This is not the first time I’ve played Halo: Reach. The first time I played it was back in 2013 during my misguided attempt to catch up on the Halo series post-Halo 3, when I played through ODST, Reach and Halo 4 in quick succession. I didn’t like ODST much, though I will admit it is infinitely better than the staggeringly awful Halo 4¹. I did quite like Reach, however; it wasn’t up to the standards of the original Halo trilogy, but it at least didn’t go out of its way to break the fiction-gameplay relationship like ODST did, and it didn’t replace the Covenant with an incredibly uninspired race of Generic FPS Baddies called Prometheans like Halo 4 did. Instead it focused solely on what the series has done best: punchy FPS combat against waves of well-designed enemies whose AI meant that you had to get somewhat tactical in order to survive. Reach at least qualified as an actual Halo game in my eyes even if there were other things missing that meant I’d put it at the bottom of the pile, and in theory it’s not a bad game to kick off the series’ long-overdue return to the PC platform.

The recent release of Reach on PC is, of course, is the reason I’m writing this review now². Back in 2015 current Halo custodians 343 Industries decided to rerelease the bulk of the Halo series onto the Xbox One as part of a package called the Master Chief Collection. I own an Xbox One, and I own the MCC, and it’s a decent collection; I’m nowhere near sold on the graphical updates that were included for Halo and Halo 2, but you can play with the original visuals if you want so it’s not so much of a problem. Initially the MCC contained Halos 1 through 4, with ODST being added later, but Reach was conspicuous by its absence. (I am going to take a wild guess and say that this is because it was a particularly tricky game to port to modern console architecture, for reasons that will become clear later in this review.) This is why everyone was so excited for Reach: up until last Tuesday the Xbox One version of the MCC didn’t have it either, and the only way to play Reach prior to that was on an original 360 that hadn’t red-ringed itself into oblivion. PC players were particularly excited, however, because the MCC coming to Steam and Microsoft Game Pass marks the first time you’ll have been able to play Halo on a PC since the baffling Vista-only port of Halo 2 back in 2007³. Sure, you can only play Reach right now, but the intention is to release the rest of the games in the MCC onto PC over the coming months, and hopefully by this time next year you’ll be able to play all of the actually good Halo games on Steam.

Halo: Reach itself functions as a prequel to the main Halo trilogy. The human forces of the UNSC have been locked in a war with the vastly superior alien Covenant for several years by this point, and they are losing badly. The original Halo kicks off with the Master Chief’s ship fleeing from a massive Covenant attack that destroyed the UNSC military headquarters on Reach, and so Halo: Reach is a ground-level portrayal of that assault on Reach as the Covenant funnel more and more forces to the planet and eventually turn it into a smoking cinder. This is a slightly more interesting premise than your typical first-person shooter, simply because you know the conclusion if you’ve played any of the other Halo games: you lose the battle, and Reach gets blown up. It’s even more interesting because you’re not playing the Master Chief in this game either; instead you’re playing a generic Spartan super-soldier called Noble Six who is part of a small squad of Spartans attempting to hold back the invasion. Since the OG Spartans are kind of a big deal in the Halo fiction, and since Noble Team isn’t mentioned at all in any of the following Halo games, it doesn’t take a particularly active imagination to guess what happens to them by the end of Reach.

This makes Reach a much bleaker game than the rest of the series. It is not particularly good at communicating this bleakness — certainly it doesn’t tell you any of the stuff I just did in the previous paragraph, and very much relies on your having played Halo in order to make much sense of what’s going on. This is a continuing failing of the series and something that drove me absolutely mad in Halo 4 and 5, which not only expected you to have played the previous games but also to have read all of the shitty tie-in novels in order to make any sense of the plot, but in Reach I think it’s just the right side of acceptable and the problems are more to do with hamhanded story pacing and some extremely abrupt cutscenes that do nothing to adequately portray the scope of the Covenant threat and the overall hopelessness of your fight. For example, at one point a character sacrifices themselves to blow up a Covenant super-battleship, complete with heroic soliloquy and swelling, emotional musical cues — but the capabilities of the Covenant super-battleship are never shown and the super-battleship itself has about seven seconds of screen time, so it’s not obvious why destroying it was so important or why this character needed to kill themselves doing it.

Most of Reach’s story beats fall flat in a similar manner, undone by storytelling that’s far more interested in having the Noble Team leader have a lengthy conversation with a static .jpg of his commanding officer than it is actually communicating the stakes and the cost of this Covenant invasion. Your Spartan teammates gradually die off one at a time, but for at least half of them their deaths have zero buildup and seem to come about simply because they turn to the next page of the script and discover that they’re due to expire during the current cutscene. None of it has any impact — at least, not until the very end of the game when Noble Six decides that they have to be the one to fire the big gun at the Covenant instead of one of the many highly expendable marines in the general vicinity, and so ends up in an unwinnable fight against impossible odds where they’re just trying to kill as many Covenant as they can before they get dragged down through sheer weight of numbers. Unusually for Reach you actually get to play this sequence instead of watching it or hearing about it over the radio, and it’s one of the few moments where Reach’s gameplay experience matches the bleakness of its premise.

Structurally Reach is a bit of an odd beast. As a series Halo became famous for its impossible alien megastructures containing large open spaces that you traversed via vehicles to fight interesting Covenant enemies in a series of unscripted battles. Since Reach is set on a regular human planet there’s no Halos or Arks to catch the eye and provide a cool backdrop for your shootouts, and the levels are much more conventional FPS fare: almost entirely linear, and with most of the significant vehicle use quarantined off into dedicated vehicle levels in much the same way Call Of Duty would do it. Reach does still retain those unscripted set-piece battles, though, where the game delivers waves of Covenant baddies to your location via dropship and then leaves their AI to create interesting, emergent gunfights that never play out the same way twice — and they’re probably the best in the series to date. This is largely thanks to two things: one is that the previous four games in the series gradually added new enemy types to the Covenant ranks and Reach is playing with the full set, giving the combat the widest tactical breadth it’s ever had. The other is that Reach is one of only two Halo games that doesn’t get distracted with Flood, or Prometheans, or other types of gleep-glop that aren’t anywhere near as fun to fight as the Covenant are. This ensures Reach feels a bit more like a precursor to Doom 2016 than it does a Call Of Duty game set in space, in that it’s a series of combat arenas where your movement and actions are driven by the enemy behaviour rather than by any scripted objective. It does just this one thing well, but it does it very well.

So Halo: Reach is probably the least quintessentially Halo of the first five Bungie-developed games in the series, but ironically this has given it a level of focus in combat design that the other games lack. Every fight in Reach is fun. There’s very few moments of outright frustration. Just like the enemy variety, the weapons are as good as they have ever been in a Halo game, with the rocket launcher especially retaining its trademark chunkiness and sense of explosive impact. The grenade button continues to be one of the best additions anyone has ever made to the FPS genre. And despite my criticism of how Reach makes use of its premise, there are a couple of levels that do manage to be more than linear romps through generic military installations; the one where you’re helping evacuate a city under assault by the Covenant is the sole moment outside of the epilogue where the reality of the Covenant invasion is made clear, and the level based around using a Hornet to visit a series of mile-high skyscrapers is interesting in concept if not in execution. There is good stuff in here, if you’re prepared to put up with the two-dimensional writing and unusually drab environments for a Halo game.

As a game Reach mostly holds up, then; I wasn’t blown away by it at any point during my replay but then I didn’t think it was particularly great the first time around either. It misuses its premise but is otherwise solid and dependable and scratches a very specific Halo itch, without really standing out in any notable way. Normally I would say the PC release is just about worth the £7 it’ll set you back on Steam, and if you have friends who also own the game it’s actually great value for money because the entire campaign is playable via online co-op⁴ and there’s also a fun little horde mode included. However, this is where we come back to that little thing I mentioned earlier in the review: I suspect there’s a very good reason it’s taken 343 this long to add Reach to the Master Chief Collection at all, let alone release it on PC, because there are some very serious things wrong with the port. For PC users specifically it feels like the kind of port we’d have gotten a decade ago when PC ports were little more than an afterthought, with next to no graphics or audio customisation options and a control system that’s still 100% designed for console. Movement feels a bit slow. Aiming feels a bit floaty. It feels like my mouse movement is acting as a poor substitute for a controller analogue stick instead of something natural and precise, and while I did find myself getting better at it the more I played the game it takes some getting used to; there’s definitely more than the usual amount of awkward flailing whenever I venture into a multiplayer game, both from me and from other players.

These PC-specific issues are comparatively minor compared to the real problem with Halo: Reach, however, and it’s a problem that affects both the Xbox One and PC versions of the game: the audio is a fucking disaster. It’s the worst audio I’ve ever heard in an FPS, and would have totally ruined the experience for me if I hadn’t been playing the campaign in co-op and was concentrating more on ripping the piss out of the game on Discord than I was listening to the in-game sound effects. I know 343 were aware of the audio problems prior to release, because they mentioned them in a development blogpost. Here’s how they described it:

To update Halo: Reach for Xbox One and PC required entirely changing the encoding for the game’s audio which has resulted in it sounding different from the original release.

This is technically correct. I could hear my gunshots in the original release of Reach. Explosions didn’t sound like a mouse farting inside of a tin can in the original release of Reach. The original release of Reach could play more than two sounds at once and didn’t completely cut out the sound of combat whenever the music had to be one of them. Even in a perfectly controlled environment, with absolutely nothing else going on, the sound effects are flat and indistinct compared to the original release of Reach, with no sense of heft or weight to any of your weapons. The moment you add in more than one person firing a gun it becomes exponentially more so; I was driving one of my co-op buddies around in a Warthog and I couldn’t hear him firing the extremely large chaingun just behind my head in the back of the truck. By contrast, this Reach port thinks it’s very, very important that you be able to hear the panting and wheezing sounds both you and other people make whenever you’re using the Sprint ability (I had no idea the Spartans were so out of shape), even if they happen to be standing fifty metres away at the time. Reach already has a big problem with its cutscenes not making a huge amount of sense, and it turns out this is something that’s greatly exacerbated when you can only hear one word out of every three thanks to the port’s bizarre sound mixing.

(And to add insult to injury the subtitles are broken, so I guess Reach’s plot will forever remain a mystery to anyone who hasn’t already played it.)

These audio issues are so bad that the otherwise-solid Reach campaign is reduced to being borderline unplayable unless you happen to be using your phone speaker as your PC’s sound system, in which case you probably won’t notice the difference because that’s what it sounds like anyway. I’d love to try and fix it via the in-game audio options, but unfortunately they don’t exist. Reach should not have been released with the audio in this state, but I imagine there was some arm-twisting happening to get the game out of the door before Christmas — that or 343 figured that most people would be playing the multiplayer, where it’s a little less noticeable thanks to the lack of music and radio chatter. Whatever the reason, though, it means that what should have been a triumphant return to the PC platform for Halo has ended up leaving a very sour taste in my mouth, and given 343’s track record here (the original Xbox release of the Master Chief Collection was notoriously broken) I’m not exactly filled with confidence that the rest of the series will be any different once it finally arrives on PC. My expectations weren’t high; all Halo: Reach really had to do was be the same game I played on my 360 six years ago, but it couldn’t even manage that. It’s a real disappointment.

The post Thoughts: Halo Reach appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

All MMOs end up fighting a constant battle against entropy. The bulk of MMO development takes place after they are released: new content and systems are added, existing systems are streamlined, and some aspects of the game are rendered entirely obsolete. This rapid and constant change inevitably produces more than a few evolutionary dead-ends. Fire up any popular MMO and you’ll instantly be confronted by the signs of a game at war with itself; your journey up the levelling ladder will invariably take you past the corpses of game mechanics that were really, really important for one expansion before being discarded by the designers in favour of the next big thing. The longer an MMO is released, the worse a problem this becomes; World Of Warcraft is the unquestioned barnacle-encrusted nautilus champion of abandoned and now-irrelevant expansion features¹, but even the younger examples such as Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy 14 are starting to groan under the weight of their own history.

The good news is that this entropic decay is usually a gradual, creeping process that takes years to fully manifest. Most MMOs have at least one or two expansion packs’ worth of breathing room before their design and structure starts to become obviously unfocused.  And this makes Destiny 2 a deeply impressive game, in a way, because where it took half a decade or more for entropy to start claiming other MMOs, Destiny 2 has managed to develop itself into a state of almost total incoherence in just two short years.

I played Destiny 2 at launch. It struck me as a perfectly decent game — not quite the same thing as the original Destiny, but that was fine because I didn’t like Destiny all that much. It took much more of its general design thrust from the quick gameplay loops of ARPGs such as Diablo 3 than it did the crushing grind of a full MMO that Destiny was originally modelled on, and I thought it was all the better for it. Interestingly it seemed to be structured so that it had a concrete end point where most players were intended to put down the game for a while until the next expansion pack, which made a lot of sense to me because I think this is how the majority of players play these big online experiences².  I heavily dislike games that effectively present themselves as a full-time job because I already have one of those, thanks very much, and I’m prepared to forgive much of a game that at least seems like it knows when to stop.

So Destiny 2’s plot was utter balls and the strikes seemed a bit rote and the Crucible had been turned into some awful 6-player thing in the name of chasing esports money, but the core shooting experience was about as good as you’ll ever find in an FPS and I could play it for thirty-odd hours (which, in MMO terms, is not long at all) and still feel like I’d achieved some closure on a relatively satisfying game. That was more than the original Destiny managed, and so Destiny 2 felt like an improvement. Unfortunately some stuff then happened:

• The hardcore Destiny playerbase all but rioted. They’d spent thousands of hours grinding up light levels one at a time in Destiny, and they wanted to do the same in Destiny 2. Where was the grind? What was this shit where you just played it for a few dozen hours and then put it down? Bungie bowed to the pressure and the item and quest systems went through several redesign iterations that made them considerably more baroque — and confusing. There are whole gameplay strands that are now based solely around rolling the same item over and over again in order to try and get a perfect combination of stats. The hardcore playerbase is now happy, but this retooling of so much of the game’s fundamental driving force strikes me as a colossal waste of time and development effort for little gain.
• Bungie split from corporate overlords Activision. Given what’s happened to Blizzard in recent years this is almost definitely a smart move in the long term; however it does mean that the game was being driven in one direction by Activision and then suddenly got turned in another by Bungie. It also deprived Bungie of the Activision-owned studios that were supporting Destiny 2’s development.
• Destiny 2 went free-to-play. Again, from a long-term business perspective this is a very smart move, as it already had a comprehensive set of microtransactions built into it at launch and they’ve only added more ways to feed money into the game since then (such as the now ubiquitous Fortnite-style battle pass). Moving to a full F2P model will guarantee the game’s long-term health while maximising revenue and giving Bungie enough time to get whatever they’re working on next out of the door. It also means that Bungie have had to retool the game again in order to try and onboard this vast influx of new players without forcing them to sit through the 12-hour Red War campaign that much of Destiny 2’s content was originally locked behind.

In short, the two years of Destiny 2 post-release development have been nothing but redesigns and major shifts in direction. When you combine that with four named expansion releases it’s really no surprise that it’s such an utterly indescribable mess of a game, especially since, like Firaxis, Bungie strike me as one of those companies that’s now almost totally disinterested in surfacing how their game actually works to first-time players. They’re not designing for that audience any more; they’re designing for their hardcore playerbase who have hundreds or thousands of hours invested in the game and already know it like the back of their hand. (Which is very much at odds with their recent F2P release and their onboarding funnel dropoff must look more like a cliff at points.) They don’t feel the need to explain themselves at any point, and this ethos is reflected in almost every single aspect of Destiny 2.

So what did the retooling for the F2P release actually entail, then? Well, what it was really designed to do was to ensure that people who were just starting the game could play with people who had been playing it for years by immediately unlocking every single piece of non-paid content. Destiny 2 used to have a campaign where the Cabal invaded the boxy Tower that the Guardian player characters call home and separated them from their powers; this set things up so that players could have basic Destiny concepts such as strikes, equipment, light level, subclasses and supers gradually reintroduced to them over the course of the campaign. It wasn’t the most original concept (every single Metroid game ever made starts like this, for example) and the plot itself was pure nonsense, but it at least fulfilled the basic duty every videogame has of teaching its players how to play it. Unfortunately this campaign is no longer the first thing a player experiences when they boot up Destiny 2 for the first time; it’s instead been replaced by the notoriously awful tutorial from Destiny 1 which has inexplicably been ported into the sequel. This does nothing more than teach basic FPS controls, and when it’s over the game immediately fast-forwards to the end of Destiny 2’s original campaign. All of Destiny 1 — the fight against the giant blob in the Black Garden, the business with the Taken King, whatever the fuck happened in Rise Of Iron — and all of Destiny 2’s launch content is assumed to happen during the loading screen that separates the player jumping in their ship at the end of the D1 tutorial and them spawning into the Tower for the first time.

This is an unconventional approach that results in some… unusual consequences. For example, there used to be a conventional RPG levelling system supporting the original campaign, where you’d gradually unlock abilities and subclasses as you levelled up and then eventually transitioned to item light level once you maxed out your regular level towards the end of the campaign and had fully gotten to grips with your character. With the F2P release this levelling system has been thrown straight into the garbage: all new players start with all subclasses and abilities unlocked (good luck making sense of that) and have their starting light level boosted to 750, because that’s where everyone else is after two years of grinding³. I get that Bungie didn’t want a situation where new F2P players bought the Shadowkeep expansion and then couldn’t play it for a dozen hours or more while they ground up their light to an appropriate level, but arguably all this truly achieves is to expose how vacuous Destiny’s light level progression system really is; it’s just a meaningless number that goes up and Bungie can arbitrarily set the scale however and wherever they like.

Another consequence is that new players — or even returning players who haven’t played since launch, as I did — are confronted with an absolutely baffling cornucopia of content after getting out of the tutorial without being given any accompanying context that would help them make sense of it. The only content that’s locked off from non-paying players are the Forsaken raid and campaign and the currently-active Shadowkeep content, and at first glance this is a ridiculously generous package: F2P players get all of the launch content, all of the Warmind and Curse Of Osiris content, the Forsaken strikes and patrol areas, and the first Shadowkeep strike and patrol area, all without paying a penny. The big thing here is that most of this content is almost totally flat and can be tackled in any order. You can instantly jump into any strike in the game, You can go to any patrol area without having to unlock them first. The Crucible and Gambit multiplayer matchmaking is immediately open to you. And this is actually kind of a problem, because Destiny 2 doesn’t breadcrumb a single goddamn thing besides pointing out some key NPCs in the Tower⁴, which is the Destiny 2 equivalent of being told where the toilets are on your first day at work. Otherwise you’re just thrown into a world that now has something like eleven distinct destinations to visit and god knows how many matchmaking queues and left to figure out what the hell you’re supposed to be doing.

To say this has resulted in some confusion amongst new players is putting it lightly. Bungie giving away the Red War campaign along with the Warmind and Curse of Osiris campaigns is generous, to be sure — but it’s also not advertised to the player in any way. I’ve seen multiple people report that they weren’t aware Destiny 2 even had a campaign because the start point for them is so out-of-the-way. Getting to grips with the Tower NPCs takes a few hours at the best of times, but even when you do it turns out the campaign quests aren’t with any of the ones you regularly visit as part of Destiny 2’s daily and weekly bounty/loot loop. No, if you want to find the campaign content you have to walk down a very long corridor to an isolated dead-end hangar with a single ship mechanic NPC in it and nobody else (so you never go down there unless you want to visit her); the ship mechanic sells some crappy ship skins, but also happens to have the Red War + DLC campaigns on her because… I couldn’t actually tell you why, I can’t fathom the design logic that led Bungie to effectively hide all of the free plot content in Destiny 2 in the deepest darkest portion of the Tower that they could find. Hell, I didn’t realise it was down there until I’d been playing it for a couple of dozen hours, and I’m quite good at picking up on stuff like this.

This is hardly an exception, either, since the quest and bounty system in general is a complete car crash of design. You can hold up to 63 quests or bounties at once but you can only actively track three of them in your Ghost overlay, with the rest having to be checked via the quest menu which subscribes to the “giant disorganized pile of stuff” school of UI design. For extra confusion, quest items are also stored in your quest menu and not distinguished from the actual quests in any way. Some of these quest items are actually portals to whole subsystems that were important in previous seasons of content, but which are barely advertised to the player now. Even the wording on the quests is by turns misleading or simply out-of-date. I had a bounty to “Open five chests on the Moon”, except it apparently doesn’t count chests dropped by special enemies, chests obtained by completing public events, chests at the bottom of Lost Sectors or region chests, which together make up probably 90% of the chests you find in an average play session on the Moon. I had a quest that said I should “Complete 3 challenges”, but which didn’t explain what a challenge was. I had another quest that asked me to go into the Triumph menu (Destiny’s ingame achievement system) and click on a specific Triumph, except there are about 1000 Triumphs in the game and the Triumph system is a labyrinthine mess and it doesn’t signpost in which sub-sub-sub-menu you’re supposed to find the target Triumph, and so the only way to find it is to go through and click on all of your recently-unlocked Triumphs. Since I hadn’t been doing this regularly I had about 50 of these to go through before I found the one that the quest wanted.

This brings me to a wider point about Destiny 2’s UI. I namechecked Firaxis earlier and I’m reminded quite uncomfortably of a criticism I made in my Civilization 6 review: Bungie clearly regard keeping the Destiny 2 UI understandable — and by extension, Destiny 2 itself understandable — as a secondary priority. Unlike Civ 6 I can at least understand how Destiny 2 got into the state it’s in; as with so much of the game, the pace of development and the rapid changes in direction must have made presenting all of these new and conflicting systems via a UI that was definitely not originally designed to accommodate them very, very difficult. The thing is, though, I can think of maybe one menu in the game that isn’t a disaster area: it’s the clan menu, and that’s only because Bungie have barely touched clan mechanics since release. The Destinations menu should be a very clean interface because it’s just a collection of pictures of where you can go on an adventure next, but it’s also got these little yellow circles next to specific nodes on its map. What do these mean? Mousing over them is no help, and there’s no key telling you what they are; it turns out they’re the missing challenges that had baffled me so when I encountered them in the quest menu, but I had to figure that out on my own. Bungie have overhauled their clean and simple equipment system to include RPG stats on every piece of armour, and now you get minor bonuses for having these stat totals meet or exceed certain breakpoints — but the inventory screen won’t tell you if putting on a new pair of trousers or slotting a new mod will increase or decrease a stat total past one of these breakpoints and you have to do the maths yourself. That’s the big problem in general: I have to do too much of the work the UI should be doing for me, whether it’s adding some numbers together or working out what major game mechanics mean. It’s a constant source of irritation because the UI is, well, the UI: the means by which I interact with the game. I am using it 100% of the time I am playing it, and if it is shit — and Destiny 2’s UI is utterly, abjectly shit — then I am constantly being confronted with shit. It’s not exactly something calculated to endear a game to me, you know?

That’s why I’m less willing to forgive some of Destiny 2’s more conventional fuckups than I would be otherwise. The loot pool is laughably small; exotic drops are rarer than they were on release and so you end up picking up the same three sets of legendary armour over and over again. That’s probably somewhat intentional since, as I said earlier, much of the loot system is now focused on repeatedly rerolling items until you get a perfect stat combination, but it’s not particularly interesting for me as a casual player. The game still showers loot on you, but after the first ten hours you’ll have seen 95% of all of the drops it has to offer; this means that seeing a purple engram fly out of an enemy’s exploding head fails to spark any joy as you know it’s not even going to boost your light level by more than a fraction. Picking up loot in Destiny 2 is boring, as it just leads to inventory management instead of cool new abilities, and this is a huge problem seeing as the acquisition of new loot is the major predicate of Destiny 2’s core loop. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the battle pass, which hands out the same five pieces of armour over and over again and expects me to treat this as some kind of reward. It also gives you zone resources which you’re supposed to hand in for zone-specific equipment drops — but again, this equipment is all legendary-grade (i.e. trash) with no increase in light level and none of the exotic properties that would make it interesting. The only reason you’d particularly want to go for it is if you liked the look.

And then there’s the netcode issues. Since Bungie introduced cross-save between platforms I could port my PS4 characters across to PC and play the Steam F2P release of Destiny 2, and mostly this has been great. The shooting has been designed to feel fantastic on a controller and it feels doubly so when using mouse and keyboard, it looks and performs far better thanks to the much more powerful hardware I have inside my gaming PC, and the magic of SSDs ensures that the interminably long loading screens have been cut down to a fraction of their original length⁵.  However, at least once per session the game will boot me out of whatever I’m doing with an error message saying I’ve lost my internet connection. This is a lie. I know this is a lie, because the moment it happens I can immediately check the connection on my other monitor and see that everything is fine; if the connection is being lost then it’s happening for a fraction of a second at most, and Destiny 2 thinking otherwise probably has more to do with its netcode being stitched together out of rainbows and hope than the quality of my internet service. To add insult to injury this error doesn’t just boot me out of my session, it crashes Destiny 2 entirely, and — somehow — Steam along with it, which is another indication that all is not well with Destiny 2 networking code on PC.

Destiny 2 post-release development hasn’t all been bad. The additional DLC content, which is mostly being given away for free now, has served to bulk out the game considerably with the addition of five new patrol zones and many new strikes, even if the strikes are all “walk through dungeon shooting baddies and then shoot a boss”. The Gambit PvPvE mode is possibly the single most innovative thing Destiny has ever done: two teams of four compete to shoot enemies for points which they then dump into a central bank while trying to stop the other team from interfering too much. It’s nothing too special, but it still feels oddly daring considering how conventional the rest of the game is. The Menagerie is a series of unfailable raid-lite encounters for anyone bored to death with strikes (and trust me, you’ll get bored of them quite quickly), and there’s a couple of horde modes present which are perfectly serviceable if you just want to shoot things for 10-15 minutes. And, most importantly of all, there’s a five-minute cutscene of the incredibly annoying android Cayde-6 being beaten to death at the start of Forsaken which I very much enjoyed. Bungie are sneaking some good stuff in here despite the prevailing design ethos of building the game for the hardcore obsessives and leaving everyone else to sink or swim. Thanks to that ethos I don’t think Destiny 2 would be an incredible game if the last two years had been more stable for them, but it does at least prove that somebody at that studio still knows what they’re doing.

It’s not remotely enough, though. I’ve spent a fair chunk of time trying to decipher all of Destiny 2’s systems, trying to dig my way through all of the layers of misinformation and obfuscatory bullshit to try and see something that’s worthwhile in the long-term; something beyond shooting an endless procession of robots and aliens in the head, which Destiny 2 admittedly does do rather well. Unfortunately since rolling the same item 20 times in a row doesn’t really appeal to me I’m forced to conclude that there isn’t really a reason to continue with it. Importantly this doesn’t feel like a natural end to my time with the game the way it did when I played it at launch; I’m only halfway through the Forsaken plot and haven’t even started Warmind or Curse of Osiris, so there’s still stuff for me to do that’s not embarking on some preposterously long quest chain of “Kill 1500 enemies with a tuning fork so that you can get a golden version of the tuning fork”, but I just don’t feel like doing it. None of the game’s progression systems mean anything to me any more, and so the only reason I would do any Destiny content now is for its own sake, and when measured on that scale Destiny 2 is laughably inadequate outside of the raids⁶. When I look back on my time with the game this time around, instead of a mild feeling of satisfaction I just feel empty. Not sad, or angry, or annoyed, just… empty. Emptiness is not the emotional reaction I was expecting after spending two full days of my life playing it, but after some thought I’ve decided that it’s an almost perfect reflection of the meaningless pile of goop that is Destiny 2.

The post Thoughts: Destiny 2 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Destiny is one of the most stupefyingly average games I’ve ever played. But I cannot stop playing it.

(Bear in mind, also, that I am playing the Legendary Edition of Destiny with all of the DLC and the Taken King expansion included in the sticker price. This Destiny 2.0 is widely considered to be a significant improvement on the base version of Destiny, and the only thing I have to say about that is that the base version of Destiny must have been truly dire for the Taken King to be considered a step up.)

Anyway, Destiny is What Bungie Did Next after breaking free of Microsoft’s clutches, and unfortunately bidding the Halo series farewell in the process. Somewhat unsurprisingly it’s a console oriented shooter that’s not a million miles away from Halo in terms of the shooty-shooty bang-bang bits, and if that seems more unoriginal now it’s only because Halo has been an incredible influence on the FPS genre and most of the innovations it introduced have now been adopted as genre standard, for better or worse. Destiny does make a questionable quantum leap over Bungie’s previous efforts, though, and that leap is to splice Halo’s gunplay together with Diablo’s crack cocaine loot mechanic. It’s been done before, of course, most notably by Gearbox’s Borderlands series, but Borderlands didn’t come anywhere near as close to being the gaming phenomenon Destiny is; two years after they launched it’s generally regarded as the single best reason to own a PS4/Xbox One.

Whether that says more about Destiny or about the anaemic lineup of games that’s been pushed out so far during this console generation I will leave as an exercise for the reader.

Destiny jettisons Halo’s structured missions for a series of baddie-filled free-roaming environments more reminiscent of an MMO. The solar system has been overrun by a number of alien factions (all of which are curiously humanoid, even the robot hive mind, because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to headshot them quite so effectively) and your job as one of the generically-titled Guardians of humanity is to clean them out one planet – and one bad guy – at a time. Each planet constitutes a single huge, sprawling level that can be visited by you at any time. If you travel there as part of a quest (and the game does call them quests in spite of its sci-fi nature) then your trip will be somewhat scripted, as you first trudge through this semi-open world to the quest location to pick up a macguffin or smite a beastie or whatever, and when you reach your destination the scripting takes over and you get a bite-size mission experience lasting no longer than 5-10 minutes. If you just go there for funsies then your activities will consist of a series of MMO-esque procedurally-generated filler activities like collecting 10 robot asses or assassinating the terrifying Big Robot, which are precisely as interesting as they sound.

The open worlds of Destiny are a somewhat impressive technical achievement – relatively large and complex, at least to the point where you need a summonable jetbike to easily get around — and especially so since they’re populated with other players doing much the same things you are. Because this is Bungie the game looks very nice, and the goes double for the skyboxes; I have some issues with some of the choices made in level location as three out of the five major worlds are set in a desert (Mars), a barren moonscape (the Moon, obviously), and what looks like the inside of the sewage pipe Andy Dufresne crawled through in the Shawshank Redemption (the Dreadnaught), and these are environments that historically have been difficult for developers to render in an interesting way because they’re so one-note. To their credit Bungie do a reasonably good job on the first two (those skyboxes really do help) and it’s only inside the Dreadnaught where things start to get so visually tedious that I seriously start to question why I’m spending my time on this game. The worlds are at least livened up with another of Bungie’s hallmarks: independent AI factions which will fight each other if they run into each other, which happens often as there are ships constantly warping in to drop off reinforcements to the area. As one of the poster children for the current generation of consoles there’s a considerable amount of effort that’s gone into making running/driving around the worlds of Destiny as entertaining as possible, and while Bungie’s attempts don’t wholly hit the mark I can at least say that a surprisingly small amount of that effort was wasted.

Nevertheless, no matter how pretty you make your environments the above mission structure isn’t a particularly robust skeleton to hang your game on, as many an MMO has found out to its cost; these repetitive activities may provide relatively evergreen content but they’re not particularly fulfilling for the player. This is where the loot drops come in: shooting baddies gives you experience which levels up your character, and sometimes they’ll drop guns and armour that you immediately – immediately – compare to your current gear to see if they’re better. Towards the middle of the game the drops of actual equipment start to dry up and you instead start to pry “engrams” from the remains of your enemies; an engram is effectively an unidentified item that you have to take back to the game’s hub area – the Tower – to be identified. Each engram gives you a roll against the loot table for that item that’s dependent mostly on your Light level – veterans of WoW will recognise this instantly as Item Level, as it’s a composite number that reflects how good your current equipment level is. A blue engram decoded at light level 200 will give a worse item than at light level 250, and so the loot system is made effectively self-perpetuating: as each new item you get will potentially increase your light level (and hence the quality of future items) you mainly get better loot so that you can get *even better* loot in the future.

Oh, and I guess you also use the guns to shoot baddies, but that’s almost an ancillary side effect at this point. You mostly play Destiny to watch that Light level number go up – as it’s used throughout the game as a concrete, quotable measure of what content you’ll be able to do this is, unusually, more than just a primitive tapping-in to the part of our stupid monkey brains that enjoys gambling (although that’s still obviously a large element of Destiny’s appeal, just as it is with Diablo). The endgame economy around weapons becomes increasingly stratified as you start to deal with Exotic-quality weapons and infusing unwanted weapons into other ones that you want to improve the raw stats on because you like their inherent perks/handling qualities, but that’s for people with hundreds of hours to sink into Destiny and I’ve been dabbling in it for a mere thirty.  Right now I’m just content with getting my Light level high enough so that I can do all of the Strikes in the game.

Ah yes, the Strikes. These are Destiny’s analogue of a dungeon run in WoW: you select which Strike you want to do from the navigation menu, wait a minute or two in matchmaking, and are then thrown together with two other players to run yet another bite-size dungeon experience lasting no more than 15-20 minutes. As you’re part of a group, though, and because the Strikes are substantially more goal-oriented than the rest of the game, this is where Destiny becomes slightly more than a mindless loot-fuelled shooting gallery. The Strikes start off like that to ease you in, sure – the first one is just a run through a dungeon with a couple of bullet-sponge boss encounters — but they gradually get more complex with set-piece fights and sub-tasks or even puzzles that need to be completed to gain entry to the next part of the mission. They’ve been the most rewarding parts of Destiny for me so far, and are coincidentally one of the best ways to get engrams as each boss is guaranteed to drop at least a couple.

If you want to go beyond Strikes then Destiny has three raids that require a group of six and multiple hours to complete. These are *proper* raids by the MMO definition, too, with lots of dying and respawning to learn attack patterns and figure out the trick to a particular encounter; however after watching my flatmate slowly lose the will to live while grinding through a six(!) hour raiding session I was kind of turned off of the idea of trying it. There’s also a variety of multiplayer modes called the Crucible if you really, really miss Halo deathmatch – this works surprisingly well despite everyone being allowed to take in whatever overpowered weapons they’ve managed to acquire as the game will adjust the stats so that everyone is roughly the same level. If you want to get invested in the game long-term then there’s quests that take multiple days or even weeks to complete, regular/timed events, reputation you can grind with various factions…

…yeah, what I’m describing here is basically an MMO. You talk to somebody who plays it long-term and they’ll get all defensive and say it totally isn’t an MMO, it’s just an ARPG with guns, to which I would retort that:

1. The long-term time investment is on par with an MMO. People can – and do – sink hundreds or even thousands of hours into Destiny’s quests and raids. ARPGs are no mean time sinks themselves, of course, but I feel like Destiny doesn’t just start to bleed into the “second job” territory that is the hallmark of a good – or a bad – MMO, it’s full on hemorrhaging at this point.
2. I can draw direct comparisons between nearly every single one of Destiny’s core and long-term play mechanics and their analogues in World of Warcraft. That’s not to say that Bungie just ripped it off; they’ve shown a significant amount of creativity in adapting the concept to work for a console FPS and a year after its release the underlying systems are pretty slick in how accessible they make something that’s traditionally had an abnormally high barrier to entry. It would be foolish to pretend it didn’t draw a heavy load of inspiration from the current genre leaders, though.

Anyway, the fact that it’s a quasi-MMO adapted for console is the secret to Destiny’s success, but it’s also its greatest failing: it looks great and the shooting plays pretty well, but it *feels* rather light and characterless to play, not to mention repetitive. This is compounded by three really bizarre design choices that I just cannot figure out for the life of me:

• The plot. There isn’t one, not really; the DLC packs have these small self-contained storylines but as a whole Destiny is woefully bereft of anything approaching the structure a backbone of plot would have given it. The original single player campaign is laughable as you ping-pong from planet to planet for no real reason, shoot a blob in the end bossfight (the reasons for this are never really explained) and then are told that You Won, but also that The Story Will Continue. I was actually a little shocked that this is what the game launched with; if I didn’t also have access to the DLC – which is just as terribly plotted, but whose writing leverages this mystical thing called “humour” as well as making far better use of ubiquitous nerd icon Nathan Fillion in the voiceovers and cutscenes — then I would actually be pretty pissed that the game ended there. As it is I’m just baffled at how nonsensical and inconsequential it all is.

• The above weaknesses with the front story are exacerbated by the backstory. Unlike the frontstory it’s not like this doesn’t exist (it does, and there’s quite a lot of it), and it’s not like it’s terribly written (some of it is actually quite interesting!). No, the problem here is that almost none of this backstory is to be found in Destiny itself; instead, every so often when you’re playing you’ll pick up something called a Grimoire card – a small snippet of backstory – that you have to go to Bungie.net to read. Let me reiterate: if you want to find out more about Destiny’s world you have to stop playing the game and go through the trouble of connecting your Xbox credentials to Bungie’s website, after which it’ll let you look at your cards in a buggy interface that doesn’t really display in Chrome all that well. This is ridiculous, not to mention completely self-defeating considering the amount of effort that’s gone into writing some of this stuff, as you’ve just ensured that only the most committed/bored players will ever read it. Anyway, you can find all of this stuff on the Destiny wiki if you really care that much, so what was the point in bothering with the cards in the first place?

• The main hub area that you return to every so often in order to turn in missions and decode engrams. This is ostensibly part of the last human city on Earth, but the hub area itself is on top of a really tall tower (the city itself is just another skybox) and so essentially constitutes a big, flat, characterless platform around which are scattered a dozen or so NPCs who stand in one place and spout the same three generic lines every time you talk to them. Say what you like about World of Warcraft, but it managed to fucking nail hub areas with Stormwind et al; even Rage’s brown, drab, confusingly laid-out hub town had more character than the City, which feels like nothing so much as a box in which to put the unfortunately-necessary NPC quest-givers and vendors any good MMO needs. It’s boring as hell, and I resent the fact that I have to go back there every hour or two to unload my inventory.

Hurgh. Whether you compare Destiny to an MMO or an ARPG, it’s painfully apparent that while the basic gameplay is polished and the various encounters and game modes are well-designed, there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s a game that’s been somewhat crippled by the inherent weaknesses of the genres it’s tried to iterate on – and it doesn’t even deal with those flaws anywhere near as well as the best MMOs or ARPGs do. To a degree that weakness is a deceptive one, of course; during the latter half of my time with it I’ve kept thinking “This isn’t that good, but…”, which is a solid indicator that there’s actually a hell of a lot of work that’s gone on in the background to make it as well-tuned as possible to keep people coming back. It’s equally true, also, that up until you hit endgame Destiny is as fun a shooter experience as you’re likely to have on a console, and if that sounds like it’s your jam then it might be worth it for that alone. Even then it’s a rather empty experience, however, and when you do get to the endgame the true soullessness of what you’re doing comes to the fore; repeatedly running daily missions to get the items required to slowly grind my light level up to 300 is not really my idea of fun. Perhaps it’s yours. I doubt it, though.

The post Thoughts: Destiny appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

If you asked me a question via the Ask Hentzau box in, oh, the last month or so, I just found out that Gmail had been helpfully rerouting them to my Spam folder. I will hopefully get around to tackling the backlog soon.

This is terrible.

You know, I don’t really have that much of an attachment to the Master Chief as a character. He’s an almost perfectly bland action-hero super-soldier who is far more interesting because of what he is than who he is. The only remotely interesting thing about the Chief as a person is his interaction with Cortana. As the face of the Halo series he does his job, and little more — which is why it’s actually kind of amazing to me how quickly the whole Halo concept comes crashing down when you remove the Master Chief from the equation.

Admittedly the offensive blandness of ODST cannot be entirely attributed to his absence. I suspect ODST would still be a bad game even if the Master Chief was front and centre as he has been for the previous three Halo titles. But at least it would be coherently bad. It would be the sort of badness you could analyse in a laboratory, and after pinning its dissected body open on the lab bench you could point to one or several aspects of it and say “Yes, this is where the badness comes from.” As it is ODST is, first and foremost, a confusing game. Confusing, muddled, and insubstantial, because it represents an awful attempt by the Halo series to incorporate gameplay elements from the other two console juggernauts of the period — Gears of War and Call of Duty — and they do not mesh well with the Halo mechanics and world at all.

Instead of the Master Chief, then, you’re thrust into the armoured combat boots of the titular Orbital Drop Shock Trooper squad sent into the Covenant-occupied city of New Mombasa on a covert mission that they haven’t been briefed on. The plot reason for this is because it’s just that classified, but the real reason is because if the game explained what was going on the player would say “This is fucking stupid” right at the beginning rather than getting all the way to the end before realising that there was no real plot to speak of. The player character is ostensibly the faceless, nameless and voiceless “Rookie”, but your perspective jumps from squad member to squad member a la Call of Duty in a series of flashbacks that serve to render the plot even more unintelligable. Indeed, in most cases I wasn’t even sure there was a plot; the game was just shuffling me around so that I could grind through a slightly different gameplay encounter. There’s never any sense that you’re going anywhere, that you’re achieving anything. You’re just locked in an endless series of fights against the Covenant, and then when they’re all dead you’re whisked away to another character and another battle.

As far as narrative goes ODST comes across as a collection of unconnected maps for Halo 3 that have been bundled together and sold as a full game. I’m not sure the complete and utter lack of a focal character is the cause of this malaise or simply a symptom of it, but I do know that the game is much weaker for not having any story or overarching theme beyond “meet up with your squad”. The combat is another thing entirely; it’s the same polished experience you can find in Halo 3, and that’s precisely the problem with it. ODST is the first game in the series that doesn’t have a Spartan super-soldier as the main character, and so I was very puzzled to discover that virtually no accommodation had been made for the fact that you’re now controlling the fleshy, vulnerable meatsacks that are regular human beings. Yes, the ODSTs are elite shock troops, but that doesn’t explain why they can, for example, rip 200lb chain guns off their mountings to hose down the enemy with 20mm cannon shells. In Halo 3 this is explicitly stated to be something only the Master Chief is strong enough to do, and yet here you’ve got John C. Chump from Chumpville, Tennessee hefting it like it’s a bag of moderately heavy shopping. They’re also startlingly resilient, even more so than a Spartan; those wimps have to rely on regenerating shields, but ODSTs? ODSTs can just walk off being hit by high-tech Covenant plasma weaponry. Getting thwacked in the face by a fuel rod round simply winds them a bit, and they have to wait for a couple of seconds for the ubiquitous flashing red screen to go away. One wonders why the UNSC went to the vast expense of developing the Spartans and their MJOLNIR armour when these bog-standard human troopers can do everything the Master Chief can for a fraction of the cost.

This might be a rather personal complaint, of course. Part of the appeal of the Halo series for me is that it’s always been very good at contextualising its gameplay abilities with in-universe fluff. I appreciate that it goes that extra mile to explain why you’re so goddamn powerful compared to everyone else you come across instead of just expecting you to accept your mysterious ability to soak up enough lead to roof a dozen churches without comment. ODST sabotages that, though. It could have been an interesting look at the Halo universe from the perspective of somebody who wasn’t superhumanly tough, who couldn’t take on a pair of Hunters in a straight-up fight and win effortlessly. Fighting one Brute should have been a challenge; fighting a half-dozen of them — as the game expects you to do several times — should have been nigh-on impossible. It would have been interesting to have to rely more on stealth and surprise than on your innate durability in a firefight. Instead Bungie have chosen to circumvent their own fiction by making the ODSTs carbon copies of the Master Chief with some slightly different HUD graphics. It’s a real shame.

The final nail in this drop pod-shaped coffin is the Rookie “hub” area. Because it’s set on Earth ODST can’t bring in any of the stunning alien megastructures that are the signature of the Halo series, but I still think it’s impressive just how boring they managed to make the central city environment. It doesn’t help that it’s constantly night-time and so you’re looking at it through the ghostly haze of your night vision, and the worst part is that they make you criss-cross this level several times in order to activate the next flashback mission segment; I very quickly got tired of having to retrace my steps for the umpteenth time through this drab, monotonous city, knowing that the game would have helpfully deposited new enemies in my path via dropship to replace the ones I’d killed on the way in.

The flashback missions themselves are at least somewhat imaginative in the way they’re put together, but that constantly switching perspective and the lack of an overarching narrative really kills any sense of urgency or purpose the game might have otherwise had. Instead you’re struck by the constant impression that ODST is a game that is simply going through the motions; that it was made simply to give Bungie something to do — and to make Microsoft some more money — while other, bigger projects made their tortuous way through the development pipeline. I said ODST was Halo’s attempt to incorporate the worst attributes of the other console blockbusters, and it’s this more than anything else which dismays me about ODST: its conscious rejection of quality in favour of a limited scope and a substandard game with a quick turnaround time, which is a development approach straight from the handbook written by CoD. Don’t play it unless you want to end up being sorely disappointed.

The post Thoughts: Halo ODST. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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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The post In Praise Of: Halo. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This finishes up my history of Bungie during the pre-Halo years; the first part can be found here.

Part Two: Myth.

Myth is a game that is remembered for all the wrong reasons. I suspect this is at least partly down to a marketing misstep on Bungie’s part, as it was the first ever 3D strategy game and that was the element they subsequently played up in all the previews. This was a mistake; the 3D in Myth is kind of janky and horrible and doesn’t really add much to the gameplay, and what’s more the game uses 2D sprites to represent its units which doesn’t exactly help it in the looks department. As a result the first Myth game was critically panned¹ as a failed experiment. Some of that criticism is fully deserved – Myth’s gameplay is, to me, a fascinating tactical challenge, but I can easily see how it would have provoked feelings of revulsion in reviewers used to the Command & Conquer RTS paradigm – but I would be willing to bet a fair amount of money that those critics didn’t get too far into the game before dismissing it out of hand. Because, once again, Bungie have turned what is otherwise a merely fairly solid game into far more than the sum of its parts through the addition of a well-told story.

The story isn’t even that original this time around. Myth draws heavy inspiration from Glen Cook’s Black Company novels²; the backstory at the start of the game is actually summed up in just three short paragraphs:

In a time long past, the armies of the Dark came again into the lands of men. Their leaders became known as The Fallen Lords, and their terrible sorcery was without equal in the West.

In thirty years they reduced the civilized nations to carrion and ash, until the free city of Madrigal alone defied them. An army gathered there, and a desperate battle was joined against the Fallen.

Heroes were born in the fire and bloodshed of the wars which followed, and their names and deeds will never be forgotten.

There’s a bit more background to be found in the manual, but for the most part this is all the scene-setting the game bothers to do. While it’s got a certain ring to it, a certain gravitas, you might think there’s only so much you can do with so brief an intro.

You would be wrong.

Ignore the intro that comes afterwards; it’s one of the more baffling design decisions in Myth to have all the cutscenes be drawn in this bright, cartoony style that’s completely at odds with the rest of the game. Those sixty seconds of narration should be all you need to convince you that Myth is going to be something special, and showcase the game’s two parallel masterstrokes in telling its story.

The first is Marty O’Donnell’s wonderfully haunting and mournful musical themes. Bungie were extremely fortunate to have O’Donnell on their staff during the Myth and Halo years because he is hands down one of the best composers working in video games today, and his score for Myth remains probably his best work. The main theme — The Fallen Lords — is a desperately evocative lament for a civilization driven to the brink of extinction, while tracks like The Five Champions emphasise the acts of heroism mentioned in the prologue and The Last Battle effectively communicates the grinding, implacable terror that is the undead horde of the Fallen. And then you’ve got The Siege of Madrigal, which was so good Bungie put a variant of it into every single Halo game they made.

By itself, the music is great. What makes it particularly effective is the way it works together with the second masterstroke, which is to tell the story through this fantastically world-weary narrator; a soldier in the Legion (the elite of the rag-tag army still resisting the Fallen Lords) who narrates his journal entries at the start of every mission. The particularly clever thing here is that the identity of the narrator is never stated, or even hinted at. All you can tell from his narration is that he’s not particularly high-up in the Legion – he could be anybody, any one of the soldiers you command during the missions. By telling the story from the perspective of one of the rank-and-file soldiers – somebody well-informed but who by means knows everything that’s going on, and who is completely at the mercy of the eddies of war – Myth really gets across how badly the battle against the Fallen Lords is going. At the start of the game the Legion has been pushed back all the way to the coast with only a tiny scrap of unconquered territory remaining, and unlike most contemporary games that’d have you taking command of the good guys and magically winning the whole war, this situation basically never changes.

As a result, no game before or since has done such a fantastic job of communicating just how hopeless the scenario facing the player is. The entire game is a constant struggle not for victory, but for basic survival. The narrator – and by extension, the Legion – doesn’t seriously expect to win the war against the Fallen Lords, but he keeps on fighting anyway because the Fallen are an enemy that will give no quarter and accept no surrender. He has no other option but to fight, and so the various missions are a series of daring raids and desperate rearguard actions fought against impossible odds. This bleak, oppressive atmosphere is one of the hallmarks of all the early Bungie games (and even the first Halo) but Myth is the one that pulls it off the best, and it’s all down to the narration and music.

Not to say that the gameplay doesn’t play a part as well. Myth is what today would be called a tactical RTS – that is, you’re sent into a mission with a certain number of troops, and you have no way of getting any more unless the mission happens to give you reinforcements at a set point. If you lose a man he cannot be replaced and you have to continue on with a diminished force. The soldiers you are given are a cut above the average undead Thrall that makes up the bulk of the Fallen forces, but there’s normally three or four Thrall for every soldier in your tiny group, and they’re mixed in with other enemies that can easily wipe out your entire force in one attack if you’re not careful. The relative fragility of your men really works well together with their finite supply; you will lose troops during a mission, and every single loss hurts.

This aspect of the game is made even better by the persistent character veterancy. Every soldier in Myth, when you click on him, will display one of several in-universe quotes describing the soldier type along with the soldier’s name. This name is randomly picked off of a list, but once assigned to a soldier it becomes fixed. That soldier then permanently carries the name through that mission and – if you keep him alive – through all subsequent missions in which he appears.  The game also tracks the number of kills he has as shields displayed next to his name; once a character gets a few kills under his belt he’ll become a veteran and become slightly better at killing things. You end up carefully shepherding this small core of elite veterans through the game – just like the Legion is supposed to be – and while any losses incurred during a mission will be made good at the start of the next, the replacement soldiers will be fresh-faced recruits with none of the experience or shared history of the guy who bought it. That man is gone forever, and nothing’s bringing him back.

I hate to be banging on about world-building the whole time, important though it is, but Myth also excels in this regard. Backstory is explained both explicitly and non-explicitly in the journals and incidental details throughout the game; the flavour quotes for the soldiers hint at the world’s history and just how long this cataclysmic war has been going on for. Myth wisely leaves a lot of this story untold, with the various leaders of the Legion and the Fallen referred to by the narrator as if the player should already know who they are by their reputation alone, and this allows the player to fill in the gaps with their imagination. The geography and character types are a mishmash of different cultures that somehow works; you have medieval Warriors mixing with Nordic Berserkers, aboriginal Archers and Tolkien-esque Dwarves that love to throw explosive molotovs, and they come from disparate locations with names as diverse as Covenant, Myrgard, Bagrada and Muirthemne. This constant use of words and concepts that sound vaguely familiar to us makes Myth very, very good at conjuring up a mental image of something from the name alone.

When the time came for Bungie to make the sequel, I imagine they ran into problems at the initial design meeting when they realised they wouldn’t be able to pull off the same trick twice. After the defeat of the Fallen Lords at the end of the first game (yes, Myth doesn’t depart from genre convention so severely that that doesn’t happen, although it keeps up the illusion almost until the very last mission) the ravaged cities of the West have rebuilt their civilization. Peace has reigned for sixty years with nary a single Thrall raising its ugly head. Given this scenario it’s a bit difficult to reproduce the same feeling of being completely screwed, so Bungie decided to do something a little different. Myth II: Soulblighter starts with the narrator as part of a small company of soldiers patrolling the countryside. They run into zombies at a village called Willow Creek, and further investigation leads to a Baron with some very unsavoury habits. Things snowball from there as the situation rapidly grows beyond the ability of the patrol to handle it, and their focus switches to simply surviving the undead onslaught while making their way back to the capital to get word to the King (the sole surviving member of the group of sorcerers that led the Legion in the first game).

Myth II uses the same storytelling method as the first game – it even uses the same narrator, although he’s clearly supposed to be a different person —  and despite the setup being different the game still manages to create the same impression of events spiralling beyond the player’s control. What seems to be a problem affecting a single village soon blossoms into a full-blown undead invasion that sorely outclasses the narrator’s group, and even when they make it back to the apparent safety of the capital city the chaos follows them and rips it apart with astonishing ease. The first nine or ten missions of the game are absolutely cracking as the narrator stumbles from one bad situation to another; unfortunately the game then takes a bit of a dip in quality as Soulblighter (the main bad guy) was one of the flunkies of the leader of the Fallen Lords in the first game, and the second half of the game feels a bit second-rate as the armies of the Light get their act together and focus solely on dealing with what used to be a second-rate baddie. Still, even after it lost the atmosphere of menace it was still a perfectly solid game.

I am not going to talk about Myth III. Myth III was made by a completely different company after Bungie got bought up by Microsoft and it is terrible; uglier than the first two games and with a character-driven plot (ugh) that screws with several crucial elements of the mythology.  Instead I’ll spend the paragraphs I should have spent talking about a hypothetical awesome third game that rounded off the trilogy talking about the Myth series’ approach to difficulty instead.

The Myth games were somewhat unique amongst RTSes at the time for even having a difficulty setting. You fire up Command & Conquer or Red Alert and you won’t see any difficulty setting there; even the games that did bother merely gave the AI ridiculous bonuses to its unit production and left it at that. Since you can’t build units in Myth Bungie had to take a much different and far more thoughtful approach to difficulty. Lowering the difficulty meant you faced less bad guys in a mission, and the ones that were present were easier to kill. Raising it both increased the number of enemies and introduced more dangerous types of enemy, as well as making them harder to kill. Completing a mission on the very hardest difficulty setting, Legendary, sometimes meant taking on an enemy force that outnumbered you ten to one, but – crucially – since the number of troops on each side were fixed, overcoming the Legendary difficulty setting was simply a matter of mastering the control of your units to the point where they became very, very efficient killers, somewhat in the manner of a very hard platformer. It was a challenge I found far more satisfying than the ones offered by other strategy games since it required some actual thought on the part of the player as how best to use their units rather than just being able to crank out more tanks than the enemy, and was just another area where a Bungie game was some way ahead of the curve. You know what the next RTS game I played that took the same approach to difficulty was? Starcraft II. It took fourteen years for somebody to pick up that torch and run with it, strategy-wise.

Happily Bungie themselves know a good idea when they see it and used the same difficulty system when making the first Halo game – even going as far as to recycle the name of each difficulty level (Timid, Simple, Normal, Heroic, Legendary) – but Halo was a troubled beast that I could easily write a whole post on. For now, though, I’ll simply say that it seems like the product of a team that wanted to carry on the same themes they explored in Marathon and Myth, but which was now stymied by having to appeal to the mass market. This explains why Halo 2 – and to a lesser extent, Halo 3 – were almost totally devoid of those themes, instead preferring to focus on big-budget spectacle at the expense of any kind of textured world or nuanced storytelling³.

And that’s the story of Bungie software in a 5,000 word nutshell: they’re one of the classic examples of an extremely talented development studio that lost its soul to a corporate buyout. If you are interested in Myth’s story at all the Myth Journal website has all the journal entries, narration tracks and various bits and pieces of art, and full videos of the journal entries as they appear in game are available on youtube; there’s also a Let’s Play that runs through the first game from beginning to end in excruciating detail. Sadly I think tracking down the games themselves isn’t an option — I’m certainly not aware of any freeware/digital/budget versions, although if you did manage to source a copy there are some fan patches at Project Magma that will make them compatible with modern versions of Windows.

These articles are turning out to focus on what games can do besides good gameplay to make themselves particularly compelling experiences, so next week I’ll probably talk about something they can add that’s not even part of the actual game itself: a decent manual.

1. Or at least it drew review scores averaging about 60-65%, which amounts to the same thing.
2. I have read these, and the first three books are actually pretty good – for fantasy. Everything after that is absolutely dire.
3. Please do not talk to me about ODST or Reach because I haven’t played those yet.

The post In Praise Of: Bungie Software, Part Two. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

It may be difficult to believe in this age of Halo and Halo and yet more Halo, but Bungie Software used to be in the business of making some very, very good games. That these games have only achieved a cult following rather than the recognition they deserve is mostly down to two things: Bungie’s acquisition by Microsoft in 2000 in order to use Halo as a flagship title for the then in-development Xbox, and that Bungie started out as a Mac developer at a time when the iPod was a tiny, tiny glint in Steve Jobs’ eye. The latter meant that three of their best games were released on a format that no-one was really paying any attention to – as with today, the Macs of the early nineties were for artists and writers, not gamers – while the former brought them massive public attention at the cost of everyone conveniently forgetting that they’d ever existed as a separate entity to Microsoft. I’m going to spend the next two of these columns trying to turn back the clock by explaining just why Bungie’s old games are so fondly remembered by those who played them.

Part One: Marathon.

Bungie’s first ever game¹ was the first person-adventure hybrid Pathways into Darkness. This is an odd game that looks like it’d be kind of painful to play through today, which is why it’s a good thing that somebody has already gone to the trouble. Even this first effort – flawed though it was and which existed as a kind of prototype for a small company that was just stretching its legs – showcased Bungie’s greatest strength: their ability to turn something that might otherwise be unremarkable by the standards of the time into a compelling experience through the addition of a well-written and well-told story. Pathways is all about a special forces team dropped into an alien pyramid in the South American jungle. Their mission is to descend all the way to the bottom of the warren of tunnels that lies beneath it and detonate a nuclear weapon in order to stop the awakening of a Cthulu-esque dead god. This is a very good premise even if you don’t like Lovecraft because it allowed Bungie to do some rather interesting things with the adventure game format; for example, on your trek through the tunnel system you find the butchered remains of other pyramid explorers who can nonetheless be talked to post-mortem using an alien crystal. Piecing together what happened to the previous expeditions and avoiding the traps and monsters that killed them forms the bulk of the game’s storytelling, and it’s an effective way of creating an oppressive, bleak atmosphere – even leaving aside the inherent nihilism of talking to the dead years after they have perished, the player is constantly confronted with evidence that the pyramid is dangerous and will kill them if they’re not careful.

Pathways was a moderate success that gave Bungie the funding they needed to start work on a second game. This began as a sequel to Pathways but, after the spectacular success of Doom (released just after Pathways), it switched track and became a true first person shooter: Marathon.

Contrary to appearances — and at first glance they look very, very similar, with space marines toting futuristic weapons attempting to avert an invasion from an outside source — Marathon was not one of the legions of Doom clones attempting to cash in on the sudden FPS frenzy. Marathon made an attempt to take the genre in a new direction. Where Doom simply said to the player “Here is a gun, now fight your way through the infernal legions into the very maw of Hell,” Marathon tells a full-blown and intricately detailed story – a story that was so good they went back and shamelessly plundered elements of it to use in the Halo franchise.

The titular Marathon is a vast colony ship (built by hollowing out the asteroid Phobos and hurling it at the stars) which has recently arrived at its destination, the star Tau Ceti. The player is a security officer out on a routine shuttle mission when suddenly all hell breaks loose: an alien ship warps in and boards the Marathon, attempting to take it and the newly-built colony by force. To make matters worse one of the three AIs running the Marathon, Durandal, is in the advanced stages of rampancy (a neat Bungie concept where an AI becomes exponentially more intelligent as it ages, but also increasingly unstable in terms of sanity) and appears to be masterminding his own agenda. The player has to follow instructions from Leela, the sole surviving AI still on their side, in order to take back the Marathon and free the colonists.

Marathon’s gameplay is almost pure Doom; it includes a few new features like the addition of NPCs that are on the player’s side (the other colonists) but otherwise it’s functionally identical — this is no bad thing, mind, because the gunplay and the level design is on par with that of Doom, which was excellent. With the bleak post-apocalyptic FPS wasteland created by scripted cutscenes being some years distant, Marathon opts to tell its story via a series of in-game terminals that can be accessed by the player.  These are the medium by which the various AIs in the game communicate with you: Leela, attempting to coordinate a desperate defence of the Marathon; Durandal, alternating between taunting the player and offering dubious “help”; and finally Tycho, the third AI which has been subverted by the aliens. The plotting, scheming and mutual recrimination amongst the AIs takes up most of the terminal time, but Bungie also put in various bits of backstory that hint at why the aliens are there, why Durandal became Rampant, and why the player is capable of murdering legions upon legions of cybernetic monstrosities with barely a scratch. They even find the time to paint a picture of the situation back on Earth and the reasons for launching the Marathon in the first place. Not bad for a game that uses the mechanical equivalent of e-mail² to tell its story.

Marathon was a big hit with the Mac-owning community – the staff of Amiga Power were particularly taken with it – and Bungie duly started work on a sequel, which was released on Mac on 1995 and PC in 1996. This was Marathon 2: Durandal, a game which focused solely on the sociopathic, manipulative Rampant AI from the first title. Durandal is helping one of the alien slave races rebel against their former masters for reasons unknown, and to do this he’s kidnapped the player at the moment of victory in the first game. After spending seventeen years in cold stasis the player is rudely awakened, handed a gun and set loose on the alien slaves’ occupied homeworld to decimate the garrison there. The aliens themselves are massively, massively pissed that that their original force was defeated so completely, and not only do they wipe out the survivors of the Tau Ceti colony but they also send a full battle group of ships after Durandal’s captured alien scout vessel accompanied by an angry and vengeful Tycho, still smarting over what was done to him in the original game. As the story unfolds the player character is caught between the two warring AIs as he desperately attempts to unravel the mystery of the ruined homeworld. 

Durandal did everything that Marathon did, only better – it had more levels, more enemies, better audio, new environment features such as water, and if you ask me it really nailed the feeling of being an explorer on a dead alien world. The story is absolutely cracking too; the capricious character of Durandal never wears out its welcome and there are some amazing moments as the vendetta between him and Tycho progresses to its natural conclusion (WARNING SPOILERS). If the player has been paying attention all the way through Marathon and Durandal the last line of the final screen hits like a punch in the gut. Unfortunately the PC release was largely ignored thanks to the release of Quake three months earlier; nobody was interested in 2.5D shooters after that, and after the release of the third game in the series – Marathon: Infinity³ – the series faded into relative obscurity.

However, Bungie still had one card left to play. Noting that the PC release of Durandal had been something of a flop and concluding that they probably weren’t going to sell many more copies, they released the source code for it in 1999. This allowed the reverse-engineering of the free Aleph One open source engine to which all three games were eventually ported. That along with the staggeringly in-depth (and now rather venerable) Marathon Story page ensured that the series retained an ever-growing cult following, which eventually led to the release of the second game on Xbox Live Arcade in 2007. It’s nice to see Marathon finally getting some of the recognition it deserves, although it’s also somewhat bittersweet to think that the Halo series is as close as we’ll ever get to a modern successor.

So, go and download the freeware versions (which finally hit version 1.0 last December after a decade of development work). Give them a whirl. If you don’t feel like playing through the games themselves you can still read through the terminal screens that tell the story – and it’s definitely a story worth reading. It’s not often a series like Marathon is lovingly preserved in the way it has been, and it’s only possible because of a rare collusion between developers (who released all three games for free in 2005) and dedicated fans (who came up with the Aleph One engine that allows the game to be run on modern versions of Windows).

Next week: Bungie turns their attention to the strategy genre and makes one of the best fantasy RTS games ever.

1. That is, developed and published as a full company. Their real first game was an adventure game involving the Cretan labyrinth and the minotaur that was developed by one of the founders while he was still at university.

2. Interspersed with gorgeous digital art heading up the chapter screens, several of which can be found adorning this post.

3. This was something of a misstep for the series if you cared about the single player, as Infinity was a title that largely focused on the popular multiplayer aspect of the game. The single player campaign was subcontracted to a different development house, and it shows.

The post In Praise Of: Bungie Software, Part One. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.