Halo: Combat Evolved is closing in on 20 years. The designs in that game have aged much better, IMO, than many other games of the same era. The design is grounded and practical. It's something you could envisage as a potential future evolution of combat technology. IE - more grounded in realism than fantasy even though the entire game is fantastical.
Going back to it (playing), I still like the design, something I can't say for many of the games from the past 20 years.
Regards,
SB
I agree 100% on that, with reggards to the human tech. That simplicity and grounded-ness is what made Halo CE special then. It did look like some bland boring tech the american military would come up with. And that is why it was so immersive. I love that 343 seems to be going back to that with infinite.
But I don't see as much inspiration on the original's creature design, nor alien tech and architecture. It was as both bland AND unrealistic. It managed to be cheesy, but not fun cheesy, just boring cheesy. And it has gotten worse with age.
And I say all that despite the fact that I'm all for a fully nostalgic remaster of old classics with modern tech but absolute loyalty to an originals source. Paying homage not just to the end result, but to the feel and impression it caused at the time. But that has to be done with self-awareness, and that starts recognizing the weaknesses of the original source and deliberately choosing to own them up.
I've had wet dreams of a modern doom game with a real-time miniature of the protagonist's face on the HUD for example, and unapologetically 80's/90's heavy metal comic book design for all monstars, with no atempt at "MoDeRnIzAtIoN"
I've dreamed of a MK game with fully photorealistic 3D modeles of the original characters in exact replicas of the cheap-ass costumes the actors used for the first game's photo-shoots. Environments with a mix of perfectly convincing objects where they would have been photo/video cutouts of real-world objects in the originals with purposegully non-PBR old-school shader stuff to try to capture shitty 90's cgi for other parts of the scene. With even a simulated green bounce lighting around the characters silhouettea from a virtual chroma-key screen, just for the shits and gigs.
Embrace the camp, with all the good and all the bad. No compromises. I'd find a game like that hilarious, but I don't see it happening.
So since I know 343 would not have the balls to do that with Halo, so if they are gonna modernize here and there, then I think where they should care the least about mantaining the integrity of the original is the Mosters and Alian tech, because that shit was positively ridiculous.
