The Halo General in /vg/ died today. It's been on life support for the last few weeks and has already died before this in the last 10 days.
Whether it stays dead or if someone makes yet another one, I don't know, but this was the only Xbox-brand oriented general on that board and now it's gone.
I think it's fair to say Halo's popularity is a shell of its former self, but why? Surely the answer is more complicated and systematic than just "343 industries" or sonething like that.
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It's a mix of multiple things all happening in succession. Think of it as a perfect order of disaster events aligning just right.
To generalize though, the two biggest contributing factors were the rise of call of duty and the Halo series' response to it.
Halo is not a popular series anymore. It hasn't been for some time. It's supported on namw recognition alone. A VERY small portion of the original fans still play the new games, and they're only getting older.
Meanwhile, virtually none of the newer generation is taking up the series. This is something you absolutely need to maintain a healthy playerbase on consoles. Kids today don't even know what Halo is. All they know is they're not interested in it.
>#3327
Get at me.
Halo has been dead since post-Reach as both a viable brand and a fun series of games. The only things to come out of the franchise since Reach came out are the Forerunner books, and a couple of Halo Custom Edition mods and maps.
Halo 4 was the biggest factor but other things like MW2 redefining shooters to this day played a role.
343i killed Halo.
Halo 4 was shit.
MW2 redefining shooters
How?
Microsoft was fucking stupid for not letting Bungie make Destiny, which would have been a much better game and a huge hit for the Xbox had Microsoft published it.
As far Halo goes, there's no hope that Halo 6 will be the series' redemption. There have been too many awful decisions and mistakes by 343 - Halo 4, Halo MCC (which should have been the easiest 10/10 game ever. They had one fucking job) and Halo 5's failure.
Halo 4 only sold as well as it did because the brand was still relevant and it was the first main series entry in 5 years. In a couple of weeks, its multiplayer base had less people playing it than Halo 3. I'm guessing that's why 343 did the whole "free updates" in H5 and was so negligent in fixing MCC, because it meant the player base would keep coming back and they wouldn't have the PR disaster of more people playing the older games than H5.
Apparently, 343 is "listening" to the fans for H6, but you would have to be a fool not to be skeptical. They have never delivered a fantastic or even great Halo experience and they fucked up the story so badly that it's better for them to drop their own saga and start over again.
Microsoft's greed and 343's incompetence has killed this franchise and it will never go back to having that amazing momentum that they once had.
You will never see people get this excited for a Halo game ever again.
Cod 4 and MW2 are the earliest models of the kind of game that is attempted tp be replicated to this day on the console market. It's been said that COD "cracked the casual" code and I think that's accurate. Win or lose, every normie gets a rush from taking down someone else in COD and you are always rewarded. It's thats constant stream of unlocks and progression that makes post COD 3 Call pf Duty so addicting for so many people.
Compared to Halo, which is largely win-loss oriented, that's not engrossing or addicting enough for players now. There is not that constant fix of unlocks, which is why in Halo now, if one team gets out to an early lead, players on the losing team will oftwn quit.
Halo 3 still held it's own against COD 4, but barely. Then MW2 released and Halo had no real answer, just a standalone expansion for 3 priced at a full $60 retail. Seriously, ODST doesn't get enough blame for what went wrong. By the time Reach came out, it was too late, Cod was the new king and Halo was largely deprived of new and incoming ypungsters and older players... well, got too old. Most original fans were into their mid or late 20s by then which meant the Halo 3 boom players had to sustain the population and Cod was sucking them up by the thousands.
You NEED a consistant attach rate from younger players to sustain a franchise because okder players eventually just stop playing video games. If I could say one good thing about Halo 5, it's that it peobably has the oldest average age of any halo multiplayer, but that's only because the onky people playing it are old timers that can't let go.
last canon game was odst. everything after that was just "we want the cod multiplayer audience" cashgrab trash with fanfiction campaign slapped on.
Prometheans, Bonnie Ross and the fruitless endeavor of shying away from MC.
People like Frank O'Connor, Josh Holmes and Kiki Wolfkill are also to blame.
You're asking two different questions that are only indirectly related.
>Why did Halo fall from grace
There is no one answer to this. There were SEVERAL things that occured, both within the franchise and outside of it, all happening in succession that contributed to the fall. Think of it like the Titanic. They said they had 5 or 6 emergency failsafes that could go before the ship sank. Think of Halo 4 as the final failsafe that went. We know this because despite everything that had gone wrong between 2007 and 2012, as of the release of Halo 4 there was still a high demand for the Halo brand. You can see by the good sales of Halo 4 at launch and the catestrophic drop off in population that fell off a cliff that the bullet that finally brought Halp down happened there. Halo 5 having a low population is just a formality. Nothing was going to return the series to grace after that. In case you're wondering on what somw of the earluer factors were before 4 happened, they were to name a few: the rise of Cod as a titan of console multiplayer, a shift within the halo custom game community from social varients of the competitive mp to all out mini games,
As far as /hg/ goes however, the general in question is a good example of how the fanbase reacted to the changes: they left. Seriously, the only people left in /hg/ are people that are overly contrarian about the state pf the series compared to what the vast majority feel. If you've bewn in an /hg/ xbox live party, the hivemind mentality is that bungie is the real villain and that Halo 4 and 5 are fine games. 5 especially, which the consensus /hg/ opinion is that it has the best multiplayer in the series and any attempt to argue against that will get you labled anything from "bungiedrone", "destinyshill", or "halo 3 babby". These are the only people still playing the new Halo games. There might be the occasional exception, but the reason the pop is so low is because the only people playing are the ones that like it.
nice phonepost, buddy.
I just haven't been able to get into the newer ones like I did halo 2 and 3, even though I think halo 5's gameplay is pretty fucking good. I always enjoyed the campaigns personally and once 343 started incorporating the books and other halo media into the story more and more I found myself unable to really enjoy it because I had to go on Google and read up on all these characters I had never seen before since they were only in the books or comics. I can also see why people would get pissed about other shit too like sprinting and classes a la cod but that shit doesn't really bother me as much.
Also as much of a step forward that halo 5 was from 4, halo 4 pretty much killed any hype and love I had for the series moving forward. That game was so fucking shit
This. /hg/ actually has a discord, and it's very active, with anywhere from 30 to 60 people being online and posting at once, but the actual "Halo" chat area of the discord is almost always barren. The main chat, which is much more active, is filled with far right wing hivemind circlejerking, anime posting, and meme dumps. This means that there are people that post in discord constantly but can't be bothered to bump the thread. In fact, I was in an /hg/ party a few days ago and several of them specifically stated they WANTED the thread to die and would purposely not bump it.
Not that the thread has been worth visiting in the last 6 months anyway. Any conversation that gets any steam is an argument about why Halo _ is "objectively" the best halo and why everyone that disagrees is "objectively" wrong. So I guess the general has been dead on the inside for a while now and only now realized it.
I played with those guys once. Never in my life have I dealt with such a clusterfuck of imtolerable personalities, randing from mildly autistic to debating the most pointless things. It didn't help that two thirds of them went negative in the game we were in. The only ones that were good at all complete dicks to everyone else.
Doesn't matter to me, I still enjoy the games.
>that /hg/ party last night
Only like 3 people actually playing halo (though admittedly I wasn't either) while everyone argues about how WWII should have ended
Glad the general is dead desu.
Just get a xim4, Xbone, and mcc and replay the single player campaigns over and over until you die. That's all halo has left anymore
People here have been pretty spot on.
Halo was never going to retake it's spot in the sun after MW2, but it didn't have to die like this.
Also yeah /hg/ is... was terrible
ODST is also a terrible Halo game and a bad shooter in general.
The series is dead, and if nothing is done soon, seemingly for good. The Xbox as you know it, is currently a dying console. Microsoft has run the Xbox brand into the ground, 343 has run the Halo series into the ground, and without an installbase anywhere near the size of the PS4, PC, or at least the original Xbox 360, there's now hardly a place for a PERFECT Halo game to flourish.
Halo 4 struck gold and led 343 into a false sense of security, because for all its faults the game sold exceptionally well and the xbox 360's userbase was incredibly large, coupled with the fact longtime fans saw the long-awaited sequel to Halo 3. In the end though, it showed clear signs of failing to retain this audience early in its lifespan, and not many efforts were made in Halo 4 to appease them until the MCC re-release of the game.
It ultimately failed to maintain that new audience for long, but with Halo 5 around the corner there was a couple of things 343 just flat out didn't consider
>The Xbox One console and launch of MCC were very poorly received and many still did not own an Xbox One
>The new audience attained from Halo 4 all bought a PS4 instead, who were already bored of the Halo series with Halo 4.
>Meaning that the only consumers left who actually bought the new console and Halo 5, were longtime Halo fans.
>You still tried to cater to both audiences, retaining neither
This is why games like arma , r6s and other tacticool games will never reach cods level of popularity
Videogames died in 2008
Halo 4 sold well because it was marketed as a sequel to 3. It was literally childhood nostalgia pandering on a stick. If 343 honestly thought the initial sales were a better metric tp look at than the population drop, which is the worst I've ever seen in a game, then they are still completely to blame.
343 is notorious for living in their own little bubble.
This /hg/ lasted almost 2 years, that's the longest a Halo General has survived since /vg/ was created back in 2012.
I'm realizing now that there was a fucking 5 year gap between 3 and 4, holy shit. Yea it was nostalgia pandering to college and high school kids who played it when they were teenagers
Halo 3 was the last true "halo" game in the sense of community strength and overall quality of mechanics.
Halo: Reach was the last gasp of air for the franchise and started the decline with all the classes and bullshit.
The franchise should have died with 3 like it was intended to. Every new aspect of the games that followed were meant to copy call of duty/every new fps instead of providing an alternative.
They fucked over their core fan base for the competitive scene which alienated a lot of people who play it casually.
Fuck 343 and fuck Microsoft for continuing this zombie franchise
>How to make Halo great again:
Release any and all Halo games to the PC, along with robust mod tools. Just look at CE - 16 years later it's still being played and mods and maps are being made.
the only thing halo has going for it now is the game modes
idk much about the new halo but all those crazy multiplayer game types were a blast, something modern console shooters lack
halo basically invented the infected gametype which cod stole
zombies
all in all i think halo slowly lost it's fan base starting with 2, but after 3 it really dipped and the amount popular shooters out there both new and old were more than enough to take it's place
Last decent Halo game was Reach
Just give it up friend
Anyone that thinks Halo could ever reach its popularity from 2007-2010 is a fool. That ship has sailed and people need to learn to deal with their game being a niche title.
idk but it hurts
i had some great times in halo 2, halo 3, and reach mp
Fuck off with your biased nitpicking videos shill.
The fight finished.
>the only thing halo has going for it now is the game modes
And then 5 threw that all out the window.
The last 8 months of that have been life support, systained on bumping for the sake of bumping, arguing about MY HALO IS BETTER THAN YOUR HALO, and discord drama
3 had the most fans and biggest population. The population started dipping in 2009. Despite its issues, Reach stayed a healthily populated and popular game through its existance and to this date is more populated than Halo 4 and is only about 13,000 behind halo 5 which sits at about 19,000. Halo 4 was the one that really did it
343 industries, this is not some complicated secret, the games have lost what made them unique and popular, the series is dying itself
Which modes are missing?
>It's been on life support for the last few weeks
It's actually been on life support for best part of a year. People kept anime posting and drama posting, pointlessly keeping the threads alive for no other reason than to keep their secret little club alive.
All of the asymmetrical modes, and Extraction.
Sigmund won.
He is the emperor Sheev of /hg/.
He tried to defeat Kai and claim leader, but he was unsuccessful, however his discord grew in strength with people that now only post there and not in the thread. The discord has become the new /hg/ and sigmund has become the new leader.
>nitpicking
That would eventually lead to the downfall of the franchise
Pretty much. I have friends that ditched Titanfall 2 because "I already unlocked everything." Knowing that people prefer a pat on the head after every match to actually decent gameplay makes me angry.
>friend and I consider grabbing a used XB1 and Halo 5 when it comes out so we can crank that splitscreen like when we were kids
>343 comes out and says Halo 5 won't have splitscreen
Fuck it.
Like Reach?
Nice to see someone else from the general who wasn't deluded as fuck. was my post for reference
user you have nut on your macbook
Better off playing 3 again, or get the remake of 1 on xbone why would you bother with 5
funniest thing is the Halo Killer was Halo itself lol
...
Actually, it's 343. Nice try though lol
See I have probably the same issues with Reach that you do, but it didn't kill Halo. The game was pretty regularly in the top most played Xbox games. I'm not saying it didn't contribute to the fall, but 4 put the franchise in the grave.
oh, the ironing
>competitive
>competitive
>competitive
>competitive?
>competitive, competitive
>competitive!
>competitive
>competitive
Shut the fuck up.
m.youtube.com
Reach killed interest in the franchise and started the decline. Its numbers were pitiful compared to 3.
/vg/ was a mistake. good god you're acting like having nothing left to say is a major life changing event
Explain, who is Sigmund and who is Kai
Mandatory Viewing
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/tfg/ is nice because there isn't any cliquiness and secret club bullshit yet
Can someone post a discord invite?
I just want someone to talk about halo
At least try
No game series can last forever changing so little between releases.
>Muh ADS
>Muh sprinting
>Muh new enemies I don't like
These are all minor changes in comparison to the experimentation in other long running series like Mario or Zelda. The sure fire way to make Halo more dead than it is now was to constantly release Halo 3 clones with almost no changes. To become a titan again Halo needs another Halo 1 moment.
I don't know how you reinvigorate and revolutionize a first person shooter any more though. Almost everything has been tried or done.
Actually when Reach launched it broke tge record for most popular game on Xbox Live ever. It did average less players overall but that's in 2011 when COD was king of the world and Reach had to split its population with the still popular Halo 3.
I hate having to defend Reach. I really don't care much for the game, and I do think it contributed to the downfall, but it didn't kill the series. 343 did.
>Actually when Reach launched it broke tge record for most popular game on Xbox Live ever.
And then a week later Black Ops came out.
Sigmund will cling to the discord for as long as he possibly can. He was the biggest power hungry loser in hg, constantly trying to paint himself in the best light, obsessing over it and trying to create rifts against other members and Kai. I'm glad Kai held on to the Company as it will eat away at him for as long as he does. Sigmund had the typical "nice guy on the surface" persona.
I hope when the next iteration of Halo General losers like himself and Dew, the 2 most contrarian people I've ever met, don't come back. We're clearly kidding ourselves though as the general was pretty much all they had and obsessed over. 99% of the arguments in the threads were them sperging out over even the smallest of lore details, if you ever spent a night in any of the hg parties its obvious who was behind which posts. The same way they speak, the same opinions, the same sensitive snowflakes when their preferences are questioned.
It's a shame because hg had some pretty nice people, some I'd gladly class as friends, but they either left or were drowned out by the shitposting and arguments.
This.
People complained about Reach all through its tenure, but they still kept playing, and the customs community was at an all time high. Halo 4 was the death knell.
>never get another halo general community montage
Thank you for proving my point.
QUICK!
LIST THE TOP 5 WORST PEOPLE IN /HG/!
The point being that even Halo 4 had a pretty good launch night. Halo 3 survived how many Call of Duty games in first place?
Reach shattered the playerbase that Halo 3 had. Follow that up with Halo 4's drastic changes to the already drastic changes that Reach made from what was really the perfect formula to release every three years or so, and the playerbase wanes again. Halo 5 comes along and kills any hope for the single player for the lorefags, and the multiplayer is hot garbage except for the most hardcore of fanboys wanting to justify their purchase of an Xbone, which, at this point, only has THREE exclusive games.
You're missing the point. Those "minor" changes completely gutted the gameplay without introducing anything new. Honestly I feel like the new successor to halo should be titanfall. They just need better enemy design because the gameplay and level design were on fucking point
Change of tone/themes and CoD happened
when you have a game large enough to compete toe to toe with CoD you have either 2 options
1: risk your playerbase and add mechanics and stuff from the rival series to appeal to other playerbase.
2: play it safe and tweak/fix/perfectioning the gameplay so that your playerbase stays loyal and grows.
Microsoft risked it and tried option 1 and Halo 4/5 happened.
And now they went full panic mode with Halo 6, because they know, if this one fails, they might aswell can the rest of the series for ever.
Microsoft never learned that Halo is a niche series, outside of the multiplayer and FPS appeal, Halo always had this "hard" military sci fi universe, they killed that theme for a easier to understand "anime" theme
instead of being complex and shit, they went we wuz spartans n shit basically, also, you NEED to read the latest books to understand Halo 4 and Halo 5, its a clusterfuck what 343i/Microsoft did with the series.
Halo 3 was always in the top 5 games of XBL till Reach, and then Reach was on the same top (5/10) until 4 and all the shitstorm that came with it
Yes, Reach wasn't as large as 3, but it hold its weight vs CoD and such games.
*fuck
:^)
Halo 5 is great and has tons of players
The general probably degenerated into a tripfag circlejerk
Again, Reach contributed to the decline, but not even a hundreth of what 4 did
This video makes me too depressed.
In fact this entire thread has been depressing to read because I know its all true.
This
Halo 4 came out after a shit game that nobody wanted to play. Reach didn't.
I mean, CoD was getting big, and FAST, so instead of securing their playerbase, they tried to appeal to them.
and thats something they didn't know, you don't COMPETE with another predator, you coexist with it.
But people like reach. Nobody likes Halo 4.
The population drop off was catastrophic.
You can twist the goalposts all you want. Reach didn't kill halo. 343 did.
People were still holding (and still are) onto brand loyalty when Reach came out. The changes to Firefight, the nickel and diming of credits for customization rather than just unlocking gear as you did cool shit, armor abilities, everything that Halo 4 did wrong, short of the poor enemy design in the single player, started in Reach.
The trend started before Reach with ODST, Reach contributed to it, but the biggest contributer by far was 4. Not even close.
>all that "hunt the truth" garbage pre-release Halo 5
>all that hype about Master Chief being a "bad guy"
>MC literally fights Locke for no more than a minute
>shortly after they team up to fight some mechanical bird
The entire marketing campaign was literally geared towards selling this farce about Master Chief going rogue. Also,
>creating enlarged maps to justify the spartan abilities and sprint in Halo 5
>literally copying and pasting every single player ability that was in CoD AW
>automatic rifles that were stupidly overpowered for no logical reason
>excluding classic gametypes like king of the hill, assault, and oddball
>big team battle was trash
They'll only continue to try and milk this franchise and you can bet they WON'T learn from previous mistakes. CoD is on a steep decline, Infinite Warfare was a dud and only sold a decent amount of copies because CoD4 remastered and WW2 looks pretty trash so if ever there was a time for Halo to make a comeback it's with Halo 6 but 343 will fuck it up guarantee.
>b-but reach!
Looks like the discord has arrived
Could you at least agree that Reach was the fatal shot?
Everything you've just mentioned is what is so disgusting about /vg/. It's Reddit Plus.
Reach had really solid consistent numbers for its whole life until 4 came out, even when black ops 2 was released.
Don't forget that Bungie was proud enough to have a population counter in both games and on their website to show. It never reached 3's numbers that's for sure but it was still standing on its own feet.
>Could you at least agree that Reach was the fatal shot?
Not at all. It held a very healthy population all through its life. Hell, it has more players now than 4 does.
Ease up on the Bungie worship, dude. ODST was a spin-off, and the only thing Reach took from it was Firefight.
It's simple. Think about it, every since Halo first released it was a trend setter.
>Halo:CE made console FPS and FPS story telling big
(Only other game at the time to do this would be Half-Life)
>Halo 2 had an ambitious story and introduced everyone to console online play
>Halo 3 came out at the start of a new generation and showed off the power of the 360 which no one had experienced up to that point.
During this golden age of Halo everyone was trying to make "the Halo killer" in order to out shine Halo.
Compared to Halo 3, it might as well have had 0 players. It was a miracle for the game to hold over 100k a year after launch.
No because the numbers don't back that up. Halo's popularity was declining steadily from 2008 onward. Reach split the population with but otherwise the overall halo numbers were consistant with that decline until 4 released, which is when the numbers plummeted.
No. Literally next to nobody thinks that. Reach is and always will be a more popular game than 4. 4 is widely considered the game that killed halo.
From someone who has always been outside the fandom let me tell you, from my point of view Halo has been dead since like 2009.