Why I'll Never Grow Bored of Halo
The Halo series has been around for more than ten years, and while its popularity began to wane as time passed and it started to share the spotlight with other major first-person shooter games, it is still a widely popular franchise with loads of people still playing. There is a good reason for that. Over the years, the series's former developer, Bungie, and its current developer, 343 Industries, dedicated themselves to making a crazy, dynamic, constantly evolving, and truly unique multiplayer experience that is unlike anything that has ever been seen.
Although other first-person shooters do their best to offer an exciting and diverse multiplayer, (and usually succeed in doing so) Halo's sci-fi, outer space setting allows it to break free from reality and offer some totally bonkers game modes and memorably ridiculous game moments. The Halo games include basic competitive multiplayer game modes like Team Deathmatch (Team Slayer) and Capture the Flag, but popular community modes created by players have become official game modes over the years which greatly expand each entry's lifespan.
Two notable examples include the games Flood and Grifball. Flood was originally a Team Slayer variant, known as Infection, played on Halo 2, where a team of two, wielding only energy swords, would take on everyone else wielding only shotguns. If a player was killed by an "infected" player they had to pause their game and switch teams to become one of the infected. When Halo 3 released, the developers decided to make Infected an official game mode that automatically switched players over if they became infected, and is now known in Halo 4 as Flood (named after a parasitic enemy type within the series known as The Flood).
Grifball is a Rugby-esque game mode invented by the creators of the web series, Red vs. Blue and named after one of the show's characters, Private Grif. The game relieves players of their guns and only gives them gravity hammers and energy swords. The players have to attempt to bring a ball from the center of the court to the opponents goal. The person with the ball (known as the "Grif") will receive a boost in armor shields as well as running speed and jumping height. The game was created for Halo 3 and was later made an official game type in Halo: Reach and again in Halo 4.
Along with the above mentioned games, other community created games are inserted in online playlists and rotate every week. These games are usually minor variants of official game modes like Team Snipers which is Team Slayer except everyone only uses a sniper rifle or Fiesta which gives every player a random weapon when they spawn.
Because of Halo's refusal to fully conform to the realistic nature of other popular shooters like Call of Duty, Battlefield, and even Gears of War, and its ability to stay true to its old-school roots, it is able to offer more bizarre, and quite frankly more enjoyable, experiences. Sure, it can be entertaining to coordinate with teammates to expose a weak spot in the enemy's defenses or meticulously wear them down with carefully placed sniper shots. But, usually, it's more fun to fly around on a jet pack, blasting people beneath you with a rocket launcher or outrunning a horde of infected players on an ATV. The hilariously fun, ever-changing multiplayer seen in these games works so well because of Bungie's and now 343 Industries community devotion and the tools they give that allow players to create their own games.
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