>>723230519
It basically shifted the paradigm of the industry. Previously most shooters were twitch reflexes, now you had a non-Doom aim assist and something balanced around joysticks with the two-stick setup becoming fully standardized. Characters weren't bunnyhopping super demons, they're folks with an analog movement pace that don't need a run button, plus floaty jumps built for traversal first. Enemy AI isn't strictly march at the player and shoot, they would run for cover, evade grenades, try to use formations for weaker enemies up front with the tougher enemies coming from the back, etc, and the AI actually got better the higher in difficulty you got. Basic maps and set dressing for what were mostly on-foot shooter affairs were shifted into basic setpiece design ahead of its time, and large battlefields with vehicles, opposing factions, and a scale you just didn't get in most games period unless you were a PC title like Battlezone, or the rare one-off game like Carnage Heart on PS1. And come 2's release, it outright standardized match lobbies, friend systems, clans, and a much younger form of matchmaking as we know it today, straight up. You could do some of these on PC - but rarely were they integrated into a game directly.
By today's standards a lot of it seems quaint, and by the standards Half-Life set it all feels relatively minor by comparison since HL set the bar for narrative structured, seamless adventures in first person. But even without dual wielding and vehicle hijacking yet, 2001 for Halo CE was both a streamlined arena shooter for consoles that got basically everything right, AND it essentially had the makings of a non-class Battlefield equivalent on consoles. Which, frankly, Battlefield itself never quite lived up to until the next damn decade, and its campaigns sure as hell never reached the breadth of what Halo campaigns offer for raw gameplay despite both being linear shooter affairs.
What's unimpressive now was a big deal in 2001-2007.
