I fully expect to be skewered for this take. But I think this could be a fun debate.
I am not stating that Halo 3 is the greatest game ever. Rather, that as a complete gaming experience on day one, Halo 3 was feature-complete (despite a litany of novel features) and debuted with a level of polish and engineering excellence that the industry has rarely, if ever, replicated at a similar scale.
Today, we are plagued with games-as-a-service drivel--meaning features are stripped out at launch and trickled in over years. H3 launched as a fully realized ecosystem on day one. It didn't just have a campaign and multiplayer. It launched with forge, theater mode, and bungie.net fully integrated. To my knowledge, these were all new and transformative to the console space.
- Forge: A real-time, multiplayer map editor running on a console in 2007. The synchronization required to let multiple players manipulate physics objects simultaneously in a shared peer-to-peer session was an incredible networking feat at the time.
- Theater: The game didn't record video. it recorded the network traffic data and controller inputs of the match. This allowed players to rewatch games from any angle, detach the camera, and take screenshots. And the file sizes were tiny.
- Bungie.net: Stat-tracking and heat maps of where you died on a specific map. And the file share system for custom games/maps.
When H3 launched, millions of players hit the servers simultaneously. Roughly ~$170m in first-day sales.
By modern standards, we expect a launch of that scale to crash the servers, cause massive matchmaking queues, or require a 50GB day-one patch. H3...just worked. The matchmaking netcode was rock solid out of the box and Bungie was ready for the compute demand.
If a game tried to launch today with a comparatively ambitious feature set, development would likely descend into a silo'd nightmare. Forge would be delayed six months. And theater mode would be cut for budget.
2007 is often remembered as the best year in the history of console gaming. I think H3 was its apex. Creative ambition was matched by elite engineering--backed by a publisher willing to let the developers ship a finished product. Imagine that.
EA and Ubisoft are on my blacklist. I will never purchase another game published by them ever again. And haven't for years.
Nothing of value lost.