After 5 years in development and heavily pushing Unreal Engine 5 technologies, Immortals of Aveum was met with a whopping 751 player peak. For reference, Forspoken was considered a flop but still had over 12,000 players peak total. This may be the biggest flop of the year.
The first two halo games were masterpieces in world building and suspense in gameplay. When the flood is first introduced your on the edge of your seat it’s on par with the best horror games ever made.
Even Halo 3, for all its faults (“to war” immediately springs to mind), kept everything largely within the world-building of the previous two games, and it made the whole trilogy feel super cohesive and immersive when played back to back.
3 was definitely the last solid one. I still can’t believe they tried to turn it into a class based loadout cod game for multiplayer…
The story is good in Halo, but you really discount that 1-3 were basically the best shooter experience available at the time.
Halo was one of the first console fps games that got the controls right. Before Halo, FPS games were only really good on the PC (though some console ones like Goldeneye and PD were good despite bad controls). Mouse and keyboard are still supreme, but Halo’s one stick looks one stick moves scheme brought consoles out of that awkward to control range.
Moving around effectively in Goldeneye or PD was an art. In Halo, like PC games, it was natural.