RobotGeek

So we’re coming up on the tenth anniversary of Bungie’s Halo: Combat Evolved (and the date of 343 Industries’ appropriately named, graphically spit-and-polished re-release, Halo Anniversary). And just as I’m sure Microsoft would like us to, for reasons that may be viewed more or less cynically, that makes it about time to get all misty-eyed about what was, and is, a very excellent game.

The Halo franchise gets about as much stick these days as it does praise, if you’re measuring by internet grumbles. This is for a few reasons: for all it has come to represent in the gaming market, both cause and symptom of the mind-numbingly homogeneous flood of modern FPS games; because of the kind of Xbox Live player it’s been known to attract, who has become the stereotypical ‘Halo player’; and because we’ve had five salvos of what is very nearly the same game, which, when including a midquel, a prequel, and the news of a whole new trilogy—even after the original developers decided to move on—does smack of milking it just a little bit.

One thing that must be said for the Halo series, so far, is that all of these games have been pretty good, both single player and multiplayer. Very likely, the core gameplay has only got better over time. But for me, every Halo game since the first one—Halo 2, 3, ODST and Reach—ultimately got filed away in my personal ‘really solid but not quite transcendental’ category of gaming experiences. It’s certainly not a bad place to be, but it means that these games all fall just short of that greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts magic that classics are made of.

The original had that magic. It was damn near perfect. There are many reasons why this is, and you could cite things like balanced gameplay and the simple but ever-reliable Rule of Three (guns, grenades and melee), realistic physics, and a really strong multiplayer element, even before the days of Xbox Live. But ever the stickler for narrative, I’ve got a few more that you might want to consider, in relation to what the campaign, specifically, had to offer us.

(1) Halo itself. I’m not too up on the classics of science fiction, but those who are will point out that the Halo universe borrows from a lot of sources. Bungie themselves have admitted as much. What the first game managed to do, however, was to translate all that into a very simple yet highly effective premise for a game. Halo itself, the ring-world construct after which the series is named, cleverly contained many of the features that structured the game in such a simple yet compelling way.

The first was the mystery of it. The purpose of the ring is initially unknown; its creators, known only as the Forerunners, are conspicuously absent. Aside from the eccentric AI they left behind, who doesn’t really explain anything much, and mutterings of a fairly apocalyptic place in the Covenant’s hazy theology, most of what we get of the Forerunners is in their architecture and the evidence of their strange super-advanced technology. These primarily take the form of the important installations you visit when you’re trying to figure out what Halo is for.

But from the very first level on Halo, they also appear generally dotted around the various landscapes, looking distinctively alien and their purpose not always known. There is always a sense of exploration and intrigue alongside your ongoing battles with the Covenant, and the mystery of this ubiquitous Forerunner technology, as well as the race to unearth its secrets before the Covenant do, is the main force pulling you into this world.

There’s also the sheer scale of it all. Halo itself is huge, and replete with endless chasms as the architecture takes on mind-boggling, awe-inspiring proportions. That’s another thing the game is very good at—that massive sci-fi sweep of humanity-dwarfing scale and vastness.

In addition, having all these chasms which drop away to nothing is a pretty neat way of keeping things big while, in most interiors and some outside sections, you’re actually fairly restricted with where you can go. There are a lot of bridges in Halo. There are a lot of claustrophobic corridors, too, but this is balanced out. Importantly, most of the times you’re outside, the space is all yours, and said claustrophobic sections are often strewn sparsely around the map and you’ll have to, say, fly up to a platform improbably high up on a cliff face to reach one.

And while we’re on the subject of being outside…

‘Interesting… the weather patterns here seem natural, not artificial. I wonder if the ring’s environment systems are malfunctioning… or if the designers wanted the installation to have inclement weather.’
– Cortana

What Cortana touches upon here, during the snowy ‘Assault on the Control Room’ level, are Halo’s oddly capricious weather patterns. What better excuse to offer such variety? Again, it’s so simple, but there you have it—different meteorological conditions for almost every level. Then they can use some equally simple scene-setting tricks: the most epic battles have the harshest, snowiest conditions; the creepiest level puts you in a dark, misty swamp; your first taste of Halo is a relatively quiet valley of rolling hills, perfect for your first go of driving around in the Warthog. It helped mark each level out as its own distinct, memorable experience.

The sequels had this meteorological variation too, but to the point that it became a cliché—here’s your sandy level, your snowy level, and so on. And even though we returned to other Halos or Halo-related constructs, there was never quite the same sense of straightforward mystery about the world around us. I’ll also put my hand up and admit that I wasn’t a huge fan of the shift to earth and earth cities, though they did improve after Halo 2. Those sections seemed like a couple of steps away from that distinctively Halo experience.

(2) The overall narrative structure. The story of Halo is not complicated. Your general M.O. is pretty straightforward: find out what Halo is for before the Covenant do, though of course there are a few complications along the way, and after the halfway point it changes drastically. It’s always really basic, though: get to the map room, get to the control room, find out what’s happening in the creepy installation in the middle of the swamp. It’s easy to keep oriented in relation to what you are doing and why you are doing it. There’s no slipstreaming to different worlds, no switching characters, and the story doesn’t just feel like background noise to busting up the aliens.

If I were to pick out a ‘chapter’ from the lists provided in Halos 2, 3 or Reach, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t always tell you what the main objective was, certainly not in relation to the overall story. I’m sure some people had no trouble following all the details of the sequel stories, but there was definitely more of a bits-and-pieces feel to their plots.

And it’s not like you can necessarily attribute that to being in the middle of battle, either. The original Halo didn’t lack the chaos and constant movement of its unpredictable warfare scenarios—you were always heading back and forth, doing lots of little things, rounding up Marines, having Foe Hammer swooping in and away again, hopping from installation to installation as the Covenant made their moves. But your orientation in the story wasn’t whisked away by the relentless action, and there was a much smaller, more solid cast of characters to keep track of.

I think the plots of the sequels are just convoluted, lacking a clear beginning, middle and end like the first one did. And though you do technically start and end in the middle of things in the first, there’s a structured opening and conclusion. Halo 2 has that notoriously abrupt ending; Halo 3 starts with the Master Chief waking up in a forest for some reason that I think is covered in a prequel comic book and not, as I had assumed, even leading on from whatever the heck he was doing at the end of 2.

It’s easy to accuse Halo of being repetitive when the last three levels, of ten, are basically earlier levels done backwards, but the symmetry worked pretty well as a way of having us experience the infestation after the halfway turning point. And, of course, we poetically end up right where we started, back in the burnt-out Pillar of Autumn where, very aware of the build up to a climax as all four factions collide head on, we then get the countdown and that final, incredible Warthog run.

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