After 5 years in development and heavily pushing Unreal Engine 5 technologies, Immortals of Aveum was met with a whopping 751 player peak. For reference, Forspoken was considered a flop but still had over 12,000 players peak total. This may be the biggest flop of the year.
Not surprising, but disappointing. The premise was interesting (first person magic shooter) but the execution was tepid. The presentation / atmosphere, the generic graphics, the dopey dialogue, the lack of an interesting story. A lot of the success of games like Halo is how the world sucks you in with its atmosphere and storyline, I think developers really underestimate how much that matters in a single player game. Cinematogrophy is important, the feel of an experience is more than the simple gameplay of moving a character around and pushing buttons.
The first two halo games were masterpieces in world building and suspense in gameplay. When the flood is first introduced your on the edge of your seat it's on par with the best horror games ever made.
Even Halo 3, for all its faults ("to war" immediately springs to mind), kept everything largely within the world-building of the previous two games, and it made the whole trilogy feel super cohesive and immersive when played back to back.
Halo was one of the first console fps games that got the controls right. Before Halo, FPS games were only really good on the PC (though some console ones like Goldeneye and PD were good despite bad controls). Mouse and keyboard are still supreme, but Halo's one stick looks one stick moves scheme brought consoles out of that awkward to control range.
Moving around effectively in Goldeneye or PD was an art. In Halo, like PC games, it was natural.