In Praise Of: Halo.

halo

A little over a year ago I wrote a two-part history of Bungie Software. It took in their early games – Pathways into Darkness, Marathon and Myth — which were nearly all superb in one way or another, and then abruptly stopped with only the barest mention of the series that’s eclipsed all Bungie’s other achievements: Halo. There were several very good reasons for this, first and foremost of which is that Halo is Microsoft’s flagship game series and it’s already had countless column inches written about it. There’d be little if anything new that I could add to the discussion, even if that discussion is one so corrupted by PR and marketing that it’s now reaching the point of parody, and so that was where that particular pair of posts ended.

That you are reading these words now is evidence enough that I’ve since warmed to the idea of writing something about Halo. It started with the recent Xbox One console reveal, where the mock UI screen they’d worked up for the thing featured a splash banner for Halo 4 in amongst all of the TV programmes Microsoft thinks you’re going to buy an Xbox One for. Wait, Halo 4? It seemed like only yesterday that I was playing and enjoying Halo 3, which itself came out a good five years after the original Halo, and it was at this point that I realised that both I and the series were old; Halo was released as a launch title for the Xbox – not the Xbox One, or the Xbox 360, but the first Xbox – back in 2002, over a decade ago. Given enough time any game will seem pretty good in comparison to whatever modern variants of it exist since nostalgia tends to paper over all the little niggles and annoyances that would probably drive you up the wall if you played it today, but this realisation happened to coincide with a trip back home where I had little else to do except dust off my Xbox1 and see whether or not Halo really would stand the test of time.

gun

In order to understand Halo, and why Halo turned out to be simultaneously groundbreaking and yet disappointing, you first need to understand its protracted development process. Bungie started making Halo shortly after the release of the Myth games (for a time Halo itself was an RTS) and since it ended up being the spiritual successor to the Marathon series I imagine they’d been thinking about the general themes of the game since long before that. The difference between the first preview of Halo that I read in PC Gamer and the finished product is particularly striking: Halo was originally supposed to be a multiplayer-focused game for the PC (similar to Tribes) set in vast living and breathing open world arenas with gorgeous landscaping and herds of alien fauna, both of which were heavily featured in the promo shots scattered throughout the preview. They also showed vehicles that could be crewed by multiple players – almost unheard of in multiplayer gaming at the time – and hinted at a broad power symmetry between the human soldiers and their alien counterparts. One picture showed an alien brandishing the energy sword that has since become a series icon, but the human opposing him was also armed with his own more conventional metal machete.

Of course this was a first look at a game that was still in the early stages of its development and the preview shots were likely all mockups intended to demonstrate planned game features that wouldn’t necessarily make the final cut (which is one reason I doubt the machete would have featured in the game even if it had stayed on its original development path), but the design decisions that focused on an open-world multiplayer game also had a large part to play in how the release version of Halo would turn out four years later. They’re what provided the first game with its most striking signature characteristics; the large, open levels and the vehicles with which you traversed them are both legacy features from this earliest iteration of Halo. Ever wonder why the tank can accommodate four passengers sitting on each of its tread mountings, since to my knowledge it never shows up in any of the multiplayer levels that shipped with the final game? It’s because that tank was designed for a much larger-scale multiplayer experience, and even though the AI marines riding along on it with the player are all but useless it still looks kind of cool, so Bungie left it in.

Fast forward to E3 2000, where Bungie show this video of the game. It amazed pretty much everyone who saw it, since it was a) phenomenally pretty for the time and b) promised gameplay  far in advance of anything previously experienced in single-player FPSes (having AI companions that would sit in vehicles the player was driving and crew weapons systems was particularly mind-blowing). However, the fact that the phrase “single-player” has snuck in there belies a shift in the game’s design goals. Multiplayer is no longer the focus. There’s now a clear power asymmetry between the humans and the aliens. The armoured human soldier has become the main character, and his squadmates are now basic human grunts. This is Marathon’s influence showing through, a combination of Bungie reverting to what they know best and also probably realising that 1999-era PC technology didn’t really have the power to achieve the sprawling multiplayer battles the game was originally intended to portray with the level of graphical awesomeness they’d been showing off in all their videos. And so Bungie took the solid base they’d built up for those multiplayer battles and tried to build an amazing single-player campaign out of it instead.

They probably would have succeeded, too, except their E3 video was so good they ended up getting bought by Microsoft. Halo was named as a launch title for Microsoft’s very first games console in November 2001. Suddenly Bungie had to finish the game in a little over one year. It’s no wonder that the final product ended up being a little… rushed, shall we say.

LANDSCAPE

There are two common complaints levelled against Halo. One of them is that the last five levels are merely the first five levels quite literally done backwards, making the player retrace their steps through terrain they’ve already covered. This is kind of a problem because while Halo did the vast open areas very well its interior environments were all abstract geometric shapes and odd, alien design. This was great for projecting a general atmosphere of unease, like the ring was made by somebody whose building psychology was very definitely not human, but it also ensured that those environments were confusing as hell to navigate through – especially since Bungie’ level designers had a tendency to use certain chunks of level over and over again, giving the overall impression of running through a maze of twisty passages all alike. They were infuriating to travel through once, and so making you turn around and go back through them again seemed like a calculated insult on the part of the developers.

This recycling of level design can at least be explained away by the sudden deadline that Bungie had to meet, however. It doesn’t really excuse it and it doesn’t make the last five levels any less of a pain to play, but I do understand that it was the only sane way for them to finish the game on time. I also believe it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as much of a problem had this sudden volte-face not coincided with the introduction of the other common complaint about Halo: the Flood.

elite

Even after twelve years of other, lesser games stealing its mechanical innovations – regenerating health, a two weapon limit, dedicated grenade and melee buttons2 – and flogging them to death in unimaginative brown desert environments, the most striking thing I found about Halo when I went back to play it was how downright fun fighting the Covenant is. Each enemy type is clearly identifiable and has its own niche in the Covenant war machine: Jackals provide cover, Grunts provide firepower in numbers and the Elites… well, the Elites are basically alien versions of your character, the Master Chief. They’ve got regenerating shields just like you do, they’ll dodge out of the way of grenades unless you physically stick one to them, and they’ll use cover to great effect in flanking you and peppering you with deadly accurate plasma fire. When you see an Elite on the battlefield you target them first, not because they have big guns (they have much the same guns as everyone else) or because they’re particularly tough  (once you get the shields down a single headshot will down an Elite) but because their simulated intelligence allows them to make the best possible use of the terrain and other Covenant forces to kill you stone cold dead. What impresses me about the Covenant’s design as bad guys is that it’s almost never a question of weight of numbers. There are no respawn closets in Halo, and you’ll never face more than three or four Elites at once, but they still provide a challenge simply because they’re so hard to bring down thanks to their shields and their AI.

And of course they’re not shy about using their superior Covenant technology to mess you up. Elites are invariably the drivers of Covenant vehicles like Ghosts and Banshees, and they also occasionally pop up disguised in active camouflage that makes them very hard to target. They also have a visible rank structure as indicated by the colour of their armour, with red and white Elites being much harder to dispose of thanks to tougher shields and increased accuracy. Then there’s the golden energy sword variants, who not only have the strongest shields of all but will kill you in one hit if you let them get into melee range. Bungie managed to make that single enemy type stretch a long way, and it’s repeated to a lesser degree with the Grunts and Jackals. Pushing the difficulty level up a notch won’t throw more baddies at you, it’ll merely replace the already-existing ones with tougher, smarter variants. It’s an approach to enemy design that I’ve always admired, and I’ve often wondered why, when they were so quick to draw “inspiration” from Halo’s other game mechanics, the Medal of Honors and Call of Duties of the world just double enemy health and accuracy when you stick it on Hard and then call it a day.

(Well, I actually do know why this is. It’s because they probably have stats saying that only a fraction of players attempt the single-player campaigns on a difficulty setting that’s not Easy or Normal, and so they don’t waste development resources on Hard mode. This quite overlooks the possibility that if they maybe put more effort into an engaging and challenging difficulty system more people might be inclined to try it.)

flood

Anyway, about halfway through the game these interesting and engaging Covenant enemies are rudely shoved aside and replaced with the Flood. The Flood are not a result of a rushed development schedule, since they have appeared in every subsequent Halo game I’ve played3 and so the blame for their existence must be placed solely on the shoulders on Bungie somehow thinking it would be a good idea, after five levels of the most engaging skirmishes to be found anywhere in gaming, to suddenly introduce space-zombies into the equation. The contrast between the Flood and the Covenant couldn’t be starker; the Flood simply run towards you firing their guns, and if you somehow manage to open up a bit of distance between you and them they’ll do a bullshit power-leap to close it again. The Flood are practically immune to melee, removing one of the player’s key close-quarters tools, and they themselves punch like trucks. And they are always in melee range. If you asked me to make a list of the top ten most unfun enemies to fight in gaming the Flood probably wouldn’t be in the number one spot, but they’d definitely be somewhere in the top ten.

Because of these twin missteps in design – one of them forced, one of them not – Halo ends up being only half of possibly the best console FPS ever. It hits all of its highest notes within the first five levels; after the so-so escape from the Pillar of Autumn you start traversing the wide-open environments of Halo in a Warthog jeep having pitched battles with dropship-delivered Covenant infantry. The assault on the island in The Silent Cartographer is still the touchstone Halo moment for me that no subsequent game has ever managed to top. Assault On The Control Room has a few too many dreary interior bits, but outside it’s pure vehicle warfare (this is the first level where they give you  a Scorpion tank) in a glorious snowscape. And then the game comes to a screeching halt in 343 Guilty Spark, which – appropriately – starts off in a swamp and steadily gets worse from there. The only moment in the game really worth talking about past here is revisiting the crashed Pillar of Autumn in The Maw, which actually employed the recycled level design to good effect as you last saw the Autumn in the opening level 6+ hours ago and it’s now become a wrecked, zombie-infested shadow of its former self.

haloa

Still, for the five-odd levels where the Flood weren’t around to ruin the experience, Halo delivered something truly unique. With modern FPSes trending ever further towards heavily-scripted and barely-disguised linear level design I have to say I was rather surprised to rediscover just how open the environments in Halo were; ultimately they’re just as linear as a Call of Duty game but they do a much better job of providing at least the illusion of a world existing beyond the confines of the level. It’s a legacy feature left over from Halo’s roots, and yet it serves to give that first game nearly all of its character. It would have been interesting to see what Bungie could have achieved here if they hadn’t had that Xbox release deadline forced upon them. We still would have had to put up with the Flood, of course, but maybe with some improved level design the game could have made better use of them as enemies and we might have gotten a second Silent Cartographer moment into the bargain. As it was all we got was the most influential FPS since Goldeneye. Halo is a hell of an achievement, and it still (mostly) holds up twelve years later, but it nevertheless represents one of the great missed opportunities in gaming – and since subsequent games in the series have subtly shifted away from the open-world design base used for Halo, it’s probably one that will remain missed4 for the foreseeable future.

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  1. Which is still working after ten years of heavy use as a DVD player, in stark contrast to Microsoft’s record with their 360s.
  2. I have no doubt that other games experimented with these concepts before Halo, but Halo was the first to bring them all together into one paradigm-shifting package.
  3. I would like to take a moment to point out that I have only played the first three; my 360 red-ringed shortly before ODST came out and as much as I love the series I really couldn’t justify buying a new one just to play Halo games. My job situation should be improving shortly, however, and it’s  near the top of my list of things to do once I actually have money, so please don’t spoil them for me.
  4. Of course we do live in a world where Planetside 2 exists and hits most of the design points for the original version of Halo.
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13 thoughts on “In Praise Of: Halo.

  1. garrywong says:

    Am I the only one that though of these “innovations” as actually being backwards? The weapons themselves in the game are excellently varried and offer you good choices to be used in certain situations.
    The plasma pistol being able to be charged up could be used to take out the shields from tough enemies in one shot, letting you follow up with another weapon to quickly deal with tough enemies.
    The needle gun was good for taking out fast moving enemies due to the semi-homing nature of them, or shooting into a pack of grunts because of the splash the needles did when they exploded.
    And the standard rifle was good for just taking out packs of easily killed grunts.
    (I don’t remember what other weapons the game had, these were the ones I used mostly.)
    You had great tools available to you to fit for any situation the game threw at you, allowing you to really enjoy using the tools available to beat the AI, but instead you were restricted to using just two. This made the game feel very restricted in what you could do.
    It would have been great if this restriction was somehow tied into some clever situations where this retriction itself was part of the challenge, but that wasn’t the case – you had many of the weapons lying around on the floor, you just couldn’t pick up more than two.

    Then there’s the regenerating health that has forever made every single FPS game that has used it since Halo (and Halo included) as a cakewalk in the park. Sure, the old standard of med packs lying around all over the place wasn’t ideal, but it was better than regenerating health, because you had to use your skill to pass a certain point in the level or battle, before you could get to the med packs that were situated later in the game to heal yourself up.
    But with regenerating health you just turtle behind a rock or whatever and even the toughest battles become a simple boring grind and chore, robbing it of any sense of challenge and tension.

    I’ll admit that I didn’t play Halo when it first came out, but rather some time in late 2003, so by that time I probably would have already played some games that aped Halo in some way, but I distinctly remember how all the hype around the game was it’s “innovation” and how revolutionary it was and how awesome the battles were, but when I played it I never found anything particularly new or innovative in it. Everything has already been done before by someone, and some of the things that it did do, like limiting the amount of tools you can use to just two a time seemed very backwards to me and frustrating.

    And the AI? It was pretty good, sure. I especially liked the little grunts running in fear away from you when you shot any of their buddies. That was a nice, cute detail, but I didn’t find it so awesome as to deserve the praise it receives. Heck, Half-Life had pretty good AI (especially the soldiers), and it doesn’t get this kind of praise.

    • Darren says:

      I don’t mind regenerating health, especially since it means that you tend to avoid instances where a bad run on your part leaves you stuck at a checkpoint with basically no hope for survival.

      The problem with regenerating health as I see it is that developers too often make enemies far too powerful. If you can regenerate health, then they tend to see the only way to make an enemy a threat is to let them kill you near instantaneously. This is a huge problem in Uncharted, and one of the reasons why the success of that series baffles me (not that it’s bad, mind).

      When the gameplay is engaging, I vastly prefer regenerating health. Bulletstorm’s score system and the Goldeneye remake’s multi-pathed levels are easier to enjoy when you don’t have to worry about managing health, though of course it would be nice if more devs did what said remake did and offer an old-school mode for those who want it.

      Finally, it’s worth noting that Halo had regenerating shields but not regenerating health. It was more of a halfway point between FPS health systems, and its interesting that most successors skipped straight to regenerating health. In fact, Borderlands may be the only series that copied Halo directly on that point.

      • Hentzau says:

        That last point is crucial as it allowed Halo to get the best of both worlds. Regenerating shields were a cushion that ensured you were never stuck in an unwinnable position rather than (especially on the higher difficulty settings) a full-on substitute for your health bar. I’d love to see the idea revisited at some point, as it always seemed superior to both pure health and pure regenerating systems.

        Halo is also reasonably special in that it has a plausible in-universe explanation for regenerating health. I don’t think I could name a single modern FPS (except Borderlands) that rationalises the protagonist’s ability to absorb volley after volley of hot lead with no lasting ill-effects. I think Far Cry 2 made the most radical step in at least acknowledging how absurd it all was (if you stop for a moment to heal your guy will literally remove bullets from his body with pliers and snap broken limbs back into place) but otherwise it’s always rankled with me a bit that they stole the system without trying to rationalise it in the context of the game.

        • garrywong says:

          What’s so wrong with the more classic approach of starting with full health whenever you die and respawn at a checkpoint? This way you are never in an unwinnable situation because you did rather poorly in a previous battle, and at the same time you still have only a limited amount of health to defeat the upcoming battle.

          Because if the only reason to have regenerating health is to ensure you never ended up in an unwinnable situation, then the above approach seems to me to be a better fit in making battles challenging (and thus giving the player more engagement and tension). For single player games, anyway.

          The games that have regenerating health, but only when out of combat, seem to handle this particularly well (think almost any MMO). You can’t turtle any battle because you’re not regenerating any health, but as soon as the battle is over your health will regenerate to full by the time you reach the next battle.

          • Darren says:

            I think the argument is that if you’re just going to go back to full health and start over, why not just add a mechanic to allow the player to continue the fight? In my experience, really tough bosses should always have health pickups in their vicinity to get you through the fight, and regenerating health simply cuts out the middleman.

            And the checkpoint thing has its own problems. If you regenerate and the enemy doesn’t, then you have the Bioshock problem of tedious, often boring, protracted fights where you whittle down the enemy’s health. If the enemy regenerates health (or respawn, or whatever) then you have the Borderlands problem where it’s extremely frustrating to try to get past a particularly tough boss.

          • garrywong says:

            @Darren,
            Sorry I should have elaborated more by what I meant as the “classic checkpoint approach”. You gain full health when you reach the checkpoint, allowing you to fight the next battle with the intended amount of health (and so you don’t need to go and purposely die to gain full health. Think Dark Soul’s bonfires). And if you die and respawn, then obviously all the enemies in the battle are also reset. That seemed kind of obvious to me when I was typying that up, so sorry for not clarifying.

            I totally agree, though, that you can easily mess up checkpointing terribly. Bioshock is a good example that you provided. Other examples include games that have incredibly silly placements of checkpoints, where you could have checkpoints every 5 meters in a straight corridoor, but then go on with no checkpoints between big fights and a boss at the end. However, those games usually have more pressing issues, such as rather poor structure of progressing through the game, which leads to the checkpointing issue in the first place.

    • Gap Gen says:

      I remember someone arguing that making the Elites strong (i.e. shielded) added to the sense/illusion of intelligence, because if you can kill an enemy quickly they seem weak and stupid no matter what AI is up there, and a difficult-to-kill enemy appears smarter even if the AI isn’t all that. This was the same article that said that shout-outs like “moving to flank!” make decisions like running into the open more believable, even if they’re really stupid, because it seems like a deliberate tactical decision.

      • Hentzau says:

        It’s not so much that they have buckets of health, it’s that they have the same regenerating health that you do. Couple that with a semi-decent ability to use cover and suddenly you have a enemy that seems terrifyingly effective because if you lose sight of them the chances are they’ll pop back up in ten seconds with full shields and you have to kill them all over again.

        I guess that Halo’s big strength isn’t so much its AI, which is definitely respectable but which also has big gaps that you can exploit if you know they’re there, but rather in its ability to confront you with enemies that are tough to bring down without having the player say “This is bullshit!” Having the Elite come back with full shields is much more palatable than having a human baddie get back up *again* after you put him down for the third time in a row.

    • Hentzau says:

      You make good points about the weapons, but since such a large part of Halo was about rationalising the design decisions it made in the context of the game it wouldn’t have made much sense to have Master Chief running around with five different guns. And the system was geared towards constantly picking up new weapons since the Plasma Rifle and Plasma Pistol both had non-replaceable ammo. If anything I think it was a little too generous with the ammo for the human weapons, which led to this problem; it seems like you’re supposed to be scavenging alien weapons in a guerilla war, but instead you can use pretty much whatever you want whenever you want and so the the two weapon limit starts to seem like more of a restriction than it would be otherwise.

      • Darren says:

        Gun choice is a big problem for me in FPS titles.

        Bulletstorm is far and away the best FPS I’ve played in many years, at least from a strictly mechanical standpoint. You have control over what guns you bring with you, and your ability to upgrade guns and acquire ammo is mostly about your skill at the game and not about arbitrary and artificial restrictions imposed by the developers.

        Contrast this with something like Resistance: Fall of Man. That game had a pretty large assortment of often quite exotic weaponry, including a gun that could shoot through virtually any wall, a gun that shot a stream of ricocheting crystals (with enough force to knock over a car!), and more, and you could carry all of them with you at all times. Unfortunately, ammo was so scarce for most of them that you have little choice but to use the most common guns.

  2. Everblue says:

    You can get the tank in multiplayer.

    Back in 2003 when I was in my early 20s we used to have LAN parties. My flatmate Richy nicked a router from work (I had never seen one before), and I bought 40 metres of ethernet cables. We had four XBox controllers linked up and 3 big TVs and a projector in four rooms in our house.

    I bought 80 cans of lager.

    We played 8v8 capture the flag, single flag. I remember the first time we fired it up, and I was crouching in the bunker in Blood Gulch, holding my assault rifle for dear life. It was quiet. Too quiet. All of a sudden from upstairs we heard “Let’s get the bastards!” and a tank and two warthogs lurched round the corner into view.

    There was incoming plasma fire all over the bloody place. A sniper opened up on us from somewhere to the left. No-one had a clue what was going on – we were all just firing wildly out of every window and screaming at each other. Beer all over the floor.

    Those were the days…

    • Hentzau says:

      It is? I must have been playing the wrong multiplayer modes since I don’t remember seeing one on Blood Gulch. Mind you I never did get to do a system link; today the concept of daisy-chaining four Xboxes together seems more than a little bit ludicrous but back then it was the only way to get one of those 16 player games going, and as such was a little out of my reach. I’ll happily concede that I’m wrong about the tank, then, although I still think riding on the treads is a little bit useless.

  3. innokenti says:

    Halo for me has always been the sole FPS that has ever been fun to play on a console. It works and it works really well because Bungie seem to be the only people who have thought about how to make a controller-tailored experience of the FPS (mostly by making aiming far less important than positioning, weapon-choice and target prioritisation).

    Yeah, Halo is definitely the one I enjoyed least, but Halo 3 and ODST both felt like top-notch experiences, and very different facets of Halo to boot, having their own take on the game.

    Still, what interests me most now is whether Destiny will make it to PC (and it seems Bungie want to do it if resources permit). I am not sure I’m so down with the concept as such, and I would have loved to have them tackle a non-FPS again… but still worth looking it for I reckon.

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