Years ago, Bethesda famously marketed The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim with an enticing call to adventure: “If you see that mountain, you can go to it.” But Halo did it first. In early Halo games, it was a rite of passage to try to escape the confines of its linear levels, exploring the mountains and buildings that bordered the pathways you were meant to stick to. So the fact that you seemingly can’t replicate this trick in the new Halo: Campaign Evolved remake has upset some long-time fans.
Out now in early access for PlayStation 5 (for real!), Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, Halo: Campaign Evolved is a fully rebuilt remake of Bungie’s Halo: Combat Evolved, the sci-fi FPS that arguably launched Xbox to prominence back in 2001. Halo: Campaign Evolved is pretty excellent. Despite being built entirely on Unreal Engine 5, developer Halo Studios replicated the bones of the original, right down to the uniquely nonsensical rules of physics that make Halo Halo. But the studio didn’t capture everything, apparently.
“What’s the point of having skulls in a game if you’re going to kill me for exploring?,” Reddit user KyxeMusic wrote in a semi-viral post on the Halo subreddit, paired with a minute-long video showing Master Chief exploring the “Silent Cartographer” level. In the video, Master Chief jumps along some narrow ledges to scale a derelict Forerunner structure — all par for the course for a Halo campaign. Then, suddenly, he dies.
“Happened twice. Very frustrating, makes me not want to try to find the collectibles,” KyxeMusic added.
“Fucking bullshit,” reads the top response, as of this writing. “Halo should only have death boundaries on massive falls.” “So bullshit,” wrote another. Many players chimed in saying they can’t wait for Halo: Campaign Evolved mods to start rolling out that would help players escape mission boundaries.
This reaction might seem hyperbolic, but it’s a very real change for Halo fans. Yes, most games follow a straightforward rule: You exit the level and you die. But pushing past the boundaries has been part of Halo’s DNA since the beginning. For the original games, Bungie physically modeled all of the geography surrounding each level, rather than leaning on skyboxes to convey a scene or mood. Combined with the first-person perspective, this resulted in levels that actually felt like real spaces, instead of merely looking like them. Naturally, players explored what they could.
In Halo: Combat Evolved, the original iteration of “The Silent Cartographer,” which is set on a circular island, was the perfect test bed for this sort of thing. It was almost a mode unto itself to team up with a friend and use well-placed grenades to launch your warthog as high as you could up the mountain at the center of the island. It allowed you to skip entire segments of the stage through tricks that were certainly not what the developers intended. The tradition carried into Halo 2, where you could scale the buildings in “Metropolis” and find a giant soccer ball stashed on a nondescript roof. This soccer ball didn’t exactly do anything per se, but hey, it was cool to find. (Urban legend has it that Bungie inserted the soccer ball into the game to test Halo 2‘s physics engine and forgot to remove it, but this is unconfirmed.)
Though later Halo games experimented with hard limits on level boundaries, pretty much every longtime Halo fan has a story of staying up until dawn with friends, getting lost in the mountains of “Delta Halo.” While Halo: Campaign Evolved captures a lot of that original magic, the initial response from fans — about what to most observers might seem a minor detail — reveals the challenges inherent in capturing nostalgia 25 years after the fact. But here’s a free thought-starter for Halo Studios: Is there a skull for that?