Halo used to be a juggernaut in the gaming industry. Its success is the reason the Xbox even exists today, with Halo serving as the system-selling launch title for the original Xbox. When the 360 came around, Halo 3 continued to sell Microsoft consoles and became the highest grossing game in the series. New Halo titles used to be events for gamers and now, we only get controversial or lackluster entries. Worse still, the series seems to be on life support. There’s no 10th anniversary remaster for 3 this year and 343 Industries has confirmed 6’s reveal “won’t be soon.”
Halo’s previous success put it as a solid rival to even Call of Duty. However, Halo 3 was a peak from which things only went downhill for the franchise. The next entry we got in the series was Halo Wars, an RTS made specifically to be played on Xbox 360. While different from past games, Wars didn’t sell anywhere near as well as them. Ensemble Studios, the game’s developers, were even shut down before Wars released due to controversy with Bungie.
Then came Halo 3: ODST which, while most applauded what content it had, was panned by many critics. The biggest complaint was that it cost $60 but felt more like Halo 3 DLC than a full game. The final game made by Bungie was Halo: Reach. While many applauded it as a quality send-off from Bungie, many others weren’t fans of the gameplay changes. From what I noticed, this was where the first major wave of people left the fandom.
Bungie left to work on Destiny and 343 Industries was created by Microsoft to continue work on the series. Their first big project in the series was a remaster of Combat Evolved and, despite positive reviews, it wasn’t anything new. Halo 4 ended up being 343’s first big expansion of the franchise. It ended up being an incredibly polarizing game due to major changes in aesthetic, gameplay, and music. This game marks the beginning of the 343 era, but that also meant that Bungie purists lost interest in the series.
From here on Microsoft decided to release a bunch of minor games. We got Spartan Assault and Spartan Strike, a duo of top-down shoot ‘em ups that went under the radar of most gamers. When the Xbox One came out, we got our first teaser for future Halo projects. This included hints at a new game, a mini-series, and even a Steven Spielberg-produced TV show. However, next to nothing shown at the E3 2013 conference ending up coming to fruition for the series besides the Ridley Scott-produced mini-series.
Then 2014 came around and we got the remaster of Halo 2 with The Master Chief Collection. Hyped as potentially being the first system-selling game for the Xbox One, it ended up being incredibly disappointing, with a plethora of bugs and shoddy multiplayer servers. Once more, many fans lost faith in the series. Halo 5: Guardians looked to rectify these mistakes the next year, but it ended up being the most polarizing entry in the series. Most agreed its multiplayer was fantastic. However, it shipped with a campaign many found short and uneventful, it added micro-transactions to the series, and it didn’t even have split-screen.
This game ended up being the last straw for many, myself included. I’m personally no longer excited about this franchise’s future. Halo Wars 2 was a breath of fresh air, but it wasn’t fantastic and it seems to be all we’re getting this year from 343. There are still plenty of chances for announcements throughout the year, but if 343 didn’t have anything to show at E3, that’s most likely a false hope. As bleak as things seem for Halo, 343 seems to be taking their time and focusing their resources on 6. Here’s hoping that the series can regain its lost fanbase and become a respected shooter once more.
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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