A game designer who worked on 2001's Halo: Combat Evolved isn't taking kindly to some of the remake's changes, specifically the removal of a couple of rocks.
Halo: Campaign Evolved was announced last night at HCS 2025, and Halo Studios decided to reveal it to the world by showing off arguably the game's most beloved mission, The Silent Cartographer, which sees good old John Halo go from driving around a sunny beach to shoot outs in claustrophobic alien interiors and back again.
But OG Halo: CE designer Jaime Griesemer didn't have nice things to say about a 13-minute walkthrough of the remade mission posted online.
"You aren't supposed to be able to take the Warthog up to steamroll the Hunters," Griesemer tweeted. "I intentionally placed rocks in the way so you had to fight them on foot. When you can just smash the crates out of the way it wrecks the encounters. But the worst part? They put trees in the landing area of the WooHoo Jump. Lame."
He's of course referring to a moment in the demo where our Master Chief takes a machine-gun-fronted vehicle into an encounter with two Hunters (Halo's big hulking baddies) and wrecks them pretty quickly, which arguably makes the moment less of an event and speeds up the entire mission.
"It's like the dance remix of a classic song that skips the intro and the bridge and just thumps the chorus over and over," he added.
On the other end of the spectrum is Halo co-creator and frequent art director Marcus Lehto, who said it's "good to see the new and familiar faces building the Halo team" and "the explorations look fantastic."
Halo: Campaign Evolved is being billed as a faithful remake built on top of some original code, but Halo Studios has also been open about how they're updating certain missions to make them fit for four-player online co-op and to remove very 2001 quirks, specifically in The Library. So, it's hard to tell if the small change makes the game worse or just... different without seeing the full package sometime next year.
