6 ms·

"When Halo came out"? As opposed to the endless steam of first person shooters that came before it that were even more straightforward, simplistic, and violence

"When Halo came out"? As opposed to the endless steam of first person shooters that came before it that were even more straightforward, simplistic, and violence-driven? Blaming Microsoft for this is insane. There is virtually no difference between Wolfenstein and Doom on the one hand, and Halo and Gears of War on the other - except for better graphics. If you think this is a trend of the past decade, then you either weren't a gamer in the '90s, or you are letting nostalgia colour your perceptions.

vanderZwan 14y ago
If you think there's virtually no difference except graphics, I'm not convinced that your perceptions are that unclouded either.
- pyre 14y ago
  Halo and Wolf3D have about the same amounts of 'whimsy' to my recollection.
pjmlp 14y ago
Given he was a kid when Halo came out, I doubt he was born when Wolfstein was all the rage for PC gamers.
unalone 14y ago
Wolfenstein and Doom were simple, playful, colorful. Even as game devices became more powerful, there was a playfulness to FPSes that you can see in titles like Perfect Dark and the Unreal series. One of Halo's major innovations was that it removed the health bar. In a shooter like Doom or Goldeneye, you have let's say 100 HP, and different weapons deal a different amount of damage. It's just like any fighting game with a health bar. Halo replaced that with a shield system, wherein being shot repeatedly wasn't a game-ender if you could get away long enough for shields to recharge. It changes the pacing of the game substantially, especially in multiplayer. The jittery feeling of older games, where every shot counts and you always have to be on the lookout for your opponent, was made both slower (because other players weren't constantly trying to get a shot on you and wear you down) and a bit more mindless (because once you got into a firefight, your only choice was to shoot the other person repeatedly or else there'd be no damage left whatsoever). This complements the self-seriousness of the Halo games, which absolutely inspired the direction of the next-gen titles. Halo was "grittier" and less silly than previous shooters had been. In Wolfenstein, you were fighting enemies like robo-Hitler. In Doom, the enemies you were up against were inventive, silly, and fun. And the push towards realism was by no means inevitable. Look at Unreal Tournament 2004, which was a touted push towards enhanced graphics and gameplay that took advantage of modern systems, but which remains an utterly comical game. The violence is whimsical and comic; the levels are far more ridiculous than Halo's or Halo 2's. It's a pretty game, as far as that goes, but the prettiness is used for exaggeration rather than for "grit". So obviously that path was not only possible for games, but it led to quite a few very good games over the last decade.
- thomholwerda 14y ago
  You seem to be missing a whole slew of games here, and most importantly, you don't seem to understand just how gritty, dark, and realistic Wolfenstein was for its time. You cherry-pick robo-Hitler in order to paint Wolfenstein as a fun and happy game - but the fact of the matter is that when it was released, it was the most realistic game ever made (give or take), in which you killed nazis. Nothing but nazis. In a first-person perspective, in a dark and gritty environment, in what was seen as very realistic. The policor backlash to the game's realism and grittiness - and the nazi-aspect - was huge. Wolfenstein was far, far more realistic and gritty than Halo has ever been, when put in historical perspective. Then there's the fact that other realistic console shooters existed long before Halo came out. Take Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark for the N64, for instance. Two highly-realistic first person shooters, accompanied by successful multiplayer elements. Or Medal of Honor for the PS1. On the PC, too - take Rise of the Triad, one of the most violent games I can think of. Its multiplayer was simplistic, straightforward, and incredibly violent and gory. I know it's all the rage to talk down on console gaming and games like Halo in particular, but the fact of the matter is that this kind of gaming didn't start with Halo, and had been around for a long, long time before it. Games like this have always existed alongside deeper and richer games, and that's a good thing - I like more intelligent and rewarding experiences, but after a long day or a stressful week, I just want to get some friends together and shoot zombies in Left 4 Dead 1/2 - just as I don't want every movie I see to be Philadelphia. Sometimes, I just want Armageddon or Die Hard, and there's nothing wrong with that.
  - kevdigital 14y ago
    Not to mention Doom was not at all "simple, playful, and colorful". Running around through Hell with dismembered corpses on spikes being chased but gruesome demons was frightening in the early '90s. Maybe it was just cause I was 10 at the time :)
- ChiperSoft 14y ago
  Just a minor nitpick, but Halo did have a health bar. It was Halo 2 that removed it. Bungie briefly brought it bak in Halo ODST (which was why my friends and I loved its firefight the best). Halo 2 wasn't the first game to remove the health bar either, Red Faction 2 had an almost identical vitality system to Halo's shields.
kevdigital 14y ago
Yeah, violent games and shooters have been around well before Halo. It just brought shooters to the consoles. God forbid other "bro types" enjoy games too. There's plenty of other inventive, creative games out there if that's your thing too.
- unalone 14y ago
  > God forbid other "bro types" enjoy games too. Being a bro isn't, like, something you're born into. It's a certain mentality, a certain way of approaching the world. And while I like many facets of bro-dom, and enjoy the hell out of sitting down for some Smash with a couple of friends and a six-pack of Yuengling, there are some bothersome things about bro culture which that particular category of game emphasizes. I mean, I'm critical of the FPS as a genre to some extent. It's fun as hell, but the nature of how the genre's set up has given it some kind of crappy limitations that no game I know of yet has managed to overcome. Even the best ones, like the Half-Life franchise, are limited in ways that bother me. I'm also not super fond of hardcore gaming: it's cool to watch from afar, but it's not an especially inclusive culture, and I fear that games like Starcraft and League of Legends help to scare away a broader variety of players. I'm not trying to say that gaming was perfect before Halo came out; I do think, however, that Halo helped to push a wave of bright designers in some shitty directions, and that game design has suffered as a result. I'm critical of "games that attract waves of bros", if the bros seem to be the majority of person attracted to a game, in the same way that I'm critical of movies that attract that sort of person. Adam Sandler movies, for instance. I'm not saying everybody who likes Adam Sandler is a bad person, but I do feel that Sandler movies are kind of puerile and limited in a way that appeals to a particular type of person, and that, to the extent that they influence other creators, they do some damage to our culture. Adam Sandler's influence on movie-making has been less impactful than Halo's influence on game design, so the mentality described in the OP does bother me somewhat. To hear a guy working at Microsoft say "my company specifically tried to manufacture this kind of experience to reach this kind of audience" pisses me off.
  - mbrock 14y ago
    Have you seen Punch-Drunk Love? The thing about that movie is that it takes Sandler's film personality, but abstracts it out from the context of blatant comedy and inserts it into a low-key tragedy, with the skill & taste of an auteur writer/director (Paul Thomas Anderson). It's quite wonderful, and now I'm thinking about what the equivalent for Halo would be. Maybe a game that brings out the tragic aspects of war -- not just as shocking gore, but as sadness and horror. Maybe a game about a Halo warrior's post-war life, a civil Sim-type game interrupted by disturbing scenes of post-traumatic hallucination & paranoia. Or a game that starts out as a shooter and becomes impossibly difficult, until the player's inevitable death, after which the real game begins, taking place in a Tibetan Buddhism-inspired series of post-death liminal states of terrifying scenes of his past sins.
astar 14y ago
Halo was a standout because of it brought multiplayer to console, wasn't it the first console game to have 16 players? The coop campaign was also really fun. Maybe the article-writer thinks that Halo made FPS too mainstream? Unlike Doom/Quake, it was cleaned up enough in a pretty blockbuster-wrapper to make it the new model of gaming to follow?
- DanBC 14y ago
  Saturn Bomberman had 10 players for multiplayer. I'm not quite sure I follow OPs point. Playstation had a bunch of thoroughly unfun uncute games.
  - hnal943 14y ago
    Absolutely. It was the PlayStation that first marketed itself as the system for hardcore gamers.
    - shiftpgdn 14y ago
      Genesis does what Nintendon't. Sega was the system for 'hardcore' console gamers of the 90s. Just take a look at this ad: http://www.eidolons-inn.net/segabase/G-32XPromoAd1.jpg http://www.eidolons-inn.net/segabase/G-32XPromoAd1.jpg The gaming industry has /always marketed to that crowd, it's not something Microsoft invented.
  - thenonsequitur 13y ago
    Tangentially, have you seen bombermine? It's an online bomberman clone that generally has several hundred people playing simultaneously, a ton of fun. Obviously not a console game, but your Saturn Bomberman reference made me think of it.
- brudgers 14y ago
  In 1996, my wife would call my pager Tuesday night because I hadn't come home from the office. We were playing Quake over the Novell on our CAD workstations. It's easier now, but there hasn't been a quantum change.
6thSigma 14y ago
Halo (well, Bungie) revolutionized the console FPS. Halo had dual analog control (I'm sure there were FPS that had it before Halo, but I don't know what it is). Halo 2 introduced online play with playlists rather than servers (I believe they were the first). Those are innovations that sparked hundreds (thousands?) of copy cats. Not saying Wolfenstein/Doom didn't have a ton of innovations as well, but I think it's safe to say Halo took things to a completely new level.

vanderZwan 14y ago

If you think there's virtually no difference except graphics, I'm not convinced that your perceptions are that unclouded either.

pyre 14y ago
Halo and Wolf3D have about the same amounts of 'whimsy' to my recollection.

pjmlp 14y ago

Given he was a kid when Halo came out, I doubt he was born when Wolfstein was all the rage for PC gamers.

unalone 14y ago

Wolfenstein and Doom were simple, playful, colorful. Even as game devices became more powerful, there was a playfulness to FPSes that you can see in titles like Perfect Dark and the Unreal series. One of Halo's major innovations was that it removed the health bar. In a shooter like Doom or Goldeneye, you have let's say 100 HP, and different weapons deal a different amount of damage. It's just like any fighting game with a health bar. Halo replaced that with a shield system, wherein being shot repeatedly wasn't a game-ender if you could get away long enough for shields to recharge. It changes the pacing of the game substantially, especially in multiplayer. The jittery feeling of older games, where every shot counts and you always have to be on the lookout for your opponent, was made both slower (because other players weren't constantly trying to get a shot on you and wear you down) and a bit more mindless (because once you got into a firefight, your only choice was to shoot the other person repeatedly or else there'd be no damage left whatsoever). This complements the self-seriousness of the Halo games, which absolutely inspired the direction of the next-gen titles. Halo was "grittier" and less silly than previous shooters had been. In Wolfenstein, you were fighting enemies like robo-Hitler. In Doom, the enemies you were up against were inventive, silly, and fun. And the push towards realism was by no means inevitable. Look at Unreal Tournament 2004, which was a touted push towards enhanced graphics and gameplay that took advantage of modern systems, but which remains an utterly comical game. The violence is whimsical and comic; the levels are far more ridiculous than Halo's or Halo 2's. It's a pretty game, as far as that goes, but the prettiness is used for exaggeration rather than for "grit". So obviously that path was not only possible for games, but it led to quite a few very good games over the last decade.

thomholwerda 14y ago
You seem to be missing a whole slew of games here, and most importantly, you don't seem to understand just how gritty, dark, and realistic Wolfenstein was for its time. You cherry-pick robo-Hitler in order to paint Wolfenstein as a fun and happy game - but the fact of the matter is that when it was released, it was the most realistic game ever made (give or take), in which you killed nazis. Nothing but nazis. In a first-person perspective, in a dark and gritty environment, in what was seen as very realistic. The policor backlash to the game's realism and grittiness - and the nazi-aspect - was huge. Wolfenstein was far, far more realistic and gritty than Halo has ever been, when put in historical perspective. Then there's the fact that other realistic console shooters existed long before Halo came out. Take Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark for the N64, for instance. Two highly-realistic first person shooters, accompanied by successful multiplayer elements. Or Medal of Honor for the PS1. On the PC, too - take Rise of the Triad, one of the most violent games I can think of. Its multiplayer was simplistic, straightforward, and incredibly violent and gory. I know it's all the rage to talk down on console gaming and games like Halo in particular, but the fact of the matter is that this kind of gaming didn't start with Halo, and had been around for a long, long time before it. Games like this have always existed alongside deeper and richer games, and that's a good thing - I like more intelligent and rewarding experiences, but after a long day or a stressful week, I just want to get some friends together and shoot zombies in Left 4 Dead 1/2 - just as I don't want every movie I see to be Philadelphia. Sometimes, I just want Armageddon or Die Hard, and there's nothing wrong with that.
- kevdigital 14y ago
  Not to mention Doom was not at all "simple, playful, and colorful". Running around through Hell with dismembered corpses on spikes being chased but gruesome demons was frightening in the early '90s. Maybe it was just cause I was 10 at the time :)
ChiperSoft 14y ago
Just a minor nitpick, but Halo did have a health bar. It was Halo 2 that removed it. Bungie briefly brought it bak in Halo ODST (which was why my friends and I loved its firefight the best). Halo 2 wasn't the first game to remove the health bar either, Red Faction 2 had an almost identical vitality system to Halo's shields.

kevdigital 14y ago

Yeah, violent games and shooters have been around well before Halo. It just brought shooters to the consoles. God forbid other "bro types" enjoy games too. There's plenty of other inventive, creative games out there if that's your thing too.

unalone 14y ago
> God forbid other "bro types" enjoy games too. Being a bro isn't, like, something you're born into. It's a certain mentality, a certain way of approaching the world. And while I like many facets of bro-dom, and enjoy the hell out of sitting down for some Smash with a couple of friends and a six-pack of Yuengling, there are some bothersome things about bro culture which that particular category of game emphasizes. I mean, I'm critical of the FPS as a genre to some extent. It's fun as hell, but the nature of how the genre's set up has given it some kind of crappy limitations that no game I know of yet has managed to overcome. Even the best ones, like the Half-Life franchise, are limited in ways that bother me. I'm also not super fond of hardcore gaming: it's cool to watch from afar, but it's not an especially inclusive culture, and I fear that games like Starcraft and League of Legends help to scare away a broader variety of players. I'm not trying to say that gaming was perfect before Halo came out; I do think, however, that Halo helped to push a wave of bright designers in some shitty directions, and that game design has suffered as a result. I'm critical of "games that attract waves of bros", if the bros seem to be the majority of person attracted to a game, in the same way that I'm critical of movies that attract that sort of person. Adam Sandler movies, for instance. I'm not saying everybody who likes Adam Sandler is a bad person, but I do feel that Sandler movies are kind of puerile and limited in a way that appeals to a particular type of person, and that, to the extent that they influence other creators, they do some damage to our culture. Adam Sandler's influence on movie-making has been less impactful than Halo's influence on game design, so the mentality described in the OP does bother me somewhat. To hear a guy working at Microsoft say "my company specifically tried to manufacture this kind of experience to reach this kind of audience" pisses me off.
- mbrock 14y ago
  Have you seen Punch-Drunk Love? The thing about that movie is that it takes Sandler's film personality, but abstracts it out from the context of blatant comedy and inserts it into a low-key tragedy, with the skill & taste of an auteur writer/director (Paul Thomas Anderson). It's quite wonderful, and now I'm thinking about what the equivalent for Halo would be. Maybe a game that brings out the tragic aspects of war -- not just as shocking gore, but as sadness and horror. Maybe a game about a Halo warrior's post-war life, a civil Sim-type game interrupted by disturbing scenes of post-traumatic hallucination & paranoia. Or a game that starts out as a shooter and becomes impossibly difficult, until the player's inevitable death, after which the real game begins, taking place in a Tibetan Buddhism-inspired series of post-death liminal states of terrifying scenes of his past sins.

astar 14y ago

Halo was a standout because of it brought multiplayer to console, wasn't it the first console game to have 16 players? The coop campaign was also really fun. Maybe the article-writer thinks that Halo made FPS too mainstream? Unlike Doom/Quake, it was cleaned up enough in a pretty blockbuster-wrapper to make it the new model of gaming to follow?

DanBC 14y ago
Saturn Bomberman had 10 players for multiplayer. I'm not quite sure I follow OPs point. Playstation had a bunch of thoroughly unfun uncute games.
- hnal943 14y ago
  Absolutely. It was the PlayStation that first marketed itself as the system for hardcore gamers.
  - shiftpgdn 14y ago
    Genesis does what Nintendon't. Sega was the system for 'hardcore' console gamers of the 90s. Just take a look at this ad: http://www.eidolons-inn.net/segabase/G-32XPromoAd1.jpg http://www.eidolons-inn.net/segabase/G-32XPromoAd1.jpg The gaming industry has /always marketed to that crowd, it's not something Microsoft invented.
- thenonsequitur 13y ago
  Tangentially, have you seen bombermine? It's an online bomberman clone that generally has several hundred people playing simultaneously, a ton of fun. Obviously not a console game, but your Saturn Bomberman reference made me think of it.
brudgers 14y ago
In 1996, my wife would call my pager Tuesday night because I hadn't come home from the office. We were playing Quake over the Novell on our CAD workstations. It's easier now, but there hasn't been a quantum change.

6thSigma 14y ago

Halo (well, Bungie) revolutionized the console FPS. Halo had dual analog control (I'm sure there were FPS that had it before Halo, but I don't know what it is). Halo 2 introduced online play with playlists rather than servers (I believe they were the first). Those are innovations that sparked hundreds (thousands?) of copy cats. Not saying Wolfenstein/Doom didn't have a ton of innovations as well, but I think it's safe to say Halo took things to a completely new level.