With Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision-Blizzard, Xbox certainly has a lot of new famous games and series to work with. But, does Xbox even need Diablo, Call of Duty, Warcraft, and so on to create great games? In my opinion, the golden age of Xbox was fuelled by great original exclusives, passionate developers, and a sense of community that’s become rare in gaming.
Cast your mind back to the early years of the Xbox 360—console multiplayer gaming was really beginning to explode. The “console wars” (I hate that term) were in full swing, as thousands of people took to every forum they could to argue the merits of their chosen gaming machine. I was a young gamer at the time, completely entranced by the wonders of Xbox 360’s online realm.
If you were an Xbox player in 2007, you were treated to a cavalcade of good games. The original BioShock, the beginning of two legendary RPG series in Mass Effect and Assassin’s Creed, and a few high-quality exclusives in Halo 3, Forza Motorsport 2, and Blue Dragon. That last one was an interesting attempt to bring a high-profile JRPG exclusively to Xbox, with the result being a decent original IP. A shame we never got a sequel.
Halo 3 dominated that holiday season, growing into the peak of first-person shooter multiplayer in the years to come. Sure, there was stiff competition from the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare but the potential of Halo 3’s forge mode in combination with the ability to create custom game modes edges Bungie’s magnum opus ahead.
It was a fantastic time to be a Halo player. Your average day online might start with you queuing in some public playlists, but it was very common to be invited to a custom lobby after just a couple of games. In these lobbies, you’d witness Halo 3’s community at its best. You could spend an entire day in those lobbies, cycling through popular custom game modes like Griffball, Cops ‘n’ Robbers, Duck Hunt and so on while chatting to people on the microphone. These are cherished memories.
It seems implausible to talk about, but when playing custom game modes like Cops ‘n’ Robbers, where game mechanics did not enforce the game’s rules, people would still comply fully with these made-up restrictions. Basically, if you, a robber, were caught by a cop, then you’d have to crouch down and allow yourself to be escorted to a joint prison cell. The robbers that had been rounded up then attempted to escape, usually by melee’ing a gap between two walls until they could slide through. You’d only rarely have someone ‘griefing,’ and this was usually solved by a quick kick.
This is a microcosm of the community spirit that existed on Xbox Online during this time period, and it was further compounded by Xbox’s reworking of the home dashboard. The update included additional social features, including my personal favourite, short community videos.
For example, there was SentUAMessage, a show courtesy of the now-defunct Inside Xbox, where Andy Farrant and Dan Maher answered submitted questions about Xbox and Xbox titles. Or you had IGN’s Jessica Chobot teaching you how to get a particularly tricky achievement.
While Xbox was starting to become more and more of a cohesive community, you also had popular online shows like Arby ‘n’ the Chief and Red vs Blue hitting the scene. As a player, you felt the perfect mix of being connected enough to feel communal and disconnected enough that you were experiencing something new every day. These days, with home screens transitioning to storefronts and how easy it is to access perfect information online, it’s not a feeling you could recapture.
Anyway, enough of my nostalgic ramblings about a bygone era. Let’s get back to the games. 2008 would bring us exclusives Gears of War 2 and Fable 2, arguably the two best games in their respective series. Fable 2 was a triumph for Lionhead, striking the perfect balance between a life simulator and a fantasy RPG. The fact you could earn income from your in-game investments while not even playing the game, though greatly abused, was a novel concept.
Gears of War 2 is a thrilling experience, managing to encapsulate the hopeless ‘forever war’ feeling of the original while adding more relatable characters and a deeper plot. This year also brought us Castle Crashers, a hack-and-slash side-scroller with a charming art style that went on to become the poster child of Xbox Arcade, Xbox’s sort-of built-in indie storefront.
2009 was a quieter year for Xbox exclusives, with Forza 3, Halo 3: ODST and Halo Wars being among the most notable. Halo 3: ODST was of course conceived as a low-effort means for Bungie to accelerate through its contract with Microsoft, which stipulated that the studio had to create two additional Halo games before splitting. That being said, playing a game from the perspective of a non-Spartan was interesting, and to this day, ODST has an eeriness that has never been recaptured in the series since. Halo Wars was an admirable attempt to bring the RTS genre to the console, and most would agree that Ensemble did an admirable job.
Capping off the decade was a flurry of sequels: Mass Effect 2, Fable 3, Bioshock 2, and Bungie’s last dance, Halo: Reach. I’ve prattled on enough about Halo, but Reach was a stellar and emotional end to Bungie’s tenure with the series it created. We didn’t know at the time, but this would also be Lionhead’s last real crack at Fable, and it created an enjoyable sequel, focusing on the player’s ascension royalty. Controversially, it was more story-heavy and roleplay-restrictive than past instalments, but Lionhead never was one to play it safe and a lot of people liked the plot.
You might be seeing a pattern here. Halo, Forza, Fable, Gears of War; these series were the bedrock of Xbox in the late 2000s. Sprinkled in with exclusives like Saints Row and Naruto: Rise of the Ninja, Xbox had a very healthy ecosystem at this time. The Xbox 360 would continue as Microsoft’s flagship console for a few more years until the Xbox One was released in 2013.
Well, what’s happened with these beloved series’ in the decade since the 360 was replaced? Halo was transferred to the stewardship of 343 Industries, a studio created by Xbox solely for this purpose. 343 hasn’t done a bad job in any respect, but I think it’s time for all of us to admit that Halo really hasn’t been the same since Reach. Halo 4 and Halo 5 never reached (pun intended) the heights of their predecessors, and while Halo: Infinite had potential, the piecemeal release of the game’s features has killed a lot of the interest in Halo.
Gears of War didn’t experience as drastic a fall-off as Halo, but Gears of War 4 and Gears 5 ended up being a continuation of the formula that started with the original but with less-interesting characters than Marcus, Dominic, and company. That being said, these games are still well-liked by fans, and Coalition is currently developing Gears 6, so who’s to know what the future holds?
Fable, sadly, died a slow death. Lionhead released an ill-fated Kinect spin-off in 2012 before teasing and subsequently cancelling Fable: Legends, a planned Xbox One game. Lionhead was closed soon after, and we heard nothing of the series until 2020, when rumours began to emerge that Playground Games would be rebooting the series. This was ultimately the case, and development is progressing on the project, as evidenced by the game’s recent teaser.
Forza is the one series on the list that actually went from strength to strength through the years, with each successive game being well-received. Playground also spun off the series into Forza Horizon, a more casual open-world take on Forza’s formula. These spin-offs proved incredibly popular, with Forza Horizon 5 releasing a couple of years ago.
While Xbox has lost some of its shine over the last decade, I think a return to form for its exclusives is a way forward. Over the years, Xbox has acquired other studios in order to leverage its exclusives, to mixed success. Redfall is a recent high-profile blunder of this strategy. Maybe the Activision Blizzard acquisition will re-establish Xbox as the top dog in the coming years, but only time will tell. Regardless, for me, nothing will ever top those late nights on the Xbox 360. The good ‘ol days.