My Halo Story, My Motivations, My Disappointments, And My Hope for the Future of Halo.

This blog post is not on behalf of the ElDewrito Team. It’s on my own behalf, with solely my own thoughts and opinions. Most of this has been said before, but I wanted to share my opinions with the community on why Classic Halo is so important. Not just to me, but to an entire generation.

I also wish to honor my promise I made to communicate frequently and be transparent with the community.

My Halo Beginning

My Halo experience starts just like most other halo players - with Halo CE and Halo 2. I didn’t get my first OG xbox until 2004, when I was 14. From the first playthrough of Halo: Combat Evolved, I was hooked. My best friend at the time, (and current best friend to this day), RabidEskimo and I lived just a few minutes from each other. Halo quickly became our go-to past time. With co-op split-screen campaign in both of the games, we probably have played through them 25-30 times.

You know In Halo 2, The Arbiter mission, where you start out with one player as the Arbiter and one as the Master Cheif and you have no weapons? We used to simply load up this level and have boxing matches. Melee’ing your enemies was a lot easier than punching your teammate, so you had to dodge eachother and time the punches perfectly. One punch would take out his shields, and the second punch finishes him off. We’d do full boxing tournaments, make best of 15 tournaments which we kept track of on handwritten tallies/brackets. And why did we do this? Just be because we loved the game so much. The gameplay was simple yet addicting, the weapons were fun, balanced, and unique. The story was compelling and the Universe was vast and unbelievably easy to get lost in.

Halo 3

I never played multiplayer much on Halo 2 due to internet speed, but when I got high speed internet and Halo 3 came out for the 360, it was the beginning of an amazing period of my life that I feel was defined by amazing experiences playing Halo 3 with my high school and college friends. I remember sitting in my living room with RabidEskimo, bridging my wifi connection on my netbook to my 360 on a less than 1Mbps connection. It took us 5 minutes to find a match, but the game was so fun, we didn’t care. I remember screaming at the TV, yelling at the other players to party up so we wouldn’t have to re-search for a game, and we’d all jump up and celebrate when they did. Playing Halo 3 on a terrible connection and long search times was much better that the alternative: not playing Halo 3. It was that fun.

Moving on to college - being a Computer Engineering student, our entire floor in our dorm played Halo 3, which is how I met a lot of my best IRL friends to this day. We would have frequent system-link games between rooms. We’d play 4-player split screen and invent crazy rules, like whoever had the least stickies had to take shots. We’d find crazy custom lobbies with unique forge maps and gametypes, and play and chat with random people we’ve never met until 6AM. RabidEskimo and I would play the campaigns split-screen on legendary over and over.

While the competitive scene in Halo was massive, I was a social player. I played it to have fun with my friends, play cool gamemodes, and fight the Covenant split-screen in the campaigns with my buddies. It was the perfect game; the maps, the weapons, the balance, the art style, the story, the writing, the community, everything. ODST coming out just added extra amazing maps, firefight, and all-around great gaming. I started reading up on the lore; I read all of the Halo books, my favorite of course being the “Fall of Reach”. Halo became my favorite pastime again, and for these years, everything was perfection.

Things Started To Change

After Bungie split and sold the rights to Halo, the game slowly started to change. Change is important, because without it, you’re just releasing a different versions of the same game. As the changes from Halo 1 to Halo 2 to Halo 3 showed, making the right changes and implementing new features without changing the ‘feel’ or core of the game can take a great game and make it magnificent. Handing off a franchise as massive as Halo is no small feat, so I expected Halo 4 to be extremely hard to ‘improve’ from Halo 3 given that a new studio was developing it, and Halo 4 was pretty much exactly as I expected. I enjoyed the story, did have fun playing it, but there was no wow factor that brought me back to the game. I never held this against anyone at all, as many people absolutely loved Halo 4. Different strokes for different folks, and a new studio needs time to get its feet wet with such a massive universe. I did not like sprint at all, the new art style made it feel a bit ‘off’. It just wasn’t for me.

My Disappointments

My life had settled down to a point where I had gotten a steady job, a fiance, and the desire to experience true Halo came back when I had some free time. When I bought my Xbox One, my first purchase was MCC. RabidEskimo and I were ready to team up and relive our childhood, but… MCC - you all know the story. I once again gave them the benefit of the doubt. Putting 4 games that were all built on different consoles/architectures into one game on a new console is no small feat. I know much of this was probably contracted to other studios, and there were many complex factors involved. So I waited. And waited. And before I knew it, Halo 5 was out.

Once again, I took the plunge and bought Halo 5, hoping it was an opportunity to once again relive the pure passion I once enjoyed. My buddy came over to play the campaign with me after it downloaded and we had no idea that the game didn’t support splitscreen campaign. This feature had been the main source of my previous Halo fun, and now, all of a sudden, it is gone. My friend didn’t have the money to go out and buy his own Xbox, so immediately, we could not experience our favorite pastime together with the new game, which is split-screen Halo campaigns.

I gave the campaign a solo go. I made it two hours into it, but it just was not for me. Remember those changes I mentioned earlier? The ones that shouldn’t be made if they alter the core feeling of what the game is to a point where it no longer feels like the same franchise? Well, they were made. The game I was playing was no longer Halo, it was something entirely different. Many people enjoyed the game immensely, but it wasn’t what I was interested in playing.

Glimmer of Hope

In 2015, I was linked to the /r/haloonline subreddit in a random reddit post. I visited it, and learned of what Halo Online was. I applied for the official beta and got an invite code.

The state of the official Halo Online, and especially the already started Eldewrito mod, was pretty terrible and nearly unplayable at the time.. Spawn zones, equipment, descope, dual wielding - all were broken. There were terrible audio lags, AMD users couldn’t play the game, and there were countless connection and performance issues. Soon, the official beta was cancelled, and into ElDewrito I dove.

I started hosting games myself since ElDewrito had a decent population due to the Beta’s shutdown. (Remember RabidSquabbit’s funhouse, anyone?). Even though the game was riddled with bugs, it was the closest thing I could find to that classic Halo experience. I soon started contributing to the open source repo to make hosting an easier experience. I wrote the voting and veto systems along with UIs and configurable Jsons for them, wrote the dedicated server functionality so hosts didn’t have to be present in-game to host them.

The groundwork layed down by former devs at the beginning of the project’s development (before I became a dev) , and even research from back in the Halo 3 modding days, played a vital role in how we were able to accomplish the tasks we set out to do.

Our initial goal as a team was never to make a “Halo 3 on PC”. Our goal was to take this buggy ODST-forked engine and fix the plethora of bugs and problems with it, and make it playable. As time passed, we learned more and more about the engine, reversing thousands and thousands of functions by hand. (Remember, we never had a single line of source code) We learned more about the new tags and other resources that weren’t in Halo 3, and how the engine interacted with them. We manipulated and expanded on the engine’s functionality and assets to implement brand new features without needing anything other than what the Halo Online game itself already provided to us.

When opportunity knocks, you answer the door. And what showed up at the door was a chance to do something that fans had been asking for for over a decade - and that was a true, working, classic Halo experience that not only delivered the classic gameplay, but greatly expanded on it with tons of brand new features (a forge that rivals H5F, a completely customizable voting system for hosting customs, etc) without taking away the ‘Halo’ feeling. And all without a single line of the game’s source code. It was a project of passion for all of us, and not a single team member took a donation for the three years of work that we dedicated our free time to. We were fueled by that longing for that time in our lives when everything was perfect, when we had no cares in the world and played classic halo with our friends til 6AM. And an entire generation of Halo fans, hurt by the last decade of mistakes, were begging for this game.

The Preparation and Release of 0.6

When I joined the team, transparency was one of my main focuses. I have followed many game studios over time, and if I had learned anything, it’s that you need to be transparent with the community following you. I started writing weekly dev blog updates and also became test lead, organizing playtest sessions and helping the team fix the reported bugs. Our initial goal of releasing in September immediately blew up when we started the proper bug tracking system, but we always kept the community very informed, and it allowed me to get 3TB of 4k60 gameplay that I would eventually edit into the 0.6 release trailer. :)

Our team worked our asses off to fix bugs, put in countless all nighters pouring over network logs, and wouldn’t stop until it was done, and done right. We pissed a lot of people off with our delays, but the good thing about working for free as a hobby is that nobody is giving you orders about deadlines and game mechanics, and you can do things the right way, make the game the players want. All of our decisions could be based on the gameplay without having external factors such as profits interfering with the development direction. Most importantly, we could wait to release the game until it’s actually a working, finished, tested product.

I have talked to many game developers across several studios and companies. I’ve known many people who have worked on projects for game studios or publishers that were engineering/game dev jobs, and they didn’t even know what game is was that they were writing code for. They were given a directive and project to work on, but had no idea what it was for. Just some parameters and a deadline. Our ED team was the exact opposite, with one large open line of communication for discussion and collaboration. When we couldn’t decide on an implementation, we’d cast a vote. I have worked as a Software Engineer professionally for 6 years, and our ElDewrito dev team is the most efficient and talented team Ive ever had the pleasure of working with. Through all of this knowledge sharing and collaboration, we have learned so much about the different parts of the engine - even havok’s inner workings, that given the game/engine’s source code, we could probably re-implement in a month or two what took us 3 years to do without source code.

Once I released the 0.6 release trailer, we were blown away by the response. Well over a million views, articles from PC Gamer, Arstechnica, and many other outlets. We could feel the passion and nastalgia emerge from the community. The final three days were all-nighters for everyone - putting the finishing touches on that Beautiful new UI, finishing setting up all the dedicated servers and playlists, and just general release preparation.

Apart from a 1-hour blip with the server browser, launch was perfect. We had zero marketing, but a game we we were so careful to perfect needed no marketing. The game itself was the marketing. Within two days, we had 9000 concurrent players. Some popular streamers started playing it and loved it. On the 4th day, it was the most streamed, and played, Halo game of all Halo titles across all platforms at the time. My college buddies and I immediately dove in, and they were hooked. Finally, that classic experience we enjoyed in college was back, and for the first time in 8+ years, we loved Halo again. For four wonderful days, I experienced my teenage and college years again. Constantly full 16-player lobbies, crazy custom maps created with the expansive new forge, and chatting with random people about Halo until 6AM.

While the mod still lives on, it was only 4 days before Microsoft started rightfully issuing DMCA takedowns on their assets that were being distributed by random community members or torrents (NOT the mod’s dev team). I do not know what the future holds. All I know is that watching three years of work slowly die hurts. We have not yet met with 343 or Microsoft (other than the initial meeting on the day of the Waypoint blog), and understandably so - these things take lots of time to prepare and organize, and with E3 coming up, they definitely have had their hands full. In our brief talks so far, 343 has been professional, kind, and even sympathetic of the unfortunate circumstances we all find ourselves in.

My Hope for the Future of Halo

I hope that we can collaborate in some way with 343 Industries to deliver (or continue to deliver) an experience that we just proved has a huge demand.

I truly believe 343 is extremely passionate about the Halo universe and is investing immense effort to deliver the absolute best experience they can deliver, while learning from the mistakes that have been made over the last decade. After watching the ‘Halo: Infinity’ engine showcase at E3, it definitely looks like they are trying to bring back a ‘classic’ feel with a new art style for their next main Halo title, which is great.

I just hope that collectively, we can help to put the ones in charge into the shoes of an entire generation of classic Halo players, understand what the game means to them, and give the consumer what it’s been begging for for 10 years.