You Will Never Play Halo 3 With Your Friends Again
There will never exist another game like Halo 3
On Jan thirteen, 2022, the Halo iii Xbox 360 servers shut down for proficient, over 14 years after the game debuted. While you tin still play the iconic blockbuster through the Main Main Collection, there's a certain sadness in the air. After all, Halo 3 launched at a fourth dimension when game premieres had red carpets and glory attendees, and when in-person events were still the norm. Now, with Halo Infinite drawing so many comparisons to Halo 3 and nostalgia playing a starring role in our everyday pandemic lives, information technology's no wonder that many players feel a collective sadness over the end of such a defining era.
While Halo 3 isn't the simply game whose servers permanently shut down on January 13 (Halo: Accomplish, Halo three: ODST, and Halo 4's 360 matchmaking servers are also gone forever), information technology is arguably the most iconic game of the 360 era and the franchise at big. The surround around Halo 3 is impossible to recreate: a perfect storm of omnipresence that meant everyone from not-gaming parents to MLG pros knew about the newest Halo title. We'll never feel anything quite like Halo 3 again, and that's a legacy worth looking back on.
The golden era
Looking dorsum at it now, the launch of Halo 3 was surreal – a reflection of the growing prominence of video games in popular culture. It launched with a London blood-red carpet premiere attended by Pharrell Williams and Christian Slater that was linked via Xbox Live to premiere events across the globe. Celebrities and fans in London, Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, and Milan teamed up to play Halo iii together alongside Bungie employees – Carmen Elektra played from Paris, LL Cool J from Amsterdam. In California you had Zac Efron, fresh off of High School Musical, posing for pictures in a GameStop at a Halo 3 launch party.
On its opening day on September 25, 2007, Halo 3 made $170 meg in United states sales, and doubled that within a week. Halo 3 transcended the perceived cultural boundaries of gaming and garnered attending from all corners of the world. At the time, it felt similar anybody with a broadband internet connection and an Xbox 360 were playing Halo three, propelling it to a kind of juggernaut status that'southward nigh incommunicable to replicate now. Halo 3 stood alone, head and shoulders above whatsoever other console-bound multiplayer game, a monolith on the video game horizon.
Halo 3 was everywhere...it was inescapable
Freelance journalist Juno Stump
"Halo 3 was everywhere, even in my modest midwestern hometown of Boxing Creek, Michigan," says journalist Juno Stump. "Ads were everywhere and it was all anyone was talking most. It was inescapable."
"I don't know if I take always fallen into the hype of a game release quite like I did with Halo 3," says Jordan Hoffstetter, chief marketing officer at Turbo Dork. "I scoured every corner of the internet I could, listened to Bungie's official podcast, grabbed every magazine I could, everything."
For MLG pro Queen (known as Queenx3), Halo three mania was an inevitability, given the popularity of Halo 2 and the increased attention the franchise received between releases. "It was on every slice of media that you could find… I remember waiting outside GameStop to get my hands on a re-create and seeing thousands of other people doing the same," she tells me. "I recall how pop Halo 2 had fabricated the Halo franchise, which was why people were really, really excited to play Halo 3."
Halo 3 was uniquely poised to accept reward of the increased ubiquity of online gaming and the relative ease of broadcasting professional matches. With the ascent of YouTube and streaming sites like Justin Telly, along with a brusque-lived stint on cablevision Tv set, Major League Gaming's Halo 3 streams had major audiences. As such, Halo iii offered upwardly a kind of fame and fortune that is commonplace in esports today, but was near unimaginable in the late aughts.
"I feel like Halo 3 was the ane of the offset competitive first person shooters that was bringing in audiences that truly are hard to replicate today, even with how big esports are at present," says Queen, who'southward been a pro actor since 2005. "The community and the franchise in general has been trying to replicate that golden era of what Halo iii brought to competitive video games and to competitive Halo… I experience like ever since then, they've been just trying to recreate that experience and recreate that dynasty."
That dynasty wasn't just reserved for gamers on the burgeoning professional scene. By 2007, broadband net was more readily available and Xbox Live had long-proven itself as feasible; console players were eager to leap into online multiplayer lobbies and compete against others effectually the world from the comfort of their homes. Brilliantly, Microsoft encouraged social interaction through online gaming by shipping a free wired microphone with the Xbox 360 – with that, almost every gamer was able to chat in Halo 3 matches, which also included pre- and mail service-game lobby and in-game proximity chat.
Thanks to all of these elements, Halo 3 was an incredibly communicative game. In comparison, Halo Infinite, which doesn't have pre- and postal service-game lobby or proximity chat, is bizarrely serenity. That the Xbox Series Ten/S doesn't come with a gratis microphone just adds to a silence that is lamented past players on Reddit and beyond, who are calling Infinite "the quietest Halo" they've ever played.
Even myself playing in matchmaking and having my microphone on, in that location were e'er those comments from guys that were not actually as accepting or welcoming into the group
MLG pro Queenx3
The abiding chat heard in Halo three was, naturally, a double-edged sword. While many Halo 3 players used the in-game chat functionality to forge friendships and communities – many of which extended beyond the borders of Bungie'due south FPS to other corners of the internet, persisting to this day – others took advantage of the systems and open lines of communication. It's worth remembering that Halo 3 arrived on the precipice of the smartphone and social media boom, at a time where Xbox Live's customs guidelines were more loosely defined, and long before we had the ability to easily record gameplay clips and share them with the world. The online environment could be truly hostile, and that's an inescapable part of Halo 3's legacy, too.
"I hated how much bullshit strangers were willing to put other strangers through online. And while I was e'er muting people, it was still not fun knowing those people were out in that location," Hoffstetter admits. "Also, as a closeted trans woman, hearing the things men said about women in those lobbies scared the shit out of me… it was one of the first ways I realized how out of identify I was in my assigned nativity gender."
Despite the prevalence of toxic lobbies and deplorable hate speech, players were able to carve out condom social spaces on Halo three all the aforementioned, creating clans on websites like MLG and other forums. Bungie may accept left the built-in association ladder behind in Halo two, merely that didn't stop players from meeting to play competitively with friends and back up each other in Halo 3. For Queen, even as a celebrated professional person role player, there was value in playing games with female-run clans.
"PMS was one of the clans back then – Pandora'southward Mighty Soldiers, I call up information technology stood for. That clan was very pop and I played a lot of games with them. Information technology was just a way for girls to come together and more than casually take fun," she says. "Even myself playing in matchmaking and having my microphone on, in that location were always those comments from guys that were not really as accepting or welcoming into the group. But I feel similar the female organizers of those dissimilar communities did a proficient chore of trying to create safe spaces for united states."
And for people like Hoffstetter, Halo 3 multiplayer and its related forums helped her create lasting friendships while she was all the same struggling with her gender identity. "I never actually played Halo with my IRL friends, equally there weren't too many gamers in my circle, and being a distressing queer kid, I was not popular in school at all at the time, so Halo oftentimes became my primary social scene," she writes. "Online I made friends that I notwithstanding talk to to this day, which is wild. They've seen me abound up, find myself, transition, and like, how did we see? Halo 3, or Halo next groups or forums."
Saying goodbye
Ahead of the Halo 3 Xbox 360 servers shutting downwardly, players said their goodbyes. Completionists rushed to get multiplayer achievements – with some players dedicating their time to help others achieve the most hard ones – while the nostalgics among usa booted up their old consoles for the offset time in ages. TikTok users said bye, posting videos calling for a moment of silence and lobbies of players simply hanging out, shooting at the heaven.
Halo 3 still exists in the Principal Master Collection, so it'south technically immortalized, but it's interesting that players would accept time to pay homage to the original servers. Perhaps Hoffstetter explains this miracle best: "I do still play Halo three on the MCC, and while I however dear it, I do detect it'due south a tad weird at present that 343 has taken to adding new armor and maps. I'k non opposed to information technology, but with these servers coming down, it does feel like the stop of an era. The version of Halo 3 I put all of those hours into is beingness dusk, and while playing the same, the new version is only different plenty to remind me how long ago and how unlike a time 2007 was. It'south like visiting a childhood friend, you're never going to take a bad time, just you've both grown up into different people."
While the finish of Halo 3's Xbox 360 servers marks the terminate of an unparalleled era in gaming, its legacy lives on today. Halo Infinite's multiplayer feels a lot similar Halo three when comparison gunplay, skill ceiling, and TTK. While Queen suggests Halo Infinite feels the nearly like an affiliation of Halo 3 and Halo v, it's a solid fallback for those of united states reminiscing almost 2007 and the standard-setting nearly-perfection that was Halo iii. Halo games will always draw comparisons to the standard-bearing Halo iii, and unfortunately they will almost always come off worse for it.
Information technology'due south telling that even now, almost xv years later, customs members are still clamoring for the return of maps from Halo three – Bungie and 343 Industries may accept recycled the nigh pop Halo maps several times over past now, only information technology doesn't take much scrolling on Reddit to find somebody asking for them to be included in Halo Infinite. From Queen'southward perspective, that's part of this game'southward legacy too. "[Halo iii] actually set the stage for maps that were and so good that they were fifty-fifty recreated in future Halos… maps that were just so proficient that the customs wanted them and then much the Halo franchise just continued pushing out very similar, if not replicas, of the aforementioned maps."
With 343 Industries' plans to keep Halo Infinite up and running every bit a live service multiplayer game for years to come, in that location'southward even promise that it will eventually attain Halo 3 heights when it comes to multiplayer maps, gun meta, and more. Only it'south impossible to recreate the weather in which Halo 3 was built-in back in 2007 – weather that led to a perfect storm of pervasiveness, where anybody from casual gamers to moving picture critics to the middle-aged person ringing you up at Target knew about Halo 3. Goodbye, Halo 3 360 servers. Y'all were a special identify for many wayward Spartans.
Halo Infinite is the funniest game I've played in years.
Source: https://www.gamesradar.com/there-will-never-be-another-game-like-halo-3/
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