A Rethinking of Halo's Decline and Future

As a note, I'm not a Halo fan (or a COD fan, as you'll likely assume), just an observer sharing his observations and conclusions.

Imagine with me, if you will, that the year is 2007. Bungie's Halo 3, still lauded today as the best Halo ever made, and certainly the best selling, has been released. It is the golden age of not just Halo, but FPSs in general. Now, fast forward five years. It's 2012. Bungie has been replaced by 343. The new studio's first mainline game, Halo 4, is both less successful and is seen as subpar compared to the games of its predecessor, foreshadowing the fate of Halo's future games. The golden age of Halo is over, and its dark age has begun.

This is the traditional view of most Halo fans: Bungie built Halo up only for 343 to come in and tear it down. To be fair, it's a nice little narrative. There are obvious characters to root for and against along with a clear and unambiguous conclusion. The rise to power and fall from grace is almost evocative of the Greek tragedy. The problem is, it doesn't make sense, for three reasons:

For a smaller or worse-funded IP, a mediocre release might lead fans to abandon it under the assumption that the franchise is now dead, but Halo is not that kind of IP. While Playstation prides itself on its exclusives like The Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Ghost of Tsushima, just to name a few, Halo is basically all Xbox has in terms of heavy hitters (at least until Starfield comes out), forcing the company to dump as much as possible into the series. If anything, the replacement of a third party developer with a first-party one would've inspired more confidence in the playerbase that Halo was still kicking, not less. Any Halo fans who were so prepared to jump ship that they did so after one bad game either weren't real fans to start with or were just idiots, and I’m gonna assume for argument’s sake that traitors and fools represent a minority.

If 343 really did turn so many away from the franchise, where would they go? I don’t think it’s likely that the majority of them were so disgusted by Halo 4 that they abandoned the FPS genre entirely, going off to play turn-based shooters and LEGO games instead. But what else really was there besides Halo? Going back to 2007, while there certainly wasn’t a lack of competition when it came to FPSs, Halo was the undisputed king of the genre. Doom had basically defined what an FPS was, but Halo: CE took it to the next century, and from then on, the series would epitomize FPSs. Other IPs would follow, but Halo was leading the charge by the time its third entry was released. With this pseudo-monopoly in place, it’s hard to see how even the “disaster” which Halo 4 is portrayed as would be enough to break the franchise’s hold on the genre.

Lastly (and this is very simple), Halo’s decline began before 343 took control. Using sales data, Halo 3 has been and still is the best selling Halo game with 14.5 million total sales. But it wasn’t Bungie’s last Halo. That would be Halo Reach, with only 9.52 million sales. Even for a non-numbered release, that’s a significant decrease. This is followed by 343’s Halo 4 with even less, at 8.94 million. Based on this, the franchise began to fail while under Bungie's watch, not 343’s, poking yet another hole in the fallacy.

Unless you stopped reading early to write an all-caps rant, it’s clear that the “343 killed Halo” narrative is false. But if it wasn’t 343 that did it, then what? Three words: Call. Of. Duty.

Now, before you downvote me to the mantle of the Earth, just listen. We should probably start at the beginning. The first COD released in 2003 and was, like almost every other FPS at the time, a WW2 shooter. It, Medal of Honor, and Battlefield competed to have the funnest nazi-killing experience, but they were little league compared to Halo, which was then in its golden age, ruling the genre with a green-tinted titanium fist. But fast-forward to 2010, and things are a lot different. The failure of Halo Reach knocked the franchise off its throne and subsequent releases would only further drag it through the mud. This makes the years between 2007 and 2010 key when it comes to understanding the true cause of Halo's downfall. Now, at this point you might be wondering what all this has to do with COD, and I'm glad you asked! The answer is that in 2009, the second year of Bungie's offseason following Halo 3, the best-selling game was COD MW2. In 2010? COD Black Ops. 2011? MW3. 2012? Black Ops 2. Do you see the pattern here? Starting in 2009, COD would proceed to be the best selling game almost every year, its streak only broken twice by the blockbuster releases of Rockstar's GTA5 and RDR2. To put the significance of this in context, even before Reach, Halo had not once been the best selling game of the year (some sites will claim that Halo 3 was in 2007, but it was actually Guitar Hero 3). Furthermore, prior to 2009, no FPS had ever been the best selling game of the year. If there was anything that would've heralded the death of Halo between 2007 and 2010, it was COD. But before I continue on, let me address the two most likely holes you might poke in my argument:

"Even if we assume that Halo fell due to a competitor, why would it be COD instead of another?". Well, COD in 2009 was in a very special position. With the first Modern Warfare, it had finally thrown off the restrictive shackles of the WW2 setting, something that Medal of Honor had not. When it comes to Battlefield, which had actually modernized before COD, the answer is simply that players were more interested in arena shooters back then. I remind you that Halo had been as synonymous with the FPS genre as Mario is with platformers, so any FPS veering away from its intimate 5v5 gameplay was taking a risk. It’d be remiss of me, even as a Battlefield fan, to not concede that its large lobbies are most of what the game has to offer. These lobbies come with the consequence that an individual player is far less likely to reach as high on the leaderboard or have that much of an impact on the game’s result as they would in an arena shooter like Halo or COD. Basically, if you don’t want to roleplay as one of 64 (now 128) cogs in the machine of war, Battlefield isn’t for you, and in the 2000’s, it wasn’t for most players. By choosing to break form through embracing a modern setting while also conforming to the arena shooter dogma enacted by Halo, COD was able to outplay its competitors so that only it had the chance to steal Master Chief’s crown.

“If COD MW2 was so great that it began COD’s reign over the FPS genre, why wasn’t the original MW able to do it in 2007?”. MW1 was in the unfortunate position of releasing the same year as Halo 3, the peak of the Halo franchise. Whatever strengths that it had were overshadowed by the blinding light (I'm aware of the irony) of Halo in its golden age, and when deciding what game to buy, players would pick the angel they knew over the angel they didn’t. Conversely, MW2 released during Halo’s offseason, without fear of being smited by Bungie like its predecessor was, and was therefore able to fairly showcase itself to gamers without Halo stealing the spotlight.

Now that I’ve explained why COD’s not not the cause of Halo’s decline, I’ll explain why it actually is. Besides simply being good games, MW1 and MW2 had three aspects which allowed them to lead COD’s charge against Halo: A modern setting, arena shooter gameplay, and contemporary FPS conventions. The first two I partially discussed in part 1 of my surrebuttal and will continue to do so now. Firstly, ever since Wolfenstein, FPSs had used the WW2 setting to make easy “nazis bad, America good” narratives that were both uncontroversial and capable of letting you commit guilt-free mass murder upon scores of people without a thought. Decades of overuse left it stale, if not outright moldy. COD’s departure from this beaten and dead horse with the MW sub-series made it a unique and refreshing IP, clearing the field of most other claimants to the FPS throne. It’s also worth noting that this uniqueness and refreshment came not only in the form of contemporary maps and weapons but also a depiction of the far more contentious War on Terror. Secondly, while the popularity of arena shooters due to Halo would be Battlefield’s misfortune, COD would benefit from it. Halo and COD might have obvious differences, but in terms of how their matches play, they’re pretty similar: Two relatively small teams of players start on opposite sides of a tight map incentivizing CQC (with exceptions) and do whatever is required of them to gain the points that their victory is dependent upon. If that concept resonates with you as a gamer, then everything which rests upon it is, for all intents and purposes, completely optional and interchangeable. This means that by being an arena shooter, COD could more easily compete with Halo since it’d be fighting over the same audience with relatively uniform priorities and thought processes when it came to deciding whether or not a game was worth buying. Contrast this with Battlefield, which even today has to juggle both appeasing their current fans by being a good pseudo-MMO and trying to attract COD players by including some of its competitor’s mechanics, less able to effectively focus on either group and acting as an important reminder that a jack of all trades is a master of none. The third aspect, contemporary FPS conventions, is in my opinion the most significant of them all, though it's purposefully vague since I was unable to find or make up a catch-all term which I thought corresponded to it sufficiently. Before I discuss it, let's talk more about Halo. Anyone who's played the games, be they veterans or people who simply found them on Game Pass, can tell pretty acutely that they're a lot different from other FPSs. It shares a lot with games such as Quake Champions and Unreal Tournament, all three having at least partial inspiration from the original Doom games. Halo's uniqueness comes from the fact that its PvP combat is better described as a "duel" than a simple gunfight. ADS disabling upon taking damage and unrealistically decreased weapon spread encourages hip-firing, making you see the entire environment around you and your opponent. The fact that jumping to dodge bullets is a valid strategy paired with low recoil on many guns makes shootouts more dynamic and unpredictable than just two players pressing the murder button until someone dies. Grenades and melee are often used as simply stepping stones towards the eventual goal of getting a kill rather than being killers in their own right. Entire clips being used to bring down a single opponent is par for the course with the game's unusually high TTK, giving both players enough time to strategize and outthink each other. Halo is a ballet of death, the steps of which are obvious to everyone playing it: Shoot, 'nade, close the distance, and melee, though not always in that order. But as with any form of ballet, different styles would rise in its wake. These are the FPSs which attempted to compete with Halo during its golden age, a group which includes COD. They followed what I describe as contemporary FPS conventions, which is basically the complete opposite of Halo's duel-like combat: ADS is almost always required to reliably get kills due to accurately high spread while hip-firing, jumping is ineffective during combat and weapon recoil is logical, grenades and melee are either lethal alone or leave the target vulnerable enough to easily dispatch, and a more realistic TTK means that far fewer shots are needed to kill and each moment is more tense. Far from being graceful, the combat of these FPSs are a question of whose rationality is better at overcoming their fight-or-flight instinct within fractions of a second. Gameplay is constant paranoia punctuated by relatively swift moments of total desperation. However, Halo initially had the upper hand over these games. Even if contemporary FPS conventions became superior to Halo's ballet before COD rose up, Bungie’s baby would’ve still likely kept its position on the genre’s hierarchy since there had yet to be an IP following the model capable of breaking the loyalty of its playerbase. Medal of Honor would almost certainly stick to being an overdone WW2 game and Battlefield was too niche for the FPS audience of the time. Conversely, COD, with its interesting setting and en-vogue arena shooter gameplay, was the only franchise positioned to defeat Halo using contemporary FPS conventions, which it did. “But”, you might be wondering, “How do you know that contemporary FPS conventions were the deciding factor in the struggle between COD and Halo?”. For the same reason why I called them “contemporary”: Because almost every FPS to follow adopted them.

Gone are the days of jumping around with peashooters in FPSs. With CODs usurping the genre’s throne over Halo, it would mandate that its methods be enacted by all lesser IPs, something which occurred almost universally. If it was any other aspect of COD which allowed it to triumph, we would see similar mass-use. If it was the setting then most FPSs would be about conflict in the Middle East. If it was the arena shooter gameplay then Battlefield would’ve declined like Halo and the failure of PUBG resulting from it being a different type of FPS would’ve strangled the battle royale genre in its crib. The fact is that the tenets which differentiated COD from Halo are at least partially within every FPS from the last decade, and those tenets are the contemporary FPS conventions. To further exemplify how significant COD’s ascendancy was, let’s look again at a statistic I discussed earlier, that prior to MW2, no FPS had ever been the best-selling game of the year. Before that title, FPSs were just a gaming genre. The previous multiple best-sellers were Nintendo properties, Madden, GTA, and weirdly, Guitar Hero. But after, FPSs became the gaming genre. When people heard the word videogame, they weren’t thinking about Mario; they were thinking about the latest camera with a gun Activision had you playing as. As COD rose to prominence, the rest of the genre rose with it, fueled by a common use of contemporary FPS conventions. If Halo was king of a kingdom, COD was emperor of an empire.

Now, let’s go from Halo’s past to its present and future. Faced with its stinging defeat at the hands of COD, what did Halo do in response? Did the franchise reinvent itself to regain control of the genre, maybe even sufficiently incorporating successful aspects of its competitor to give it a taste of its own medicine? Not really. Halo is basically the same kind of game it was in 2007, albeit with more content and some new mechanics. Halo Reach can be excused for not significantly changing the formula since no one realized that there was a problem before it was released. The same can be said for Halo 4 as it was 343’s first mainline game and it still wasn’t completely clear what could stay and what had to go. But by Halo 5, a shift in the franchise was both overdue and yet to arrive. I suspect, though, that many of you will point out how Halo 4 had some similarities to COD, something which did little for its popularity besides getting veteran Halo fans upset. While this is true, the changes that were enacted were nothing compared to what would’ve been required to uplift the IP. Halo 4 basically put a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound. Hypothetically, there were two remotely satisfactory options that 343 could've chosen from for the franchise's future. The first would be simply accepting that Halo’s better days were behind it and relegating itself to be a niche legacy shooter with a fiercely loyal community, but Microsoft would never allow its only big exclusive to give in to mediocrity, so this would be out of the question. The second option was to embrace the contemporary FPS conventions which had originally been Halo's undoing, hopefully using the Halo brand and whatever remained after such an invasive surgery to launch a counteract and become the "chief" FPS once more. It'd be a difficult and certainly controversial task, but a worthwhile one. Instead, 343 chose to be go in between, a terrible decision. Had it gone all the way, Halo might have become a big player in the genre, if not the leader that it used to be. Had it gone none of the way, it could've patched up the holes in whatever remained of its hemorrhaging playerbase and gone forward from there (though, as previously discussed, this hypothetical situation would never occur). By stopping in the middle, Halo lost even more veterans, who were disgruntled by the franchise's many changes, and got little interest from outside FPS players, who'd judged the game to be just a bad version of COD due to an insufficient amount of changes. It was literally the worst of both worlds. Even Battlefield is in a better position since its changes are simply to placate COD fans into embracing it while also making it clear that it's still Battlefield for current fans. Afterwards of course came Halo 5, which was actually more successful than its predecessor, though that was a low bar. It basically suffered from the same issues, the only difference being that 343 completely understood what those issues were and how to fix them, but didn't.

Finally, we come to today, and Halo Infinite. With the 7th major entry in the series (I don’t count ODST as major because it was supposed to be DLC and is too different to the other games), and possibly the last, 343 had the chance to finally return Halo to its golden age. Besides having clear knowledge of the entire situation, they were developing the game at a time when the franchise's age-old enemies were vulnerable. Medal of Honor had ceased to exist, COD fans were getting tired of paying $60 every year as if they were FIFA fans, and Battlefield 5 was a resounding failure. In the wake of their crises, Halo could have rise to the occasion and retaken its place of greatness. But unfortunately, I don't see that happening. When 343 described Infinite as a return to the "good old days" of the series, it showed me that Halo had spent the last ten years stalling and struggling to go forward before giving up and trying to go backwards, as if making itself to be just like it used to be would release it from its rut. What's ironic is that everything Halo actually has going for it (yes, such things exist) is the result of an innovation in the videogame industry, that being live service games. We all know what live service is: It was popularized as a profit method that required no paywall (or ads), its P2W use in Battlefront 2 made us fear that tweens wielding their mom's credit card would dominate in games, battle passes made it more reliably profitable, and everything's basically good right now. 343 was smart (or just not stupid) to implement it into Infinite, because otherwise, the game would likely be DOA in a crowded field of FPSs, most of which are live service. Its free status will get people to play and be exposed to a game they wouldn't spend $60 on and its continuous revenue model using seasons and battle passes will make them more engaged (and willing to spend money). Add to that the brand of a beloved franchise, and Halo Infinite has all the tools it needs to succeed. There's one problem though: itself. For whatever profits 343 makes because of live service, it does so in spite of the actual game, not because of it. Will live service be enough? I don't think so. Remember HyperScape, Ubisoft's attempt to shoehorn the model into an otherwise uninteresting concept so that it could cash in on the "battle royale=money" trend? Yeah, neither do I, and it's proof that using live service as a crutch doesn't work. The fact of the matter is that Halo refused to go forward while everyone else did, and now it's trying to play catch-up without actually catching up. Will Infinite do better than Halo 5? Probably. Will it do better than Halo 3? Probably not. It'll likely have a good few months before losing interest and being left with its remaining veterans and those who the game's live service elements were able to successfully entice. In my opinion, Infinite’s potential to bring Halo back has been wasted. It's honestly a shame to see a franchise once lauded for innovation drown in its own stagnancy.

I think that the most striking proof of my argument is Bungie itself. After it left Halo, the developer knew that it had to adapt in order for its next game to not be a disaster like Reach was. So it made another sci-fi shooter about powerful heros traveling through space to save humanity from aliens. What differed, however, was that it used the contemporary FPS conventions which Bungie had realized were now the standard. This coalesced into Destiny, which is arguably a more active competitor in the genre than Halo has been in years. And sure, Halo’s arena shooting is a lot different from Destiny’s looter shooting, but firstly, Destiny has an arena shooter mode that’s more COD than Halo, and secondly, the point is still there that Bungie saw how Halo needed innovation, innovation which it would implement in its later IP. If you’re going to blame 343’s changes for Halo’s decline, remember that its founders would’ve done the same, though maybe more effectively. To be honest, I feel sorry for 343. It constantly faces the ire of Halo fans who see it as undeserving to run Halo and idolize the developer who abandoned them (daddy issues, amirite?). It was created to be a miracle worker and is called a failure because it was inevitably unsuccessful at working miracles. Whether or not 343 changes Halo, the franchise's fanbase will suffer, be it due to losses of veterans or prospective newcomers. Were I in its shoes, I’d just pull a Destiny, making myself a new IP that offered complete creative and developmentory freedom, giving myself the opportunity to be more than just a failure, releasing myself from the dead-end job of pacifying Bungie’s unhappy orphans. 343 would never do that, however, though it has more to do with them than whether Microsoft would let it happen. The developer has known nothing but hatred and blame for supposedly being the root of Halo’s demise, so it is willing to let the franchise slowly decay rather than face the alternative, because the last thing it would do is prove the jeerers right by definitively putting it down. But maybe it can pass the gun to someone else, that being Microsoft itself. When the corporation bought ZeniMax, it looked to me as a long-overdue realization that having only one big exclusive was a bad idea. This of course led to the developer being purchased, netting Microsoft big names like Fallout, Skyrim, Doom, and Wolfenstein, with plans for its new subsidiary’s future releases to be locked out of non-Microsoft platforms. One of these releases is Starfield, coming in a little under a year. If Infinite fails to perform by Microsoft’s standards, it might come to the conclusion that Halo, its prize pony, its workhorse, has become an old mare, and that it’s time to take it out to pasture. Microsoft will replace it with new exclusives, and that’ll be that. It might be that Infinite defies all expectations and shows that Halo still has some life left in it, but more likely than not, it’ll be proof that a new paradigm in Microsoft’s game ecosystem is necessary, and the red carpet for it will be rolled out over the franchise’s grave. All stars die eventually, but this one could’ve at least gone supernova instead of dimming out into nothingness.

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