I love Halo. When I was a teenager, I used to work in a kitchen, under a Michelin-starred chef and his ex-con sous. Hard work, poor money. One night, after a late and messy shift, the sous took me back to his place for a beer and some decompression time, and booted up his Xbox 360 and Halo 3. I had never played an FPS before, somehow, and I’d never seen anything like this. My pupils dilated, my mouth opened, and something inside me broke. We stayed up until dawn the next morning before heading back to the pub for the morning shift. I couldn’t get Halo out of my mind.
The next day, I went to my local game store and traded in my PS2 and upwards of 100 games just to be able to make the 360 and Halo 3 more affordable. It’s a decision I’d come to regret: a lot of those PS2 games were rare and expensive. But who cares, I had Halo 3! And I had a way to dig into the rest of the series, too. My love for obscure Japanese RPGs was replaced, briefly, with the skyboxes and gunplay of Seattle’s finest.
As much as I loved Halo 3, it wasn’t until I went back to Halo: Combat Evolved that everything really clicked for me. Here, the formula was in its purest essence, without the bombast and cinematic wonder of the sequels obscuring the pure, original vision. To me, Halo is a puzzle game masquerading as a first-person shooter. Every single encounter forces you to think on your feet, asses your surroundings, and respond according. Go in too hard, too fast with your grenades and you will find yourself pressured in a corner with no means of reply to the Elites flanking you. Neglect to comb the battlefield for discarded weaponry, and you will soon be facing down a pair of hunters with naught but a pistol.
It’s compelling, and nearly genius in its simplicity. Every single encounter has this enforced scarcity that makes the tension and achievement work. Bungie may say “OK, here’s a warthog, but you only get one and you need to be careful with it”, and if it gets busted, too bad! You get given a rocket launcher, but maybe only with six shells – where do you use them, and how? Is it best to take out the big guys, or use that delicious splash damage to thin out the herd so you can go toe-to-toe with the juggernauts? It’s tactical thinking paired with on-the-fly decision-making, and I don’t think any other shooter has even come close to getting this fine balance so right since.
The other Bungie-made Halo games amplified this in different ways: desperate chases, vehicular combat puzzle sections, massively increased scale, new enemy types. But that central resource management/survival shooter was always core to the experience (and, I think, perfected in Halo 3: ODST, where you were a much squishier human soldier and not the super-powered Master Chief).
So when Microsoft revealed that Halo: Campaign Evolved – “a faithful yet modernised remake of Halo: Combat Evolved’s campaign” – is coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S next year, I was dubious. The remake has been “rebuilt from the ground up” on Unreal Engine 5, and will include high-definition visuals, refined controls, two-player splitscreen co-op on console, yada, yada, yada. Didn’t Microsoft already do this? Haven’t we already got the Master Chief Collection? Is this a cynical cash-in from a desperate company, or is there actually a significant amount of the audience that wants this?
As I begin to mull it over, watching the various trailers and reading the various articles from a hands-on with the title, a slow, creeping horror starts to eat away at me. This isn’t my Halo, is it? This isn’t the game that I felt physically expand my mind – and propel me towards a career in gaming – as a 16-year-old commis chef, surely? Look at it, it’s… wrong!
Who better to explain my discomfort than Jaime Griesemer, level designer on the original Halo: Combat Evolved, who took to Twitter to explain more succinctly and clearly what, exactly, feels so messed-up here. “You aren’t supposed to be able to take the Warthog up to steamroll the Hunters,” he posted in a thread containing a 13-minute gameplay clip of the new title in action. “I intentionally placed rocks in the way so you had to fight them on foot. When you can just smash the crates out of the way it wrecks the encounters. […] On further analysis I’m sure it’s because the vehicles take damage and so you’re just as likely to destroy the hog as get it over the rocks. If anything that makes it -worse- because -none- of the vehicle tricks are going to work anymore.”
Griesemer explains that he spent a lot of intentional time making it possible but not easy to get the Warthog over those rocks for that infamous encounter in The Silent Cartographer level. It touches on what I find galling about this remake; it messes with the balance of these encounters. It’s not just modernising, it’s interfering. “I made it right, and they are breaking it for no reason,” he Griesemer replies later in the thread. Preach.
But how much of this is my nostalgia interfacing with a group of devs that actually know what they are doing? Elsewhere in the thread, the ex-level designer says, in reply to someone asking whether the remake devs ‘have a plan’, Griesemer notes: “Tough to say, but I think there are dozens of changes (reload speeds, no health packs, falling damage, etc) that make the game ‘slicker’ but ultimately less interesting. Too many to be an accident. Devs aren’t allowed to make interesting choices once the budget gets that big.”
On the other hand, there’s Marcus Lehto (who you may remember from the ill-fated venture of V1 and Disintegration). The developer, co-creator of the Halo universe and Master Chief designer himself, is enamoured with what’s been shown off so far. “My honest impression of seeing the new Halo Campaign Evolved is this: I absolutely love where this is going,” he said on Twitter. “The game looks and feels genuine. It’s gorgeous in a way I wish we could have built it originally back in 2001. It warms my heart to see Halo CE like this,” Lehto said via Twitter. It sounds to me like this reflects more on the graphics and visuals than it does on the gameplay, but to be fair, Halo has always been an icon in both regards. I just don’t think the game would be as iconic if it wasn’t for the intentional, artisanal level and game design complimenting those visuals.
So, that begs the question: who is this remake for? Even the fathers of the series seem to be in disagreement about the need for such a remake, and a Halo devout like myself balks at the idea of it. Are we here just for the PlayStation fans? If you ask Halo Studios community director, Brian Jarrard, he’d probably say yes: he appeared on-stage at the Halo World Championships wearing a “Halo is on PlayStation” T-shirt, after all… a move that feels right out of 2004 or something (a game the White House also appears to be playing, absurdly).
Maybe I’ve gotten more cynical with age, but I just cannot see a world in which this – the second remake of Halo: Combat Evolved – is going to do what Microsoft wants and reinvigorates the series that was once a standard-bearer for a whole console empire. Maybe it’ll give a few PlayStation die-hards a chance to play a game they’ve never touched before, and maybe it’ll reignite some nostalgia fires for old Xbox heads (but then, I’d assume a PvP-focused release would be more likely to do that than a standalone campaign one). Otherwise, though, I am left looking at this announcement feeling a little confused and dismayed – is this really what’s happening to the franchise that matured me from fledging gamer to full-fat devotee? I think I’m going to boot up some Master Chief Collection this evening to reflect on this a little bit more, because the direction Halo is going in may just leave me behind.
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