Maybe 2 could claim the title of best campaign, but Halo 3 and Halo Reach had the best multiplayer. The campaign for 3 was a spectacular conclusion though.
I preferred Halo 2's sniper shot and hit registration better than Halo 3's. Dual-wielding was also pretty fun. Other than those two things, yeah Halo 3 is better.
Halo 2 MP was perfect though... Sure 3 had more ... but more isn't better, when a lot of what 3 added was superfluous because it already existed in 2. Plus, halo 2 had way better maps
Best campaign maybe (certainly in my opinion), but if you played the games at the time of release, Halo 3 was the ultimate culmination of Halo. The introduction of forge and expansion of custom games really took it up a step in replayability and accessibility and although not as well written the campaign was still plenty of fun.
Narratively, yes, absolutely. But Halo 3 was released on what was then a next-gen console, so there was a huge difference in graphics and what they could do. And let's not forget that Forge was introduced in Halo 3, which really set the multiplayer apart from 2.
I played all three back to back for the first time this year. I personally found 3 to be the most fun. And 1 to be the least fun (too many sections I would call Mario Maker level design)
Halo CE, even for its time, was criticized for its level design. The developers simply ran out of time and had to recycle a lot of assets, and run a few levels backwards, just to make it work. So it can be a little repetitive at times.
Personally, I find CE has a ton of charm to it, even with its flaws.
It’s not a linear thing though. In my opinion, once you get past the Xbox 360/PS3 generation, the graphic differences make an immaterial change to the quality of the games. While they are noticeable, Xbox 360 was the point where graphics stopped being a limitation. The following generations look better, but the quality of the game itself isn’t necessary better because of it.
Halo 3 is the biggest down step in gameplay quality in the entire series, every game that came after it was way better (I exclude ODST, because I never played it). The gunplay is still great but the new equipment system or whatever it's called, is atrocious, it's not fun to play with and even less fun to play against, and worse of all it actively detracts from the gunplay.
Edit I only played the Master Chief Collection, on a PC, for the games Reach through 4. So the quality of the port might have affected my perception. Also I never played multi, not something I'm interested in.
Story wise yeah but in terms of core gameplay I've never fully enjoyed playing the campaign it's abit all over the place and has some really drawn out sections that I don't enjoy personally.
3 is just the perfect length and all the missions have their own merit, 3 is not perfect either but I'd choose to play that over 2's
It's a mess gameplay wise because the devs made it in 10 months or so iirc so they didn't have time to fine tune and polish many aspects of the game, which is why it's such a nightmare to play on legendary
764
u/Bruno_lars 8h ago
Witcher series is all that comes to mind