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Comments
It was the first FPS I ever played, so it isn't that.
I don't think it's especially bad or anything. It just never did anything for me beyond being a pretty fun game.
Dude
what are you smoking.
Why would it get a PC release?
Not surprised.
> effectively emotionless supersoldiers take on a semi-arcane extraterrestrial threat
Except Warhammer 40k does it with discussion wherein mankind's own darkness is an equivalent threat to exterior enemies, but the removal of said darkness creates a theology that supports a huge array of human rights abuses; the inherent discussion here concerns the way in which our natural, collective flaws inform our humanity and provide meaning to our triumphs, whereas perfection is homogeneous, uncaring and cruel. Human emotions lend power to the forces of Chaos, so only by neutralising the collective emotional state of a population is it made safe from demonic influence. Safe, but also sterile, without the capacity to maintain social or technological progression.
Also, sometimes they put near-dead heroes in sarcophagi and then plug said sarcophagi into battle-suits called "Dreadnoughts" so those heroes can continue to fight against anything with the tenacity to fall victim to the Imperium's many phobias.
Is there any particular reason for it not to?
Prior Halo PC ports have both sucked and not sold very well. So plenty of reason. They didn't even give Halo Wars (the one game where a PC port would've probably improved it) a computer port.
Okay do you see all of this?
All of this stuff that you typed about Warhammer's setting?
This is why it is nothing like Halo at all.
You are entitled to like one over the other but they are really not similar. Halo has plenty of influences and if you care to waste an afternoon you can look them up, Warhammer 40K is not one of those.
Or is this just one of those things where it's your pet series so clearly everything in the same genre must have ripped it off?
Don't blow a gasket; the point is that a franchise is more than cool setting stuff. I'm not implying that Halo ripped Warhammer 40k off, but both are derivatives of Starship Troopers that have established their own branches. Except I don't think Halo offers much beyond its gameplay, because cool setting details don't necessarily make for a socially relevant discussion in the wider sense.
In fact, the closest Halo has come to this was apparently panned by actual Halo fans, although that's just what I heard: in Halo Legends, there's a story wherein a young girl is taken from her home in order to undergo Spartan training. Eventually, she runs away and returns home, only to find that a clone has taken her place; both believe themselves to be the original. I thought that was a fantastic reflection on military abuses in the name of "doing what we have to" and sought out more Halo material hoping that it would contain the same degree of commentary and thought. No such luck; what I ended up experiencing was a pretty good sci-fi/military shooter, but nothing that held my interest in terms of narrative draw.
Halo Legends wasn't panned for being bad, it was panned for getting a ton of mythology details wrong, and it was several shorts in particular that that criticism was focused on. The one you're talking about was not one of them.
Indeed, because the individual shorts were managed by a number of different people, they varied quite widely in quality. Some were really good, others were mediocre, one or two were just awful.
If you don't find a thorough and interesting setting and backstory enough to interest you, then fine, but that is quite different from saying that the series doesn't have either of those things, which is what you're saying.
Also Halo doesn't pull much more from Starship Troopers than your average sci-fi shooter does (Spess Mareens fightan' alienz is not exactly a very specific thing). It's certainly not as big an influence on the franchise as several of Bungie's own concepts (Halo owes a lot to Bungie's prior Marathon series, which in turn had its own series of influences, but someone could go for months about that, so I'll not). And I would certainly argue that it pulls little from ST thematically.
Halo is just Half-Life in space and the future anyway
Oh yeah, Halo Legends...I'm planning on watching that, how good is it?
Son, please.
The quality is spotty. The good shorts are really good, but some of them are just....stupid. There're also a couple that have a good concept but poor execution.
I haven't played Halo before. Except for 5 minutes as multiplayer.
Will that affect my enjoyment of them?
If you don't mind not understanding half of what's going on, no, not at all.
I'm talking about its gameplay mechanics and the flood
Again
"Son, please".
Not really, Alex. I mean, if you wanted to argue that point, you could have made a connection to 40K's precursor races and the Forerunners. Hell, 40K isn't even that similar at all to Halo, in my opinion, because 40K is based more around 80's pulp science while Halo uses this more "ethereal" aspect to the whole thing. And 40K's "mankind's own darkness is an equivalent threat to exterior enemies, but the removal of said darkness creates a theology that supports a huge array of human rights abuses" thing probably wasn't meant to spark discussion, but to just pile on the grimdark.
Hell, BattleTech/MechWarrior has a universe where five interstellar nations, each based around some old Earth culture, a pseudo-religious corporation that has a monopoly on all FTL communications and the terrorist faction that split off from them, war-centric tribes that descended from the military of an old union between the aforementioned nations, fiercely-defiant nations that live in the extremities of colonized space that may die out at some point, money-hungry mercenaries and rapacious pirates are all fighting for most, if not all of the time, and always fighting over land or for independence.
Dont "son please" me sonny boy.
I have like completed Halo and Half-Life waay before it was cool.
No I'm not. Not that I want to be rude or confrontational, but I'm really not.
My contention here is merely that Halo is pretty bland. Perhaps I just didn't witness the right things, connect the right dots or read the EU, but I recall being a supersoldier I didn't care about fighting for a society I barely understood against enemies that didn't intimidate me. The original kernel of interesting sparked by Halo Legends was pretty much entirely killed by actually playing some of the games, although I can't remember which ones I played now.
For the record, Halo is probably truer to Starship Troopers than most films, games or books based on it, and I suspect this might be because the developers may have read the actual book rather than just watched the (very loosely adaptational) film.
This sounds like a wide stretch to me, if only because self-awareness was always a factor of 40k. While 3rd edition changed a lot, it spent a lot of its lifespan as a joke that was eventually taken seriously by its creators as a result of consumers just not getting it. In fact, both Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy have generally been good enough at handling postermodernist approaches to fantasy fiction that I'm almost sure they put in contradictions like this in the settings simply to provide some basis for speculation and interpretation.
Then it didn't work for you.
It's still not "bland". I don't know what you're trying to imply with "bland".
Also again, I am rather skeptical of claims of a Starship Trooper influence here that's not inherited from something else.
By "bland", I mean that it didn't have a human characterisation element that gave relevance to any of these factors. All I got was setting details being setting details rather than working together to make a cohesive, thematically consistent and expressive whole. Mind you, this isn't a flaw limited to Halo at all -- plenty of games suffer from this. Including ones I like, or ended up liking. Dragon Age's successes at characterisation and plotting, especially towards the late game, still don't succeed at making me care about darkspawn or dwarves. Tales of Symphonia ended up getting tied in a knot around its own world-warping silliness and kept throwing plot twists until I didn't really care any longer.
So I'm not saying that Halo is exceptionally shitty or anything. But as good a shooter experience as it may be, I don't really get anything from it beyond that.
@Alex: The thing is, I think 40K stopped being self-aware and started to turn into what some would call "grimderp."
Well whatever. I don't know what to tell you then.
^^ That arguably came with a writing staff change, but said writing staff don't have the capacity to alter core setting details. And it's those structural elements that lend 40k much of its capacity to express thematically. Whether the new writers are self-aware or not, it doesn't change the fact that for a long time, it's simply been the case that the Imperium is torn between the evils that arise from individualistic expression and the evils that arise from homogeneous standardisation. That's a pretty core, fundamental theme of the Imperium, and I don't think even the worst writer would try to retcon that, or misunderstand the general intent.
Everything I know about Warhammer has to do with their brick-stupid Orcs.
So you can imagine I'm not entirely qualified to chime in on that subject.
I dunno, I think that might be subject to change. Hell, Matt Ward turned the Necrons into ancient Egyptians.
^Nah, he turned them into Tomb Kings. Honestly, I'm still not sure if that's strictly a bad thing either, Necrons were one of the factions that I would classify as "grimderp".
Changing the central social contradiction of the Imperium would be like changing lead into gold. And I doubt even Matt Ward is enough of a dick to try that. He may be both racist and sexist, but he doesn't ultimately give the orders, and it's just one of those things so pivotal to the setting that it can't be changed. I mean, changing the Salamanders from black space marines to "unnatural" black-skinned mutants is a horrific alteration, but not one that is significant to the essential expression of the setting (except that it now screams "also, racism!").
yeah well
you suck too