INTRODUCTION

     The games that will be looked at are Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 5: Guardians.  They are both first-person shooters (FPS), in which you use joysticks to control a character from a first-person perspective, and both involve a lot of gunplay and vehicular combat.  Halo: Combat Evolved (Halo: CE) was created by Bungie in 2001 and Halo 5: Guardians was released in 2015 by 343 Industries.  Bungie had made a few titles, like the fairly popular Marathon for the MAC OS, before making Halo: CE.  This and their announcement of Halo was probably the driving force of Microsoft’s purchase of the company in 2000.  When Bungie left Microsoft, a mixture of old and new employees was used to create 343 Industries.  They had a fairly rocky start.  Their first title, Halo 4, received mixed reviews from players, and their second game, The Master Chief Collection, a remake of the first 4 Halo titles, had continuing network problems for many months after release.

     Now that we have a little background on the two developers, the rest of this article will go into details about the changes, or lack thereof, to the gameplay, storytelling, and multiplayer.  Finally, it will end with how the two games left their mark on the world, as well as the author’s personal opinions on them.

GRAPHICS AND GAMEPLAY

Halo: CE                                                    Halo 5: Guardians
           

     Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 5: Guardians are the same, yet different in many ways.  The graphics in Halo: CE, while impressive at the time, obviously can’t hold a candle to a title released 14 years later.  Halo 5: Guardians graphics are pretty impressive for the time period, with the cutscenes being the most visually impressive part of its graphic prowess.  The one flaw might be in the game’s overuse of lighting for the explosions and gunfire.  It ends up being extremely bright and overly flashy at times, sometimes blinding you to the rest of the scenery or battle in which you are taking place.  Halo: CE’s graphics, while simplistic, still hold up decently today.  The biggest flaw is probably the character models and facial animations, in particular, human NPCs.

Both games feature a shield recharge system where, if you take damage, you can hide briefly from the battle to recharge them.  A difference between them comes from Halo: CE having a health bar that you refill using health kits found lying around. Halo 5 and its other sequels did away with the health mechanic focusing entirely on keeping your shields up.  Halo 5 also contains many more weapons than Halo: CE, both alien and human, introduced throughout the many previous sequels.

The controls are the same at their core.  You use one button to throw grenades, right trigger to shoot, and the analog sticks for your movement and look pitch.  The biggest difference comes from the new abilities introduced in Halo 5.  On top of being able to sprint, your character can pound the ground if you are high enough, and can ‘Spartan charge’ if you have been sprinting for a sufficient length of time.   Another change introduced in Halo 5 was the ability to aim down sights (ADS).  Before Halo 5, all previous Halo games simply had you ‘hip fire’ using the crosshair on the screen.

STORYTELLING / SINGLEPLAYER

       The Flood                                               The Prometheans

  

     The story of Halo: CE involves the discovery of a ring planet at the beginning of the game, and introduces the Covenant, a collection of alien races who are hell-bent on humanity’s extermination.  You play as ‘The Master Chief’, a seemingly unnamed, superhuman protagonist, who is humanity’s best hope.  The Covenant is the common foe of both titles, however, the Flood, a zombie-like parasitic race, of Halo: CE were replaced with the Prometheans, an entirely robotic race, in Halo 5.

About 75% of Halo: CE is spent fighting this Covenant, with the final portion being against the Flood, which were discovered on the mysterious ring world.  The Flood end up being the more serious threat in the immediate sense, since their purpose seems to be the extermination of all sentient life, and they are very difficult to kill, even for the advanced Covenant.  The game concludes with Master Chief destroying the Halo ring, and, seemingly, the threat of the Flood along with it.

Halo 5’s story has you fighting the same Covenant for a large portion of the game.  The biggest difference from Halo: CE is the changing perspectives.  In Halo 5 you switch between controlling Master Chief and a new character known as Spartan Locke.  About halfway through the story, the new Locke character is given orders to kill the Master Chief, thinking he has gone rogue.  Later the story focuses on trying to stop the Promethean AI’s from enslaving humanity for its own so-called ‘protection’.  The story ends on a fairly large cliff hanger.

It seems a big difference in storytelling between games made 15 or so years ago and now is a need for them to contain a controversial or shocking moment that the player may not agree with.  In Halo: CE your purpose was clear, kill the Covenant and later the Flood, you never really felt like your character was making a bad decision at any real point in the story.  Another trend seems to be the need to ‘sequel bait’, with stories not really ending so that the customer feels the need to buy the next title.  Halo: CE contained a self-contained story, while still leaving itself open the possibility of future games being made.  This is a bad trend that hopefully will not survive much longer.  Games should be able to tell a full and complete story on their own, and not feel like their purpose is to sell a copy of its sequel.

MULTIPLAYER

  Halo: CE                                                    Halo 5: Guardians

 

     Multiplayer is the last big topic worth mentioning.  The original Halo’s multiplayer was the first time many were able to feel like a competitive shooter might actually be playable on a controller.  Before Halo, every competitive shooter, like counter strike, was played only on PC.  While Halo: CE had no online capability, it did allow for LAN play, and a small tournament scene, that grew much larger with its sequel, formed around it.  The LAN feature was also used, in conjunction with services like Xbox Connect and a PC, to make the game think you were playing on LAN, but you were actually able to play against other players online.  Halo 5, on the other hand, can be played online through Xbox Live, with a ranking system and many different playlists to choose from.  All Halo games are, at their core, arena-style shooters.  This means weapons and power-ups spawn on the map and players must race to and control them before the other team.  It also features mostly symmetrical maps in order to keep gameplay balance.  Halo 5 also introduced a new multiplayer mode to the franchise called Warzone that is a mixture of PvE and PvP.  In this mode, two teams of 12 race to get as many points as possible by controlling points, killing other players, and killing NPCs and bosses that spawn on the map.  This mode also featured the controversial ‘loot box’ system that has become popular in multiplayer games in recent times.  Players can buy packs that can contain items to use in the Warzone mode as well as cosmetic items.

The original Halo focused on the pistol as your primary weapon capable of killing a player in 3 shots, as long as the 3^rd was a headshot.  With all the new weapons that came with Halo 5, the player is freer to choose what main weapon they want to use, such as the battle rifle or DMR.  The best setup for every Halo game is usually a weapon capable of doing a headshot kill (pistol or battle rifle) and a power weapon that you secure from the map.  Halo: CE’s respawn system is also fairly flawed.  There are many times you will spawn standing next to the other team, usually leading to your instant death.  Arena shooters have become rarer over the years, with ‘twitch shooters’ like Call of Duty taking over the space.  However, the market is still ripe for players looking for a more skill based shooter with a longer time to kill, and Halo for better or worse has been around to fill that gap for Xbox players.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Halo has changed quite a bit over the years.  Many features added are strictly improvements to the formula.  Online matchmaking, a ranking system, improved graphics, and customization options are all good things added to Halo over the years.  From a single-player perspective, Halo has had its ups and downs.  The original Halo’s campaign and story still hold up to this day, and the more recent titles have failed to capture the magic the original was able to conjure.  343 Industries has yet to prove they are able to tell a good story or give the special feeling riding around on a tank for the first time in Halo: CE was able to give.  For multiplayer, Halo: CE was not without its flaws.  Once we take off the rose-colored glasses, no online, horrible spawn mechanics, and questionable power-up timings all held the game back.  Halo 5’s multiplayer introducing the controversial ‘loot boxes’ and spartan abilities that received mixed feelings from Halo fans hold the game back.  Recent Halo titles have been drifting away slightly from that arena style feeling that Halo used to be known for in an attempt to garner some of the COD fan base’s attention.  Halo would be better served sticking to what its fans like rather than risk alienating both player bases.  If you are looking for a single-player shooter between the two, Halo: CE trumps Halo 5 by a long shot.  For multiplayer, it’s a little more debatable of a topic.  For my money, I would prefer to play Halo: CE’s more streamlined, arena-style multiplayer.  I can see the appeal of Halo 5’s multiplayer, however, and I think it is still a decent game in its own right.  The phenomenon that the original Halo started can’t be overstated.  The original Halo brought console shooting into the modern era and its impact will continue to be felt for years to come.