Tre said:
"If you really think that Halo did nothing new, then how do you explain the success of the game in relation to all other FPS titles."
To "All" other FPS titles? Half-life and Quake, my good man.
You know I meant this generation. Why has it garnered so much love and attention if it did nothing really important? No other game in it's genre has received as many accolades or sales as Halo has this gen. And why would Halo get so much attention if those games (Half-Life/Quake) which preceded it were actually better? It wouldn't. Halo improved the genre.
"Every game uses the "Halo control scheme" today. Just the fact that the phrase the "Halo control scheme" exists proves that the game was revolutionary and genre defining"
The "Halo Control scheme," as mentioned, has been in place on console FPSs for some time.
No it hasn't. There weren't even dual stick controllers on the market for very long before Halo arrived. The FPS games that appeared on consoles prior to Halo all shared terrible control schemes.
"made the game more fun by restricting you to holding only two weapons at a time."
Rainbow Six?
Uh no offense to Clancy fans, but those games don't have the weapon balancing that Halo has. If they did they'd be as popular as Halo is.
And what about the AI? The AI is what made Halo such a fun gameplay experience compared to any other FPS games. That wasn't a big advancement? I think that's what totally made the game. And what about loading level areas on the fly the way Halo did? I haven't seen many games before that or since then which have done that so well. It allowed for open areas far bigger than anything I'd seen in FPS games that came before Halo.
Tre, it's a lost cause...some people think Goldeneye was revolutionary
Well I think so too. I don't remember seeing a lot of popular mission/objective based FPS games prior to GoldenEye. Before GE games were mostly like Doom/Quake/Wolfenstein and just focused on killing everything and getting to the next level. I think making the levels more difficult by adding new objectives to the harder difficulty levels was also a very original idea for the genre.
Play any Black Isle or Bioware RPG sans Fallout 1/2, and you'll have the SAME thing. Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate 1/2, Icewind Dale 1/2, Neverwinter Nights. The same thing, but not as simplified.
You could be right, haven't played any of them and I hardly ever hear anything about those games. If people like them better than KOTOR I'd be surprised. I do think KOTOR has stolen the attention of the genre, but maybe that
is just for consoles. Maybe it hasn't affected the PC world as much as it has the console world. Console RPGs and PC RPGs are still very different.