I still can’t stop but think how stretched out the Hobbit films were, for an otherwise short book. That’s a sin that stains forever with me. The Lord of the Rings films, do have their own flaws, but they’re fairly contained and can be debated as to whether they were good or not. I have so much trouble excusing anything with the Hobbit though.
And I hope we never, ever see anyone tackle The Silmarillion. Simply because, there will be so much improvised fluff in that would-be film, that it’d make the Hobbit films blush.
Apart from Master Chief Collection and Campaign Evolved, I haven’t touched a post-Bungie Halo game, so I can’t really comment on the quality of 4, 5 or Infinite. From what I’ve heard, 4 had a divisive campaign and horrible multiplayer, Halo 5 had decent multiplayer and a terrible story, and Infinite was heavily flawed.
What I can say is that 343 Industries fucked up hard with remastering the old games. Not even Rare (a development studio with a similarly bad reputation for pumping out shit game after shit game under Microsoft) have managed the feat of fucking up a remaster. Halo 1 Anniversary genuinely has updated graphics that do not align at all with the level geometry, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the Truth & Reconciliation mission where you had to sneak past Covenant forces, and if you were playing on the updated graphics, they could see and shoot you through boulders.
The studio rebrand and switch to Unreal 5 was a huge gamble that clearly didn’t pay off, because Campaign Evolved had terrible gunplay, glaring bugs, prequel missions with bad design and more exposition than a Shounen anime, and a redesign of Cortana where she has an incredibly masculine jawline and genuinely looks like Jerma985 wearing a wig.
I once saw a comment on Facebook about how the Halo Studios logo looks like an ODST being pounded in the ass with a giant dildo and I genuinely cannot unsee that image. It’s also a very fitting metaphor for what they did to the Halo franchise.
Disbanding Halo Studios, waiting for Marathon to inevitably fail and then buying Bungie from Sony for chump change is probably the best thing Asha Sharma can do with the franchise right now.
I’m still kinda mad that they decided Cortana had to be sexy and ditched the purple/green pixie of the first design. The AI companion of an asexual super soldier doesn’t need jiggly tits!
I think it was a consequence of them fleshing out the Halo lore after the first game became a surprise hit. To me Halo 2 Cortana will always be the best design.
I mean, it was fanservice to sell copies too. Even my child ass could see that back then.
I mean, do we really want the Destiny 2 dev working on Halo now?
I say give it to a studio with proven writing chops (Arkane, if they hadnt killed them?) or let it die.
Man, an Arkane Halo game…
Do what they did with Killer Instinct 2013 and Battletoads 2020. Bring in another studio but keep the main company associated with the IP in an advisory/support role. Rare clearly shouldn’t be trusted with solo developing another game and neither should Bungie.
Or, do what Activision did with Neversoft when they effectively merged them with Infinity Ward and became one of the three core CoD developers. Merging Arkane with Bungie could make one hell of a team.
Bungie holds serious brand recognition with Halo fans.
I find the phrasing of this amusing. In my head, I’m picturing Arkane and Bungie in a room, and Sharma is pointing at Arkane and saying “Dont leave Bungie alone in a room with the cookie jar. Dont do it.”