Halo: Campaign Evolved is finally out for everyone, after five days of early access for players that pre-ordered its Premium Edition. But as the masses finally get to replaying Master Chief’s debut adventure, one thing is starting to become abundantly clear: this isn’t your daddy’s Halo.
It’s something I mentioned in my review; Campaign Evolved is very much a remake, not a remaster. There is plenty of tweaking and changing, and nigh-on the entire back half of the campaign has been redesigned to offset how repetitive and brutal those Flood sections were in the 2001 original. But, it seems, not all the changes have been well-received. Enter: the skulls.
Now, the original Halo game didn’t have skulls: difficulty modifiers that can be collected in the campaign and then activated in the lobby to customise various effects in the actual game proper. But after Bungie saw how successful skulls were in Halo 2 onwards, the collectibles were eventually added to Halo: Combat Evolved‘s Anniversary Edition (which were then replicated in The Master Chief Collection). In Halo: Anniversary Evolved, there were 14 skulls to find throughout the campaign. In Halo: Campaign Evolved, however, there are 42 – three times as many as previous versions of the game.
This, effectively, makes Halo: Campaign Evolved into a collectathon. But that’s not something all players of the newly-remade FPS are pleased with. “What’s the point of having skulls in a game if you’re going to kill me for exploring?” asks the top-rated post on r/Halo this week. It’s accompanied by a clip showing Chief getting killed as he ventures out of bounds in a part of the map that, honestly, looks perfectly safe to explore.
“Are we meant to search for Skulls? I’m REALLY getting mixed messages,” says another top-rated post, this time showing Chief exploring a support beam on the second mission’s Halo megastructure before being unceremoniously killed as he passes some invisible threshold.
Elsewhere online, there are plenty more complaints about the way Halo Studios handles Chief going out of bounds. “Starting to think there [are] no easter eggs, just death barriers,” laments another user. And I have to say, I agree: the way Bungie let you explore in the original version of the game was wonderful. The developer trusted you, and poked secrets and easter eggs into the most obscure locations on the map, knowing lore-hungry players would explore every square inch. Halo Studios, though, has been less generous in its trust… despite cramming thrice as many skulls into the map for us all to collect.
It does, indeed, send mixed messages to curious players hungry for some of that now-classic Halo intrigue. During my first playthrough, I found 14 skulls… Funnily enough I think they were the ones whose locations were ingrained into my brain back in the 2011 version of Anniversary. But I wasn’t encouraged to go elsewhere and find the new ones because, like people all over social media, I got tired of being ‘killed by the architects’ whenever I wandered out of bounds. Bounds which, I should add, don’t feel particularly well-defined or signposted.
The most irritating example of this is during The Silent Cartographer mission,which takes place on an island. Why am I being punished for exploring certain areas in a single-player or PvE co-op game, when the original allowed you to literally play levels backwards with vehicles that were ‘prohibited’ in certain areas if you were canny and persistent enough?
Far be it for me to complain about something like this without offering a solution, though: all you need to do is think back to 2010’s Halo Reach. Here, if players strayed too far away from the developer’s intended pathing, the game wouldn’t kill you – rather, it would instigate a ‘death timer’ instead, giving you plenty of opportunity to head back to safe ground before being unceremoniously ragdolled into the nearest hard surface. Ideally, we’d still have the agency to explore where we liked, but by implementing this we’d also get fair warning before simply being pinged back to our last checkpoint.
Don’t let this put too much of a downer on Campaign Evolved, though. I think it’s a decent remake, and a bold indication of where Halo is looking to go over the next few years. And the good news is it already looks like a Halo 2 remake is in the pipes.
