Whenever I tell friends that I'm still playing in 2025, the reactions are usually somewhere between confusion and open laughter. No, it's not dead, and yes, 343 (now Halo Studios) still adds stuff to it—battle passes, the occasional gun, and frequent map packs created by the Forge community.
This week kicked off a Halo 3 nostalgia event, marked by the return of 2007 armor sets and remakes of 11 Halo 3 maps bundled into a special playlist. But the mode doesn't only turn back the clock on maps, it also recreates the feel of Halo 3—that [[link]] means no sprint, no clamber, player collision turned on, and jump height increased.
I've been playing Halo Infinite with Halo 3 rules nonstop for days, so I'm sure it's not just the nostalgia talking when I say it's the most fun I've had with Halo since Reach. This slower, more methodical version of Halo is better—it always was, really—and I believe it should serve as the blueprint for Halo's future.
The ramped-down pace has me more focused and aware of my surroundings, so much so that I'm questioning if I ever liked sprinting in the first place, or if it just felt like a feature that's supposed to be there because it's an FPS. Just like in Call of Duty, running at full speed with my gun down gets me killed a lot more often than it gets me kills—as such, taking sprint off the table entirely is like Halo slapping the pack of cigarettes out of my hand. What's the rush?
Above: When maps are built with Halo speed in mind, there's never a lack of action.
No sprint kicks a nasty habit that never served Halo's floaty movement in the first place, but no clamber? That's a real eye-opener. The ability to automatically catch any ledge, another feature that just sorta showed up in Halo 4 because every other shooter had it, shaved off a lot more skill expression in Halo than I realized.
With clambering, jumping from A to B is essentially automatic. Without it, even rudimentary jumps become legit skill checks. You have to learn the ins and outs of Halo's gravity (turned down in the [[link]] Halo 3 playlist to mimic the original game) until you can sense the arc of a jump before you take it. Sticky ledge grabs can't bail you out of an ill-considered leap. This week, I crouch-jumped in Halo for the first time in 15 years, and it was lovely.
It's remarkable how naturally Halo's weapon sandbox slots into this throwback movement. The version of the playlist with SMG starts instead of battle rifles highlights the benefits of slowing the game back down: Halo is at its best when [[link]] you spawn with a gun that you'd rather swap for something better. Base Infinite makes closing the distance so easy that you can always make a starter gun work for you, but with no sprint, the MA5K Avenger (Infinite's version of the SMG) is appropriately situational.
Dang, it's almost like Bungie knew what it was doing in 2001, 2004, and 2007.
Addition by subtraction. Maybe it was a mistake for Halo to blindly adhere to 2010s FPS movement conventions established by the rise of Call of Duty and Titanfall. I embraced the change at the time, but in our modern era of live service shooters cannibalizing each other for attention, I think Halo has more to gain by being different. In this case, the old really does feel new again.