I play a lot of Halo 3, I've played casually with similarly casual players, I've played hardcore with similarly hardcore players. I've seen the best play, I've seen the worst fumble Stickies. I think I have the ability to give an accurate opinion.
Halo:CE brought a boom into the FPS genre like it was nobody's business. Bungie had a good thing, a 'pure' FPS, nothing special, nothing revolutionary. It was the First PErson experience boiled down to a form of balance between simplicity and complexity.
Easy to learn, Hard to master. this phrase is something fans could note Bungie strives to maintain.
Halo 2 did more for the original formula, again, it did NOTHING revolutionary, it simply brought to the players a form of FPS that was literally undiluted. You are red, kill blue, these are the guns you can use to make it so.
Now, I get to Halo 3.
Halo 3 is mediocrity in motion. It is nearly identical to Halo 2, with weapon tweaks and different versions of older weapons allowing for more variation in the explosions and such. Pretending a few weapon additions is 'OMFG GotY ALL YEARS!' worthy is completely stupid.
Again, the third installment brought nothing edgy or new to the table. It did nothing that hasn't been done before. It just delivered more moon bouncing, aim assisting, frag spamming goodness to the vast expanse of XBL.
You zealous and loyal Halo fans will say foolish things like "HALO INVENTED STICKY GRENADES", but I am afraid that award goes to the Japanese in WW2. I know you will argue "IT INVENTED ITS CONTROLS" but that is a pathetic argument, those controls would have been used in a game eventually, Halo picked up on them because that was the idea at the time that worked out.
Halo is a great series, likewise, Halo 3 is a great game. To pretend however that it is in any way immortal or 'the best ever made' is quite stupid. Better will happen.
For instance, CoD:MW2 is going to be better then Halo 3 when it comes to online play. Why? Because it is part of a newer wave of FPS, it has the entirety of the CoD4 experience to draw on. the collective complaints of the players, the data, all the lessons learned. So, it will come out a new, polished beast that is superior to its predecessor and all that competed with it from its time. This means Halo 3.
And example of an edge that MW2 has is a a system allowing very speedy and convenient host migration. If the guy with host ragequits, instead of going to black screen, running the risk of getting lag-fragged if you are the last with host communication, the screen dims a bit, it tells the people in-game who has host and the game continues as if everyone had simultaneously paused. This is an edge Halo 3 does not have. One of what appears to be MANY simple technical edges.
You cannot argue that a game that literally strives to be the ultimate in basic gameplay is better then games of the genre that are built to push the genre forward.
Halo will keep FPS popular, sure, but it has never and probably will never introduce anything that will CHANGE anything. Hell, even Forge-mode has been done by other games first. Timesplitters had a map-maker that was easily a hundred times more creative.
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