw a grenade to buy some breathing room, reload, re-charge shields. Then it was right back at the top of the loop, moving in to weapons range and shooting stuff. You were always on the move, always doing something, but you have a couple of verbs to work with instead of just move and shoot like a lot of FPS games leading up to that point had. You had some flexibility. And the whole game was tuned around that loop. The speed at which you moved, the big, long, floaty jumps that could carry you up or down terrain, they way the reticle and auto-aim worked, the design of large, open levels intended to be navigated by vehicles to get the game a sense of scope and allow the player to explore, alternating with much more constrained areas that complimented the gameplay loop.

And Destiny, made by Bungie, designed by many of the people who designed Halo, uses all the same stuff. The guardians have more or less the same weapon inventory system as Halo - Two main guns that you switch between. Destiny switches it up by letting you carry a third "power" weapon, but the player's ammo supply is restricted so in practice it gets used against bosses and minibosses rather than being used as a normal weapon. Normally you choose two guns based on what role you want to take and what you expect to run in to and you stick with them. Halo:CE was the game that made "You can only carry two guns" an industry standard, even in games where this didn't work and was a terrible idea.

The Guardian's in Destiny have a bunch of "powers", but the powers are explicitly Halo's punch and grenade with fancy graphics. The grenade power is even called grenade, even though you're supposed to be throwing some kind of magic doohickey.. But most of the, what, 15 avaialable options now? are grenades. A few of them behave just like the halo plasma grenades, sticking the enemies for a few seconds until they explode (this was the height of comedy in 2001). Some are different, but most a ranged AOE attack thrown in an arc from the player, serving the same function and role as halo's grenades.

Melee works the same way - The characters have a variety of "melee" abilities, but for the most part they constitute a relatively powerful attack used at very short range.

A big part of Destiny's design is about severely restricting player behavior by constraining what they can do and when. They took the free form nature of Halo's melee and grenade and assigned timer's to them. In Halo you could melee any enemy with any weapon and do full damage whenever you want. In Destiny you have a powered up melee attack on a cooldown timer. Once you use it you're left with a much weaker attack that does less damage. Halo let you carry four grenades - Two human grenades and two alien plasma grenades. Destiny puts your grenades on a cooldown timer. Halo basically trusted that the player would figure out the shoot-punch-grenade loop. Destiny enforces it mechanically - You can only punch once, then throw one grenade, then you have to either shoot or use one of the game's mechanics for recharging your punch and grenade. It's the same loop using the same verbs for the same purpose. Destiny just gives the player a bunch of largely superficial choices and adds additional restrictions on what the player can do at any given moment.

Speaking of two guns - Destiny has a system wherein both guns and enemy shields have "energy" types. Supposedly they tie in to the game's story but they're really just a color coded excuse. You need a blue gun to do damage to blue shields, a purple gun to damage purple shields, and a red gun to damage red shields. There are also white guns, which are "Kinetic" and don't work as well against shields. This is almost directly from Halo. In Halo the human weapons shot bullets and were did less damage to shields, but more damage once someone's shields were down. The alien plasma weapons did more shield damage, but weren't as effective once the shields were down. Destiny does the same thing, they just have three flavors of shields to force players to use different weapons instead of finding a favorite and sticking with it. At higher difficulties they go even further than halo; A given color of shield can only be taken down by the right flavor of gun, otherwise the enemy is much more difficult to kill. If you don't bring the right flavors of guns for those enemy's you're essentially soft-locked and have to leave the mission, get the right guns, and come back.

Destiny's offers each class three different ways to jump, all of which end up having roughly the same range and height in order to make the game's jump puzzles completable by all players. Most of them are relatively high, long, floaty jumps that are a direct evolution from the way the Master Chief character handle's in Halo. They're used for the same purpose - To give hte player character a good deal of mobility to navigate up and down the terrain.

There are fewer direct parellels, but the enemy's do follow similar patterns. Halo:CE had big guys with shields and dangerous guns, small guys that were less dangerous but could flank or harass you, and really big guys that needed a special trick to take down. There were also the unbiquitous guy who explodes.

Destiny has several enemy factions, but in practice each one has a big guy who is dangerous close up or at range, has good guns, and often has shields, a little guy who is less powerful but can flank and harass you, and some kind of big guy, like a tank or an ogre or a giant floating eyeball.

If you've been playing games the whole time from 2001 to now the similarities would be striking even if you didn't know that Destiny was Bungie's passion project after they managed to flee from Microsoft, leaving their IP behind. If you were a true, verified fossil you'd even recognize how much of Marathon made it in to Halo and Destiny, right now to concepts like AIs slipping human control to gain true sentience and agency. Rasputin is just Cortana is just Durandal, exploring the same concept in different ways. Guardians and Spartans both have two weapons, a grenade button, a melee button, regenerating shields. Even the basic weapon classes in Destiny - Assault rifle that sprays ammo everywhere, battle rifle that fires short accurate bursts, semi-auto accurate scout rifle, sniper rifle with massive damage but low ammo, shotgun that can kill anything as long as it's within 5 feet, extremely accurate high damage pistols, missile launchers, smgs - can mostly be found in very similar forms in Halo.

I forgot one - Destiny's sparrow hoverbikes are very similar to the covenant ghost hover bikes. Indeed, the enemy hover bikes behave in the same way as the Halo ghosts, being a vehicle with medium heavy firepower, which the players can steal by shootin

I mean, Destiny has an anniversary DLC that has a bunch of weapons and items from Halo but with the serial numbers scratched off, ffs.