This is an IGN opinion piece from Matt Purslow, who was brought up on the golden era of Halo and Half-Life. He loves story-driven FPS campaigns and wishes there was more of them (but perhaps not quite as many as there were in the 2000s - that was pretty excessive.)

Of course, thanks to a $69 billion acquisition, Call of Duty is now Xbox’s Call of Duty. But I think you get the idea: Halo should be massive. It should be the premier first-person shooter on Xbox. It should be delivering stellar campaigns and phenomenal multiplayer on a regular basis. It should be among Team Green’s most-played games on any given day.

But it isn’t. And perhaps the reason why is nothing more than the passage of time and the shifting of trends. Can any game sit on the popularity throne forever? The simple truth may be that Master Chief is an artefact of the original Xbox and 360 days, and that 2010’s incredible Halo: Reach was a natural end point that should have been respected.

But while that may indeed be the case, that story doesn’t reflect Microsoft’s uneven handling of the series. Bungie delivered lightning in a bottle five times in a row over the course of a decade. Its successor, the purpose-built 343 Industries (now Halo Studios), found it all but impossible to replicate those achievements. Across 15 years, it struggled to hit a regular cadence; the development pipelines of yesteryear allowed Bungie to deliver a new game every couple of years or so, but there was a six-year gap between Halo 5 and Infinite, and very soon another six years will have passed without a mainline entry.

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