CE is fun and all but I don't get the intense love for the campaign, especially from people who praise CE as one of the all time great FPS campaigns but shit on 2 and 3.
CE has some great moments and a couple of levels that are well designed and very fun to play through, but the second half of the game is so bogged down with bullshit it's unreal. Endless copypasted corridors and bridges, fuckhuge open areas with no obstacles or interesting scenery, the 4 longest levels in the game are just two that you have to redo in reverse with different enemies, and the "boss fight" in The Maw is straight up padding since the warthog run, cool as it is, would've been too short to make a fulfilling final level.
I imagine the level design seems worse to someone who played the game more recently. Back in 2001, the latter half of the game had issues for sure, but overall the campaign was still miles better than pretty much every other FPS campaign ever made up until that point.
James Jackson
Halo 1 is loved because without it, Halo 2 (the only good video game ever made) wouldn't exist. Halo 1 being bad was a necessary sacrifice on the road to perfection.
Logan King
t. forgot about all the criticism 2's campaign got on release
Nathaniel Ramirez
>2004 people are dumb I honestly don't give a fuck.
Andrew Garcia
Nah they were right, 2's story was a mess and it had more flaws than CE
Hunter Barnes
>2 filtered people Wow what a shocker.
Aaron Howard
>so bogged down with bullshit it's unreal finally, someone else willing to admit that Unreal is not a good game
Grayson Moore
All the levels in CE are good actually. CE is still the only one where the AI is actually smart, the encounters are actually interesting (except for maybe one or two of Reach’s missions), and the sandbox isn’t nerfed to shit. It has by far the best Halo campaign.
The story is also the best told of any of the games, 2 and 3 and Reach’s storylines are totally nonsensical. I would dare anyone to explain what actually happens in Halo 2 or 3.
Dylan Thompson
Yeah, I suppose if you played CE on the Xbox on release it might've been more impressive. My first experience with it was when the original PC port came out but I'd still played plenty of great FPSes by 2001, I'd hardly say that the campaign was overall that great even by those standards. At this point the discussion could easily become a console vs. PC thing, but I'm just interested in CE's status within its own series. It still has this reputation of being this masterpiece of a campaign but I think 2 and 3 are massive improvements in that regard in terms of level design and gameplay.
I remember this but after playing it for myself I'd say it's generally a lot better, Legendary jackal snipers and buttrock aside.
Jace Price
>I'd hardly say that the campaign was overall that great even by those standards. There wasn't a better FPS campaign that was co-op before CE. Not one. I played pretty much all of them available back then.
Carson Nguyen
CE was literally the first good FPS campaign.
Jaxson Diaz
it's a classic >console exclusive >"amazing, system seller, revolutionary" >hmm I wonder >gets a PC port >oh it's fucking nothing
Nathaniel Perry
This
Oliver Torres
This is my wife, Foe Hammer. Say something nice about her.
Yeah I agree completely with that.. I think the love for it comes a lot from nostalgia. Also the first couple missions are actually amazing. Probably one of the best campaign intros ever. Everyone I talk to specifically says how landing on halo for the first time was one of th best moments.
Kayden Ward
it's a 20 year old game that had to run on an Xbox with fucking 64MB of RAM
The story is solid and a homage to old sci-fi horror movies.
Halo 2's story is a horrible mess, turns master chief from this space survivor to literal iron man, jumping from the orbit into ships and land left and right. Keyes' daughter is a mary sue and the prophets motives for infighting are never hinted.
Samuel Hughes
the story had a lighter feel for sure. even knowing the side materials, here you're just shown a simple story about a huge ringworld in the middle of nowhere.
and thank god The Maw still holds up. bought CEA on a whim last Feb and it was still as thrilling as the first time i played through it. but that's just me.
I think its very hard to put into perspective what playing CE was like in 2001 compared to other games at the time. It truly captured that feeling of hopelessness against an alien threat, and its levels were massive in comparison again to what other fps were doing. 2 was not as great in terms of level design but added in alot of neat stuff to spice up the CE formula, 3 really didn't add much and by that time it had stiffer competition.
tl;dr CE set the bar very high for FPS of the time and 2 and 3 didn't raise it in comparison
quality > quantity 343 and retards think volume of dialogue somehow means better characterization. Bungie was able to give Chief far more character through body language than 343 has with 10x more talking
Example being when Chief first sees the flood, you can tell he's freaked out by how he's checking all around him, how he throws the video chip away and shakes his head. Not a word spoken but you are spooked because the badass super-soldier is spooked. 343 would have him say "wow I'm really scared right now, this doesn't feel right"
