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.
liked it. You could tell when they were coming, they all dressed the same. The cheapest way to get armor and weapons in the game was to go to a graveyard and kill the undead skeletons that would spawn there. They dropped distinctivbe bone armor. As protection it was shit, but you could get a whole set together in ten minutes of farming without interacting with another human or using any gold or other resources. Then you'd go to your buddies house to get a cheap, shitty halberd, which had the highest burst damage in the game. You'd tame some horses, and then you and your buddies would ride around at top speed until you found someone, anyone, outside the protection of the town guards. And you'd kill them, and taunt them, and take all of their things no matter how worthless, and ride away.
We tried to deal with it in game. In repsonse to the PKs there were APKs, anti-player killers. Basically militias that could be gathered together very quickly (when we pretty much only had IRC to work with) to ride out and fight player killers. The problem was that PKs were immortal. There was a floor below which their skills could no longer fall. At the floor they were very bad with their halberds, but most of the crafting and gathering characters they targetted had low health and few or no defense skills. Why would you need them when you're just out picking flowers or sheering sheep? And if there were five or six or a dozen PKs it didn't matter - they'd land a few hits eventually and when players capped at 100 hp and a halber could do 24-50 damage against an unarmored player they didn't need to get lucky much. If you killed them they'd pop up as a ghost, run to the nearest rez shrine, and go to the grave yard for new weapons and armor, and then come screaming back in to battle with all the other Pk's you'd killed just minutes ago. There is no way to actually stop immortal trolls motivated by a sadistic joy in the misery of others, as the internet later learned. First they made it so that players who attacked another player could themselves be attacked without any reprecussions. That lead top thing like having an obvious thief walk up to a playerm follow them around, and make it very obvious they were trying to steal things from the players pack. When the player attacked them that player would be flagged the agressor and the thiefs buddies would jump out of hiding and kill them. And no one could retaliate without being flagged a criminal and suffering the same fate, either being taken down by the thieves or by a well meaning passer by. Eventually the changed how flagging worked so failed pickpocket attempts counted, and then the tactic changed to having an invisible pickpocket take something. When the player noticed it was missing they'd assume the visible thief had it and had been flagged as a criminal when they stole it, and attack. But since the invisible thief had done the crime it was the victim who ended up flagged and, shortly after, murdered. They tried all kinds of systems to stop it. Flagging people as murderers. Restricting them from rezzing until a cooldown had passed. They just made alts. restricting them from rezzing at shrines at all. They had alts wait safely in locked houses to rez them. Evcentually it got so bad, and was so disruptive to the player base, that the gamer was failing. Players were leaving and new players were being dissuaded from trying the game. So to save their project and their profits, Origin did what was probably the most fated and consequential act in the history of multiplayer gaming - They split the world in half.
"trammel" (a hobble or rope used to prevent a horse from moving) was the "Good world" where PvP was just off. You couldn't attack players, you couldn't be attacked. "Feluca" (a small, agile, fast moving ship) was the "bad world" where all the old rules applied and non-consensual PvP was still possible. A lot of people hated it at the time. A lot of players (and probably some devs), viewed it as capitulation. The sadists had won; They'd created a world where it was impossible for anyone else to enjoy themselves, no way had been found to fix it, so the developers completely changed the rules. it was derrided as "Care bear land". The organic conflicts and feuds that had arisen out of the interactions of role players in the early days of teh game were no longer possible. You couldn't take control of a bridge and demand a toll from passersby, they could just ignore you. Nor could you ride out to chase off the villains at the bridge. That whole aspect of gameplay could no longer happen organically. You had to arrange it all in advance, if at all.
And Feluca just died. None of the vulnerable crafters and non-combat players that had been targetted by PKs wanted to be there. The "good" combat oriented players all followed them; They needed the crafters for supplies, armor, equipment, and those people were their friends anyway. Why hang out in an empty, dangerous world alone? When all the "good" players left the PKs quit the game. Without victims they lost interest. What we ended up with was one world where safety was enforced by divine law, and a dead, empty world where no one went, both because no one was there and because the PKs who remained in the game were the ones who were really dedicated, skilled at PvP, and basically unstoppable unless you could muster an larger force of equally skilled PvP players.
The lesson that the industry learned from this grand misadventure was that freedom, player agency, choice, and variety were bad. If you had kids playing in sand box you would also inevitably have bullies beating them up and stealing their toys. In real life those kids would leave the sandbox (or beat the bullies to death with a brick idk I was not a well adjusted child and didn't have a lot of friends). In the game, which was a for profit commercial product, those customers would cancel their subscriptions (this was before MTX, so MMOs were on a subscription model. Usually 10$/mo, which seems quaint in the age of battle passes with extra premium battlespaces) and you wouldn't get their money.
There were other problems with choice. What if a player went somewhere they weren't supposed to go? In Ultima getting stranded on an island in the middle of the ocean when your boat was stolen by (player) pirates, or left behind on Hythloth because your buddy tried to run away from a giant python but the python followed him on to the boat and killed him while you watched watched the boat drift away from shore.
What if the player just didn't know what to do? What if they chose tailoring, peacemaking, and carpentry as their starting skills and didn't like any of those? What if they didn't understand the combat system and kept getting rekt by skeletons because they didn't know how to go in to combat mode?
A sandbox was too uncertain. Too much risk. Too much freedom. What was needed was a theme park. The player should enter through a grand facade and then be gently lead from ride to ride. Everything should be exciting and fun and, at all times, carefully managed. No going on the path. No opening doors marked "Employees only". If you try to steal the spinning teacups and declare war on the players over in the mushroom forest we will call the police.
So what we got was WoW. Everquest clamped down on freedom a good bit - Their game had levels, fixed classes, and a number of other portents of the disaster to come, but players still had a lot of freedom to fuck around and do whatever they wanted. But there was no freedom in WoW. You picked a class, then you went to the starting zone. You did not leave the starting zone until you were level fifteen and ready for the 15-25 zone, because if you did the level system had been tuned to ensure you would be instantly killed by anything even five levels more powerful than you. You were free to explore the confines of your enclosure, you were free to play with the toys provided in the manner described in the instructions, you were free to fight the same boss over and over and over again. When you had completely the appropriate rituals a number of times deemed sufficient to the devs you could progress to the next little content island, and so on and so forth, until you reached the "End game".
Ultima online didn't have an end game. When your skills were completely shit you'd find a bunch of people who seemed cool then go have ridiculous adventures. I got stuck on islands. I got chased out of dragon caves. I was party to very tense negotiations when two badly wounded parties ran in to each other in the woods and we were both convinced the other was about to murder us and steal our stuff. i was involved in several wars, a few weddings, and one funeral. And if you'd played the game for a long time, you had a house and a comfortable amount of savings and a chest full of good gear? You were running around in the same group as me, bc there were no level restrictions. You were fighting the dragons while I was applying bandages because even if you were bad at the healing skill you could apply some healing, and since there were no limits on party size and no classes you really could have a group with a couple of new players and a couple of veterans fighting dragons together in some god forsaken cave. Sure, the new players would get OHK'd if a dragon aggro'd on them, but the cap on HP was pretty low so the experienced players needed to be on their toes, too, and the healing and chip damage the new players could contribute was still enough to be useful.
None of that in WoW. Dungeons were designed for a specific party size with a specific composition of classes at a specific level. Once you levelled out of an region you were discouraged from coming back - You couldn't gain XP from mobs in that area, nor could lower level players benefit if you killed mobs for them. The resources and items there were too weak to use against monsters in your new curaed
content zone, so farming was pointless. Once you'd "finished" an area there was nothing to do except move on until you hit the level cap, and thus the end game. One of the problems that has plagued multiplayer online games every since the days of World of Warcraft is the terrible "End game". In a sandbox the game has no beginning or end. There's just stuff to play with. You make your own fun. You hang out with your friends. You do silly shit like gather everyone on your forum to dress like farmers, get pitchforks and then run around the world as a revolutionary rabble accosting anyone who looks to be of noble blood (In 1999 a UO player with 100pts in strength, Swords, parrying, and full plate armor could kill approximately 19 angry peasants before being dragged down by a tide of pitchforks. Our study was rigorous).
But if the entire game consists of a single hallway which you move down at a steady pace, never turning back or moving side to side, you'll eventually reach an end. And then what? The Devs have created a problem for themselves. If the players reach the end of the game they'll stop playing and move on, taking their money with them. The devs need something to keep the player's attention. They came up with a couple of miserable solutions and we've all suffered since then. One was PvP - A lot of games in those days were "PvP is the end game". Most of them had some kind of sport-like king of the hill system for players who had reached the level cap. Most of them were wretched - The class based system meant that not only were some players mechanically helpless against other classes, there was usually no way to change that. The DPS was always going to slaughter the healer, the tank was helpless without the healer, whatever, it was a long time ago, all I really remember is that people with meta rogue builds made the PvP miserable for everyone else. But that only worked for players interested in PvP. The other thing they came up with was raids. A raid is basically a slots machine that requires a forty person theatrical performance every time you want to put a coin in. You'd have to gather a huge group of people, all with very specific classes and very specific optimized builds, who would then have to act in very specific ways for up to several hours. if everything went perfectly you would then get to pull the handle on the slot machine for a chance to receive the meaning and purpose you'd been waiting for your entire wretched lives. It's not a direct line from raids to loot boxes but the line isn't that crooked, either.
RNG existed in Ultima, but it wasn't really a big deal. There were valuable items, and specific monsters that dropped them. But it wasn't that important. You could, and the vast majority of people did, go anywhere and fight anything wtih iron armor made from bog standard iron ore by a player blacksmith. It didn't even cost very much, i think it was like 1k gold when I was playing, which was fairly easy to farm up in an hour or so. Repairs were free by common agreement of all the blacksmiths in the game, and while I was always nervous handing my armor and weapons over to a stranger for repairs, knowing they could just keep them and I'd have no recourse, I was never robbed. Mages needed specific flowers and rocks and things to cast spells, but those could be found here and there all over the world. Farming certain monsters for them was more efficient if you had the right skills, but the devs goal was to make those reagents available so players could play the game and the spawn rates were consistent and generous. What truly rare items there were were valuable mostly for bragging rights. it was something cool to display in your house, or to wear in town when you were hanging out with your friends (around the bank, because everyone was always moving two and from the bank to store or retrieve items and it became the de-facto spot for gossip and socializing.) Items that could make you more powerful in gameplay existed, and were useful, but they were also consumable - They'd inevitably break with use, and the bonuses they provided were good but not overwhelming. A player blacksmith with ~75 skill could reliably make swords as good as the 3rd out of 5 tiers of magic swords that existed in the game. Basically - Gear was created and used by players, rather than being collected from rare drops on monsters.
In Wow, famously, drops were rare, extremely desirable, and contentious. Gamers of a certain age will remember "50 DPK Minus!" and similar jokes about the elaborate systems people devised to distribute loot in WoW raids. Later games would incorporate built-in systems for distribution loot. Why trust something that contentious to players?
Things continue in this general vein throughout the 00s and the 10s. People keep trying to make sandbox games, but the sad reality is that if a game is accessible to the public it's accessible to sadistic shitheads who will drive off anyone who isn't dedicated to PvP with no other goals. Meanwhile WoW became vastly successful. It spawned an enormous number of imitators and competitors but few managed to establish themselves. And over in teh single player field some fucking demon from hell wondered "If people will pay 20$ for an expansion pack with some new quests and enemies and items and adventures, what's the floor of what they will buy? What is the lowest possible effort I could put in to something and still sell it for, say, 5$?
In 2005 Todd Fucking Howard changed internet history by offering the fucking horse armor for sale for five fucking dollars. It was the first microtransaction. It was the beginning of the end of gaming. The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, was wildly successful and one of the things it iterated on from it's predecessor Morrowind was doing what Ultima had done back in 1997 and giving the player a horse. And the horse armor was armor, for the horse. It wasn't purely cosmetic. It did increase the horses hit points but a few hundred, making it slightly more durable. But the player could also do this with a console command, or with about 10 minutes effort in the included editor. In fact I'm almost certain that either before or shortly after people did create some new models for the horses with armor on them.
But whatever. none of that matters. Enough people bought the horse armor. WHere before games could only make money when they released the full product or sold relatively resource intensive expansion pack Todd "I am literally the spawn of satan and the death of hope" Howard had proved that people would provide real american dollars in exchange for purely cosmetic fluff that should have been part of the game in the first place.
Destiny launched, idk, like a decade or so later. Destiny had honed things to a fine degree. Now all loot was rng. You need a gun? Fuck you, farm for it. You need upgrade mats? Oh, you want to go to any mountain in the game and use your mining skill to mine for ore that you can then use your blacksmith skill to smelt in to ingots which you can then turn in to equipment for your fellow players? Fuck you. Farm for it. And no trading between players. Want any progression or cosmetics or anything? Your options are farm it and pray to RNJesus, or fork out more cash in addition to the full price you already paid for the title.
Destiny has basically everything I hate about MMOs. You can only go places that are level appropriate. Otherwise you're locked out, your guns just arbitrarily don't do enough damage while the enemy's guns kill you almost instantly. Everything gated behind farming and rng. Instead of fucking around, exploring, playing, you farm. You do the same thing over and over again hoping for a different result. The psychologists have tuned the drop rate just so that a certain kind of person will be perpetually trapped between the thrill of success and the bored of repetition, unable to escape. You want to play with your friends? Sorry, there's only room for three people on the ride. Since everything is scripted and instanced and designed to be run x number of times by the average player ensuring y hours of gameplay during which they will statistically spend z on mtx we can't allow you to have more than two friends, ever. Unless you want to do a raid! To get the rare, exclusive, powerful, sexy, desirable raid items! All you have to do is learn a complex ritual dance where you do arbitrary bullshit that breaks all the normal rules of the game in exactly the right way with precise timing, and then repeat that many many times *(during which you will statistically spend z on mtx) and then you'll get whatever shiny object they were dangling in front of you.
I'm sure this all just sounds like an old treat enjoyer whining at this point. Horse armor won. Everything is MTX now. Even games like DRG that are mostly very player-friendly still have seasons with free battle-pass progression that serves to retain player interest in relatively small gameplay additions and new game modes, stretching the products profitable life span using limited development resources. Sequels have given way to "Games as a Service", a truly cursed idea that I am told left Satan vomitting on the floor from distress. This, in turn, gave way to Activision's innovative "Games as a Service but we release one at full price every year then monetize the shit out of goddamn everything" model, which actually killed Satan.
Gaming was never good or anything, it's always been treats for people wealthy enough to own computers and consoles, but there was a time when you could ignore that. There was a time you didn't have a british tart yelling at you about how nice you'd look if you spent ten american dollars on a digital overcoat. Running across mtx cosmetics in a single player game where you had no one to even show them to was once unthinkable, but now many games sell additional cosmetics even if htey have no multiplayer component at all.
It's all gambling and manipulation and bullshit, and being wracked by severe mental illness and isolated by the pandemic I have about two breakdowns a year when I realize that I'm largely helpless in the face of this bullshit even while being painfully aware of how I'm being manipulated. I am somewhat proud that I did eventually quit destiny, at least, cutting off one shitty manipulative experience, but I miss the escapism part of a hobby that used to provide some kind of escape from the horrors of the world. idk. Fuck. I'm just old and sad and broken and tired, and now I can't even get away from some shitass marketing ghoul when I'm pretending that I actually have agency and purpose in the privacy of my own home.
i don't mean this disparagingly, but have you considered starting a blog?
I have several. The problem is that I routinely forget that I have them until I get the itch to start a blog again, find that my internet handle is already taken, then do password recovery and discover that I started a blog on that site twelve years ago. I just gave up after a while. This is probably the most effort effortpost I've made in a long time. I'm tired and kind of miserable and just wanted to talk. I haven't had a lot of chances to do that since everything went to hell.
It's a good post and I'm glad you shared it with us
I'm glad you enjoyed it.
hahaha. Really well written post, made my morning :)
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