I'm a hardcore Quake/Unreal apologist, but you gotta hand something to Halo and Halo 2. Gorgeous shader-based graphics for the time, vehicles, absurd arsenals, wide-open maps, and 16 player(!!!) LAN play. It's a game that would have sold like gangbusters on PC, and was only that much more successful for being well-supported on console too.
One might even argue that the success of Halo is what forced arena shooters like Counter Strike and Team Fortress to evolve or die. There was more at stake after it released, and outside the competitive circles there wasn't much demand for the FPS equivalent of Wheaties.
I have had tons of fun with Halo, but I am fixated on this “innovative” classification. It feels more like right place right time. Had Golden Eye been LAN play, would it have been termed as most innovative?
Edit: I should also give a shout out to Tribes for hitting a lot of those same notes
Halo 2 was basically synonymous with Xbox Live and everything that came with it when it launched (for better or worse). For example popularizing voice chat (including proximity!), rapid matchmaking, persistent parties between matches and gamemodes and player ranks and levels. They talk it about it a bit in the second half of this video.
Halo 2's online multiplayer introduced (or popularized?) party-based matchmaking. So instead of having to coordinate all your buddies joining the same pre-existing server, you'd join up as a party and then drop into a matchmaking queue, which would set up a game against opponents, optionally taking a skill-based ranking into account. They even did a bunch of marketing around this, since it was a new concept at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGSuPZVgxLg
Hell, even Perfect Dark before that. I'm not one to defend Halo as the most-innovative, especially with the disproportionate amount of funding and manpower that went into it.
That being said, I think Halo deserves commendation for bringing a lot to the mainstream without compromise. The same people that casually enjoyed Halo were probably not also playing Goldeneye or Arma in their free time. And marketing be damned, Halo is fun even today. Hopping in a match of CE makes me lament how little team-based shooters have progressed in the past 20 years.
Something about halo just feels like such modern game, even halo ce. It’s so weird to think this game was contemporary with golden eye or quake. I think it was the polish with the animations, sound, and the physics. You pull out the pistol and do that satisfying pull back and click on it. You throw a grenade and hear it arm and see it thrown. You see your teammates throw grenades. You throw a grenade under a warthog, it flips it and knocks the occupants out. Even just scoping in and out of the sniper was satisfying with the sound it made.
To me it's crazy to think how far ahead of its time in terms of emergent behavior was Battlefield compared to other games, besides battle arenas. Probably it wasn't the first one either, but it's the one that comes to mind.
Picking up a tank or a jeep is one thing, but going for controlling an aircraft carrier or a submarine? Even if the controls were really primitive, it felt amazing!
The destructible environment aspect in some of those games was so cool. Can’t breach into the objective? Take down the building. No other game is or was like that. Even new battlefield games have walked back a lot of that behavior.
One might even argue that the success of Halo is what forced arena shooters like Counter Strike and Team Fortress to evolve or die. There was more at stake after it released, and outside the competitive circles there wasn't much demand for the FPS equivalent of Wheaties.