Why aren't there any Halo copycats?

I love Halo's brand of gunfights, but Im a pc gamer, so there is no opportunity to play halo. I'm just curious as to why no major company has made a halo-like shooter.

And this is what I mean be halo like shooter vs the standard military shooters.

Standard military shooter: battlefield 3, modern warfare 3, black ops, counterstrike, etc etc
What I don't like about them: they're basically completely about spotting someone first...there is no firefight, no engagement, its shoot and die. You see someone, shoot them and 2 seconds later they're dead. That is boring to me, as I barely ever even see who is shooting me (yes I know I suck).

What I like about Halo is that there is actually engagement...it's actually a gunFIGHT. You can hit someone first and they can still have a chance. There is actually a long (relatively) gunfight, where grenades can be used strategically, where jumping in the middle of a fight can mean difference between life and death. Section 8 is as close to a halo copycat as I can think of but it is lowbudget and nowhere near as good.

 

Even if Microsoft made Halo a Windows 8 exclusive i would be okay with it because it is a nice game.
Section 8 while good got killed by two things: GFWL and the horrible netcode of Unreal Engine 3.

 

Yeah, I always wondered why we don't have anyone copying Tupac as well. And how come the uniqueness of Britney Spears never was copied? Really, it's a mystery to me.

 

IIf you ask me, the halo's were too repetitive and bland. I never got why they were so popular. The is strictly from an SP angle. I slogged through the first one and stopped halfway through 2 out if boredom. I never could get into them. I sometimes feel I should try Halo 3 and Reach. With 4 out and seemingly fixing many of the gripes I had about the previous ones I may just start there when I run out of stuff on my backlog (late 2013).

Edit: and you have to be kidding me on the copycat confusion. Halo copied things before it, and there are plenty of shooters that have aped design from it, thankfully also leaving behind aesthetics that were poor. They are most notable for spearheading the console fps control scheme.

 

I liked resistance fall of man on ps3 for the same reason, it had firefights.

No games a like this really these days.

 

Metro and Crysis did these well.

 

Huh? Wha?

And those are the only two Halo games worth playing.

 

Amazon.com: Halo 2: Pc: Windows Vista: Video Games

Still worth every penny. I was obsessed with Combat Evolved when it came out on PC. I don't think they've been making any for PC lately because the market for Halo is Xbox, not PC (not as profitable for PC).

 

Halo CE was good. Halo 2 & 3 were just more of the same. Halo 4 intrigues me, though.

 

Reminds me another game franchise, which has an upcoming release.
I also wonder why...

 

Tribe : Ascent is really great and it's free. You should really try it !

 

Agreed! Great game for a free game!

 

Unreal Tournament 99/2003/2004/3, Half-Life 2 multiplayer, CS:S rpg mod

 

^^^

When Halo CE came out there was such a raft of better multiplayer experiences in the sci-fi setting... singleplayer as well (although CE singleplayer was awesome).

Its just that Halo is pretty much one of the few xbox exclusives and so if Microsoft were to drop the ball on Halo, their console will suffer as well.

Think of Unreal tournament, Quake, Crysis, Doom, Half-life...

 

The Borderlands series has some really fun, extended firefights, but it's cooperative multiplayer, not competitive multiplayer.

I just don't enjoy the feel of Call of Duty and Battlefield. They lack the realism of, say, Ghost Recon 1, AND they lack the mobility-oriented extended firefights of Halo. To me, they're the worst of both worlds.

 

I didn't think ghost recon 1 was really realistic... you just had to be really patient, coz of high lethality. The originals of the Rainbow 6 series were very realistic - get shot in the hand? Reload slower, poorer aim. Shot in legs? decreased mobility.

EA dropped the ball on battlefield 3 in terms of gun play. Recoil was much harder to control in BF2... but the battlefield series was never about realism but rather the extended maps you get to play on.

Apart from Counter strike I can't think of a game that is a successful hybrid between the arcade and realistic shooter.

 

This thread motivated me to dig out Halo from the bottom of the pile and play it all day.

 

Apart from counterstrike? What? What part of counterstrike is even remotely realistic?

 

Quake and Unreal Tournament are the two games that are the closest you'll ever get to Halo on PC apart from the first Halo game itself

 

Red Faction (first one) was nice...
I still remember how sometimes I would be lazy to look for the key to unlock the door and just blow up the wall with the grenade launcher.

 

Red Faction multiplayer was hilarious. At every family gathering my brothers and cousins would fire up every PC on the LAN and get a good old fashioned FFA going. Nothing like running down an empty hallway and having someone burst out of the wall next to you or snipe you through it with the rail gun.

 

The better question is, why is Microsoft ignoring PC? They spend a lot of money marketing that Windows is the #1 gaming platform. Halo 4 does look fun and awesome, so why isn't it available for Windows? Heck if they want to play the stupid games that corporations do, they can make Halo 4 exclusive to Windows 8, incentive to upgrade. That would be awful if they did, but question remains. Why do they continue to ignore PC. And don't say piracy. There are plenty of pirates on console and it's easier to pirate games on console than it is on PC and you can play on Xbox Live with pirate copies of the games. So that's not an excuse. Microsoft is baffling me when it comes to Halo.

 

It is ridiculous. And they showed that they're fine with making games OS exclusive, because they made Halo 2 Vista only (and released it almost 3 years later). Honestly, Microsoft just doesn't seem to care very much about PC gamers.

 

Compare to console, it much easier to get illegal copy of games running on PC. Also, Console game easily sell for $40+ a piece . PC game ...pfff...

 

You're wrong, so very wrong and you can play MP on pirated copies on console. So again, piracy is not an excuse.

 

Actually, you can play official multiplayer with the console pirated versions while on PC you can't and also console games tend to be more expensive.

 

able to and easy to is 2 different thing.

 

From what I know, don't you need a modchip to pirate console games? Also, if you play on Xbox Live with a modded console, Microsoft can ban your console and you won't be able to use it on Live again.

 

All you need to do most of the time is write a new f/w to the dvd drive, so no extra hw is needed.

I want halo 3/reach/halo 4 on PC, halo 2 vista was a disgrace and the modding community from halo 1 didn't even pick it up of how much garbage it was.

 

I think the control schemes are why you don't see run-and-gun shooters like Halo on the PC. With a keyboard-and-mouse interface, people are a lot more lethal from a lot further off, so the sort of jumping-and-circle-strafing tactics that work well when everyone is on a gamepad are more likely to just draw fire and get you killed when everyone is with keyboard-and-mouse. Just my suspicion; I have no proof of this.

 

I said 'a successful hybrid between arcade and realistic shooter' - there are many aspects of CS that are steeped in realism but were tweaked to an arcade setting, especially the recoil system and high lethality, no health regen. I don't get your surprise - obviously its nothing compared to the military sims out there buts its far more realistic compared to the raft of modern shooters that have been released.

? There were heaps of deathmatch style shooters better than Halo on PC. Quake is still played competitively, admittedly a shadow of its former self. Its just that for some reason, they are not as popular any more. If anything, the high precision tool of keyboard + mouse made those shooters even more popular as they allow for a higher level of skill differentiation between players. I still whip out ut 2k4 and play Assault mode with friends. Never disappoints.

 

Counter-strike is about as unrealistic of a shooter out there. You can't even use iron sights on it. Using cross-hair for any competitive FPS is laughable IMO. Yeah I said it, I think Counter-Strike is lame. As for recoil, what recoil is this? Recoil on cross-hair, yeah whatever. Source engine FTL. The quick scoping on rifles, yeah that couldn't possibly be any more unrealistic for sniping. The shooting from hips with good accuracy on any gun, about as unrealistic shooting mechanic as you can get. Also whenever you are in a squad and running/walking, you're supposed to have the barrel aimed to the ground, prevent friendly fire. But right in CS, gun is always on the hip, again unrealistic. So what if it doesn't have health regen or lethal shots, not realistic at all. No bullet drop. Doesn't have proper physics, the movement of the barrel has no effect on the bullet trajectory etc. The textures and colors in Counter Strike also unrealistic. The gameplay modes, also unrealistic. Yeah terrorists just running around in a room placing random bomb. Yup that's a realistic scenario.

Anyway, point, Counter Strike is laughable joke whenever the word realistic is used to describe it.

 

CS was not meant to be realistic, if you want a realistic shooter, go play ARMA.

 

I never mentioned CS being realistic - I said it was a HYBRID ARCADE shooter, that combined multiple elements from different genres.
LOL at your comment about sniping - if you tried to stand and fire an AWP in real life you'd probably tear your rotator cuff. You want that in a game?

Looks like the only thing realistic for you is a real war buddy.

 

Or the earlier Operation Flashpoint games

 

Yeah, but either way, my point is that it's still way more work on the 360 and other consoles than on the PC to pirate games and most people aren't going to go through all that.

 

But in the same post you said that BF3 wasn't realistic enough. BF3 is clearly more realistic than CS.

 

The Halo series is intentionally simplified and "arcade" stylized due to inferior controls.

Halo is too simple and not really a proper fit for the PC gamer market.
In a nutshell, PC gamers require a lot more actual content and more differentiation in player skill.

Truthfully, Halo is much more a movie with some shooter components than a shooter.

Frankly, I think early 2000s PC deathmatch shooters are much better than Halo has gotten up to this point.

 

I disagree. I use the controller when I can on PC. (Used to be a major keybd/mouse snob starting way back in 94 in doom.) Its just more comfortable. Halo sucked because it was bland and environments were ridiculously repetitious. People still had great fun with the MP, but its SP was a step back from what came before it. It did a few things well like defining good console control methods and some other things that kept the action moving. But overall it was, for SP, not that good.

 

not sure if its been sugested but the mass effect 3 multiplayer is decent... little closer to the science fiction firefights of Halo then realistic based games like CoD etc.

its not pvp though just team/player vs AI and its no copycat but Still a lota fun.

 

If you use a controller to play FPSes then you are in a very small minority.

I agree though, I have always been underwhelmed by the Halo series.

 

I also wondered why is HALO an Xbox exclusive (except 1 and 2)? A lot of PC players would love to have the game, and Microsoft themselves can release it to the window? SO why aren't they going for it?

 

LOL are you serious. BF3 is as arcade as CS is. Forget about the hugely unrealistic shooting alone (the only thing they implemented was bullet drop), all the various attachments in BF3 are a complete joke (remember flashlight, laser sight?), and never mind how Dice/EA ruined infantry vs vehicular combat in BF3.

 

Tell me about it. If they made any video game as realistic as it is in real life, nobody would want to play. I can only speak of the aviation side of the military, but the vast majority of the stuff we do isn't action packed. It's 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror. I love the fact that Halo is so fake and the gun fights last so long. The other shooting games are just as fake, but in a different manner.

 

Real-life military simulator: service trucks in 120-degree heat while eating the worst food ever served to human beings and periodically being woken up in the middle of the night by mortar fire...and getting paid less than a typical janitor for doing so, and being ignored by the popular media because some worthless celebrity is having another high-profile bender. Also, no respawns.

I wouldn't pay $59.99 to download it on Origin, I'll say that much.

 

The fact remains that any console controller is insanely inaccurate and clunky in comparison to the mouse.

There is a reason microsoft did not allow xbox and mslive pc players to play together.
The xbox players were absolutely dismantled time after time in landslide defeats.

This is simply due to the mouse being that much better of a controller. (and console makers being too stubborn to allow mouse use... there is no reason they can't have them)

Use the right tool for the job IMHO.

I do agree Halo isn't much for a shooter to begin with.

 

I just like to sit on my couch with the laptop on my lap desk. I stopped playing fps's in mp competitively some time ago. I'm almost completely interested in immersive sp story driven experiences these days. Controller is just more comfy. If I was trying to win mp matches all day I'd be sticking to mouse/ keybd. Just differing use cases.

 

I see a lot of opinions that I don't agree with here, that's all. I'll decline to continue this absurd debate.

 

Man, obviously you haven't eaten Chinese kindergarten food...

Certainly some games you have to use M+KB for, but a USB Xbox 360 controller is one of the best gaming purchases I've made. Especially when so many games these days are ported from consoles anyway, controllers can be perfectly adequate and sometimes even superior to M+KB. Of course, now that I have a gaming/HTPC hooked up to a 42 inch TV in my living room, I'm much more inclined to game that way anyway, but sometimes you just gotta have a controller.

 

And the whole "control quality" debate is moot if all players are using the same control method. I know that's impossible to enforce on PC, but the game is just as fun as long as everyone is in the same boat. Controller vs Mouse/keybd in mist cases with equally skilled players is lopsided, no question.