- RabidNutCase45
- |
- Exalted Mythic Member
Posted by: urk
Eat raw meat.
Punch a bear in the face.
If you don't know who I am, the feeling is mutual.
I've gotten halfway through Greg Bear's Halo: Cryptum, and it's probably the best sci-fi novel I've read in awhile.
The one thing I've noticed going through past Halo games is that the best levels featured Master Chief, alone, traversing alien landscapes. Think of the memorable levels from Combat Evolved: racing through the ring's grassy hills in "Halo"; searching for the Silent Cartographer; fighting through the snowy plains to reach the Control Room before the Covenant; hunting for the mysterious presence, entirely alone, in the underground complex on "Guilty Spark"... all of those levels featured two things: the Chief and something that fills the player with awe. That's it. Throw Cortana in the mix to tell you what you're doing and provide some life and you have Xbox's smash hit.
Frankly, I think Bungie fell short in Halo 3 and Halo: Reach:
In 3, MC had the Arbiter around and took place on Earth for the first half of the game. With these elements, there was nothing spectacular to admire and there was a visible character that reminded me that Brutes needed to die. Even when the gang arrived on the Ark and the new Halo ring, it was mostly about killing the Covenant and stopping the Flood. That changed the game from "Halo" to "generic sci-fi FPS game that happens to take place in the Halo universe" (the marketing team thought that keeping the title as "Halo" was cheaper to advertise).
In Reach... well... you had Noble Team and a Covenant Invasion. The sky was pretty, but you had Carter, Kat, Jun, Emile, Jorge, and Colonel Holland all telling you that there was more Covies to kill. There was no alien wonder to see, just something recognizable that we've all seen before: an alien invasion. Even once the player sees something alien, the game forces us to take cover under the overhang of the science facility to give Dr. Halsey the time to get Cortana prepped to go. Hell, that giant Forerunner structure is never explained more than "it can win the Human/Covenant war". As a soldier in the midst of a war, that's likely all the information one would receive, but that is NOT A+ WRITING IN A FICTIONAL STORY. The player doesn't want to be left in the dark, it's much more engaging to learn that that structure is a giant Forerunner data storage base, left behind for a future generation to discover and use to help defeat the Flood, or something.
ODST, I think, was the closest Halo game to Combat Evolved to capture that feeling of awe for me. Travelling the dark city of New Mombasa, encountering sparse Covenant patrols as the Rookie to find clues as to the location of the rest of his squad... THAT'S ENGAGING. I am sad that ODST wasn't as great as it deserved to be, I think that game could've EASILY have been GOTY material if Bungie focused on that instead of Reach. A larger city, a more intricate plot, more developed characters, more varied missions, and a larger Firefight mode (with more maps and DLC)... I think that's a game that 343 should look into.
Halo 2 did well, too. Delta Halo and Regret are probably two of my favourite levels in ANY VIDEO GAME EVER. Even some of the Arbiter missions were pretty good. Still, the game WAS rushed and did have problems...
In my opinion, if 343 has less main characters and focused more on what the player could see, I think Halo 4 though 6 will be pretty good. Think about it, the first Halo game had MC, Cortana, Keyes, and Guilty Spark for main characters (hell, MC was more of a vessel for the player than a character). Besides that, there was Johnson (to some degree) and Foehammer. That would work. Focus on a few characters struggling to unravel some crazy mystery, and you got a winner.
tl;dr - more pretty alien structures, more mystery, more cowbell.