When was halo made

Free for the first time in a hundred thousand years, the Flood sweeps across Halo, devastating Human and Covenant forces alike. The Chief does so, battling hordes of Flood along the way, and returns to the control room. Before Halo initiates its systems, Cortana intervenes and tells John the truth about the Forerunner structure and its purpose- Halo was designed to eliminate the Flood threat by starving the Flood of any life source large enough to sustain them; when fired, it would essentially wipe out all sentient life in the galaxy.

Realizing the threat of Halo, Cortana instructs John to detonate the Autumn 's fusion reactor. This detonation would result in the destruction of Halo, which was against Guilty Spark's protocol. Before doing so, the two sabotage three generators needed to power Halo, which buys them enough time to locate Captain Keyes, now succumbed to the Flood, and steal his neural implants to operate the Autumn.

After battling his way through scattered and disorganized Covenant forces, the spreading Flood, and the Sentinels under direct command of Guilty Spark, John successfully overloads the ship's engine, and he and Cortana evacuate from Halo in a Longsword before the Autumn 's engine detonates and destroys Halo.

The pair appears to be the only survivors, and John realizes that they are simply beginning a harrowing battle. Halo: Combat Evolved 's gameplay was characterized by several features which set it apart from less acclaimed first-person shooter games of its time. Movement in Halo is similar to other first-person shooters, allowing the player to move forwards, backwards, and strafe left and right including diagonally and jumping independently of their aim.

On the Xbox, moving and aiming are normally separated between the two analogue sticks, and on the PC , between the keyboard and the mouse. Halo also allows the player to crouch and jump, although jumping from a high ledge will often result in death, or at least major fall damage. Damage from falling can be reduced or negated entirely with a well-timed crouch right as one lands. Additionally, if the player crouches at the peak of his jump , he will be able to land on something slightly taller than if he were to jump without crouching.

Also, if the player is jumping from a cliff he can make sure he is touching the wall periodically while he is falling. This will count as if he is touching floor, and every time the player touches the wall, the damage counter goes to zero there is no visible damage counter during gameplay. Halo: Combat Evolved features a wide variety of environments including human and Covenant starships, ancient buildings on Halo itself, and expansive outdoor climates. The first level, Pillar of Autumn , is fought entirely on the human starship of the same name.

The next level, Halo , takes place in a temperate highland climate with open-air Forerunner structures scattered about. This level also contains the famous "Blue Beam Towers". Truth and Reconciliation begin in a rocky desert, but the setting changes to the titular Covenant cruiser about one-third of the way through. The Silent Cartographer occurs on a tropical island, with substantial combat both outdoors and inside futuristic Forerunner installations.

Assault on the Control Room takes place in a snowy, icy area of towering cliffs and underground tunnels as well as high-tech suspension bridges and oft-repeated Forerunner structures built into and through cliff walls. The player is then teleported to the second of three entirely indoor levels, The Library , encountering repetitive, forbidding hallways and massive elevators.

Master Chief returns to the snowy climate of Assault on the Control Room for Two Betrayals , visiting almost no new areas but, interestingly, travelling in the opposite direction. Keyes occurs in the same Covenant ship from Truth and Reconciliation , albeit now heavily damaged, but this time the Flood are present in huge numbers. Finally, The Maw is set on the Pillar of Autumn with three major differences: the presence of the Flood, the heavy structural damage, and access to the Engineering section and service corridors of the ship, which were previously off-limits.

In total, six of the ten levels feature a substantial amount of combat outdoors. In Halo: Combat Evolved , the player has a limited, non-regenerating health , which can be fully restored by picking up health packs. Running completely out of health will result in death, but having lower health does not impede player actions.

A player's health can be reduced only if his shields have been depleted. If the player's health is at minimal levels they will faintly hear John's heartbeat. V armor. The shield will decrease in strength every time it is hit by a weapon and will fail after taking too many hits or freefall from certain altitude.

The amount of shield drain depends on the attacker's weapon but will quickly regenerate if it is not hit for a brief period of time. The shield represents a marked departure from most first-person shooters, in which one's health bar is basically augmented by picking up "armor". In Halo: Combat Evolved , splatter kills are an easy task for all vehicles.

With a simple touch, most characters, including John and Hunters can die instantly. This also includes the Shade Turret; if the Turret moves and hits someone, the victim will die instantly. Fall damage also has limits; if falling speed exceeds the maximum shield and health cap, the player will be killed instantly, regardless of whether they are touching a wall in the environment, though the damage can be nullified if player is using vehicles, unless out of bounds. Scorpion tanks and Warthogs are invulnerable to any attack, with damage taken to either vehicles will instead be applied to the driver.

Ghosts and Banshees, however, can be destroyed if the pilot is mounting it. The campaign in Halo: Combat Evolved can be played by single-player or cooperatively.

In cooperative play , the second player takes control of an identical copy of the Master Chief. This second player, however, will not appear in any cutscene in the game. Up to four players can play together using the same-console splitscreen mode. The game's seamless support for this type of play, and a few large maps that can accommodate up to 16 combatants, is a first for console games. Since the game was released before the launch of Xbox Live, mainstream online play was not available for this title.

At E3 , the first trailer of Halo was well-received. Early versions of Covenant aliens appear in great numbers and loot what they can, and war erupts between them and the humans. Unable to match the technologically advanced alien race, the humans on the ring world resort to guerrilla warfare. Microsoft announced on June 19, that it had acquired Bungie Studios.

It soon transitioned to being a third-person shooter. Halo 2, on the other hand, arrived on the Xbox in , only a year before the launch of the Xbox , and took another two and a half years to make it to PC.

There were three new consoles by then. Crysis arrived on PC shortly after Halo 2, making the port of an Xbox shooter look practically ancient by comparison. Microsoft was using Halo 2 as its flagship in the launch of Games for Windows Live and the latest version of DirectX, which was exclusive to the much-maligned Windows Vista.

There was no chance in hell most PC gamers were going to pay for a new OS just to buy a port of an old console game and pay for an Xbox Live subscription on top of that.

Halo 2 Vista was a disappointing botched release for Halo fans, but things only got worse from there. Microsoft bought Ensemble in A few years later, as the studio began developing a console-focused RTS, Microsoft decided it should be a Halo game. Microsoft decided to close the studio as soon as Halo Wars was finished, signing the death warrant of a great PC developer after forcing it to retrofit a console RTS project as a Halo spin-off.

It was canceled before Ensemble fully started work on Halo Wars. Around the same time, Blizzard was also working on a WoW successor, codename Titan, which was also eventually canceled. Many of the Blizzard developers who worked on Titan went on to make Overwatch, reusing some maps and other elements of that game to make the most popular shooter in years. In accordance with the Cole Protocol , the Autumn makes a blind Slipspace jump, and emerges in the vicinity of an unexplored and remarkable world.

The Pillar of Autumn exits Slipspace to find a mysterious ring shaped space station orbiting a gas giant. The ring, quickly named "Halo," is obviously artificial. A Covenant fleet , however, is also present, and a subsequent battle heavily damages the Autumn.

Captain Keyes initiates the Cole protocol 2 - all records of Earth's location are erased, the shipboard AI Cortana is given to John to protect from the Covenant, and the Autumn is crash landed onto Halo. Cortana leaves the Autumn with John in a Bumblebee escape pod which also crash lands on Halo. Game play begins in earnest with John's escape from the Autumn , and continues upon landing.

The player will soon discover the origins and purpose of this world - and uncover a threat that forces even the Covenant into retreat. Halo ' s gameplay was characterized by several features which set it apart from less acclaimed first-person shooter games of its time.

Movement in Halo is similar to other first-person shooters, allowing the player to move forwards, backwards, and strafe left and right independently of their aim. On the Xbox, moving and aiming are normally separated between the two analogue sticks; and on the PC , between the mouse and the keyboard.

Halo also allows the player to crouch and jump, although jumping from a high ledge will often result in death, or at least major fall damage. Damage from falling can be reduced or negated entirely with a well-timed crouch right as one lands. Additionally, if the player crouches at the peak of his jump he will be able to land on something slightly taller than if he were to jump without crouching.

Also, if the player is jumping from a cliff he can make sure he is touching the wall periodically while he is falling. This will count as if he is touching floor, and every time the player touches the wall, the damage counter goes to zero. However, there is no visible damage counter during gameplay.

The A. If there is another faction in the area, the A. Covenant weapons are better suited for reducing shields and typically fire slower than human weapons.

With the exception of the Needler, they do not require ammunition or reloading. Instead, each weapon comes with its own battery. Once the battery is depleted the weapon must be discarded. Covenant weapons can also overheat except the Needler if fired for too long, after which they must be given time to cool down before they can be used again.

There are a total of five Covenant weapons in the Campaign, three of which are usable by the player: the Plasma Pistol , Plasma Rifle , and the Needler. The two weapons the player can't use are the Energy Sword , which destabilizes after you kill the Sangheili using it, and the Fuel Rod Gun , which explodes after you kill the enemy using it.

A plasma based weapon of the same type but with greater charge than the player's current one will appear as a swappable weapon. If the weapon has lesser charge, it is not swappable until the player's current charge falls low enough. Needlers automatically collect any ammunition from other needlers the player moves over.

Needlers can also use some very rare individual packs of projectiles. Human weapons, on the other hand, require ammunition and constant reloading.

They are better suited for reducing health and do not overheat. However, on the Easy and Normal difficulty settings the difference is often negligible.

The Wraith requires ballistic aiming, firing large Plasma Bombs in arcs towards its enemies, similar to artillery. Wraiths can be destroyed with explosive weapons such as the Scorpion 's Main Cannon and the Rocket Launcher.

Also, it is very easy to splatter enemies in Halo: Combat Evolved because the game's physics engine cannot discern between a fast and slow-moving vehicle, thus making it so that a slight touch, even by accident, will kill it. This is especially frustrating on the level "The Silent Cartographer"'s LZ, as Marines tend to dive underneath the level's many Warthogs, and in multiplayer, since the player can easily be killed by unoccupied vehicles.

Halo features a wide variety of environments including human and Covenant star ships, ancient buildings on Halo itself, and expansive outdoor climates. The first level, Pillar of Autumn , is fought entirely on the human star ship of the same name. The next level, Halo , takes place in a temperate highland climate with open-air Forerunner structures scattered about. This level also contains the famous "Blue Beam Towers.

The Silent Cartographer occurs on a tropical island, with substantial combat both outdoors and inside futuristic Forerunner installations. Assault on the Control Room takes place in a snowy, icy area of towering cliffs and underground tunnels as well as high-tech suspension bridges and oft-repeated Forerunner structures built into and through cliff walls.

The player is then teleported to the second of three entirely indoor levels, The Library , encountering repetitive, foreboding hallways and massive elevators. John returns to the snowy climate of Assault on the Control Room for Two Betrayals , visiting almost no new areas but, interestingly, traveling in the opposite direction. Keyes occurs in the same rocky deserts and the same Covenant ship from Truth and Reconciliation, albeit now heavily damaged, but this time the Flood are present in huge numbers.

Finally, The Maw is set on the Pillar of Autumn with three major differences: the presence of the Flood, the heavy structural damage, and access to the Engineering section and service corridors of the ship, which were previously off-limits.

In total, six of the ten levels feature a substantial amount of combat outdoors. Up to four players can play together using the same-console split screen mode.

The game's seamless support for this type of play, and a few large maps that can accommodate up to 16 combatants, is a first for console games.

Since the game was released before the launch of Xbox Live, mainstream online play was not available for this title. The standard edition of the game includes the disk and manual, and has remained unchanged since the game's release. This edition has ceased production, along with the original Xbox itself.

This version is essentially identical to the standard edition, except with a commemorative box art.