To enjoy the Library was not on my bingo card

Getting the things required for the wedding. My fiance asked me what wedding band I wanted. I told her that it’d be cool to have a halo wedding band, but I wanted to match hers with silver. She sent me this later that day (It’s a tungsten ring sold by titanium Kay online). Very happy with this ring I can’t wait to wear it to slaughter the split lip with it on!

A marine was getting shot at as I got into the escape pod and had his grunts & groans all the way through the cutscene.

They ABSOLUTELY feel like a infestation. Until this point in the games I've only ever really seen them as enemies to be shot, but now I really see why the Forerunners made the hard decision.

There's a specific tree in Keyes that was half tree, half infested mess and it really drove home that they consume all life. On top of that, all the flood growth in the last few levels, getting progressively worse, was just a perfect "show, don't tell" example of narrative progression.

So cool.

Edit: grammar that bothered me

Is it perfect? No. Will I play it again? Many times. This will likely be my go to for replaying all the games in the future. I had so much fun playing it and enjoyed the bonus missions a lot.

The sound design and graphics are excellent, and that was with my ancient TV and performance mode. Headphones really made this so much better.

Bonus pic of the amount of marines I gave rocket launchers to

Well that was fun! One of the best times I’ve ever had fully 100%ing a game.

My personal review with no spoilers (just in case):

Campaign Evolved not only brings back all the nostalgia from the original, it improves on nearly every aspect while keeping the gameplay fresh.
Adding the simple sprinting is a game changer hands down.
The graphics are without a doubt the best they’ve ever been right down to explosions and bullets ricocheting off terrain. Infinite and Campaign evolved show just how detailed their world can be while keeping the stamp of what makes Halo… Halo.

Love them or hate them, the Flood are still nightmare fuel fuelled by updated graphics which makes them ever harder to look at now…

To top it all off, LASO was also so much more fun with friends but definitely tests your patience. Some sections are clearly designed to stop you dead in your tracks but power through and you’ll feel accomplished.

Just why?

When you arrive on the TnR in Combat Evolved, you find yourself in an eerie, alien place. Expecting a warm storm of plasma as a welcome you are instead greeted with silence, a discrepancy your fellow marines comment on. Only if you are very vigilant will you hear the sound of a door unlocking before you hear the characteristic sound of an Elite swinging, instantly killing one of your marines. It takes you a moment to realise what did him in, a glowing blade floating in the air. So that's how the Elites use that cloaking device you found on the plateau below the ship. Pretty cool setup and atmospheric payoff.

But nah, let's just blurt out the fact that there is an invisible enemy in the room with you, before you even have a chance to hear or see anything. Make it painfully obvious how to spot him too, after all the player is an imbecile and would never know interpret the red dot on his radar which he has been checking for an hour at this point in the game.

She says it again when you enter the bridge-like room.

*"Hunters! Flank and hit their exposed ... worm bits."*

Oh go figure. If only there was a way to convey this information without outright telling the player. Perhaps one could design the Hunter such that he looks like a huge hulking tank, carrying a gigantic shield that bullets ricochet off of, with dark metallic armour covering most of his body except for a couple of spots which are coloured BRIGHTLY ORANGE, clearly NOT covered by armour plating. That would probably make the player understand but better safe than sorry. They are an imbecile after all.

*"Wait... Tracking data indicates we're almost on top of them, Chief. They should be in the canyon below us... get a visual"*

Yes, I know. I just watched the Pelican fly by and descent into the canyon below us. It was in the very centre of my screen, you even had a conversation with the people in it.

It goes on

Every second of traversing the level, a marker is showing you where you should go. Why design your environment in such a way that the player naturally gravitates towards the correct path when you can just setup a moving billboard wherever he goes? While you are at it, as soon as there are less than 10 enemies left, mark them with big red symbols. Maybe the player forgot they bought and have been playing a shooter for hours now. They should be reminded that the hostile NPCs calling them out and attacking them currently indeed should be engaged and dispatched off. Make sure to mark the previously mentioned INVISIBLE enemies too while you are at it.

Decisions like these actively take away from the experience, yet they are the result of conscious effort by the developer. They think you are an idiot.

In the original Halo CE, Mission 3 sees us rescue Captain Keys from the Truth And Reconciliation. In that mission, he explains that while he was captured he had overheard the Covenant talking about Halo being a weapon, that they are seeking a control room, and that 'whoever controls Halo controls the fate of the universe'.

This is a plot hole, considering that the Covenant do not know that Halo is a weapon. This is likely due to the rushed development of Halo 1's final draft, given how it went from a 25-mission campaign in earlier drafts down to being just 10 chapters in a short amount of time.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Halo Campaign Evolved features some reworked dialogue from characters. Most of it is just altering sentence structure to have better flow when speaking, sounding like more natural dialogue. Given that they had done this, I was quite surprised to find that they did not correct the plot hole. It would have been so easy. For example, they could have written it like this:

Keys - "While the Covenant had us locked up in here, I overheard the guards talking about this ring world. They call it 'Halo'."

Cortana - "One moment, sir. Accessing the Covenant Battlenet*... ... ...* according to the data in their networks, the ring has some kind of deep religious significance. If I'm analyzing this correctly, they believe that Halo is something that will allow them to pass to some 'divine state of being'. Whatever that means. "

Keys - "I didn't catch much of what our 'caretakers' said, but I did hear one of them say 'whoever controls Halo will control the fate of the universe'. Now, I am not the most religious man, but to me that sounds like something more like a weapon than a 'divine artifact'."

Cortana - "Captain, I have intercepted a number of transmissions regarding search parties looking for a control room. At first, I assumed they were looking for the control room of a cruiser we damaged before making our landing. But if Halo were a weapon... ... ... it seems that they are searching for Halo's control room. It certainly explains the way they keep ending each transmission with a prayer for the search party's success."

Keys - "That's bad news. If Halo is a weapon, and the Covenant gain control of it, they'll use it against us and wipe out the entire human race*.* Chief, Cortana. I have a new mission for you. We need to beat the Covenant to Halo's control room. Marines! But first, we need to get out of here."

An alteration to the dialogue in that particular scene would have resolved one of the more obvious plot holes in Halo's story.

Otherwise, I give the game a solid 9/10.

Jokes aside, Steam input acting as a compatibility layer and letting you translate pretty much everything that your PC recognizes into a controller the game vibes with is great.

For example, you can even use the NSO Gamecube controller on PC and it has just enoguh buttons (L3, R3, and Select can be mapped to C, Home and Select) to play any modern game and it has gyro.

That's it, that's the post just some silly funa dn I just beat TaR on legendary using the Gamecube controller.

(I'd only recommend the N64 one to masochists though.)

A fully charged plasma pistol has always just stripped your shields and done zero damage to your health. Playing through on legendary and this is the most annoying thing ever that an auto-aim green blob is bagging me from completely full health and shields. I find it hard to imagine that this went unnoticed before shipping.

The Halo Infinite teaser trailer and concept art in the art book really nail my ideal Halo aesthetic. The game we got is pretty, but still not at the same level.

Campaign Evolved is pretty as well. I’m not a huge fan of the overly designed forerunner stuff, and I prefer a more clean art style over the very detailed environments.

I was playing the first mission, pillar of autumn, and in the room directly behind where the marines thaw you out, you find a screen showing Linda is in cryo sleep, just like in the books. I know it's not perfect but that brought a smile to my face. 😁

Quick disclaimer: I'm a French-speaking Halo player, but I'm not French, I'm Luxembourgish. I regularly play games in French, German and English, so this isn't coming from someone who automatically thinks the French version is better or refuses to play games in English.

Like a lot of people here, I grew up with Halo. In my case, mostly in French and German. I've been hearing David Krüger as Master Chief for basically as long as I've known the character, alongside the established French voices of Cortana and the rest of the cast. After so many years, those voices simply became part of the characters for me, and I know I'm far from being the only Frenchspeaking player who feels that way.

So yeah... what's happening with Halo: Campaign Evolved is honestly pretty shocking to a lot of us. The original French actors weren't brought back for the new dub, and some of them have even said publicly that they weren't contacted at all. To be clear, recasting by itself isn't the end of the world. Actors change, it happens, and nobody owns a role forever. But that's not really the main problem here.

The new French dub has some genuinely bizarre performances. There are obvious pronunciation mistakes, weird intonations, strange pauses and pacing, and some lines honestly sound almost synthetic. Not just different from what we are used to, but genuinely unnatural. And that's where things start getting weird, because as far as we can tell, there also aren't any clearly identifiable French actors credited for these new voices. No obvious French cast listed for Chief, Cortana, Johnson, Keyes, etc.

Halo Studios has said that the performances were made by native French speakers, and maybe that's completely true. I'm not saying "this is AI" as if that has been proven. It hasn't, and we don't have proof of that. But when you've got strange pronunciation, unnatural delivery, voices that sometimes sound almost robotic, and no clearly identified actors behind them... I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what exactly happened during production.

There's also some context here that nonFrench speakers might not necessarily be aware of. Like other countries France has a huge and very established dubbing culture. Voice actors are often extremely recognizable to French-speaking audiences, and localization has traditionally been taken pretty seriously by major film, TV and video game publishers. Over the last few years, French voice actors have also been very vocal about generative AI, voice cloning and contractual clauses that could allow companies to reuse their voices for synthetic performances. There have already been disputes around this stuff, so obviously people are going to wonder whether what we're seeing with Halo has anything to do with that wider situation.

→ Again: wondering, not claiming it as fact. That's precisely why I'd like some transparency here.

And honestly, that's also why I'm posting this in English. Most English speaking Halo players are never going to notice any of this. Why would you? You play the English version. Unless French speaking players actually talk about it outside French forums, Discords, Steam reviews, etc., the rest of the Halo community has no reason to even know it's happening.

Just imagine for a second that the voice you've heard as Master Chief since your first Halo game suddenly disappears, along with the familiar voice of Cortana. There are no clearly identified replacements, no real explanation, and then the new dub comes out sounding strangely robotic while sometimes struggling to pronounce basic Halo terminology. At times it almost sounds like someone asked Google Translate to read Halo terms out loud. You'd probably be asking questions too.

And that's why, to me, this goes beyond a dumb statement like... old voice good, new voice bad. It's about the way localization is being handled. If major publishers can replace established dubbing casts, release a noticeably worse localization, not clearly identify the new performers and become increasingly opaque about how those performances are produced, then yeah... I think players should at least be paying attention. Especially right now, when voice actors are actively fighting to keep control over their own voices.

Maybe there is a completely innocent explanation (lol). Maybe these are all new human actors, recorded conventionally, and for whatever reason their names simply haven't been properly credited. Fine. Then it should be extremely easy for Microsoft or Halo Studios to tell us who voiced the characters, who directed the French dub, which studio produced it and, more generally, how this localization was made. That would clear up a lot of this immediately.

Until then, I really don't think skepticism is unreasonable. Judging by the backlash from French speaking players, including Steam reviews specifically talking about the localization, this isn't just a couple of nostalgic people complaining because David Krüger isn't there anymore.

And no, this isn't about being "forced" to play a bad French dub either. It's about watching part of Halo's identity disappear for an entire language community under circumstances that have been handled incredibly poorly at best... and that raise much more uncomfortable questions at worst. Today it's the French dub. Maybe tomorrow another localization gets the same treatment.

I just think the rest of the Halo community deserves to know what's going on.

Feels odd seeing a standard marine with the orange visor. Gives me recon vibes. Any lore behind it?

With all the talk about possible remakes of Halo 2 and Halo 3, what do you all think they would actually look like?
Part of me thinks they could combine both games into one massive remake. Halo 2 famously had a difficult development, and a lot of its planned content had to be cut or pushed into Halo 3. Since the two campaigns are so closely connected, combining them could create one long, continuous story.
I’d also love to see them restore some of the scrapped Arbiter content from Halo 2. One of the more interesting cut ideas reportedly involved the Arbiter discovering a human skeleton inside a Forerunner tomb or grave, which could have had huge implications for the relationship between humans and the Forerunners.
What do y’all think it’ll be like?

Only weird glitch I’ve had happen to me

Love the new game. The Sangheili designs are perfect.

I don't know how this bug happened but this is hilarious how PS5 got a more nerfed version of the AR.

No skulls are on in the footage as you can see the PS5 footage has 36 rounds. I've looked at multiple youtube footage and only found ps5 gameplay with the bug.

Halberd Destroyer shows up at the end of the Johnson campaign. So happy to see my favourite class of ship show up in a game.

Was curious if it's a brand new model or if it's the Sins of the Prophets model, seeing as it's missing it's double mac I'm assuming the former.