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Discussion Halo or Call of Duty or none of the above?

shoot

  • Halo

    Votes: 48 45.7%

  • Call of Duty

    Votes: 10 9.5%

  • ew gross

    Votes: 47 44.8%
  • Total voters
    105
Stopdoor

Stopdoor

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Was thinking in the thread about Halo being on PlayStation how I always got the impression that Halo innately appeals to Nintendo gamers more than its "contemporary" Call of Duty. I guess it's not that crazy a theory considering Call of Duty's aesthetic is much further from something Nintendo-like, but I kind of thought even gameplay-wise the Halo games have this "sandbox" style of game/level design that's just innately more "game-y" and therefore Nintendo-esque. I think it's a more interesting question then to see if Halo has a disproportionate appeal now for Nintendo fans considering its waning wider popularity is clearly eclipsed by Call of Duty. And maybe also if this eclipses an innate distaste of the mainstream shootingest of shooters lol
 
GPKs3 said:
Halo. MCC for Switch 2. Let’s go, Microsoft.
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I can't help but think of the non-zero quantity of people who've never played Halo because they only play Nintendo games. The prospect is really exciting, if a fantasy.

The current state of MCC MP is... here and there. The mod scene is flourishing on PC, but the playerbase feels like a U shape if looking at a skill distribution, so matches are wildly uneven. With an influx of "new blood," the lower end of the skill distribution has a higher pool of similarly-skilled players to match with, leading to healthier matches and less frustration for everyone.
 
If this is which we'd rather see on the Switch, the answer is Halo, because I have much more fond memories of that series than COD. And I've played a ton of COD.
 
Between the two, I guess Halo? I've never played a CoD game and never had any real interest in it; from the outside looking in it's always seemed incredibly bro-y and "straight-up post-9/11 American military propaganda" as heck and that's just super not my vibe. The yearly release schedule and awful reputation of its community just made it even easier to avoid

Halo's something I missed out on when I was younger, but I've actually been trying to work through the MCC this year (gotten through 1, 2, and 3; if anyone's really curious I have longer write-ups in the completed games thread) and so far based solely on the campaigns it's ... fine I guess? Like, it's not blowing me away or anything, but I guess if I squint I can kinda see how this would have been a big effing deal for people who were there for it back in the day; For me personally though, playing it for the first time in 2024, I think it's mostly some really frustrating and un-fun gameplay mixed in with just enough cool moments so that it averages out to "kind of mid but I keep on playing them anyway" so far

Anyway my real answer is probably Doom or Titanfall 2. Now those are some fun video game-ass video games
 
CoD but WW2 themed ones. Modern crap is not my thing. I prefer my Captain Price British and mutton chopped.
 
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BlackthornOrion said:
Between the two, I guess Halo? I've never played a CoD game and never had any real interest in it; from the outside looking in it's always seemed incredibly bro-y and "straight-up post-9/11 American military propaganda" as heck and that's just super not my vibe. The yearly release schedule and awful reputation of its community just made it even easier to avoid

Halo's something I missed out on when I was younger, but I've actually been trying to work through the MCC this year (gotten through 1, 2, and 3; if anyone's really curious I have longer write-ups in the completed games thread) and so far based solely on the campaigns it's ... fine I guess? Like, it's not blowing me away or anything, but I guess if I squint I can kinda see how this would have been a big effing deal for people who were there for it back in the day; For me personally though, playing it for the first time in 2024, I think it's mostly some really frustrating and un-fun gameplay mixed in with just enough cool moments so that it averages out to "kind of mid but I keep on playing them anyway" so far

Anyway my real answer is probably Doom or Titanfall 2. Now those are some fun video game-ass video games
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Personally I think Halo really shines if you play it on a harder difficulty, because it forces you to engage with more scarce ammo and finding hidden caches or vantage points in the level design to get the leg up, but admittedly it's hard to convince especially that the early Halos are better than their copy-paste level design lol
 
I don't care for FPS games but if I had to pick one, Halo... but since you gave me an option to opt out, I did that
 
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Damn, I'm the first one to pick Call of Duty.

You kids might not remember anymore but the first two CoD games were amazing, and then the original Modern Warfare blew me away with its multi-player (minus angry kids in the chat). I have very fond memories with it. And then everything became iterative going forward.

As a narrative piece, Halo doesn't interest me that much, and the gunplay, for me at least, was always better in the initial CoD entries.
 
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Halo is more my type of game with the level design being more open and arcadeish gameplay. I also don't like all the screenshake and other screen effects in COD as it makes me kind of nauseous.
 
Everything on 7th gen was sick, early 8th gen cod was also sick then it just kinda fell off
 
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Well of course Halo would appeal to Nintendo fans more. Hardy LeBel - Halo: Combat Evolved's lead multiplayer designer - has gone on record saying that the whole point of CE's multiplayer was to make a fun party game that happened to be a shooter; "a shooter Nintendo would have been proud to release."

Answering the question at hand though, I'm taking Halo. I think the best Call of Duty campaigns (World At War, Black Ops, Black Ops 2, etc.) are up there with the original Halo trilogy, but Halo's multiplayer is better imo. I personally prefer Halo's more arena shooter-inspired roots with its weapons and equipment on the ground, as I think it lends itself to a more dynamic experience. (Not to mention the vehicles!) Map control is a very important part of Halo, in a way that I feel Call of Duty kinda lacks. That same focus is actually why I gravitated to Splatoon so much once Halo went down the gutter post-Halo 4! The Halo games tended to age better too, I feel. Halo: Reach feels better to play than Black Ops 2 does, for example. The gunplay still feels good, though not as snappy as later Halo games or Bungie's Destiny, but it doesn't feel... old like similar aged Call of Duty games tend to. I think this may come down to Bungie's (and yes, even 343's) excellence in game feel and gunplay more than anything; popping a headshot in Halo or Destiny feels satisfying in a way very few shooters do. And if we're talking art style, even Reach's gritter art style compared to the other Halos still has a bit of a "pop" to it VS CoD's more realistic style. Holds true even when compared to more colorful maps like BO2's Nuketown 2025.

Halo: Reach - Highlands (those skyboxes <3)
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Black Ops II - Nuketown 2025
nuketown2-1.jpg

I think what really takes Halo over the top though is Forge. Having a map and game type editor takes things way further than anything possible in CoD. The game types and maps people made really embodied the "party game" ethos of the original Halo's multiplayer. Dumb mini games like Halo's version of Jenga, a recreation of Duck Hunt, among other wholly unique experiences like Speed Halo and Trash Compactor were stupid fun. And when you got tired of all that, you could still hop into ranked and get your sweaty competitive experience, hop into some stellar singleplayer campaigns, or mess around in the PvE Firefight mode.
 
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Real talk, for all the post-Bush era propaganda in the series, the CoD games are just fun and tightly designed. I appreciate the speed and TTK in CoD whereas Halo feels like swimming through molasses and time to kill is absurdly long compared to a lot of shooters nowadays.

Campaign-wise they're like watching a bad episode of 24, which means it's TERRIBLE.

Halo tries to take itself too seriously. CoD is shlock of the highest degree and I'm here for that garbage.
 
TheSpaceBetween said:
Halo. Not a fan of realistic shooters.
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Pretty much where I'm at. Ideally my shooters have health paks and armor, but if it's gonna have regenerating health in the span of 15 seconds it damn well better be sci-fi space marines in the future that have that tech and not some WW2 vet on the shores of Normandy.

I'll play with every lobby muted regardless of game, but I just feel like CoD gets weirdly aggressive and I'm not a fan of the zeitgeist following compared to a boomer shooter. Halo I have simply had better experiences with regardless if I played at a friend's house or my own growing up.
 
Dizzle said:
They have the same politics (Halo's might be more repulsive)
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Putting aside the fact that Halo has a cartoony sheen that rejects a lot of what you could see as bad in any typical FPS, I don't see how their politics are the same at all. Halo had an entire game about contextualizing and humanizing the enemy you were destroying to the point where they even become your allies and the games basically become an interspecies alliance simulator. It also basically put its entire backstory on the evils of religious indoctrination. It's not Star Trek but unless there's some obscure Bungie quote that really doesn't reflect on the games at all (or unless this is talking about the 343 era) then I don't see it at all.

lattjeful said:
I personally prefer Halo's more arena shooter-inspired roots with its weapons and equipment on the ground, as I think it lends itself to a more dynamic experience
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This is kind of a tangent but in response to the image you put in your post, I personally feel like there's a subgenre of shooters that I'd best call "Modern Arena Shooters" which is generally pretty overlooked, things like Half Life or Halo or some other examples I'm probably forgetting (I'm honestly tempted to put Modern Doom in there too since it basically took out all the dungeon level design). Half Life doesn't get shit because it was very PC centric and Gordon Freeman feels like he's on rollerskates (though Half Life still isn't as fast paced as Doom, especially when it has a lot of trial and error traps), but I wish the elitism of the arena shooter genre would just kind of go away. Even as a PC gamer who can acknowledge Doom or Quake did a lot of things better than Halo, Halo did a lot of things better than them too. Both are very good. I know who Favyn is so I know he's not doing that, but the boomer crowd complaining about the classic Halo games just gets very tiring.
 
AngryAlchemist said:
Putting aside the fact that Halo has a cartoony sheen that rejects a lot of what you could see as bad in any typical FPS, I don't see how their politics are the same at all. Halo had an entire game about contextualizing and humanizing the enemy you were destroying to the point where they even become your allies and the games basically become an interspecies alliance simulator. It also basically put its entire backstory on the evils of religious indoctrination. It's not Star Trek but unless there's some obscure Bungie quote that really doesn't reflect on the games at all (or unless this is talking about the 343 era) then I don't see it at all.
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I mean, you're playing as a character whose existence is owed to a program that was originally designed to quell insurrectionists (read: imperialist genocide). This coupled with the overt valorization of heroic individualism and fetishization of militarism makes it not terribly different from other military shooters, the shallow critique of "religious indoctrination" aside.
 
ComradeKoopa said:
I mean, you're playing as a character whose existence is owed to a program that was originally designed to quell insurrectionists (read: imperialist genocide). This coupled with the overt valorization of heroic individualism and fetishization of militarism makes it not terribly different from other military shooters, the shallow critique of "religious indoctrination" aside.
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literally the entire in universe lore of Halo is that this was a bad thing ...... even the mainline games make that apparent
 
ComradeKoopa said:
So what?
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I don't get what you mean "so what". Halo's backstory being that there was an evil program based around creating super soldiers, and then the game criticizing that, doesn't make it a valid point to use the backstories existence against the series simply because the backstory exists when the entire reason the backstory exists is to criticize those politics
 
ComradeKoopa said:
I mean, you're playing as a character whose existence is owed to a program that was originally designed to quell insurrectionists (read: imperialist genocide). This coupled with the overt valorization of heroic individualism and fetishization of militarism makes it not terribly different from other military shooters, the shallow critique of "religious indoctrination" aside.
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Halo definitely is born from the typical American military mythmaking and propaganda, but IMO it is still significantly abstracted away from those ideas compared to a game like Call Of Duty, which is probably the most transparently jingoistic, pro-military industrial complex video game series in existence. Everything in those games is engineered to embolden American/western hegemony and imperialism. Just recently you had IDF soldiers wearing COD gear while on duty:

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So again I’m not particularly interested in defending Halo. But as far as COD goes, sometimes a spade is a spade.
 
Mekanos said:
Halo definitely is born from the typical American military mythmaking and propaganda, but IMO it is still significantly abstracted away from those ideas compared to a game like Call Of Duty, which is probably the most transparently jingoistic, pro-military industrial complex video game series in existence. Everything in those games is engineered to embolden American/western hegemony and imperialism. Just recently you had IDF soldiers wearing COD gear while on duty:

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So again I’m not particularly interested in defending Halo. But as far as COD goes, sometimes a spade is a spade.
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Sure, I wouldn't consider Halo's politics as bare and honest as Call of Duty's reactionary fetishization of militarism, but I just don't buy its incredibly weak "critique" (I wouldn't even call it that, honestly) of imperialism as evidence to the contrary. It's, like, slightly better due to its abstract nature as a futuristic sci-fi. But man, if the critique were actually solid, the franchise probably wouldn't have succeeded. A very loud portion of Halo's fan base very much fetishizes the UNSC and jingoism pervading the series.
 
ComradeKoopa said:
I mean, you're playing as a character whose existence is owed to a program that was originally designed to quell insurrectionists (read: imperialist genocide). This coupled with the overt valorization of heroic individualism and fetishization of militarism makes it not terribly different from other military shooters, the shallow critique of "religious indoctrination" aside.
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I can definitely agree that the religious critiques in Halo are shallow at best, but re: Halo's view of the military, I'd argue that it's doing the opposite of Call of Duty. Underneath all the 90's sci-fi action and power fantasy, Halo very much shows its military organizations as bad. The UNSC and ONI are shady, manipulative, and downright messed up. It rears its head more in the books, but the games aren't shy about talking about the Spartan program, ONI, etc.

Whether or not this translates to any meaningful political views is another matter, but at the very least it isn't fetishizing the military. A lot of the "woah this is cool" is just generic action scene stuff. The 343i Halo games are a little more heavy handed though. 343i has something tied to the Forerunners called the Mantle of Responsibility - the doctrine their entire way of life was built on - and it's essentially imperialism. Throughout the terminals in Halo 3 (when the Mantle was first referenced) and when 343i brings the Mantle to the forefront and makes it a key story point in their trilogy, the Forerunners and their views are constantly called into question and they as a civilization are viewed as arrogant, decadent, and cruel.

Star Trek it is not; Halo is a fun action romp and a party game, after all. But Halo isn't quite US propoganda tool that Call of Duty is either.
 
ComradeKoopa said:
, but I just don't buy its incredibly weak "critique" (I wouldn't even call it that, honestly) of imperialism as evidence to the contrary
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Halo's critique of this doesn't come from the games though (aside from 4's intro, and it is worth mentioning Reach which has the only depiction of the insurrectionists in the entire game series paints them in a very sympathetic light), it comes from the books. Which is particularly relevant since Eric Nylund's depiction of the UNSC as authoritarian and evil is literally the first Halo product that made it to shelves even before the game, and is pretty much the backing of the entire lore of the series, which 343 cares a lot about. Bungie never really took the lore that seriously but they did really emphasize making the enemies more sympathetic than COD has ever done and even made interspecies alliances a big part of the story, on top of the religious indoctrination critique. Which yes, is a light critique, but also it's Halo, it was never meant to be that deep. Different parts of the franchise focus on different themes, and honestly I'd say it's a bit weird to say that the games are inherently evil politically because they don't focus on criticizing the backstory that the game developers didn't even make themselves and were never interested in in the first place, especially when you're also acknowledging that backstory exists in the first place to criticize those kinds of politics.
 
I've never really been into FPSs, but Halo is more appealing to me than Call of Duty outside of maybe Advanced Warfare which I think possibly had some interesting sci-fi and space elements (but I didn't pay that much attention). I might buy Halo MCC on Switch 2. I don't know that I'd ever buy a CoD on Switch 2.
 
AngryAlchemist said:
I'd say it's a bit weird to say that the games are inherently evil politically because they don't focus on criticizing the backstory that the game developers didn't even make themselves and were never interested in in the first place, especially when you're also acknowledging that backstory exists in the first place to criticize those kinds of politics.
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I wouldn't and didn't say the games are "inherently evil politically." My position is that the game isn't significantly different from other military shooters ideologically regardless of its, in my opinion, shallow critique of the UNSC. The whole "these military guys are super evil, now go shoot guns and kill aliens as this super cool soldier and do nothing about it" is fairly banal and, frankly, a distraction from an interesting critique of imperialism. The disconnect between the books and the games doesn't help, but even the books fail to meaningfully address, well, any of it because there's a big alien threat to deal with.

That all said, man, a spinoff where you play as an insurrectionist attempting to defeat the UNSC with revolutionary vigor would be so damn cool, but the plot can't allow it by its very nature.
 
CoD is repulsive to me on basically every conceivable level, from its politics to its aesthetic to how it feels to play. (I wasn't even bad at it, the one time I played when visiting someone's place, I just didn't enjoy it.)

Halo, I have complicated feelings on, having been really into it once upon a time. Not on console, but Halo Custom Edition LAN parties were a big thing when I was in middle school, and I was an ardent reader of the books until it got to be too much to keep up with and keep track of. I think I'll always have a soft spot for it, but I have fallen out of love with it, mainly because Metroid (and to a lesser extent the Marathon trilogy) has everything I loved about it but better, aesthetically and gameplay-wise and especially narratively, without all the stuff I didn't so much vibe with. But all that being said, even when given an option to abstain, I would absolutely take Halo any time.
 
I haven’t played a lot of Halo and not an extensive amount of COD outside of multiplayer, but I like COD more in general. Halo’s whole sci fi thing is cool, but I prefer the more “real” setting of COD.
 
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ComradeKoopa said:
I wouldn't and didn't say the games are "inherently evil politically." My position is that the game isn't significantly different from other military shooters ideologically regardless of its, in my opinion, shallow critique of the UNSC. The whole "these military guys are super evil, now go shoot guns and kill aliens as this super cool soldier and do nothing about it" is fairly banal and, frankly, a distraction from an interesting critique of imperialism. The disconnect between the books and the games doesn't help, but even the books fail to meaningfully address, well, any of it because there's a big alien threat to deal with.
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Yeah, you're right you didn't, I was still dumbfounded by the COD is less repulsive than Halo comment I was responding to and was thinking on that same wave length, my bad.

To me the fact that the UNSC point is barely touched on the games has way more to do with the fact that Bungie almost never cared about the lore, to the point where they even retconned a lot of it in Reach. So I don't see it as a conflict of interest or problematic - the developers pretty much didn't even make a lot of the story that introduced those elements. At the same time, the Bungie games did address their own themes that were pretty far from COD's level of pro imperialism or militarism, and while it wasn't deep and was a pretty cartoony portrayal, it still showed way more empathy than anything COD has really done. I guess I just don't see the Halo games not being a response to the books as much of an issue, when that was never the developers intention in the first place (I'd also say Eric Nylund's writing is definitely a critique of those politics, though I can't say so for any other writers). At the same time, any time the games have had to address those issues they've generally done it pretty tastefully.

So I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree, to be clear though I agree with pretty much everything Mekanos and lattjeful said, and I do think that the series didn't really do enough to get rid of any possible pro military image desipte most of it being trapped in simple sci fi aesthetics
 
I don’t really care for FPS games but I find a series that’s named for ‘the attraction of militarised nationalism: the game’, and that has a long history of extremely ropey takes around real world exceptionalism, US jingo bullshit and xenophobia, more inherently offputting than the space marine one that’s just cartoony sci-fi.
 
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really this is all halo 5's fault for not doing with anything with the "unsc/oni sucks ass" stuff they set up in the marketing

seriously tho, the UNSC/ONI are pretty damn close to pre-war USA in Fallout when it comes to "wow, maybe you guys did deserve to nearly wiped out"
 
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Dizzle said:
They have the same politics (Halo's might be more repulsive), but Halo 2 is one of the best multiplayer games ever made, shooter or otherwise.
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They don’t have the same politics at all, unless you boil it all right down to ‘imperialism bad, whether you’re a sci-fi brightly coloured space marine shooting monsters and aliens, or propaganda of real world countries sending soldiers into thinly disguised proxies of real world countries and calling it mandatory heroics’. Sure, far-future sci-fi war stories play on corruption, incompetence, capitalism and imperialism all leading to totalitarian dictatorships all the time. Everything from Halo to Aliens, Starship Troopers to Space: Above and Beyond or Mass Effect all riff on these themes at some point. But there’s a huge difference between fantastical stories set in the far future where geopolitics on earth (if it’s even still around) are very different, and something like CoD’s propaganda used to get American teenagers to not just turn up to shoot at kids in far off countries, but to imply it’s their national duty to do so.
 
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I wouldn't call myself a huge Halo fan but I always found the games more appealing in terms of gameplay and theming. The stories are a bit whatever, I only remember them in broad strokes, but I find it easier to divorce them from their ideological underpinnings.

Call of Duty on the other hand feels pretty disgusting and exploitative, in ways that extend beyond the jingoistic depictions of international conflicts.

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I never want to touch another one of these again.
 
The original Halo trilogy probably clears all of CoD, yeah. It's a shame the direction CoD went after the first couple games, but as others have said it's just way too gross on every level at this point. 1+2 are pretty good, and 4 is a very interesting game to go back to look at (read: this is not an endorsement), and then the worst things of 4 get cranked up more.

Halo is also a very interesting look on SciFi in the Bush years, but they've managed to sidestep a lot of that and age well. They're also just fairly competent arena shooters all around and still fun to play to this day.
 
Sherlock HALO Post Bungie
is Garbage
and Here's Why
(2:42:54)​

343 Industries pretty much did a Steven Moffat on HALO. Now, everything is about the Major and Cortana. And Moriarty Dr. Halsey, the uber mega mind who is doing everything in the shadows and manipulating the world so she gets what she wants all the time, including in the flippin' series.

Just watch Hbomberguy's video about Sherlock and you can easily see what is wrong with the post Bungie HALO games.

Still, I'd rather play HALO than any Call of Duty game, for at least a few hundred reasons.
 
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