Activision’s Halo Must Go Beyond Bungie

This is an IGN opinion piece from Matt Purslow, who was brought up on the golden era of Halo and Half-Life. He loves story-driven FPS campaigns and wishes there was more of them (but perhaps not quite as many as there were in the 2000s - that was pretty excessive.)

Of course, thanks to a $69 billion acquisition, Call of Duty is now Xbox’s Call of Duty. But I think you get the idea: Halo should be massive. It should be the premier first-person shooter on Xbox. It should be delivering stellar campaigns and phenomenal multiplayer on a regular basis. It should be among Team Green’s most-played games on any given day.

But it isn’t. And perhaps the reason why is nothing more than the passage of time and the shifting of trends. Can any game sit on the popularity throne forever? The simple truth may be that Master Chief is an artefact of the original Xbox and 360 days, and that 2010’s incredible Halo: Reach was a natural end point that should have been respected.

But while that may indeed be the case, that story doesn’t reflect Microsoft’s uneven handling of the series. Bungie delivered lightning in a bottle five times in a row over the course of a decade. Its successor, the purpose-built 343 Industries (now Halo Studios), found it all but impossible to replicate those achievements. Across 15 years, it struggled to hit a regular cadence; the development pipelines of yesteryear allowed Bungie to deliver a new game every couple of years or so, but there was a six-year gap between Halo 5 and Infinite, and very soon another six years will have passed without a mainline entry. Halo simply isn’t in the public eye in the way it was during the 360 era, nor the way Call of Duty is today.

With this in mind, it’s entirely unsurprising to see that Xbox’s CEO, Asha Sharma, has assigned Activision the task of developing the next Halo . If nothing else, Activision is an unrelenting video game factory; a colossal machine of rotating studios that assembles high-budget shooters year in, year out. If Sharma wants to ship Halo games – lots of Halo games – there’s no better Microsoft division to rectify that issue.

But cadence hasn’t been the only problem that Halo has had to contend with over the past two console generations. Simply put, there hasn’t been a must-play Halo since Bungie called it quits. The days of 90+ on Metacritic are a distant memory. That’s not to say Halo Studios’ games have been anything close to a disaster, but every one of its projects suggests a studio struggling to stay true to a formula it didn’t invent. It’s an odd situation, because (at least in theory) it followed the Bungie playbook to the letter; each of its games honors the past, maintaining traditions established way back in 2001, while also attempting to push the series into the future with brand new ideas and reworked mechanics. The Bungie era never stood still, each new game building atop its predecessor with new playable characters, new enemies, new abilities, new multiplayer modes, and even entirely new approaches to campaign design. All of this can be said of Halo Studios’ games, yet none of them ever successfully captured the magic.

Perhaps that was the biggest problem – should it have even tried to? Halo Studios was given the arguably impossible task of maintaining and continuing the legacy of one of the most important series in FPS history. Of course it tried to make games that felt like Bungie projects. But in doing so, it never successfully established a coherent new identity for the series’ next era. Halo 4 felt like a true continuation of Bungie’s work, a natural successor to the triumphs of Reach, and while I think it’s by far the best game the studio made, there’s no denying that it’s confined by pre-existing parameters and fan expectation. Halo 5 attempted to escape those rules, but its miserable campaign is the absolute worst version of something that could still be considered Halo. 2021’s Infinite was positioned as the course corrector, but turned out to be a collection of modern trends – an open world campaign, battle-pass and daily-quest-fueled multiplayer – embedded in all the iconography of a “return to roots”; the verdant green fields, blue-lit tunnels, and tight PvP arenas of Combat Evolved.

Together, the studios’ attempts make for a fractured trilogy; united by their attempts to continue the past, divided by a lack of shared direction. These troubles are only emphasised when contrasted against its Xbox stablemate, Gears of War – The Coalition’s continuation of Epic’s macho shooter similarly hasn’t lived up to the high bar of the original trilogy, but the duology of Gears 4 and 5 undeniably has its own coherent identity (which, yes, as far as the campaign goes is a bit Gears-imitating-PlayStation’s-single-player-schtick, but it’s an identity nonetheless) and that approach appears set to continue in the upcoming E-Day. Halo’s 15-year quest to stay true to Bungie has been its albatross – a lack of a truly fresh perspective dulls its edge in the modern era, while its struggle to balance the old with the new frustrates long-time Halo fans who simply want to play more Halo. It’s hard to think of another studio for which “doomed if you do, doomed if you don’t” is more applicable.

But that quest is now over. Halo Studios has been gutted, its sole reason for being handed over to the masters of Call of Duty. But while an entirely different division of Xbox may now be in charge, it faces exactly the same challenge: what is post-Bungie Halo? That question still needs an answer.

A vague, totally unsubstantiated rumour has suggested that Activision plans to totally reboot Halo. Fans are, predictably, divided by the notion . Personally, I don’t feel strongly either way, although I do think it’s time Master Chief was laid to rest. Whether the next story takes place in existing canon or not doesn’t hugely matter to me if we’re seeing the world through fresh eyes. Akin to ODST’s special forces or Reach’s team of Spartans, there’d be little need to untangle the narrative threads of John 117’s career, and the universe’s least desirable elements are easily ignored by shifting to a different theatre of war.

For me, the more important aspect is preserving the fundamental gameplay blueprint – the slower pace, the small-but-specialised arsenal, the arena approach to multiplayer, the “wide linear” campaign design, the exceptional enemy AI that makes each and every engagement unpredictable. It’s this approach that id Software took when it created its new vision of Doom – the phenomenal 2016 shooter indisputably followed the core recipe of the 1996 original, but you could never accuse it of being beholden to tradition. Every single component felt cutting-edge. It was somehow a classic, old-school shooter while simultaneously being one of the decade’s most forward-thinking games. As my colleague Ryan McCaffrey has already pointed out , it’s hard to imagine a studio better suited to handling Halo – it’s Xbox-owned, after all.

But the task has been given to Activision, and whether or not it can (or even wants to) replicate id’s success with Doom remains to be seen. But, considering the company’s history, it’s understandable if fans already have a negative outlook. Activision could well turn Halo into Xbox’s Call of Duty… by making it Call of Duty. Overstuffed menus and a relentless army of pop-ups asking you to buy the battle pass, invest in this skin, and play this limited-time mode. Halo Infinite was already showing signs of heading in that direction, so could this new era take the plunge completely and shower us with colour-tiered weapons with 16 mod slots? A battle royale map later repurposed for an extraction shooter? I wouldn’t blame anyone who’s grown tired of Call of Duty’s aggressive approach to be wary of what’s to come.

During its golden era, Bungie ensured Halo was distinct. For all its faults and failures, Halo Studios understood that – it just never managed to coalesce a coherent, compelling version of that for the series’ next generation. And so we can only hope that Activision will recognise it, too, but find more success in bringing Halo’s distinguishing qualities to a modern player base. I believe the way to do that is not to replicate the Halo of the past, but to recreate the conditions of its creation – to allow the team of designers, artists, and engineers given stewardship of the series the time and freedom to establish something as special as Combat Evolved was 25 years ago.

The reality, of course, is that Xbox cannot afford to do that. It needs a new Halo yesterday. But it also needs a damn good reason for you to buy its next-generation console. Somewhere in that pressure cooker of a situation, I hope the game that Halo’s legacy deserves can grow.

Matt Purslow is IGN's Executive Editor of Features.