It’s Time to (re)Visit Halo 3
You might have heard about Halo Infinite in the last week, with all the buzz and brutes surrounding it. It’s an exciting time for Halo fans, to be sure, but not really where my attention has been focused recently. You see, you may also have heard that Halo 3 was released on PC recently, via Halo: The Master Chief Collection, for the first time in the game’s 13-year-long history. Having said goodbye to my Xbox in 2011, this is my first taste of one of my all-time favorite games in nearly a decade. So indulge me for a moment, and tell you exactly why Halo 3 is an incredibly special game still worthy of your time in 2020.
Dropping into Halo’s multiplayer today, the first thing you are likely to notice is how different it is from modern deathmatch shooters. Halo 3 was released two months before Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and is therefore untouched by that game’s FPS revolution. Owing more to the likes of Quake and Unreal Tournament, Halo’s spartans run fast and jump high, encouraging evasive movement during tense shootouts. This is important, as there are few quick kills in Halo 3. Players spawn in with the painfully ineffective Assault Rifle (depending on the game mode), which requires around 3–5 seconds of bullet barrage before it will even lower a player’s shields, allowing you to come in for a melee takedown. This encourages power weapon play — learn where the sniper rifles and rocket launchers spawn on every map and soon you will have a significant advantage over your opponents. If you can survive the scuffle to reach it first, that is.
I’m not here to claim that this is a better system than the one popularized by Call of Duty but in 2020, after 13 years of CoD and its various imitators (including most Halo games released since), it’s a nice change of pace. That said, it’s not the bog-standard deathmatches that elevate Halo above the rest in the shooter pantheon. That’s all due to the custom games.
In case you aren’t aware, Halo 3 introduced Forge mode, a limited but inspiring map editor that, paired with Halo’s in-depth game mode customization, led to some ingenious games coming from the community. Perhaps most famously, the team behind the machinima Red Vs Blue created Griffball, a simple game in a square court where the aim is to fight for the bomb in the center and carry it to the opposing side to score a point. Except everyone has giant hammers that will send your corpse cartwheeling gracefully into the sky.
Then there are the custom games which, back in 2007, were passed from friend to friend through each player’s individual “file share”, a place to display your favorite maps to be downloaded by others. With no central browser for these maps, they often spread organically, slowly embedding themselves into the mind of every Halo 3 player purely through word of mouth. My personal favorite is Jenga, a game about vainly attempting to stay atop a precarious tower of concrete blocks which itself hovers over a deep ravine. The twist is that your opponent is shooting barrels, crates, quad bikes, and steel girders at you, hoping to hit the tower in just the right spot to watch the entire structure topple into the canyon below.
It’s beautiful madness and is just one of many incredible game types cooked up by the community, from invisible zombies to racetracks to parkour maps to games of Duck Hunt where you are the duck, and your friend is the hunter.
Unfortunately, Halo 3 isn’t quite how I remember it. The Master Chief Collection, after all, is infamously known for the number of bugs it has. Forge was added alongside Halo 3 but it’s difficult to use with a mouse and keyboard and a current bug can cause you to die when spawning objects if you’re within even 10 feet of a wall. Theater mode has even more awkward keyboard controls and is missing the functionality to record clips/screenshots directly into Halo’s file system. And if you’re hoping to play the campaign with some friends, beware of some very temperamental netcode.
Even when it works well, modern proprietors 343 Industries still don’t really understand what made Halo so good. Slayer deathmatches by default now spawn player with the headshot-happy Battle Rifle, undermining that power weapon game-flow explained earlier. Thankfully, playlists still exist which allow for the traditional play but now the Slayer player base is split because of it. On top of that, some of the map choices are just bizarre. One map in Halo 3 is now altered during an infection game, allowing human players to climb to a previously unaccessible vantage point which makes it almost impossible for zombies to reach them.
Despite all of this, it somehow doesn’t matter. Like a tinny remaster of your favorite album, Halo’s playful soul shines through the misguided additions and it still an absolute blast to play. It’s now easier than ever to download the famous custom games of yore and jump into a game with some friends. Heck, these days you can even hop into a custom games Discord and find some new friends to punt off a Jenga tower. If you’re looking for a fresh (or nostalgic) shooting experience, I couldn’t recommend Halo 3 enough. Play it. Love it. Admire it as you careen off the side of a Grifball court.
