I bought my son an XBox and Halo 3 for Christmas. Wanting to bond
with my son, we played together. I got hooked. I began to enjoy it quite
a bit. When I tried playing other games with him, I never really
enjoyed those games as much. There was something special about Halo, and
at the time I couldn’t put my finger on it… most likely because I
hadn’t a clue about First Person Shooter games yet.
There came a time just months before Halo: Reach came out that I
began to look at forging, and I found the forging tools incredibly
difficult. I loved the creativity of forging a new map, but had not any
clue what went into making a good competitive map (I am still learning,
folks).
Then Reach came out, and I was more interested in forging with Forge
World and the new tools than actually playing the game. I found myself
forging until five in the morning, then get a couple hours sleep, go to
work all day, come back home and forge until five in the morning again.
Life was good… very, very good.
I also really enjoyed playing Reach. I knew there were people
complaining about the over powered grenades, and the jet packs, and what
nots. But I was having fun with my new shiny toy, and couldn’t be
bothered to understand the issues they were raising.
Through it all, Halo had a mystical joy to it. From mowing down
dozens of zombies with a turret on Living Dead (The Pit, Ratsnest) to
driving the hog with my son gunning on Sandtrap or Valhalla, to forging
two maps that got into Reach’s match making, to Invasion (by far the
most complex and team oriented multi player game type ever in any Halo
title), there was something special about Halo that just gripped my
attention and demanded more of me.
Then came Halo 4. The forging tools were just a little better (though
I would prefer the Forge World canvas and the palette that came with
it). But the game play took a massive turn for the worse. So severe were
the deficiencies for the game play that the population has pretty much
simply abandoned Halo. And with so little interest in the game, forgers
have lost interest as well. But it isn’t what is wrong with Halo 4 that I
want to focus on in this article, but rather what stands in Halo 4 and
indeed all of Halo that makes it my favorite FPS and why I won’t turn my
back on Halo despite the challenges presented to us by 343 Industries.
Another FPS
I bought a copy of Far Cry 3 because its level editor unleashed
creative talent beyond anything possible with Halo. But at the same
time, I found that the game play is repulsive – like its game engine is
over 20 years old or something. This love for level editing and
repulsion for the game play tore in me, and it made me think very hard
about why Halo was so dear to my heart.
Then one day as I was playing Infinity Slayer on Haven I had an
epiphany. An enemy I killed immediately spawned with an iCannon and
killed me moments later as I moved around a corner. I knew that the game
went shallow exclusively from the randomness that Infinity Ordnance
Drop introduced, but this single event brought it home in a very clear
and real way. This epiphany was my first step in realizing how Halo 4
was being CoD-ized by 343 Industries, and I didn’t like it one bit. (I
will talk more about other aspects of what this epiphany taught me in
future posts.)
So as I contemplated how Halo 4 was more CoD than Halo, I asked
myself why do I like playing Halo 4 and not CoD? That was when I
realized the one game mechanic that Halo titles have had that no other
could share – the fire fight.
Cohesion Between Theme and Mechanics
In FPS, you want to make an environment, a backdrop, an experience,
in which everything holds together, is cohesive through out, and flows
as a coherent, singular theme. You don’t want a game element or game
mechanic to feel or appear to be “out of place”. If a game mechanic
exists, it must be reasonable and work with the theme of the game
through out.
Take a look at Call Of Duty, Far Cry, or any other game today. They
all have one thing in common that Halo does not. They all have the game
experience of “get shot and you drop”. That is, they are realistic. If
you get shot by a gun, you drop and die immediately. If someone else
gets the drop on you by flanking you, you haven’t a chance, and you
quite often don’t see who it is either.
Most if not all of these popular games are set in present day with
corresponding present day weaponry. What does that mean? If you shoot
your opponent, they need to drop, or something will feel wrong. If a
bullet to the head doesn’t take them down immediately, something will
feel out of place. Being able to stay on their feet will make the game
seem very unrealistic and imaginary. Such a mechanic breaks immersion –
the player will have trouble feeling that they are in the game, because
they will feel like it is really just a poorly built video game. It
won’t seem realistic at all.
Halo is different in this one key way – the futuristic setting of the
game’s theme lays the foundation for futuristic armor that allows a
player to take multiple gun shot hits and still move around pretty much
unabated. The theme makes this game mechanic seem realistic and very
much a reasonable expectation. The player remains immersed in the game,
and has the ability to jump, move, turn, return fire, duck, find cover,
etc. In other words, flanking or getting the drop on someone isn’t
anything of a sure kill in Halo.
Why is this the most important game mechanic, making Halo my FPS of choice?
The Key To Entertainment
Because it allows players to engage the enemy, to join the battle, to
return the challenge. It allows the player to engage in the one
activity that makes FPS fun – the fire fight. And it makes this fun last
for more than just a few seconds at a time. Some firefights can last
tens of seconds.
This one game mechanic alone promotes team work by magnitudes –
because fire fights can take time to win, players can get into the
action to help their teammates battle their enemy. And even if your
opponent gets the drop on you, you can still feel a sense that you have a
decent chance of living and fighting back, even winning the fire fight.
But the biggest benefit from this game mechanic is that there really
is a fire fight. Compared with other FPS, Halo fire fights can last
quite a while, because people don’t just drop all over the place. And
the fire fight for me is fundamentally the most interesting and
entertaining aspect of FPS games. (After all, First Person Shooters are
shooter games first!)
It is true that Reach came out with a much better graphics engine
than Halo 3, and people say that Halo 4 has improved the graphics and
animation even further. But graphics and animation quality are not
enough to make a fun game. It is the engaging fire fights that make Halo
stand well above the crowd.
I will write other articles about Halo game mechanics and how they
have changed, and explain from an analytical perspective how the game
play has dropped in quality as a result. But I want to close this post
with the thought that Halo, despite the poor mechanics that have
shallowed the game play in Halo 4, is – for me – still far more
entertaining than anything else out there.
UPDATE May 2014: I came across this video that expresses the same
concept as “choice” that players can make to deal with being engaged by
their opponents. It echoes my feelings quite well.