The Halo Effect

It's been almost 7 years since Halo: Combat Evolved first hit the xboxen of millions of gamers everywhere. What resulted was nothing short of a revolution. A sensible control scheme based around analog sticks, while still not as good as the venerable mouse and keyboard, finally allowed the shooter to make the leap to consoles with a minimum of frustration. Oh yeah, and there was a pretty fun game there as well.

Two sequels later, it isn't much of a stretch to say that Halo has revolutionized the entire shooter genre. Things like stories and characters are no longer luxuries. Having HP as a simple static number, replenished by medipacks is on the way out, replaced by damage that can gradually heal itself if you spend some time out of the line of fire. Being able to carry 10 guns with you is even farther out the door. Having some sort of melee is practically mandatory. Vehicles should be easy to operate, and integrate seamlessly into the gameplay. Realism, especially physics, is important. But it can be subverted for the sake of fun (People flying 30 feet back when you kill them with a melee attack isn't realistic, but as a Bungie designer points out, it is awesome).

While Halo didn't invent most of this, it was the first game to bring it all to the masses in a single package, and the folks and Bungie deserve a good deal of credit becauase of it.

Unfortunately, much to my annoyance, some of the less savory aspects of Halo gameplay have also made their way throughout the industry.

Explosives as close-range weapons. I just love being gibbed by a rocket launcher, while its user 15 feet away escapes with a minor heat rash. Back in my day, rocket launchers were medium-range weapons that existed mainly as a counter to vehicles and a way to punish the other team for grouping up, not as a viable replacement for shotguns in a pinch. And don't get me started on grenades. Grenades should exist to soften up an area before assaulting it or to attack people behind cover. In Halo, spamming grenades is a mainstay of all forms of combat.

You can see this effect especially in CoD4, where grenade launchers and RPGs are banned on many servers because of the enormous power they have. Fortunately, frag grenades are limited to 1 per person (3 with perks) and cannot be picked up from the game world, else grenade spamming would be a huge problem.

The knife-fight shotgun. If you've ever fired a real shotgun, you know that they wield considerable killing power out over 150 feet or more (each pellet in a standard 00 shell packs the punch of a small pistol round, and you get 9 of them per shell) . If the things were only potent within 5 feet of your target, you would have seen the concept abandoned shortly after the first prototype. In the same vein, a shotgun shot shouldn't be several times more powerful than a burst from an assault rifle at short range. The use of shotguns as close-range weapons is because of the ease of hitting your target as compared to other weapons, not because they can kill a genetically-enhanced super-soldier wearing heavy metal armor and an energy shield in one shot.

This has shown up in virtually every FPS with shotguns that I've played since Halo was released, with the exception of counter-strike, turning what was one of my favorite classes of weapon into something I don't bother with very much.

Fists/knives/Gun butts > Bullets. This is probably my #1 most annoying Halo effect. I can almost buy this in the case of Master Chief, or a similar sci-fi badass. 700 pounds of body/armor weight behind a metal fist or gun butt will fuck up pretty much anything. But when my SAS soldier in CoD4 does more damage with a quick slash from his combat knife than with a blast from a .50 sniper rifle, something is horribly, horribly wrong. There's a good reason combat has transitioned from swords and spears to guns: Bullets hurt a lot more, and range is a massive advantage. Even Gordon Freeman replaced his trusty crowbar with a gun as soon as he could. Melee insta-kills should be limited to well-placed throat slashes against unaware opponents. i.e. they should be really hard to execute, and not worth the effort unless you need stealth or are going for style.

This is even worse, because in multiplayer, melee like this tends to favor people with the best connections. You only get one shot, so if your opponent has positioning a few milliseconds more up to date, and can release his attack a few milliseconds earlier, it translates into a significant advantage.

The exception to this rule is dedicated super melee weapons like the Halo sword. A 1-hit kill from a purely melee weapon that requires the user to close distance (or risk missing by using the charge from a longer range) and carefully line up his swing is perfectly acceptable because there is actually a drawback involved. But when it is possible to freely shoot and then instantly deliver a lethal blow, I get annoyed.

The giant targeting reticle. This is a close #2. If you want a weapon to be inaccurate, then use a blooming reticle. Thankfully this is gradually getting fixed as the series ages, but the original assault rifle was nigh-unusable at medium to long ranges because of the damn reticle.

Mass Effect, while not strictly an FPS, is the most egregious offender in this category, as it incorporates blooming giant reticles, making most guns damn near impossible to aim at long ranges until your character is a really high level.

Semi-automatic sniper rifles with minimal recoil. There's a reason the autosnipers are almost universally banned in CS: They are horribly overpowered. The only real way to balance a weapon that has high killing power, very high accuracy, and extreme range is to give it a slow rate of fire, either by making it bolt-action, or giving it insane recoil. And no, the trails from the Halo sniper rifle are not adequate, since there's a small chance that you yourself will have a sniper rifle to return fire.

It is true that a RL sniper is very effective at devastating entire squads from long range, forcing borderline suicidal tactics to deal with him. But this is one of those cases where realism needs to be subverted for the sake of fun.


This isn't to say that Halo is a bad game. Despite the annoying aspects, I still love gathering around the xbox and playing a few hours with my buddies. But it would be nice if designers tried to improve the Halo model when they implement it, instead of just copying it.