I was originally going to start this review with a short, punchy opener like “Halo Infinite is the best Halo since Halo 3!” After a little thought, though, I’ve chosen to take a rather more measured approach, not least because saying that would make me sound like I write for IGN or something. Saying “Halo Infinite is the best Halo since Halo 3” is not inaccurate, but it’s also a somewhat nonsensical statement for two reasons. One is that it makes the same mistake as 343 and Bungie did of assuming that everyone’s actually played the other Halo games — and their spin-offs, and read their tie-in novels, and their comics, and probably watched the upcoming live-action TV show to boot. If you don’t have the context, then that could mean almost anything. And the other reason is that even if you do have the context — if you have played every single Halo game, as I rather unfortunately have — you’ll know that this is potentially an extremely powerful curse as every Halo game after 3 has been varying shades of crap¹.

This perhaps makes me not the best person to review Halo Infinite — not because I’m particularly enamoured of developer 343 Industries or the Halo series (certainly not the latter half of it, anyway), but for precisely the opposite reason: I think those games are so bad that Halo Infinite has an extremely low bar to clear in order for me to consider it a success. Clear it it just about does, though, which is still a tad surprising to me given Infinite’s well-publicised development problems. After five years spent trying to figure out how to winch the story back up from the pit they drove it into at the end of Halo 5, 343 showed off a gameplay demo of Infinite back in 2020 that was widely derided and led to two things. One of those things was unambiguously good: they got a full additional year to work on the game and polish up some of the more obviously shonky gameplay elements, and I think it’s thanks to that extra year in the oven that Halo Infinite works at all. But the other I’m less sure about, because the bad demo indirectly led to a new Creative Lead being brought on board², and I’m fairly sure this change in direction is part of the reason why Halo Infinite feels like two completely separate games that have been bolted together into a single misshapen product.

Now, one of those games is actually quite good, and, defying my increasingly allergic reaction to the concept as time goes on, it’s turned out to be the one set in the open world. Infinite making Halo properly open world is supposed to be the big “innovation” it brings to the series, but I’m not as opposed to the idea of Halo going open world than I might be with other long-standing franchises; ever since that first trailer all the way back in 1999 it’s been obvious that that was the original vision for Halo, but the technology just wasn’t there to support it yet. I’m less wild about suiting up as Master Chief yet again just to run around an open world map hoovering up all of the map markers, but fortunately Infinite’s open world isn’t about that. Or at least, it’s not solely about that.

Halo Infinite’s plot is awful, and I’ll give it a kicking at the end of the review when I tackle the actual campaign. The gist of it, though, is that Master Chief has ended up on the surface of yet another giant ringworld called Zeta Halo. Unlike the other rings, this one has had a vast hole blasted out of it by some cataclysmic event and the ring is in the process of repairing itself, with huge chunks of the circumference still gaping voids open to space. This damaged portion of the ring also happens to be where Halo Infinite’s open world is set, since it lets 343 gate player progress by splitting the world into discrete regions separated by vast chasms that are impassable until either you get lifted over them by some plot occurrence, or you unlock the Wasp VTOL towards the end of the game. Zeta Halo is currently under the control of a bunch of Covenant knockoffs called the Banished, whose major gimmick is that they have red theming instead of purple theming and much less interesting architecture, and are otherwise identical in every way. Your job as Master Chief is to hike around the ring “liberating” UNSC bases and rallying human survivors to fight the Banished, and you do this by…

…running around the map hoovering up all of the map markers. What can I say, Halo Infinite is an open world game in 2021 and there’s apparently only one way we can do these, for all that Breath of the Wild demonstrated people could cope with a much more freeform alternative. The map markers are all of the same things that you can find in any open world game on the market — seven forts to attack, fifteen high value targets to assassinate, fifty skill point caches to find etc. etc. — but the interesting thing about Halo Infinite is how it approaches the map markers that aren’t collectibles. Or perhaps it wasn’t Infinite’s intention, but it was definitely how I ended up approaching its map markers: as an excuse for a series of interesting fights.

The fights against the Covenant have always been the most interesting part of Halo to me. Twenty years later and I’m still in awe of how good the combat in the original Halo feels; the different enemy types and the relatively sophisticated AI meant that Bungie could get away with just inserting enemy squads via dropship and letting the combat encounters play out from there in a natural, emergent way. This reached a proper art form in Halo 3, with the enemy roster at its most vibrant and some excellent weapons and vehicles that weren’t the Warthog; I replayed all of the Halo games last year via the Master Chief Collection and it struck me how ambitious Halo 3 was with this, and how subsequent games all rowed back from it substantially by becoming far more straitjacketed, proscriptive and CoD-like in their level and encounter design. And the reason I’m willing to forgive Halo Infinite quite a lot — and trust me, there’s a lot to forgive — is because the open world finally starts things moving back in the direction of these emergent fights again.

Each map marker sets up a combat encounter, or a series of combat encounters, with slightly different scenarios and enemy mixes and starting positions, but aside from dropship spawns none of the action is scripted at all. The Covenant and any supporting UNSC marines that happen to be present will fight it out autonomously; you can watch these battles from afar without intervening if you want, although the marines will get absolutely leathered unless they have special weapons. It’s far more interesting to get stuck in yourself, though, and the approach you can take to each one is truly freeform. You can hang back and snipe from afar, you can get up close and personal with a shotgun and the new grappling hook, you can bring in a Wasp and just slaughter everything from the sky, or even (and this is very much my favourite) spawn a Razorback at a FOB, load it up with five marines and then drive your little clown car straight into the action where the marines will add to the sheer chaos unfolding in front of your eyes. Because the Banished are a copy of the Covenant they have all of the tried-and-tested enemy types from other Halo games — Grunts, Elites, Jackals, Brutes, all with different weapons and loadouts, and all of whom can leap into nearby empty vehicles or turrets to try and take you out. The marine and enemy AI was one of the things that was polished up during the extra year of development, and it’s really paid off by ensuring every single map marker provides a fight that’s at least as good as the ones from the second level of Halo: Combat Evolved.

This is why I’m a bit more positive about Halo Infinite than I might otherwise be given the giant-sized “But…” that just visible on the horizon of this review: “interesting fights” are all I ever wanted from the series, and it’s nuts that I’ve had to wait over a decade for a Halo game to give me something I recognise as Halo combat, but Infinite gives me a full open world’s worth. The actual rewards you get from clearing the map markers are minor — in the case of the assassination missions they’re practically worthless — but I did them all anyway because I knew each one would be a 1-3 minute snippet of what Halo does best. If the open world has a flaw, it’s that it doesn’t have enough of these fights; Infinite’s map is considerably smaller than your typical Ubisoft open world game, and while I definitely don’t want another game on the scale of Valhalla I would like one that took me a bit more than nine hours to fully strip clean³.

I’m also a big fan of the approach Infinite has taken towards its actual combat mechanics. You may have noticed the dreaded words “grappling hook” just now, which is the other major “innovation” Infinite adds to the Halo formula; it seems to me that making your game open world and giving the main character a grappling hook fit more into the “chasing market trends” category than they do innovation, but just as Infinite manages to make the open world not suck, it has also put a surprising amount of thought into the grappling hook. First off, and to Infinite’s considerable credit, it does not fuck about with it in any way; having decided to make the grappling hook a core part of Master Chief’s equipment and a game-defining piece of mobility tech, it has the good sense to start you off with the thing attached to your armour from the very first moment of the game. Chief’s grappling hook feels almost exactly like the one I saw six months ago in Necromunda; it only has a single charge, and the range is slightly shorter, and the base recharge time is slightly longer, but it’s otherwise identical, and that’s a good thing because Necromunda’s grappling hook was the first time I’ve seen an FPS do a grappling hook right. Infinite is the second, and just like Necromunda it lets you upgrade the grappling hook to the point where it is ludicrously broken — and ludicrously fun. The base grappling hook lets you grapple to enemies so that you can punch them, but you can add an electric charge to it so that it’ll stun anything it touches, and then a shockwave attack that lets Master Chief hit the target point with the force of a small nuclear weapon. You can also fix that recharge time to be short enough that Master Chief can chain grapples to properly Spiderman his way up cliffs, firing it off again long before he’s lost his height and momentum from the first grapple, and when combined with the now genre-standard mantling behaviour the grappling movement around Halo Infinite’s open world feels very smooth.

One of the interesting things about Infinite, though, is that it doesn’t enforce the use of this shiny new button it’s given you. There’s a few bits in the first level of the campaign where you need to use it, but precious few others, and nothing that’s on the critical path in the open world requires you to use the grappling hook. Getting around the ring is going to be unnecessarily difficult if you don’t, but you can just play Halo Infinite with guns and grenades if you want. The reason I find this approach interesting is that it stands in stark contrast to what I’ve come to consider a design antipattern in FPSes: Doom Eternal, which introduced a bunch of new buttons and abilities and then forced you to use them by crippling the basic combat gameplay⁴ to the point that it was pretty much unplayable if you didn’t. Halo Infinite’s approach is much more player-positive; it too adds a lot of new buttons — the grappling hook, a threat sensor ability that will highlight all enemies inside an extremely large radius, a deployable shield wall that blocks incoming fire and will happily soak up multiple Hunter barrages before being destroyed, a dash move that can be upgraded to give you a cloaking ability — but instead of punishing the player for not using them, it instead makes them so powerful and accessible and fun that you want to use them. I certainly did, multiple times, in every single fight. This, again, is a similar design ethos to Necromunda, and in my Necromunda review I wondered what Streum On could have achieved if they had access to AAA development resources. I now have an answer to that, as Halo Infinite’s combat plays out like a much more polished version of Necromunda, one with actual enemy AI and enemy variety and attack animations.

So that’s why Halo Infinite’s open world works for me. It is in all other respects an unashamedly shallow take on the concept, with only a single biome (you’ll get bored of clambering up a series of identical rocky mountains quite quickly in spite of the grappling hook) and nothing to do that isn’t “fight some enemies at this map marker”, but those fights are the best fights I’ve seen in an FPS in at least the last couple of years. Given that, it’s slightly strange that the other game that’s crammed into Halo Infinite fell so flat with me: it’s a series of the same linear, scripted campaign levels that you can find in any other Halo game released in the last decade, and because 343 definitely haven’t changed their design ethos here — or their writing quality — it is utterly crap. That much was expected, but regardless of the level design or the writing, surely the campaign has all of the same building blocks for fun that the open world does? The weapons, the enemies, the combat abilities and so on? Well, sort of, but the lengths Halo Infinite goes to to sabotage the good bits is truly remarkable. Or perhaps I should say the lengths it doesn’t go to, because one of the truly astonishing things about Halo Infinite is how little effort it makes to mesh its campaign missions together with the open world sandbox.

Halo Infinite opens with two standard FPS missions that aren’t set on the ring, where Master Chief first fights his way through a Banished battleship and then a series of Forerunner corridors. He then gets into the first open world area, but to unlock the next one he needs to storm a big fortress called, imaginatively, The Tower — this is extremely unusual because I think it’s the only campaign mission that actually exists wholly in the open world. Once that’s done with, nearly every single mission after this has him going to some point on the surface of the ring, unlocking a Forerunner door and then sitting through a loading screen so that he can go through an entirely linear, self-contained and incredibly boring series of Forerunner corridors. I was tired of Forerunner corridors approximately twenty minutes into Assault On The Control Room in the original Halo, and the subsequent two decades of Forerunner corridors appearing in every numbered Halo game from that point on has not improved my attitude towards them much. They’re just not interesting spaces to fight in; Halo is at its best when the levels are wide open and you have complete freedom of movement, and it’s at its worst when they’re so cramped that you can’t really vary your approach beyond moving around cover while shooting an endless succession of Brutes in the head, because that’s what I do in literally every other first-person shooter out there. But by setting the vast majority of its campaign underground, Halo Infinite not only divorces its campaign from the open world to the point where they feel like two completely separate games, but it puts the emphasis on precisely the kind of combat that Halo isn’t very good at — or at least at which it is no better at than the competition.

The thing that really baffles me here, though, is this: if you’re going to almost totally segregate your campaign missions from the open world like this, why not take advantage of this temporary freedom from any open world restrictions and put in some cool Halo set-piece missions? Having marines riding around on Mongoose ATVs blasting rockets at enormous Scarab walkers is something the series already managed to do back in 2007 on the Xbox 360; are you really telling me that fourteen years later all we can do are Forerunner corridors?  Halo Infinite only really attempts this twice, and one of those attempts is the “take out the three anti-aircraft cannons” mission from the 2020 gameplay demo, which feels like it’s been spliced in from a completely different game — it looks like it’s in the open world, but your fast travel is locked off while you’re in that region and none of the map markers spawn until after the mission is finished. It also happens to take up probably around 10% of the map, which possibly explains why so much of Infinite is locked away underground; 343 couldn’t figure out how to fit more missions than this onto the surface of Zeta Halo. The other set-piece is a fairly standard mission where you drive a Scorpion tank down a canyon while blowing up Banished until you get to the end, and that’s it for your not-Forerunner-corridor levels. That’s two missions out of fifteen-odd where you even get to touch a vehicle. There’s only one mission where you get help from AI marines (it’s the Scorpion tank one, where two of them spawn so that you can have somebody on the machine gun). For a Halo game, releasing in 2021, that is insane; these are core mechanics that make Halo Halo, and in Infinite they’ve been rudely shoved into the open world so that the campaign can be made into a boring corridor shooter.

(If you wanted any more evidence that 343 really couldn’t figure out how to make Halo work in an open world setting — which feels like a ridiculous thing to say, but it appears to be true — you need only look at the features that were cut in order to get it out of the door before the end of 2021 rolled around and Phil Spencer had everyone fired for missing another deadline. Infinite is the first Halo game to ever release without campaign co-op; what has previously been a core feature of the series has been delayed to the second half of 2022, and frankly I’ll be amazed if they release it at all given the difficulties they seem to have had with the open world so far. It also doesn’t have any mission replay functionality, apparently because the few missions which are actually integrated into the open world make this awkward. You’d think I wouldn’t be that upset about this given that the missions are so bad, but 343 have decided to put collectibles like the skulls inside of these non-repeatable missions, and if you miss them on your playthrough then the only way to get another shot at finding them is to replay the entire game until you get to that mission again.)

And if the incredibly unimaginative campaign missions weren’t bad enough, they’re twinned with 343-grade writing and storytelling. I’m going to try and avoid going on a rant here because I feel like only a few people are brain-poisoned enough to actually care about the Halo story and world in 2021, but even by 343’s standards Halo Infinite’s plot and storytelling is utterly dire. It’s an attempt to try and get the train back onto the rails after they already fucked everything up in Halo 5 (short version: Cortana goes insane, incites an AI rebellion and takes over the universe) but they don’t actually make any attempt to address what happened in Halo 5, they just do a time skip at the start of Halo Infinite during which everything gets resolved offscreen. The intro cutscene to Halo Infinite features the UNSC supership Infinity being boarded and Master Chief getting beaten up and tossed into space by the baddie from Halo Wars 2. The game then cuts to six months later after Master Chief wakes up from his coma, during which the following has happened:

• Cortana has died, somehow. Exactly how you kill an omniscient AI who controls dozens of ancient planet-destroying superweapons is, alas, never explained.
• The baddie from Halo Wars 2 has also died, somehow. Which is a whole lot of who-cares, except why show him beating up the Master Chief if you’re just going to kill him offscreen two seconds later?
• The Infinity has been blown up and all of the characters on it thrown into the garbage.
• The UNSC and Banished have gotten into a war that the UNSC have somehow lost, despite the UNSC being an interstellar nation state and the Banished being the Covenant equivalent of a terrorist group.

The later Halo games have always been terrible for expecting you to read the tie-in fiction in order to understand what is going on, but Halo Infinite is the worst offender yet; I have played every single Halo game, including the RTSes and the two twinstick shooters, and I have absolutely no idea why anything in its plot is happening or how things got to where they are. Playing Halo Infinite is like playing the direct sequel to a game that doesn’t exist, and the game not bothering to explain key plot developments means it can never be anything other than a confused mess. Not that it particularly tries to be more than that, since it chooses to devote 90% of its story time to setting up the baddies for the next Halo game (already trademarked!) in between having the new leader of the Banished repeatedly call you up on the holophone to issue empty threats and assure you that he’s always one step ahead, which is a sure sign you have absolutely no idea how to write a villain.

Between the execrable plot and the dull level design, Halo Infinite’s campaign missions are probably the worst Halo has ever been — yes, even worse than 5, which at least managed to squeeze in a couple of interesting missions between the repeated bossfights with that warden guy. I strongly suspect that this is because of the last-minute change in creative direction; when a game spends more time setting up its sequel than it does actually telling the player what is going on in the thing that they are playing right now, I can only assume it’s because 343 now have some Big Ideas that they didn’t have time to crowbar into Infinite and had to settle for rebuilding the game into a series of boring corridor levels so that they could at least foreshadow it. When the original vision of Halo Infinite as an open world game is allowed to breathe, Infinite shines; when the combat clicks, which it does more often than not in the open world, it’s absolutely brilliant. The longer I spent with it, though, the more the sheen was taken off by the abominably bad campaign, and when I ran out of things to do in the open world and had to devote my full attention to finishing the story my opinion of the game nosedived straight into the toilet. Halo Infinite somehow wraps up the best and worst of Halo in a single package; the combat design is genuinely inspired and it’s well-integrated into the open world, but the rest of the game is an overindulgent, incoherent and ultimately self-defeating mess that I couldn’t wait to be done with.

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

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.

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.

Difficulty is one of the hardest things for a modern game to get right. Because games are catering for a much wider range of players than they were even ten years ago, deciding what level you should pitch your game’s difficulty at is very tricky and potentially very risky. Make it too hard and you’ll alienate the coveted “casual” gamer market that makes up the bulk of game sales these days; too easy, and you’ll piss off the hardcore gamers who are most vocal about their hobby and generate most of a game’s buzz. Either outcome hurts sales, and pleasing both camps is nigh-on impossible. This is why the difficulty setting exists.

Difficulty settings are theoretically very, very useful tools for developers. Not only can they provide the best of both worlds by accommodating both extremes of the ability scale, but they’re also incredibly valuable in their pedagogical aspect. Taking the most generic example of an FPS, these will typically start the player out with a simple pistol fighting some weak enemies and gradually introduce more weapons and more enemy types with more complex behaviour that require complex responses. What started as a very basic matter of moving forward and pointing and shooting ends as something that requires the player to think and react very quickly, juggling two or more weapons plus grenades and a melee attack and constantly repositioning to respond to new threats.  There’s a definite difficulty curve involved, and getting the shape of this curve right is half the battle. Most games manage it. Some games don’t. This is bad news for them since nothing will kill a game faster than a poorly-judged difficulty curve, but even games which dodge that bullet can end up being immensely frustrating experiences if they balls up the other half, which is the difficulty level.

Difficulty levels exist as a way of allowing players to choose what point of the difficulty curve they enter the game at. What they shouldn’t be is a simple multiplier that shifts the curve up or down; this is the laziest implementation of difficulty and it’s something that FPSes have been getting wrong for years. With difficulty levels, new players can be eased into the game at the very start of the curve, while veterans can skip all that tedious learning crap and get straight to the meat of the thing, starting the game halfway up it and ascending to greater heights than the average player would normally experience. Even that isn’t the best way to implement difficulty, though; in my opinion, the most important thing about difficulty levels is that they should keep things interesting.

Lets take the FPS example again. Shooting a bad guy with twice as much health as usual isn’t particularly interesting. Fighting a wider variety/larger number of enemies is, since you’re facing a different challenge to the one you did before. Running through the same level you did the first time you played the game isn’t particularly interesting. Having to complete additional objectives that force you to explore and go places you normally wouldn’t is. I’d go so far as to say the key to difficulty is to provide a challenge that is not only harder, but substantially different from the one the average player experiences; this rewards them for taking on that challenge in the first place and provides an incentive for those who might otherwise feel that trying to play the game on Hard is just asking for trouble.

There’s a number of ways to approach this. Some work better than others.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

Otherwise known as How Not To Do Difficulty. Picking a harder difficulty setting in CoD doesn’t make the enemies smarter, it doesn’t add more varieties and it doesn’t even increase their numbers. What it does is turns all the baddies into the terrorist/commie Russian equivalent of a Terminator who has combed the phone book for the player’s name and address. They target the player mercilessly, ignoring NPC allies who are stood right next to them blazing away in favour of picking on the squishy meatbag. They are super-accurate; sticking your head out of cover even for a second is just inviting the veiny red screen of death. And they never, ever die. Watching AK-toting goons get back up after you fired eight rounds from an assault rifle into their torsos reaches the point of absurdity at times, and – worst of all – utterly shatters player immersion. It becomes clear that you’re not fighting people; you’re fighting robots with intrinsic advantages that you can never hope to match. And that’s no fun at all.

Halo.

Bungie have always had an unorthodox approach to game difficulty (see the article on Myth for more info) and Halo was no exception. It had an advantage in that the sci-fi game universe allowed for enemies that were difficult to bring down but which didn’t seem implausibly tough, but Halo at least paid lip service to the idea that playing on Legendary should be a fundamentally different experience from playing on Normal by varying the enemies you’d encounter at specific points in a level. On Normal you’d go into a room and face down a blue, moderately tough Elite and some grunts. The same room on Legendary would contain lots of grunts, some jackals, multiple blue Elites and a single, very tough gold Elite commander who’d probably be armed with an instant-kill weapon like the plasma sword.  This changes the way the player perceives the game in three different ways:

• The player can see from the extra enemies and the gold Elite that the game is very visibly different on Legendary.
• The extra threat of the gold Elite is accentuated by contrasting him with the same blue Elites the player fought and beat before. Their toughness hasn’t been increased and they’re no more accurate than they were the first time around. It’s just that this time they’re flunkies of a bigger, badder Elite.
• The enemy AI isn’t necessarily better, but the increased number of bad guys means it’s more likely that one of them will throw a grenade or flank the player, making them seem smarter.

Unfortunately while every subsequent FPS stole Halo’s regenerating health, two weapon limit and dedicated grenade and melee buttons, they largely ignored the steps it took in making playing FPSes on a harder difficulty setting compelling.

Goldeneye.

A half-and-half mix, here. Playing on 00 Agent in Goldeneye could be immensely frustrating since it goes with the tried and tested method of making all the bad guys really really tough (so much so that my defining memory of Goldeneye is walking an entire magazine of AK fire along a closely-bunched line of Soviet guards at head height that didn’t kill a single one), but unlike CoD’s approach 00 Agent was a setting you wanted to play on. This is because the difficulty settings gradually ramped up the complexity of what you had to do in a mission. To complete the first dam level on Agent you simply had to jump off the dam. Completing the same level on 00 Agent required you to plant a bug in one part of the level and then access a computer withing the dam structure itself while shooting out all the alarms, and then jump off the dam. Again, a substantially different experience to the one you’d have on Agent.

Hitman: Blood Money.

A game that allowed an astonishing amount of freedom in the way you could approach (most) missions. Walking in the front door guns blazing was almost always an option, and doing this made the game very easy even if the gunplay was a little bit stale. However, Blood Money was a game that had some very, very creative ways to kill people — none of which involved guns except for the one in the opera where you swap a fake pistol for a real pistol, causing an actor to inadvertently murder his co-star –  and which it encouraged you to find by breaking down your performance in excruciating detail at the end of the mission. Here, I’ll let Wikipedia explain:

If the player, during a mission, gets caught on CCTV or is witnessed committing murder, Agent 47′s notoriety will rise.^[3] Conversely, if the player executes the mission perfectly with none of the aforementioned events occurring, 47′s notoriety will be minimal. … The higher Agent 47′s notoriety is, the easier it will be for NPCs to identify him. Players may use the bribery system to negate accumulated notoriety.^[3] Notoriety gained in early missions will affect later missions. Earlier missions in which 47 has gained notoriety in can be replayed in order to attempt to reduce notoriety in later missions. The notoriety system is not enabled on “Rookie” mode, the easiest difficulty setting.

At the end of each mission, a newspaper article is displayed regarding the hit, in which the content varies depending on the investigation results and the player’s notoriety. It will detail the weapon most frequently used, how accurately it was used, the number of police, security, and civilians killed or injured, and if there were any witnesses. Any injured people will be counted as witnesses, who affect your notoriety. Sketch drawings are also sometimes visible of Agent 47′s face, which grow progressively more accurate as 47′s notoriety grows.

You see? Killing the crap out of everyone with guns may be easy but it also creates notoriety and potentially makes future missions more difficult. The newspaper headlines you got at the end of each mission were a little generic but were on the whole a very creative way of communicating just how much commotion the player had caused. And the best part is that all this stuff is entirely plausible within the game’s universe. Of course you’d want to do it quietly. Of course you’d want to leave as little evidence behind as possible. You don’t have to, but you’re strongly encouraged to. Using scoring systems to reward good performance like this is fairly common, but the way Blood Money went about it and meshed it with difficulty was rather unorthodox. I really liked it.

Starcraft II.

How do you make a strategy game more difficult while keeping it interesting for the player? There’s the Civilization approach – which I don’t necessarily agree with – of giving the player bonuses on the earlier difficulty levels, but then penalising them on the later ones and giving a boost to the AI. Civilization usually pitches its difficulty levels so that being able to win reliably on one means you’re ready to step up to the next one, but it always sticks in the craw to see the AI marching over your border with a huge stack of troops that you know it didn’t have to pay for. Most RTSes have a highly accentuated version of this problem, where continually having to fend off huge streams of units that a human player couldn’t possibly have built starts to feel more than a little bit artificial – much like the CoD example described above.

Starcraft II’s solution to this problem wasn’t original, but it was unusual. Choosing the Hard difficulty setting would mean facing tougher enemies, yes, and there’d also be more of them, but there’d also be more advanced/harder unit types mixed in you had to deal with and you’d encounter bad guys at a point in a level where there were none before. Additionally the AI was much more aggressive on Hard, and playing missions that were deliberately asymmetric – like the colony defense mission, or the zombie mission – meant that the frequency and ferocity of the scripted attacks were increased. You couldn’t beat the computer by just playing more efficiently than you did on normal; you had to change the basics of your strategy.

Covert Action.

The old Microprose games all had roughly the same approach to difficulty. When you finished a game, you’d see your total score tallied up. This number was essentially meaningless on its own, but it’d always be paired with a verbal equivalent of how the game rated your performance. A low score would invite insulting comparisons with Dan Quayle or Ethelred the Unready, while scoring highly would see you retiring as a Governor in the Caribbean or going on to become President of theUnited States. The highest scores weren’t possible unless you played on the harder difficulty settings; this was a crude but effective way of incentivising the player to do better next time.

However, there’s also Covert Action. Covert Action is a game that casts you as a spy who is out to foil a series of randomly generated plots by terrorist groups, and it wasn’t really possible to make this more or less difficult by giving hardcoded bonuses to the AI. There was no AI. Instead, playing the game on an easy difficulty setting would give you a very, very simple plot to unravel – there’d be no more than three or four conspirators who would be easily identified, they’d use simple ciphers and their phone systems would be trivial to tap. Upping the difficulty level would increase the complexity of the plot, adding more layers, more conspirators and making the puzzles much harder. Often the Mastermind – the guy you were trying to catch – would go into hiding before you managed to work your way up the chain to him, so even though you stopped his bomb plot you’d have to live with knowing he was still at large. Probably the earliest example of a game that was measurably different as you made it harder.

Looking at these examples, the reason why developers often plump for the lazy CoD solution is fairly obvious: going beyond that is a whole load of extra work and you’re cutting a large number of people who have bought your game off from a lot of its content, which I understand is a big no-no in today’s game industry. It’s much easier to just have them play the same game with tougher bad guys and no-one gets left out in the cold! Still, I’d argue that if you’re going to do that you might as well not include a difficulty setting at all. These days you might be able to bait people into grinding their way through your game on Hard with achievements, but unless they’re of a certain masochistic mindset (hi Jim) they’re not going to have fun doing it. Remember the gnome challenge in Episode Two of Half Life 2? Where you had to carry the gnome through the entire game from beginning to end? Nobody really enjoyed doing that because there wasn’t a huge amount of creativity involved in transporting the gnome; you just had to remember where you’d dropped the little bastard when baddies turned up. It was an additional, pointless chore that players who really wanted all the achievements had to carry out. That’s how I feel about playing games on Hard these days. If there’s no additional challenge — if it’s not interesting — then I’m just not going to bother.

The post The Difficulty Of Difficulty. 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.

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