The original post: /r/gaming by /u/TheReiterEffect_S8 on 2024-10-01 19:15:39.

It’s hard for me to compare Halo 2 or Halo 3 to any other video game release since then. They were massive, and took the entire entertainment industry by storm. It was literally everywhere. As massive as Call of Duty is (even today), it still has not managed to produce the insanity that surrounded the Halo games during their releases. So what was the secret sauce?

The second and more important part to my question is: Why have we not seen anything like this since? I know everyone has an opinion, and I’m sure there are plenty of people that will try to compare these launches to other games. But the reality is that don’t hold a candle to Halo. Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, Call of Duty, etc. I can’t think of anything that had conjured up so much hype and actually delivered on it. The games were spectacular, far far ahead of their time. Has corporate overhead seeped too far into the creativity of video games? Is the market too cut-throat for good talent to produce worthy content? We see plenty of good games, even great games. But the Halo games were genuinely on a Mythic, Legendary level.

Something disastrous happened somewhere between now and 2007. Hyper-focusing on microtransactions? Studio buyouts? Massive escalation on shareholder interest? What happened to our industry? Assassin’s Creed, for example, was a massive heavy-hitter that showed innovation, art style and narrative progression alongside technologic advancements. Now it’s literally a running joke for a cookie-cutter ubisoft formulated game.