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Geographically speaking Halo 2's total playable area appears to be much smaller overall than Halo 1's as it lacked any truly large and spacious levels in the vein of AotCR, and may be the smallest game in the series. Halo 3 appears to be a bit closer to Halo 1, but is certainly no bigger. Reach is possibly technically larger than Halo 1, but that's only because of massive open-air environments designed around fast-moving flying vehicles (New Alexandria for the Falcon and the space battles in LNoS for the Saber). The regular environments appear to be more on par with Halo 3. Halo 4 is definitely the most constrained of the series, and if you ignore the Pelican section on Shutdown it may be even smaller than Halo 2.
In terms of completion time there's larger gaps. Here's a sample of my own personal completion times on Legendary cribbed from a past discussion on difficulty balancing:
Halo 1: 615 min
Halo 2: 650 min
Halo 3: 383 min
Reach: 460 min
Halo 4: 570 min
Of course, completion times are affected strongly by things like the overall difficulty, geographical scale, and pacing of the game. You can be slowed down by difficult encounters and/or a large number of encounters in a small area (the latter is why Truth & Reconciliation takes so long despite its small size), plus having truly large levels that take longer to traverse can increase completion times. The huge gap between Halo 2 and Halo 3 (the latter took me only about 60% as much time to complete) is obviously a result of Halo 2's extreme difficulty on Legendary. This disparity shrinks on Heroic:
Halo 1: 333 min
Halo 2: 382 min
Halo 3: 257 min
Reach: 297 min
Halo 4: No time recorded for the discussion
While dropping the difficult to Heroic allowed me to drop my completion time on Legendary in Halo 2 by nearly half, on Halo 3 I was only able to achieve a 33% reduction, thus showing a stark difference not only between each games' base difficulty, but also how they scale said difficulty between difficulty levels. I was able to achieve a 46% reduction for Halo 1, but that's largely because, despite Legendary being a solid challenge, Heroic is quite easy (of course, that may also be because I always default to Legendary on Halo 1, plus Halo 1's Legendary derives its challenge from somewhat different factors than later games). For Reach I got a reduction of about 35%, comparable to that of Halo 3.
But going back to Legendary, here's some more metrics from those playthroughs mentioned earlier:
TOTAL DEATHS
Halo 2: 124
Halo 1: 79
Halo 4: 74
Reach: 68
Halo 3: 65
AVERAGE STAGE COMPLETION TIME*
Halo 4: 71.25 min**
Halo 1: 61.5 min**
Reach: 51.1 min
Halo 2: 50 min (92.9 min)
Halo 3: 42.6 min
DEATHS PER STAGE*
Halo 2: 9.54 (17.71)
Halo 4: 9.25
Halo 1: 7.9
Reach: 7.55
Halo 3: 7.2
DEATHS PER HOUR
Halo 2: 11.45
Halo 3: 10.2
Reach: 8.87
Halo 4: 7.79
Halo 1: 7.71
*Note: For Halo 2, I use the stage count as listed in the stage select menu; the parenthetical value is for if we count each "super-stage" as a whole level instead of a set of two levels linked by location and theme/objective.
**Note: Halo 1 had several very short levels. TPoA, 343GS, and The Maw combined took me only 90 minutes in that particular playthrough. Meanwhile, AotCR and Two Betrayals both took me nearly two hours. Meanwhile, the longer Halo 4 levels got their length largely from a high population density of enemies, especially Prometheans which were much tougher to deal with than the Covenant. Also it was only my second Legendary playthrough of Halo 4, while the others I had played many times. I imagine my times for Halo 4 would be much shorter now (according to Waypoint, my first and so far only Legendary playthrough of Halo 4 averaged about 53 minutes per stage, and I think I left the system running during Shutdown to go do something so the real per-stage average might be less).
___________________________
So, what can we expect from Halo 5? I'm not expecting anything truly huge by Halo standards, but given the dual campaign I certainly do hope we get a larger mission count than the average and a larger geographical scale than average. Ideally we would get ten missions (five for Blue Team, five for Fireteam Osiris), each on average closer in size and length to some of the larger levels in the series (e.g., AotCR, The Ark). I wouldn't expect an "experienced" playthrough to be much longer than 10-12 hours, but I certainly hope it's at least towards the upper end of Halo standards.
Halo 5 Campaign "Length" Speculation | Alexis | 6/30/15 7:21 am |
Re: Halo 5 Campaign "Length" Speculation | serpx | 6/30/15 8:49 am |
Re: Halo 5 Campaign "Length" Speculation | car15 | 6/30/15 9:27 am |
Halo 5 Campaign "Length" Speculation | Bounce-A-Gon | 6/30/15 11:30 am |
Re: Halo 5 Campaign "Length" Speculation | Dielectric | 6/30/15 6:39 pm |
^you are right *NM* | Bounce-A-Gon | 6/30/15 7:42 pm |
Yeah, but . . . | cheapLEY | 6/30/15 8:35 pm |
Re: Yeah, but . . . | Dielectric | 6/30/15 9:19 pm |
Re: Halo 5 Campaign "Length" Speculation | car15 | 7/1/15 8:53 am |
yuk yuk yuk *NM* | Bounce-A-Gon | 7/1/15 12:09 pm |
I'm not expecting anything truly huge. | Gravemind | 6/30/15 3:52 pm |
Re: I'm not expecting anything truly huge. | Apollo | 6/30/15 9:33 pm |
New support that the game's campaign could be huge | serpx | 7/4/15 3:45 am |
Re: Halo 5 Campaign "Length" Speculation | Alexis | 11/10/15 10:49 pm |
Re: Halo 5 Campaign "Length" Speculation | cheapLEY | 11/11/15 9:31 am |
Re: Halo 5 Campaign "Length" Speculation | ChrisTheeCrappy | 11/11/15 11:24 am |