Halo: The Master Chief Collection now on Steam

[JDR13]

I used my free month of Xbox Game Pass for PC to play Halo CE Anniversary and was pleasantly surprised by the game. It's actually good.

Are later Halos good too or did the franchise turn to shit over time like everything else?

Remember that Reach actually takes place before the events of Halo CE.

 

[wahrk]

Are later Halos good too or did the franchise turn to shit over time like everything else?

Yes and yes.

How much did you like CE? None of the later ones really quite match the original in terms of single-player. Reach is probably the next best overall campaign although 2 and 3 have a few fun levels, along with a lot of mediocre-to-terrible ones. The MP is more of a focus so if you’re not into it then you might not find as much to enjoy. Don’t even bother with 343’s Halo games.

 

[ultimanecat]

I replayed a few levels of Halo 4 a couple months ago on the 360 and I think I decided it actually is terrible.

-Ammo is weirdly limited in that you can barley hold any. Fucking bizarre literally going from playing Halo Anniversary with huge ammo pools to this where you max out at four mags or can shoot maybe 5 overcharges with a full plasma pistol. Annoying as fuck on Heroic and higher, making precision headshot-capable weapons not just a good idea but absolutely necessary since every other gun can only carry enough ammo to kill a handful of normal enemies or maybe strip one or two shields. This is all the worse because...
-...new enemies are massive damage sponges and tactically unfun to fight. And then some enemies make other enemies even bigger damage sponges. And melee doesn’t really work because most enemies are hyper aggressive at melee range.
-Vehicles seem pointless outside setpieces.

So yeah, on reevaluation it’s 100% pure decline even without raging about core stuff like being able to sprint.

 

[Citizen]

Oh nice, owners of the complete bundle get it for free, I expected that it would be sold as a DLC. Doubt I'm ever gonna play it tho, CE and 3 with expansion are my jam

 

[baud]

Are later Halos good too or did the franchise turn to shit over time like everything else?

Yes and yes.

How much did you like CE? None of the later ones really quite match the original in terms of single-player. Reach is probably the next best overall campaign although 2 and 3 have a few fun levels, along with a lot of mediocre-to-terrible ones. The MP is more of a focus so if you’re not into it then you might not find as much to enjoy. Don’t even bother with 343’s Halo games.

I'd say ODST is worth a playthrough too, with a few fun levels (though I'd put Reach's campaign below Halo 3, on par with 2, so YMMV)

 

[wahrk]

Are later Halos good too or did the franchise turn to shit over time like everything else?

Yes and yes.

How much did you like CE? None of the later ones really quite match the original in terms of single-player. Reach is probably the next best overall campaign although 2 and 3 have a few fun levels, along with a lot of mediocre-to-terrible ones. The MP is more of a focus so if you’re not into it then you might not find as much to enjoy. Don’t even bother with 343’s Halo games.

I'd say ODST is worth a playthrough too, with a few fun levels (though I'd put Reach's campaign below Halo 3, on par with 2, so YMMV)

I actually forgot about ODST, but yea that’s a fun little campaign. Great soundtrack and atmosphere too. A bit of a different experience from the others though.

 

[Zariusz]

ODST was where soundtrack of this series peaked

 

[DalekFlay]

2 and 3 have a few fun levels, along with a lot of mediocre-to-terrible ones.

I think this is true even of the first game. Halo is a very up and down experience overall IMO, with some great levels and some terrible ones in every game.

 

[Israfael]

Finished Halo 3, it was way easier and more boring as compared to Halo 2(thanks to the many weird story/actor changes - why did the original Prophet of Truth and his "evil mastermind" British voice that was quite rational, manipulative bastard with understandable, if really unethical, misguided and wrong goals, was replaced with this screaming Saturday morning cartoon villain? Gravemind also was changed into "muhaha I'm evil" persona instead of the Shakesperian-speaking uncomprehendable cosmic horror). I'd even say it felt it was a kind of not that great DLC to Halo 3 - movement speed was nerfed for some reason, no new mechanics (apart from the shotgun getting nerfed even more and the pistol getting completely useless), no new enemies (apart from the brutes with different skins), no Arbiter gameplay (to change the pace / battle tricks kit). And those HUEG HUD marks all over screen that cannot be disabled. I guess console shooters market at that time was so poor that even that passed as a "good" game. ODST, on the other hand, played like some very different game, and it was in itself more interesting - haunting after-conflict, very oppressive atmosphere (as you go around, collecting the clues / audiologs and trying to find a proper weapon that can actually kill something), as well as much less grandiose conflict overall. Are Reach and Halo 4 even more 'adapted for wider, younger audiences'?

 

[wahrk]

2 and 3 have a few fun levels, along with a lot of mediocre-to-terrible ones.

I think this is true even of the first game. Halo is a very up and down experience overall IMO, with some great levels and some terrible ones in every game.

I think it’s pretty solid up until the Library, which is definitely infamous. Overall I’d still say it’s the most consistent campaign outside of Reach although it does go downhill near the end.

Are Reach and Halo 4 even more 'adapted for wider, younger audiences'?

4 yes, Reach no.

 

[Valestein]

ODST was where soundtrack of this series peaked

My fave tune from it:

 

[Azalin]

Ok it's steam sale time I am considering getting this since I saw that this has the coop tag and I am looking to play some games with a bro. Are these games worth playing in coop and if yes which of them are best played that way? All? None?

 

[Alienman]

All are good for co-op.

 

[Valestein]

All are good for co-op.

To add to that, Halo 1 and 2 have 2 player coop and the rest have up to 4 player coop.

 

[Ebonsword]

Man was that a pain in the ass the second half. Bullet-spongey flood and brutes everywhere, both of which rush you and can kill you in one melee hit. Heroic singleplayer in the original Halo is a fun challenge, but I'd call this one more just annoying. The game itself... eh, it's better than my Windows Vista memories, but not as good as the first half of the original by any stretch. The levels just don't feel as well designed, aren't as open, and the story is more "epic" but also kind of random and all over the place. It's amazing how ugly it is too, if you switch to the old graphics. Halo 1 original has this timeless smooth look to it but Halo 2 is just ugly. The visual remaster looks good though, barring some weird stuff like the game environment looking way brighter than the cutscene that just played. Anyway... I'll defend Halo 1's first half against other PC gamers who look down on it, but Halo 2... meh. Only worth it for sci-fi shooter addicts like me I'd guess.

Hope Halo 3 is better like people say.

I really hated Halo 2 when it first came out, and I still do. Beyond any gameplay weaknesses, I just loathed having to play as the Arbiter. When I play Halo, I want to play as a Space Marine, and not as some whinging alien.

 

[baud]

Man was that a pain in the ass the second half. Bullet-spongey flood and brutes everywhere, both of which rush you and can kill you in one melee hit. Heroic singleplayer in the original Halo is a fun challenge, but I'd call this one more just annoying. The game itself... eh, it's better than my Windows Vista memories, but not as good as the first half of the original by any stretch. The levels just don't feel as well designed, aren't as open, and the story is more "epic" but also kind of random and all over the place. It's amazing how ugly it is too, if you switch to the old graphics. Halo 1 original has this timeless smooth look to it but Halo 2 is just ugly. The visual remaster looks good though, barring some weird stuff like the game environment looking way brighter than the cutscene that just played. Anyway... I'll defend Halo 1's first half against other PC gamers who look down on it, but Halo 2... meh. Only worth it for sci-fi shooter addicts like me I'd guess.

Hope Halo 3 is better like people say.

I really hated Halo 2 when it first came out, and I still do. Beyond any gameplay weaknesses, I just loathed having to play as the Arbiter. When I play Halo, I want to play as a Space Marine, and not as some whinging alien.

I like the camo cloak of the arbiter, it gives a nice 'oh shit' button. I don't really care who I am playing as, as long as Ig get some aliens to shoot at. But I agree that gameplay-wise, Halo 2 is weaker

 

[Deleted member 7219]

I preferred Halo 2 to Halo 1 because of the more varied environments, new gameplay with the Arbiter (yes, cloak mode is a LOT of fun), and the outstanding cutscenes that come with the Anniversary Edition.

I've just completed Halo 3. Over the past month I've played through Reach, Halo 1, Halo 2 and Halo 3 in the PC MCC. Halo Reach is almost as good as I remember - almost. I thought it looked a lot better when it came out but of course that just shows how far visual fidelity has come since then. But it is still the best Halo game from an artistic, story and gameplay standpoint.

I didn't really get the buzz around Halo 1, though to consoletards it really must have looked like the second coming because there were no good console first person shooters before then (except Goldeneye on the N64). Being a PC gamer I've seen most of it done before and better, although the vehicle sections are ok (not a big fan of the Warthog driving controls though).

Halo 3 doesn't have the remaster that Halo 1 and Halo 2 Anniversary Editions had but that's ok. The gameplay is pretty good in this one. Again, new environments, not very repetitive, although I downgraded the difficulty to normal because I'm not really a fan of first person shooters (I just wanted to shoot stuff without dying every few seconds, the Flood are boring zombies and on higher difficullties they are bullet sponges as DalekFlay said).

I'm downloading ODST at the moment, after that I'll play Halo 4 and write up my thoughts on both games. Overall, if I was to put my view on the Halo series in two sentences it would be, "Of its time - these were the best console shooters when they came out, but that's not saying much. Better story and gameplay experiences can be found on PC, although Reach and Halo 2: Anniversary Edition still hold up as good action games today."

 

[Ocelot]

Played CE, H2 and H3 on release date and finally got to play them with all other titles on PC after many many years.

CE has aged badly and the remake is shit. The game has a nice story and an excellent atmosphere but it feels so poor compared to newer releases, especially due to reusing maps for the second half of the story. The MCC port has broken graphics as well. Multiplayer is still fun though.

Halo 4's campaign is good, even though the Prometheans and their arsenal are sub-par. The multiplayer is lukewarm. Everything's too fucking bright in this game. I feel like 343i did a shitty job with Halo 5's campaign but Halo 4 isn't that bad. This whole "let's give Master Chief a personality sub-story" idea was needless but it didn't affect my experience.

Halo 3 and ODST have great campaigns but I never liked the multiplayer, especially Reach multiplayer. Halo 3 concluded the original story flawlessly, though.

Halo Reach gave me mixed feelings. The campaign is good but not the best. Same for multiplayer. It has a lot of needless things like automatic marine squads and armor abilities. The needler rifle was not as unique as the carbine.

I feel like Halo 2 is the best game of the series. The single player content is a vast expansion of CE's world, you get to play as a Sangheili, the atmosphere is great and the multiplayer is still fun. It got an excellent remake, minus that hideous Cortana model. The hardest game to beat on legendary and the most interesting overall. Dual wielding was still an unnecessary addition.

I want to play Halo Wars 1 on PC next but I'm not sure if it's worth it for the single player content alone.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

I completed Halo: ODST yesterday and Halo 4 is almost done downloading.

ODST ranks as my third favourite campaign of the series after Halo 2 and Reach, although it does the squad camaraderie a lot better than Reach (Nathan Fillion is excellent, I wish he was in more games). Knowing that there wasn't going to be any Flood, I decided to play this one on Heroic difficulty just like Reach, and it was challenging in places. The level design was pretty good too for the most part. I liked all the squad missions and the varied gameplay they provided, although I wasn't too fond of the intermission parts despite the unique atmosphere (the darkness was a nice touch, and the music was pretty good). I guess they just got samey after the first one - only so much running you can do around a mostly-empty city before it gets boring.

They need to drop the '3' from the name as it is very misleading, it makes you think like you should play it after 3, yet all the events are set before 3 and don't spoil anything from that game. The play order should be Reach, Halo, Halo 2, ODST, 3, 4.

 

[baud]

I want to play Halo Wars 1 on PC next but I'm not sure if it's worth it for the single player content alone.

I had some fun with the single player campaign Halo Wars, but I didn't pay for it (played during a Steam free weekend), I'd say it's worth it if you want another Halo story/another game with the Halo aesthetics.

 

[Dayyālu]

This is going to be spergy, but whatever, if I can't sperg here where the fuck you can.

The Collection being kind of a steal for the price lured me in, I played the oldass version of Halo CE more than a decade ago and I was always a little curious about the story going on. Buy the entire thing and it's what, 5-6 games? A steal.

So I replayed Halo CE in its "remade" form.

Spoiler

Halo CE is a goddamn weird shooter. I did not play Marathon the first time I played Halo but now I can see that there's quite a lot of Marathon DNA in Halo: and I'm not referring just to the graphical throwbacks, but to gameplay elements that are clearly an evolution of concepts (and problems) that Bungie already had with Maraton. Hell, there's even a little ONI in Halo (the layered shielding and the dreadful plain grey levels!).

It's still a weirdass shooter. I guess one needs to firmly set it in its age and role, for a 2001 console FPS this thing must have been mindblowing, but from a general shooter perspective Halo has to contend with stuff like Serious Sam and RTCW, and even relatively older games (classics like Quake) easily beat it on several levels. But as a console shooter? This must have been insane.

Graphically, it's weird. The engine is functional and when it's at his best (I'm referring to the original, the remade version is completely generic) gives you nice vistas for 2001, particularly The Silent Cartographer and Two Betrayals, but at the same time you're endlessly dumped in nondescript grey areas that look like some cheap Half Life mod. The models are nice but I find them completely devoid of.... how to say, soul? The Covenant look like The Most Generic Sci-Fi monsters, and the Flood are your usual zombies. Marines and their tech are painfully generic. There's nothing of the craziness of Serious Sam's bestiary or the wonderful beauty of RTCW Idtech3 SS troopers. Much like Marathon, it feels generic and bland.

The sound design is competent. Soundtrack is functional if bland. Enemy sounds are well done: I consider a sign of great design when you can easily use sound to identify foes, attack patterns, who's attacking you and from where and with what. Halo makes everything very clear to recognize and understand, and the grunts and screams and chatter of your foes add both ambience and give information.

Gameplay needs some extra words. Enemy design is probably the best single piece of design that Halo offers, and that's only for the Covenant: the other two foes are essentially there to waste space (the Sentinels are generic flying enemies with bad aim and the Flood are generic armed zombies with the frankly puzzling Infector enemy). The Covenant are great as enemies, and I'll almost admit that they made a better bestiary compared to any 2001-era shooter. Their variety is great and gives you an excellent array of foes that needs to be quickly identified and destroyed, every one of them with some small little somethings instead of "shoot at them until they die". Grunts and their need for leadership and morale breaks: Jackals and their pistol overcharge and shields, the numerous variants of Elites, with shields and camo fields an' swords an' grenades, miniboss Hunters (if you fight them as you're supposed to do of course). And they're fast and reactive, jumping and seeking cover. A heritage from Marathon is clear in the "tier" of enemies indicated by colour, giving them extra abilites and equipment and escalating the danger yet giving the player a chance to learn and adapt. Some serious work went into the Covenant....

.... and then everything gets dumped into the gutter with the Flood, that are generic as hell, unthinking, and flat out boring. The Infector variant is a completely puzzling enemy for me, because I can somewhat try to understand why it exist (extra pressure for the player? wasting ammo?) but when the standard procedure for killing it becomes ignoring it until the fight is over and let it suicide against you - or ignore it wholesale - something went wrong.

Furthermore, the Flood murder the careful and fun Covenant fights. From Two Betrayals on, but particularly in The Maw, you can simply ignore the game and soldier on (and this on Heroic!) while the Flood and the Covenant play the game for you. You can walk merrily for a good % of the level without bothering to fire a shot! Entire fights where you enter the room, ignore everyone, follow the green light and exit the room. Masterful design.

This leads to map design. Hell, CE keeps being weird. Some levels are.... you know it's easy to go over all of 'em.

Pillar of Autumn: it's a boring grey corridor devoid of any level design whatsoever.

Halo: I'd say this one is one hell of a change: from a corridor you get open spaces and even objectives you can choose to approach in the order you like, with fortifications and enemy dropships that give you warnings and enemy locations. It's a great level IMHO, Halo at its best.

Truth and Reconciliation: With a beginning that tries to almost a stealthy insertion and some amusing arena fights with AI mates, it quickly devolves into boring corridors with cheap trash spawns and the occasional open space. The Hangars in particular are hard as fuck, I liked that.

The Silent Cartographer: it's such a neat map. Open spaces, free exploration, underground levels.

Assault on the Control Room: mixed bag. Nice vehicle sections, but now it starts. The copy&paste. Entire sections of this level are copy&paste, boring grey areas thrown at the player to pad time. Padding, shameless padding.

343 Guilty Spark: outside of the cinematic jungle and survival horror ambience, you get a shitton of copy&paste padding. Now with Flood!

The Library: You didn't like copy&paste grey rooms? What if we copy&paste entire levels and fill it with Flood?

Two Betrayals: let's recycle entire levels, but this one at least gives you some good fights on open areas and bridges.

Keyes: Ignore the Covenant and the Flood fighting each other, enjoy the wonderful corridors devoid of any design and the recycled content. Aren't you entertained?

The Maw: Ignore the Covenant and the Flood and the Sentinels fighting each other, enjoy the wonderful corridors devoid of any design and the recycled content. Aren't you entertained? Also Warthog run.

Halo throws in the towel early. I've read somewhere that the dev cycle was insanely accelerated, and the game clearly supports this: some enemies and levels were clearly the results of proper work and design while some are nothing but cheaply copy&paste padding. Far more levels than the infamous Library: you can cut everything after 343 and the game would not suffer.

Weapons. For a game that apparently has the most boring arsenal known to man (Standard Human Weapons and three Covenant toys) Halo's weapons are IMHO almost better designed than some better shooters - coff Half Life 2 coff - . The Pistol is one monster of a starter weapon, giving you everything you need, great damage and sniping capability. How many starter weapons are this useful? The Assault rifle conversely is another heritage from Marathon, being essentially a close range spray weapon with pitiful accuracy. I wonder what's exactly its intended use if not as a trash weapon for Flood foes, because the Shotgun is awesome as a standard gun when you get it, almost on Doom tiers of "if you don't know what you're going to fight, get a shotgun". Helped by the fact that the open spaces pretty much disappear after you get it. Sniper rifle and rocket launcher are conventional, but the Covenant weapons show again the care they gave into designing the friggin' aliens with the amusing balance between shield damage/health damage, battery and overheating. Everything with the Covenant seems designed to keep you on your toes, tbh.

Plot: Marathon or Pathway or even Oni it ain't. Aliens bad, zombies, female AI, supahweapon! Hey, at least they kept the funny Bungie level names. I miss Durandal, but I guess the console crowd would have gone insane with that style of writing. Master Chief is the lesser son of Doomguy and the security officer, and for sure he's green, helmeted and bland.

Weird 'un. I wonder what it would have happened if it was release only on PC, and the Xbox wasn't a thing. Probably half-forgotten bar on forums like this one, I'd dare to say...

Holy fucking shit that's a shitton of words for a console shooter. Whatever, sometimes you need to sperg. Onwards to Halo 2, let's see what they did...

 

[Puukko]

I was a pretty big Halo kiddie and while my tastes have certainly moved on, these games do have a place in my heart. I haven't beat any of them in years, but I played a bit of Reach a year ago (the lag when playing online coop and not hosting was insane) and now most of ODST. It is solid, though looking at it now with more experienced eyes, there does seem to be something missing. Wisecracking marines have always been a Halo staple, but when each of your squad mates is one and gets 2-3 scenes of hurried development... Reach is far more serious in comparison and in a good way. If I end up replaying another one of these, it will probably be 2 so I can see that HD treatment with my own eyes. At least the music never stopped being great.

Now to touch on the technical side a bit. I am playing this via game pass and let me tell you, the Xbox app is a piece of work. MCC itself is largely technically sound and clearly had some effort put into integrating all the games into it, but there are some weird quirks. The game won't let you save any options if there are any unbound keys, which there will be by default. Unlike on Steam, you cannot install the games one by one - they're all individually in the store, but each of them is listed as requiring 170gb of free space to install, which is the size of all the games combined. Now once you let MCC install itself, you can launch it and it gives you the option to choose what games to install - except disabling CE which it always seems to install first regardless caused the app to throw me an installation error and I needed to start over. I can only guess once a game has started downloading, you have to let it finish, but I gave up and let it install everything overnight. I'll segue into my experiences with using the app during my free game pass period.

Some smaller issues include the lack of file verification and a wonky search function (how'd they screw this one up?) that likes to omit obvious results. Typing in "final" doesn't give me FFXV, put typing in "XV" does. Also, it separately asks you to login for every new game and sends email about them.

The most absurd design decision is the fact that games installed via the Xbox app are sandboxed - in other words, super secure to the point where you can't even browse the files by default without changing the owner of the folder, and even after that, I still couldn't manipulate the files as it wouldn't let me disable read-only. This led to me being unable to restore a folder I had deleted with the intention of modding, and since there is no file verification tool, my entire installation was now irreversibly borked.

It was then I once again adorned my pirate hat, as dealing with console level locking down of files is not the kind of bullshit I will tolerate.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

As you say, it’s great on Steam. I only had 1 game installed at a time due to limited space on my SSD (got other stuff installed too).

 

[wahrk]

Soundtrack is functional if bland.

I agree with most of what you wrote except for this. I’ve always thought the soundtracks for these games did a lot to elevate them beyond the sum of their parts. Although the remaster did re-record tracks and ruined some of them.

 

[Dayyālu]

I agree with most of what you wrote except for this. I’ve always thought the soundtracks for these games did a lot to elevate them beyond the sum of their parts. Although the remaster did re-record tracks and ruined some of them.

I don't know if it's the fault of the remaster or not, but often the music is off, doesn't play at the right moment and you end up with silence during heated firefights and blasting action music while watching grey walls. I specifically remember a point in Double Betrayal (when you get out from an underground passage in a Covenant/Flood fight) and the music started right at the correct moment, I noticed it because it was so rare. Maybe it's a remaster issue, dunnow.

I find the Generic Latin Chanting charming, but it's also overused in media nowadays.