Were PC gamers actually impressed with Halo on release?

I'm interested in views specifically from PC gamers, who are older, around and existed upon the time of the PC release.

Upon the release on Halo 1/2, where you impressed by it?

To be honest, I wasn't. The port itself wasn't great, but even if it was, thought it was a mid'ish game.

I think it's safe to say part of it's appeal was that console users have never had internet multiplayer for FPS seamlessly before, where as it was absolutely common on PC at the time, that we just had a higher standard by default?

Is it arrogance to say this or just reality?

Again, older pc gamers, not young children who just bought a GTX pretending they are one so they can play ports.

I remember it landing okay on PC, because by that point it was already almost two years after the Xbox release, so it was already a known quantity.

Solid shooter, but not revolutionary or anything. Still garnered a decent community.

By far the most impressive game ever brought to Pee Salty Seas. ;o

Say it with me. Thank you, Xbox. lol :P

Eventhough I do think it's an interesting FPS, it's nowhere in the same ballpark as Half Life or Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

What impressed people the most I think is the fun/funny AI quips and having interesting weapons like the needler.

It was boring back in the early 00s and still is. I tried the game back then on PC and i wasn't impressed, never bought the original xbox.

As a very hardcore PC gamer I feel that I am highly qualified to answer this. Perhaps the most qualified.

Yes, we were very impressed with Halo on release. Jealously so in fact. Of course we’d mask this by saying it was kind of mid and that stuff like Half-Life was better but honestly we knew what was what.

Some of us have learned to be honest these days and acknowledge Halo’s superiority. I count myself as one of those ascended PC gamers.

It must have been weird, they contracted a third party to port it to PC (Gearbox), it used GameSpy for networking, and the game would only work under a newer version of DirectX at the time so there must have been extra driver issues too. The PC version also had missing graphical effects. Apparently the port was based on an older version of the game than the final Xbox release.

Sounds like the PC version was a steaming pile of s***.

On console, the game also had deliberately slower aiming with specific acceleration tuned to gamepads, and aim assist, and the gameplay was tuned to that. It probably felt very slow for PC players. It must have been strange on PC, especially for multiplayer. I don't even know if console and PCs were able to connect to each other. I guess not because the original Halo only had LAN support and no online.

PC gamers who say it wasn't special or anything like that clearly weren't around when the Xbox arrived. I didn't get into PC gaming until the rise of Crysis, which was my first introduction to the world of PC, despite me playing Half-Life before that.

The day I picked up my Xbox, I also picked up Halo CE and Blink: The Time Sweeper. Halo CE blew my mind, it was like having a super PC as I was still a console gamer at the time. Halo CE revolutionized console FPS perspective. You had to be there on the Xbox side of things. When Halo CE got so big, others like Sony wanted their own Halo Killer such as Killzone, Resistance, and Haze. Nintendo had Metroid Prime because of it. Halo CE may not mean anything to current PC gamers at that time, but it was important for console gamers as Halo CE brought LAN parties, CE was an amazing game for its time and an important game in both FPS and gaming history as it showed not only were FPS games on console actually possible and to play well which was a fairly unheard of thing at the time as well as showing an FPS game can be more story-driven and focused with well-written characters and story.

Honestly, the best part about Halo CE was the LAN parties. It's something that just doesn't happen anymore. As much as split-screen sucks, the feeling you have playing with others on the same screen is something that can't be replaced. I feel bad for console kids today now they will never experience this like we had back in 2001. At least you have online now, but it's not the same. Halo CE was so epic that I can't even explain it as Halo is what truly cemented me as a former Xbox console gamer.

Halo 2 gave us the birth of online gaming.

And TC is wrong but that's to be expected. ;o

lol :P

I'm in this boat too, we just had better FPS.

On console it's like if you show fire to caveman, think it's magic.

While PC gamers have had central heating for a while.

@SecretPolice: Was this aimed at me?

@davillain:

Yes why, don't you like to be right? lol :P

@SecretPolice: Right? Oh yes, yes. I am always right😁

@parapcc: What are you basing that on?

I was more into it on consoles for cooperative gameplay, I have no idea what PC gamers experience would be like whether it'd be easy to do split screen around a PC or if at the time it offered online co-op. I feel being able to play in co-op would be essential for getting the best Halo experience.

Again, PC gamers were already playing online with Quake 3 (1999), Half Life mods (1999+), RTCW (2001), Medal of Honor allied assault (2002) long before Halo 2

Halo 2 gave us the birth of paid online gaming, would be more correct.

I was glad to be able to play it with mouse and keyboard and pwn noobs online. Don't think I was especially impressed.

Atleast Halo was not woke and movie game.

it felt mega slow

I was, but I was pretty young and more easily impressed at that time. I think I'd only played a random smattering of PC FPS games before Halo and had not played some of the classics like Half Life.

While not for everyone I'd generally say if you like First Person Shooters, majority would enjoy Halo 1, 2 & 3.

I'm a massive Quake and Unreal fan, heck I even have over 300 hours in Quake: Champions & they're much faster pace than Halo. Dusk is also my favorite FPS in the past decade. Doesn't prevent Halo from being excellent.

Correction: was excellent. 1,2,3, Reach are peak.

Don't @me on 343 games, I'm very mixed on them overall..

Oh yeah definitely. I did play it on the Xbox but I primarily played games in general on PC at the time. It was a real breath of fresh air (The Sp was anyway: don't care about MP so no comment on that). Not gonna lie: was a bit salty when I saw previews for Mac. Then MS bought bungie and locked it to xbox for a while...then the PC port was apparently poor.

The setting, the large levels, the driving around with Ai companions shooting (or they driving around while you shoot), the physics of the vehicles, the art direction and music. Really set itself apart from other FPSs at the time. A proper system seller.

Also I lied a bit about MP: couch co-op Halo 1 was class.

As a PC/console gamer back then, I can say that the Master Race was on the whole unimpressed with Halo CE. The port was shoddy, and gameplay was slow, some levels were too big for their own good. We had much better multiplayer with UT and Quake, and much better singleplayer with Half-Life, Wolfenstein, NOLF, and even immersive stuff like System Shock or Deus Ex.

But, as a college kid around this time, I can say Halo was IT! Split screen with your roommates, and 16-player matches with four XBoxes hooked together in the rec room was an awesome experience. And putting that aside, even with the slow gameplay and questionable level design, the campaign did feel epic.

@R4gn4r0k: Again, that's what you experienced with PC for you. I was still mostly console gamer and for you most old PC players out there, Halo CE was truly something else on Xbox console side. That's what I'm talking about, not what already came before such as Quake.

It was incredible when it released for Xbox and that it was a console game, that was the punch line for me at least. By the time it came to PC, as a PC gamer, I think it being a known entity already made it desirable but not as "impressive." It was just nice to have what was already Halo on PC. Half Life 2 amazed me in ways Halo never dreamt of and this is coming from someone who played and still plays Halo somewhat competitively.

Halo was universally praised when it came out. The PC version was superior to the Xbox version (multiplayer), and was very well received.

If it wasn't, the Halo 2 launch wouldn't have been as big of a deal as it was. And, Sony wouldn't have spent almost a decade trying to come up with a "Halo Killer".

Anyone who says other wise is just being a fanboy.

I was mostly a console/arcade guy back then, maybe played a PC game or two every year. Even still, just never got the hype for CE.

Halo 2 had me hooked for a bit though. The game itself was good, slow/floaty compared to proper arena shooters, but well designed around controller limitations. The fact that so many of my friends were into it though, that's what really carried the experience, great times. And admittedly it was impressive at the time to see such streamlined online functionality on consoles.. even if we had to pay for it lol. Wasn't even close to being my first online console game, but it was nice not having to jump through hoops for simple shit.

Forcing people onto Vista to play it didn't help either.

@davillain: Yeah on console it had a big impact and was well received

I was not impressed by its release on Xbox or PC. It was just another shooter that got hyped to sell Xbox consoles. Let's not forget that Halo was coming to PC before Xbox was ever a thing....

Actually, I think it was the co-op more than anything. Most FPS campaigns were not co-op at all, so that added an extra element for kids because couch co-op was so prolific back then.

The game itself was incredibly mid as a whole, but the ability to do LAN sessions or split screen elevated it.

It was alright. It was no half life, but it was another good shooter back then. Nothing groundbreaking though.

Vehicles and scale made Halo standout among the competition.

Yes

played it a few times ,haven't played the one on console but it was pretty competent

Yes, the original on the Xbox not necessarily the release on PC in 2003. When the original came out on Xbox I had Pentium 4 2.0 GHz and GeForce 4 64 MB DDR, while we had good looking games on the PC like Return to Castle Wolfenstein in late 2001 and early 2002 , Halo was using Pixel Shader 2.0 already with translucent effects as it was based off of GeForce 3. One of the first console games to do so. So, the game looked “cool” and the entire playing Master Chief on a different planet was interesting. Not that we didn’t have games like that already on the PC like Unreal. So, I would say it was intriguing to say the least by 2003 we already had games like Unreal Tournament 2003 with better graphics. Not a lot of people know this but Halo was originally supposed to be released on the PC. There’s an ad you can find around the web where NVIDIA is promoting it with their GeForce 2 before Microsoft brought the rights. Outside of the being able to play it at higher resolution on the original 2003 PC version the PC version lacks somethings that the original had like they were using an older version of the Master Chief suit and was missing some graphical effects like translucency that the original version had. So technically the Xbox version was the “better” outside of the higher resolution. Gearbox kind of botched the port like they did with James Bond Nightfire which the PS2 version was better.

Never played it. Always found the art style and BMX helmet lame.

Same, never understood the fandom for Master Chief. Motocross helmet man with a cliché hero hunk voice. That's all it took? lol, so lame.

I played it bit late but I played it on PC in 2008 after I played Halo 3. I could not get the shaders to work properly and pretty sure it ran at 360p or 480p 30fps. It was either a shoddy port or my PC then was just ancient or, was due to the fact I pirated it off a very well known torrent site. Anyhow I only played the campaign once and loved it but looking back, its probably mostly due to I was just hyped for halo.

No.

2001 means I was still very deep into Half-Life and all the wonderful mods (TFC, Counter-Strike, etc).

We also had Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex, too, which showed us just how far multiplayer-focused and story-focused first-person games could go.

Oh yeah, we also had Battlefield 1942 released in 2002 as well. And, while not a first-person game, Diablo 2 was still very much a big game at the time. With all those options (and more), why the hell would I play a pretty vanilla shooter like Halo?

Halo was good, maybe even great...but you just can't compare to the titans of that era.

It's hard not to sound like a jerk, but Halo's biggest virtue was being a great xbox game...I don't think, in the grand scheme of gaming (especially PC gaming), it was a good game. With that said, I have fond memories of linking up our xboxes in my dorm and having LAN parties of Halo. Some good, drunken times.

Truth be told I found the 2000's pretty bland for console gaming. A lot of games came out that succeeded simply because there wasn't anything better to play. That was sort of my feelings as a non-console gamer, at least.

I was a freshman in high school at the time and I remember Halo was originally intended to be a PC game and was later changed to an Xbox exclusive. I also remember PC gamers being upset about that at the time.