The quality of the recent Halo games can often be difficult to discuss with anyone who has been a long-term fan or has a significant investment in the franchise whether it be money via loyalty or emotion by experience. I fall into the former; I bought Halo on the original Xbox when it first came out, and I never skipped a pre-order for every single Halo game that has released, including Halo 5: Guardians, arguably the most polarizing entry in the series.
The same general statement can be said about many things. It is so much harder to criticize and evaluate the things you love most to the deepest level, in fear that you may be betraying a brand that you have enjoyed for so long. You may feel as if you’d be doing yourself a disservice as a self-proclaimed ‘fan’ of the thing that you love.
It’s the predicament that many fans of the Halo series have found themselves in, including me. It’s hard to argue the outstanding quality of the original Halo game. It provided an innovative approach to the nice FPS combat loop that was only seen in a few games at the time and the overall standing approach to merging design and sandbox in a cohesive mechanical package that suits the players.
After all, being a bio-augmented Super-Soldier rampaging around sometimes requires you to make your own fun with what’s given to you. Surprisingly, it worked wonderfully well. Being dropped on Silent Cartographer expecting another linear mission only presents you with the possibility of exploring the island at your own will and completely evading scripted sequences planned by the developer. It’s possible to turn back from where you are dropped off, deactivate the security systems before the Cartographer door closes on you, and therefore save a whole lot of time.
Many believe that this was intended by developer Bungie to allow the player their own sense of free will within the game environment, never treating them like an idiot and essentially saying “If you can get there faster, then we won’t stop you.” Assault on the Control Room allows you to bypass a full 5-7 minutes of game time if you are so quick to snipe an Elite before he takes a very lonesome looking banshee on the icy bridge.
Such a fundamental approach to open sandbox design has been somewhat sorely lacking within past entries, where the games have begun to feel like an attempted culmination of other games in the genre rather than a game that sets its own genre, as it once was. In the current gaming landscape, today, the latter is sorely needed again. Most other games existing within the marketplace, for better or for worse, always assimilate different ideas and approaches that succeeded in other games, as well as reacting to those ideas that do not. CoD went for a futuristic-modern approach when fans called for it, and Battlefield went back to boots on the ground when fans realized it wasn’t what they desired.
When speaking of Call of Duty, many fans have already said that if there is one game series out there that is most easily identifiable with the current state of Halo, it is that game. ADS, linear corridors, expansive set pieces played out in cinematics, and overly ambitious storylines riddle the Halo series. Some of these mechanics, as it turned out, fit very well in what remains of the combat loop that was popularized by the first game back in the day.
As is expected with current next-gen technology, much more bombastic and realized scenarios of a grand war and a galactic take-over are better realized with this current state of gaming technology than it could have done in 2001. When the story calls for it, it’s only then appropriate that the scenario is given the just treatment. The issue herein lies that many set pieces found in more recent iterations of the Halo series completely take away control from the player, and merge set-piece and gameplay into its own unique meaning, but not for the better.
It was a similar situation with Halo 2’s Scarab, where there was no interaction, and the beast was simply a set-piece. You didn’t even ‘destroy it,’ you killed a few enemies on the crew deck and then a cutscene played. Halo 3 rectified this by giving you specific control over how the Scarab battles played out, allowing you to take multiple approaches such as boarding action, or raining fire on the Scarabs backplate to expose the core. You never saw these colossi in cinematics in Halo 3, only within pure gameplay. While that is applied to the same Kraken fight in Halo 5, it’s still somewhat tethered to a fixed set-piece that limits player interaction extensively. There’s no thought to be put into how you tackle the much larger specimen in this game, you just simply must go where the marker tells you and shoot the big glowing thing, and then move on. In saying that, I will say that in my opinion, the fight is as anti-climactic as it sounds. During the first half of the game, you see and hear several appearances of the Kraken, only for it to be taken down within 10 minutes. Players felt scared upon seeing the Scarab dramatically waltz down on them for the first time; no one felt scared when the Kraken fumbled into the scenario.
Tying back into what I spoke about earlier when it comes to giving the player the tools to make their own fun, it’s simply a shell of its former self. Halo 4 had it completely absent, where the levels were extremely reminiscent of the corridor-shooter tropes found in, again, Call of Duty. It was little surprise that this turned out to be the case, given that the game’s Narrative Director, Frank O’Connor, had stated the year before that the company themselves (343 Industries) believed that Call of Duty got a lot of its gameplay mechanics right. While I’m not to say that’s not true in the series’ own sense, the gameplay mechanics established in CoD have always been different to how Halo operates, and the combat loop doesn’t suit the sandbox approach that Halo has always striven for. Halo 5 had a slight improvement with the wider open levels, with much more player interpretation as to HOW they could fight their enemy, but not WHERE or WHEN.
I firmly believe the last two have a greater importance in the overall grand scheme of Halo’s gameplay; it’s fun enough finding a Wraith or a Gravity Hammer to decimate foes. But what about the option to steal a vehicle and fly away, or take a secret approach that leads you to a later set of foes, much earlier, at the expense of shortening the game time? It can be argued that it’s all down to the player decision, preference, and ultimate satisfaction, but not having the components there to supplement these options is heavily detrimental to the ‘Halo experience.’
Halo has every chance to bring itself back to former game design glory as the years press on, as it was fairly obvious that much of the feedback taken from Halo 4 went into improving Halo 5’s design, even if they still had a lot more to achieve. With more tech on the way, coming in the form of Project Scorpio, new project leads, and ultimately the combined player feedback of two games and a whole community who wants nothing but for each one to have succeeded, I have the utmost faith in 343 Industries that the next Halo title will hit the sweet spot that many fans are craving. It was done time and time again in Bungie’s era of Halo games, and the series itself is only deserving of such an honor.
It’s just us, the fans, that will be waiting with bated breath until 343 can prove that Halo can still retain its own identity as a genre-defining experience, rather than a mashup of games that came in its wake.
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