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Notes -
I have to completely disagree with the assertion that Halo was viewed as purely a multiplayer game - for myself and many, many others it was viewed as a story game first and foremost, with multiplayer as a (very welcome) secondary feature. I'd also say your coloring of Call of Duty, especially 4, being primarily a multiplayer game, is completely false. Call of Duty was essentially only known for being a single player game until after Call of Duty 4, which was a surprise hit. Destiny was supposed to be a negative example of story (minus the text-based entries). Dead Space is an example that I had to bring up because its story was decently (DS1) to very well (DS2) regarded, and it's an indicator of how much it fell that a modern, well-made Dead Space game fell so far short of these.
As a preemptive response to discussions on multiplayer in games, I will concede the multiplayer is going to have longer legs but that's because you're always going to get much more playtime out of multiplayer than out of single player. I don't want the discussion to devolve into talking about "which people played more", because in any game with a functional multiplayer it's very likely its overall playtime is higher than the campaign's. But that should not be an indicator of the importance of a campaign. It's also pretty biased toward what we know of the series now, given than both Call of Duty and Halo started out as pretty much exclusively single player affairs. They became popular on that merit first and foremost long before Xbox Live or matchmaking even existed.
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