It’s pretty damn close to dead. 40 year old men at work used to lan every night after work in the city in 2001-2008. We had open events that sold out from 2005-2010’s with 256 (give or take) teams. Making top 64 meant something and if you made top 32+ at an event you were really good and it was an accomplishment.

There was a leaderboard that mattered, halo used to be on ESPN, and we had a great story with master chief that everyone cared about.

Now there are more games to play and less time to spend on mediocre stories and stagnant gameplay.

Halo3 had coding problems but took some skill with the projectile based BR.

Reach had bloom and then removed it. Less skill with the increased hitscan but the DMR took some precision.

H4 made the BR easy to use and turned the game into a team based frenzy.

But H5 just muddied up the classic and skill based projectile/hitscan weapons. The first day my buddy got top whatever in FFA just whoring the storm rifle.

Each of these things just slowly brought the population down and MCC breaking on launch just turned lots of people off from the series forever.

I miss playing H2 every day. The 1,000s of hours i put into that game to play at a top level and make friends was the best time of my life. The game is dead though. Till they put it on PC and make it a floaty simple space shooter again; halo is fucking dead.