- FleetAdmiralBob
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- Fabled Legendary Member
- gamertag: Bobvob
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Oh, where to begin? I could go on for hours on all the various sides of this issue.
First thing's first: the Arbiter probably his own branching path in draft one. A ludicrously vocal minority wanted him written out of the series entirely, and Bungie compromised by relegating him to co-op partner.
This focus on one single soldier in one planetwide battle with arms at the edge of the galaxy and delta Halo creates some odd moments -- High Charity arriving from nowhere with little in the way of explanation of where it got the power, furinstance. Master Chief probably wouldn't realisticly ever discover how HC managed to warp, but realism isn't neccessarily good storytelling.
Next, half the game is catching up to that scrapped final level in Halo 2. The plot here in slight, almost nonexistant. You spend one level being discovered by Johnson, another having Keyes tell you "you have to get to the pit!" -- level three is spent driving to the pit. Level four activates the pit. One continous line on the road to one plot point -- one we've already seen in the announcement trailer.
_Compare the above to acts 2, 3, and 4 of Gears of War III, where the journey -is- the plot. They meet familiar faces, learn things. I'd give GoW III a C+ on the plot (a high point for that series, even!) and this is still better than H3's plot in the early levels.
It gets better the second they reach the Ark. Still, you spend one level making landfall, one level taking over the joint. There's not enough mystery after that first "look up in the sky!" Hence why they made a point of trying to recapture the magic in Reach.
I did like the ending, though. That it was the one full level with Cortana in your head was no coincidence.