Favorite Game of a Franchise: Halo Edition

Thread: Favorite Game of a Franchise: Halo Edition

What is your favorite Halo game?

  • Halo: Combat Evolved (or Anniversary)

    Votes: 10 29.4%

  • Halo 2 (or Anniversary)

    Votes: 4 11.8%

  • Halo 3

    Votes: 16 47.1%

  • Halo 4

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Halo 5: Guardians

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Halo: Reach

    Votes: 4 11.8%

  • Halo: ODST

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Halo Wars

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Halo Wars 2

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Total voters
    34
Hostile_18

Hostile_18

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Platforms
  1. PC
Each week we focus on one established franchise at a time and see which title D-Pad likes the most and people's general thoughts on the series. This week it's the Halo games.

We don't allow collections so that is why the Master Chief Collection isn't here. It's separate editions only. Presume every title is with all DLC and multiplayer components. As in the past if a remake/remaster is largely the same game I've included it as one entry, so one games votes don't get diluted.

Halo-Head-Art.jpg

Week 1: Metal Gear Solid
Week 2: Tomb Raider
Week 3: Soulsborne
Week 4: Fallout
Week 5: Uncharted
Week 6: The Legend of Zelda
 
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I only played the first three, but Combat Evolved is by far my favorite. The second one had some weird shit thrown into the narrative (Gravemind or whatever) and all I remember of the third one is the monkey aliens and that I told my boss my mother was in the hospital so I could ditch work and play it. Combat Evolved is just Master Chief shooting motherfuckers and taking names.
 
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It's a series I haven't had much love in the past I must admit. When the first game came out I still rated Goldeneye alot higher due to the more real world locations and human enemies etc. I've only played Halo 1, Halo 3 and recently Reach. I do want to get into the series though and I've bought the Master Chief Collection to see the games at their best.

Bare in mind my limited knowledge of the series, I'm going to give my vote to Reach. I wanted to do some game series that were a) fun, with strong contenders as always AND b) wernt just series I was intimately familiar with. 😊
 
Halo 3 was one of the, if not THE, greatest video game event of all time. The hype was through all the roofs, man. The fandom went absolutely NUTS around the game and honestly it delivered. The campaign is effectively flawless, the multiplayer was as well (not by today's standards, but back then it was just HNNNNG, spent hundreds of hours on it). The memes, machinimas, references in pop culture, etc. etc. it was MINDBLOWING! Also, it is THE END OF THE STORY for Master Chief (Bungie said so themselves), Halo 4 and 5 are just bad fanfic. Man, oh, man, I just love that game so much it is stupid!
 
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Halo 3 was my first Halo, and it was so good I slogged through 1 and 2, which were no where near as good, them loved ODST and Reach, hated 4, and 5 onwards just has done nothing for me at all.

No opinion on Halo Wars, never played them.

3 > ODST > Reach >> 1 > 2 >>>>> everything after Bungie.
 
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Halo 3 gets my nod. That first impression after the massive pre-launch hype was amazing. I still vividly remember counting down to the midnight launch in the rain with a couple hundred other fans, someone in a Halo costume, a few demo stations for competitive play and a news crew filming it all. Had a lot of fun playing the story in co-op mode, too.

A bit like Zelda it came down to three games that stand above the rest for me (though much smaller gap between them all): 3, Reach and ODST. All three games had a good balance of simple yet engaging storylines with entertaining encounters between enemies and friendlies both. I thought they all had just the right amount of humor mixed in with their action and drama.

Never really gave the Halo War games a try. Couldn't blame them for wanting to branch out, but to me exploring that universe was first person or nothing.
 
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Gotta go with combat evolved. Many a night spent playing multi over LAN with my brother and friends. Good times and good memories.
 
Having just gone through the Halo campaigns on MCC, Halo 3 definitely.

Halo 3 has the best balanced Legendary difficulty, some truly epic moments, and a lot of enjoyable gameplay. Blowing up a bunch of Scarabs over the course of the campaign by boarding it through various methods was awesome. The final Warthog run is also the best in the series.

On the other hand, I didn't really care for ODST or Reach. Controversially, I like Halo 4 more than Reach. While Halo 4 isn't as good as the classic trilogy, I still found Halo 4 more compelling than Halo Reach. Ironically, complaints about lack of ammo, overreliance on long distance power weapons, levels that look good but don't play as well, etc. I found even worse in Halo Reach, and Halo 4 at least had a compelling story which I didn't find much in Reach.
 
Not a big Halo fan these days, but damn did I play dozens and dozens of hours of Combat Evolved multiplayer on Xbox. Loved the map Blood Gulch and probably played that map 95% of the time. I vividly remember the physical altercations over who got the S controllers and who had to use the "Duke". Also was a massive fan of the first "season" of Red Vs Blue. Was HILARIOUS!

Halo 2 was decent enough, but never was a big MP game in my circle. Halo 3 I was pumped for. Even bought the Custom 360 (and still have), but didnt really care for the game honestly. Have not played any since.
 
Remember playing Halo 3 with stoner mate in his bolthole away from society in at the end of the 2000s, it was fucking epic. Second would have been Halo 1 just cos that was the first. Of the others I only played Reach and can't remember too much about it tbh.
 
gameragodzilla said:
Huh, I've actually heard ood things about the second game, though RTSes don't really interest me much.
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Same here but I surprisingly really liked Halo Wars.

Never played the second game but the story didn't interest me much.

I like Hali mainly when it's about the Flood.
 
Halo 2 for me and only really because I just heavily played the first 2. I was so addicted to the Halo 2 multiplayer at the time. I didn't really care all that much for the campaign. In fact, I found it lazy as hell even in 2004. They would take a really simple map where you walk through hallways and then mirror it to double the length of the level without having to do any extra work.

The first one's campaign felt pretty incredible in its day, but I've never felt like these games were telling good stories. Everyone who says Halo has an amazing story always seems to reveal you have to read books for that to be true, sorta accidentally admitting that the game stories suck. I played a little Halo 3 campaign and then I barely got through 2 hours of the Halo 5 campaign. For as big of a series at it is, I can't help but feel that campaign-wise, it's extremely overhyped.
 
Cryptek said:
Same here but I surprisingly really liked Halo Wars.

Never played the second game but the story didn't interest me much.

I like Hali mainly when it's about the Flood.
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They actually do bring the Flood back in Halo Wars 2's DLC. If you have Xbox Game Pass, it's on there.

Also, controversially, I do like the Forerunners and the Prometheans. I find that lore quite fascinating too. Though of course Halo 5 dropped most of that in favor of turning Cortana into female Skynet, which was unfortunate.

Grinchy said:
Halo 2 for me and only really because I just heavily played the first 2. I was so addicted to the Halo 2 multiplayer at the time. I didn't really care all that much for the campaign. In fact, I found it lazy as hell even in 2004. They would take a really simple map where you walk through hallways and then mirror it to double the length of the level without having to do any extra work.

The first one's campaign felt pretty incredible in its day, but I've never felt like these games were telling good stories. Everyone who says Halo has an amazing story always seems to reveal you have to read books for that to be true, sorta accidentally admitting that the game stories suck. I played a little Halo 3 campaign and then I barely got through 2 hours of the Halo 5 campaign. For as big of a series at it is, I can't help but feel that campaign-wise, it's extremely overhyped.
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Eh, I always thought that was a relative strength of the series. Halo's campaign is mainly about fun and epic moments in a rich universe, and if you want more backstory and lore, you read the supplementary material. Granted, a lot of Halo's story popularity also comes from the cinematography and well written dialogue, a lot of which weren't very common in the early 2000's.

Though since the lore is fascinating, I also enjoyed 343 making a concerted effort to add that lore to the games, like Halo 4 being about the Forerunners or how the Prometheans are digitized ancient humans. But the problem, of course, is that trying to fit all that lore in a single exposition dump halfway through the game is very, very hard so even though the lore was there and explained, it's summarized in such a clunky infodump that it went over most people's heads anyways. A longer game probably would've given more breathing room, though the terminals do flesh out some of it.
 
gameragodzilla said:
They actually do bring the Flood back in Halo Wars 2's DLC. If you have Xbox Game Pass, it's on there.

Also, controversially, I do like the Forerunners and the Prometheans. I find that lore quite fascinating too. Though of course Halo 5 dropped most of that in favor of turning Cortana into female Skynet, which was unfortunate.


Eh, I always thought that was a relative strength of the series. Halo's campaign is mainly about fun and epic moments in a rich universe, and if you want more backstory and lore, you read the supplementary material. Granted, a lot of Halo's story popularity also comes from the cinematography and well written dialogue, a lot of which weren't very common in the early 2000's.

Though since the lore is fascinating, I also enjoyed 343 making a concerted effort to add that lore to the games, like Halo 4 being about the Forerunners or how the Prometheans are digitized ancient humans. But the problem, of course, is that trying to fit all that lore in a single exposition dump halfway through the game is very, very hard so even though the lore was there and explained, it's summarized in such a clunky infodump that it went over most people's heads anyways. A longer game probably would've given more breathing room, though the terminals do flesh out some of it.
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Oh yeah that is right.

The Proto Gravemind was awesome.
 
The first Halo on legendary in co-op and solo is one of the ultimate shooter experiences for me in terms of challenge in a campaign. Legendary is unplayable nearly in Halo 2 though. Three seemed more concerned with the epic and having these big moments than just having great combat arenas, to be fair 2 begin that push. Reach and ODST don't really hold up that well for me replaying them in the Master Chief collection.

As far as multiplayer goes I still think the first Halo because I had way more fun playing split screen or on more than one TV with friends than I ever did when the series went online. I've played incredibly little Halo online multiplayer, and even split screen my friend group was disappointed with Halo 2 and its new mechanics and weapons to the point that we switched back to the first one. It's weird franchise for me because while I enjoy every entry I totally feel like directly after the first one it became a franchise for other people not me there's a different franchise it could have been off the first game that would have been totally my sort of franchise but it didn't happen.
 
It was a tough decision between 2 and 3 for me. 2 had better multiplayer maps but 3 is the one that holds up better today. Couldn't give a toss about the campaigns really despite having finished 1, 2, 3, odst, reach, wars 1, 4 and 5. It's the mp that keeps me coming back but sadly not since 3. 3 is my pick.

1 bomb btb assault on Waterworks and Headlong was peak Halo MP. Fuck, I think typing this has made me change my mind again.
 
Reach. Everyone hates the multiplayer changes but I loved them and that ending was incredible.
 
I've spent thousands of hours in this series. Several thousand in CE alone. It was the only game I really cared about for a very long time when I was younger as the xbox was by far the most powerful piece of hardware I'd ever even laid eyes and hands on and CE was just as revolutionary to me as VR was when it launched and I tried out my Vive. I spent every bit of time in it that I could to distract myself from my miserable situation in life. Fast forward and I'm sitting at a Halo LAN party with my bro's for my bachelor party. Shortly after that, on my wife's request, I spent a day of my honeymoon in a very long line at gamestop for the launch of H4. After all of that, I'd definitely say that CE takes the cake in terms of special memories of me and my bro racing to get our homework done so we could then take turns speed running the campaign on Legendary. What a wonderful world and scenario. The chief is a proper heroic badass which became a role model of sorts for me. No other game in the series ever really captured the wonder of the first time you step foot on the ring, let alone exploring it.
 
Halo 2 was a gift and possibly the greatest online multiplayer I will ever have played in my lifetime. The amazing thing is that Halo 3 was right there with it. Pretty much everyone of my friends had an Xbox360 and Halo 3 during hs, those were great times and both are timeless games. We need a real company to Remake them one day
 
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