Halo Stopped Being Relevant A Long Time Ago

It’s hard to fathom now, but there was a time when Halo wasn’t playing catch-up with its contemporaries and instead revolutionized first-person shooters, right down to the notion of only being able to carry two weapons at a time. Its sandboxes and multiplayer felt revelatory back in the early 2000s.

When’s the last time you felt that way about anything in Halo? Infinite was the clearest vision of what a Halo game could be, with a fun campaign that tried to rethink the standard linear FPS format in an open-world setting–and even then, that structure was more reminiscent of other games, not something novel. Infinite’s reworking of the battle-pass model to ditch the FOMO aspect was also nice–if somewhat of an indictment of the quality of the uninspired rewards, which wouldn’t be worth a purchase if restricted to a limited-time window–but the mere presence of a battle pass in Halo in the first place felt, again, like trend chasing. 

In retrospect, it’s no surprise that Infinite, and every other post-Bungie Halo game, failed to resonate as much as the earlier entries in the series. In that time, Modern Warfare catapulted Call of Duty clearly ahead of Halo and the franchise never looked back; battle royale games and extraction shooters came along and carved out significant markets of their own; Counter-Strike continued to do its thing; various games in the mold of Battlefield tried to nail that formula to varying degrees of success; classic shooters like Doom and Wolfenstein reinvented themselves to become better than ever; and Bungie again reimagined the first-person shooter with Destiny 1 and 2. 

What has Halo done in that span? What even defines a Halo game at this point? Would you recognize it without the name or Master Chief attached?

No doubt much or all of this can be traced back to poor management. Despite a 15-year span composed of far more disappointments than highlights for Halo, as someone who has adored the series, I am sorry to see Halo Studios gutted and the franchise handed off to Activision. Given Xbox’s shifting focus, it’s easy to worry that the next Halo game will feel more like Call of Duty than ever before, and the 343/Halo Studios era has amply demonstrated that Halo can only succeed by being its own thing.

It might be unfair to stack up the number of years in which Halo was relevant against those in which it was not. The impact of Halo extends well beyond the 2000s. But the days in which Halo was Xbox’s flagship franchise–let alone something that felt special or worth looking forward to–are a thing of an increasingly distant past.