Halo's Decline & Activision Takeover — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] Halo should be Xbox's Call of Duty. Of course, thanks to a $69 billion acquisition, Call of Duty is now Xbox's Call of Duty. But I think you get the idea. Halo should be massive.

[00:13] It should be the premier first-person shooter on Xbox. It should be delivering stellar campaigns and phenomenal multiplayer on a regular basis. It should be among Team Green's most played games on any given day.

[00:26] But it isn't. And perhaps the reason why is nothing more than the passage of time and the shifting trends. Can any game sit on the popularity throne forever? The simple truth may be that Master Chief

[00:38] is an artifact of the original Xbox and 360 days. And that 2010's incredible Halo Reach was a natural end point that should have been respected. But while that may indeed be the case,

[00:50] the story doesn't reflect Microsoft's uneven handling of the series. Bungie delivered lightning in a bottle five times in a row over the course of a decade. Its successor, the purpose-built 343 Industries, now Halo Studios, found it all but impossible

[01:04] to replicate those achievements. Across 15 years, it struggled to hit a regular cadence. The development pipelines of yesteryear allowed Bungie to deliver a new game every couple of years or so, but there was a six-year gap between Halo 5 and Infinite, and very soon

[01:20] Another six years will pass without a mainline entry. Halo simply isn't in the public eye in the way it was during the 360 era, nor the way Call of Duty is today. With this in mind, it's entirely unsurprising to see that Xbox CEO Asha Sharma

[01:36] has assigned Activision the task of developing the next Halo. If nothing else, Activision is an unrelenting video game factory, a colossal machine of rotating studios that assembles high-budget shooters year in, year out.

[01:50] If Sharma wants to ship Halo games, left of Halo games, there's no better Microsoft division to rectify that issue. But cadence hasn't been the only problem that Halo has had to contend with over the

[02:02] past two console generations Simply put there hasn been a must Halo since Bungie called it quits The days of 90 plus on Metacritic are a distant memory That not to say Halo Studios' games have been anything close to a disaster, but every one of its projects

[02:18] suggests a studio struggling to stay true to a formula it didn't invent. It's an odd situation because, at least in theory, it followed the Bungie playbook to the letter. Each of its games honors the past, maintaining traditions established way back in 2001, while also attempting to push the series into the future with brand new ideas and reworking mechanics.

[02:40] The Bungie era never stood still. Each new game built a topic's predecessor with new playable characters, new enemies, new abilities, new multiplayer modes, and even entirely new approaches to campaign design.

[02:52] All this can be said of Halo Studios' games, yet none of them ever successfully captured the magic. Perhaps that was the biggest problem. Should it have even tried to? Halo Studios was given

[03:07] the arguably impossible task of maintaining and continuing the legacy of one of the most important series in FPS history. Of course, it tried to make games that felt like budget projects, but in doing so, it never successfully established a coherent new identity for the

[03:23] series' next era. Halo 4 felt like a true continuation of Bungie's work, a natural successor to the triumphs of Reach, and there's no denying that it was confined by pre-existing parameters and fan expectations. Halo 5 attempted to escape those rules, but its miserable campaign

[03:41] is the absolute worst version of something that could still be considered Halo. 2021's Infinite was positioned as the course corrector, but turned out to be a collection of modern trends. an open-world campaign, battle path, and daily quest field multiplayer

[03:55] embedded in all the iconography of a return to roots. The verdant green fields, blue-lit tunnels, and tight PvP arenas of combat evolve. Together, the series' attempts make for a fractured trilogy.

[04:07] United by their attempts to continue the path divided by a lack of shared direction these troubles are only emphasized when contrasted against its Xbox stablemate Gears of War The co continuation of Epic Macho Shooter similarly hasn lived up to the

[04:22] high bar of the original trilogy, but the duology of Gears 4 and 5 undeniably has its own coherent identity, which, yes, as far as the campaign goes is a bit Gears imitating PlayStation single-player-shake, but it's an identity nonetheless, and that approach

[04:38] appears set to continue in the upcoming e-day. Halo's 15-year quest to stay true to Bungie has been its albatross. A lack of a truly fresh perspective dulls its edge in the modern era,

[04:50] while its struggle to balance the old with the new frustrates long-time Halo fans who simply want to play more Halo. It's hard to think of another studio for which Doomed If You Do, Doomed If You Don't is more applicable. But that quest is now over. Halo Studios has been gutted.

[05:06] its sole reason for being handed over to the masters of Call of Duty. But while an entirely different division of Xbox may now be in charge, it faces exactly the same challenge. What is post-Bungie Halo?

[05:19] That question still needs an answer. A vague, totally unsubstantiated rumor has suggested that Activision plans to totally

[05:38] reboot Halo. Fans are, predictably, divided by the notion. Some feel it's time Master Chief was laid to rest. Whether the next story takes place in existing canon or not doesn't hugely matter if we're

[05:50] the world through fresh eyes. Akin to ODST's special forces or Reach's team of Spartans, there'd be little need to untangle the narrative threads of Chief's career and the universe's least desirable elements are easily ignored by shifting to a different theater of war.

[06:05] The more important aspect is preserving the fundamental gameplay blueprint, the slower pace, the small but specialized arsenal, the original approach to multiplayer, the wide the linear campaign design the exceptional enemy AI that makes each and every engagement unpredictable It is this approach that id Software took when it created its new vision of Doom But you could never accuse it of being beholden to that tradition Every single component felt cutting edge It was somehow a classic old

[06:33] school shooter while simultaneously being one of the decade's most forward-thinking games. But the task has been given to Activision, and whether or not it can, or even wants to, replicate id's success with Doom remains to be seen. But considering the company's history,

[06:48] it's understandable if fans already have a negative outwork. Activision could well turn Halo into Xbox's Call of Duty by making it Call of Duty. Overstuffed menus and a relentless army of pop-ups asking you to buy the battle pass, invest in bitskin,

[07:02] play this limited time mode. Halo Infinite was already showing signs of heading in that direction. So could this new era take a plunge completely and shower us with color-chewed weapons, with 16 mod slots, a battle royale map,

[07:15] later repurposed for an extraction shooter? How can you blame anyone who's grown tired of Call of Duty's aggressive approach to be wary of what's to come? During its golden era, Bungie ensured Halo was the state. For all its faults and failures, Halo Studios understood that.

[07:30] It just never managed to coalesce or cohere in a compelling version of that for the series' next generation. And so we can only hope that Activision will recognize it too, but find more success in bringing Halo's distinguishing qualities to a modern player base.

[07:43] The way to do that is not to replicate the Halo of the past, but to recreate the conditions of its creation, to allow the team of designers, artists, and engineers given stewardship of the series the time and freedom to establish something

[07:57] as special as Combat Evolved was 25 years ago. The reality, of course, is that Xbox cannot afford to do that. It needs a new Halo yesterday, but it also needs a damn good reason for you to buy its next-generation console.

[08:10] Somewhere in that pressure cooker of a situation, I hope the game that Halo's legacy deserves can grow. But what do you think? Does Halo need to change? Does it need to revisit what made it successful in the past? Or should chief and friends get the eternal rest they deserve?

[08:23] Let us know in the comments below and for more on Halo, Xbox and all video games, stay with IGN.