Halo's new Xbox remake is an instant culture war disaster

Halo: Campaign Evolved is a new remake of a 25-year-old game. It is, by many accounts, great: faithful where it needs to be while also charting a new course forward for a series that has been the face of Xbox for as long as it has existed. In theory, the discussion about Halo: Campaign Evolved as a game should amount to, “yep, pretty good!” And yet, it has found itself at the eye of the culture war hurricane du jour.

Depending on how you count, Halo: Campaign Evolved, which was July 23 in early access for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, is anywhere from the third to fifth re-release of Halo: Combat Evolved depending on if you squint. If you’re a fan of the series, you know how it plays out. Frankly, even if you’re not, you probably have a general sense. The ground here could not be more well-trod.

To freshen this umpteenth iteration, developer Halo Studios added a mini bonus campaign to the game. Spanning three brand-new missions set a year before Combat Evolved, the campaign pairs protagonist Master Chief with guy-who-absolutely-should’ve-been-protagonist Sergeant Avery Johnson. They’re tasked with infiltrating a Covenant ship to acquire critical war information. In the middle of their mission, they discover some marines are being held captive, and naturally decide to rescue them. One of those marines, Lieutenant Wiliams, is a woman. Some players don’t appear to be thrilled about that.

“Remaking Halo and then deliberately hiding every mention and appearance of an annoying girlboss character who's constantly in the player's face is a terrible look for Xbox,” one gaming influencer wrote in a post on X that has since racked up more than a million views. “Seriously, if they were going to include a character like that, they would have been better off not making those extra missions at all.”

That post appears to be patient zero for a vitriolic wave of backlash about Williams. She has since been called “the most annoying character,” “an ugly, mannish girlboss,” and “pure DEI insertion,” among other less-savory things. One meme, which is so on the nose I legitimately can’t tell if it’s a joke or not, reimagines Williams with “Instagram face,” mirroring the viral “makeovers” of Horizon Zero Dawn’s Aloy that we’ve all since agreed were a low point in 2020s gaming culture.

If there’s any oxygen to be given to players arguing in good faith, such as it is, some fans said it’s out of character for a marine to look at a Spartan soldier like Master Chief with anything but awe. Compared to the marines in the original Combat Evolved, Williams is openly snarky to Chief, doubting his skills and downplaying the Spartan project as nothing more than a PR campaign. But there is a clear lore explanation for her reaction: Spartans were not created to fight the Covenant. They were created to quash human uprisings throughout settled space. Of course some soldiers, even in the face of an extinction-level threat, would still harbor deep resentment for Spartans.

Image: Halo Studios/Xbox Game Studios

There are fair criticisms to be leveled about the new missions in Campaign Evolved, too. Chief and Johnson engage in some banter throughout that feels written more for a Marvel film than a Halo game. At one point, Chief drops a famous one-liner from Halo 2, a groan-worthy bit of fan service that does nothing more than undermine the impact of the original moment. But criticism of Williams for, again, merely existing only crowds the space for meaningful critical discussion about Campaign Evolved.

This is, however, the very clear playbook a certain corner of the internet likes to run. We saw it most recently in the run-up to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Nolan’s epic film received a lot of, um, attention on social media for casting Elliot Page as a warrior and Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, with some firebrands saying such these choices would doom the film to become a critically panned blockbuster bomb reviled by every single person who had to suffer through a showing. The Odyssey currently has a 94% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes (based on 400+ reviews), alongside a 97% audience score (based on 10,000+ reviews). It has made more than $600 million.

Crucially, the people who were loudest about The Odyssey before it came out were also the people who hadn’t seen anything beyond a trailer. That appears to be the case here, too, with Halo: Campaign Evolved. As the original poster wrote, “I haven't even played it yet.”