[360] Halo of War

[Moby Halcyon]

I don't disagree on that point. What would you have done to improve the story (honest question)?

[Stark]

a) actually have you fighting rebels in the first mission

b) cov reveal being a brown-trousers moment for everyone

c) emphasis on 'winter contingency' being immediate scorched-earth evacuation and no attempt to hold the planet at all

d) exposition on reach's significance as a military base and the covenant's inability to find earth and thus the sacrifice being made for security

e) more noble character work and more time given to the excellent 'halsey doesn't treat spartans like people' stuff

f) constant conflict between noble's desire to help unsc troops and their mission to ensure mankinds future

g) implication of the cortana death sentence and sacrifice of troops and material to allow autumn's escape

h) no piano solos

[JointStrikeFighter]

excellent 'halsey doesn't treat spartans like people' stuff

That was one thing I always disliked about the characterisation of the Master Chief post halo-1.

Halo 1 he was pretty much the embodiment of mechanised warfare; he wasn't king Arthur he was a piece of equipment; they kept him in a box and brought him out when they needed him.

It was reflected in the design of the Mk V armour too; very utlitarian, angular lines more reminicent of a main battle tank than the later ZOMG TACTICOOL armour designs. In concept art he even had a smoke grenade launcher off a tank on his shoulder

Also I wanted an excuse to post this picture and say that the ideas it presents are pretty much more interesting than everything we got in halo:

[Moby Halcyon]

I may be something of a Halo fan (something which, on the net, you reveal at your own peril) and I can't help put perfectly agree with all of those.

Except maybe the piano solos, heh.

[Stark]

Okay, the piano solos would have been fine if they were played over ACTUALLY dramatic moments, and not 'ooo epic! did you see what we just did!!' moments. Noble 2's exit was particularly egregious as quite boring.

I don't like the games but elements of the setting (especially as presented in Halo 1) are potentially really good. It's sad that Epic can do more with subjectively worse material, and I really put it down simply to Bungie being full of their own shit. The fall of Reach is almost automatically the stuff of drama, and they managed to suck it all out (except for any scene Halsey is in).

EDIT - actually, JSF, if they'd stuck with the more brutal attitude towards spartans it could have made Avery Johnson an interesting character, in that he has a personal relatinoship instead of being another faceless officer sending MC on another suicide mission.

[Moby Halcyon]

To expound upon JSF's point, I remember an old conversation regarding Halo that lamented the lack of "super" ability regarding the Chief and the other Spartans. Sure, he can jump high and has shields, but the benefits on behind in a giant half-ton suit of armor as demonstrated in the games aren't enough to make me believe that these guys are turning the tide of the war. As much as I give Crysis grief, I think Reach was right in taking a page from its book with the armor enhancements - it's too bad it's too little, too late. I mean, this is the first Halo game with an ability to sprint. You don't really get the sense that you're a giant mechanical titan, and the game certainly play as much.

The presentation, as Stark pointed out, is also lacking. When half your cutscenes are random camera-views, you're not giving the story a "documentary" feel, you're essentially removing any chance you have for interesting cinematography - something videogames, being free of the constraints live action films suffer, should exploit to insane degrees. The handle of the three hundred or so warships beaming in about two seconds after Jorge dies is especially bad, you have no sense of despair with the three or four lines of "excited" dialogue. There's no expansive sense of destruction in space, especially with the one space mission essentially being ACE COMBAT: HALO. The spartan (pun intended) attitude towards painting the story canvas shows itself again when you look at the characters - I got a better sense of their personalities and histories when I looked the game's background material than the actual game. It's especially hopeless, but I'd wish once Bungie didn't make the PCs faceless, nameless fill-the-shoes cardboard cutouts with utterly no personality. It gets to the point that, if that their intent, you start rolling your eyes and throwing your controller across the room when Noble Six decides to stay behind on Reach.

[JointStrikeFighter]

Yeah its really sad that fucking nanoman is better than masterchief in every regard

[Stark]

Yeah, if they remade Halo but with Nanoman-style superpowers, it'd be awesome and you'd actually buy that you're a supersoldier and not just another wanked-out videogame protaganist. I actually found the deep-throat fellation of MC in the Halo 1 manual to be extremely off-putting, largely because at the time you knew he was just another Doom soldier clone.

As Moby says, I think the back of the fucking box tells a player more about what's happening in Reach than any single chapter of the game, and the entry of the main Covenant fleet was a total anticlimax - and coming right after a heroic sacrifice to save mankind, that is a truly great effort of shit writing.

[JointStrikeFighter]

I actually think MC has gotten WEAKER as the games went on;

in Halo 1 his normal movement speed was something like 20kmh vs about 7-8 in the later games; he could throw grenades hundreds of metres vs five and carried around hundreds of rounds of ammo instead of 3 mags.

[Moby Halcyon]

It's something of a shame, because I like the Halo games at least for the art aesthetic (vietnam weapons, sqwuak sqwuak aliens, pretentious music and all), but I just wish half as much time was spent catching up Halo with every other AAA shooter on the market. This is my personal taste, but I just wish a bog-standard FPS shooter like Halo would at least incorporate some sort of dynamic melee system that a bit flashier than simple "bonk them on the head" and the "snap their neck" mechanic I abused with reach. With melee being such a heavy component of the series, I actually wish I could have a bit more depth and something approaching choreography. But that's just me.

Another preferential thing I felt when playing through Reach - Halo 2 must have really hit the fandom backlash hard, because I really miss the lack of identifiable villains within the Covenant. I understand the intent in removing their English and making them more frightening, but it isn't black/white either-or business with between having an interesting villain and making the enemy a faceless horde. If anything, struggling against an individual would have at least left me with some sort of sense of accomplishment while my stupid PC decided to stay behind on Reach. I hate bringing out the Halo EU as an example, but Ghosts of Onyx kinda shows you can pull off having a ton of the heroes die, have a downer ending, and have the Covenant be consistently threatening while having a named villain for the hero to prevail against.

One of the Bungie chiefs commented on trying to instill Reach with a sense of accomplishment regarding the fact that the game ends with 700 million dead - and despite the one mission where you're helping civilain evac whales shuttles escape, your character doesn't really get a feeling of accomplishing much of anything on the wider scale - as Jorge's death obviously showed.

Am I too much of a fatty nerd? Probably. But I hate seeing the possibility of something better slip by.

[Stark]

The evacuation thing was terrible, because in the one level you see civvies, they're waiting for non-existent covenant to kill them because the soldiers ACROSS THE RIVER can't move 15M DOWN THE ROAD to press the 'on' button on some missile batteries. Needless to say the ship overhead can shoot down the transports once they take off, but not when they're sitting on the launchpad in plain sight.

Halo doesn't just have a lack of identifiable villans, it doesn't even have bosses. Levels just end after yet another 'kill the spawning armies of guys too stupid to just shoot you with the guns on the transports' battle.

Amusingly Gears can make GIANT WORM, ANYA seem more dramatic than 'millions dead, humanity doomed' was in Reach.

[Moby Halcyon]

With all the differentiation between species and ranks, you'd think Halo would be the perfect game to have decent boss fights in.

Oh well. At least Firefight is customizable.

[Ford Prefect]

Halo 1 he was pretty much the embodiment of mechanised warfare; he wasn't king Arthur he was a piece of equipment; they kept him in a box and brought him out when they needed him.

Things changed. You can see in Halo: Combat Evolved that the Chief really was just a player avatar (though paradoxically he has more personality than in the latter games), and so there was no real effort in aggrandising the Chief as such. Yes, he was the only hope available on Alpha Halo, but that wasn't reflected in the narrative as such. By Halo 2, the Chief is 'the Demon', implied to be so hardcore that the Covenant essentially start using their own religious mythology to describe him. By Halo 3 the popularity of the game was so high that Bungie leapt off the deep end. Halo was no longer a game about a big green space marine killing psychedelic aliens, it was an mythic text on par with the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Chief is not just a player avatar, he is a messianic figure, supposed to be as iconic as Heracles and King Arthur. This is not really a new theme for Bungie, but it makes me wonder if Bungie went back to Marathon with that line would read 'I am Beowulf, I am Gilgamesh, I am the Master Chief'. The end of Halo 3 is especially obvious in its effort to make the Chief the Once and Future King.

In principle I have no problem with this, and if a game developer wanted to make their FPS hark back to something like Paradise Lost, that's fine. But Halo was the wrong franchise; the Master Chief was the wrong character. Sure, he didn't need to be some sort of broodingly intellectual examination of the nature of man, but if you want us to buy him as Space Jesus like in the Believe ad campaign, then you'd think he should have some kind of charisma.

Halo doesn't just have a lack of identifiable villans, it doesn't even have bosses.

This is in part why the Arbiter is such a better realised character and that his half of the story in Halo 2 was much stronger: the Master Chief has only the faceless Covenant as his opponent, whereas the Arbiter has real personal rivalries, an actual antagonist he interacts with etc.

[Stark]

It says something that when I played Halo 2 I was blown away by the Arbiter having actual objectives (like 'do xyz' or 'stop abc') instead of 'go here, watch cutscene' like MC.

Even if MC had been a blank character, they could have sold the epic-ness in others that interact with him; but everyone else on the human side is nobody or Shaft.

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

With all the differentiation between species and ranks, you'd think Halo would be the perfect game to have decent boss fights in.

They actually complained back in the days of Combat Evolved that there were no bosses. Bungie went in and put actual bosses in Halo 2, and still they complained. Cue even more complaints when Halo 3 came around with a lack of bosses other than an anticlimactic tussle with 343 Guilty Spark. There's just no pleasing them, really.

[Moby Halcyon]

That's something to be said of whenever (and if when Reach sells well, it will) a Halo movie is made. Blokamp had a point about making the movie not actually be about the Chief, but about all the soldiers around him and how he indirectly inspires them. Hell, they'd already got the aesthetic and cinematography style done from all the live-action shorts they've done - Remember Reach, the ODST drop trailer, and the Blokamp "Let's have a rocket blow a Chieftain in bloody falling chunks" Halo 3 prequel. But I'm sure the retarded fans would bitch about the lack of Chief alien punching going on.

It goes without saying that the Halo 2 Arbiter is my favorite part of the series, which makes me all the sadder he became a bit character (save for the epic one-liner) in Halo 3. Hell, if Noble Ire's The Rift - a fanfiction - handles the resolution of the Arbiter's story arc and the Covenant political machinations (why the hell did Truth lose it in Halo 3? Who cares!) in a much more satisfying manner, you know Bungie isn't exactly looking to play any sort of A-game in designing the series.

EDIT:

They actually complained back in the days of Combat Evolved that there were no bosses. Bungie went in and put actual bosses in Halo 2, and still they complained. Cue even more complaints when Halo 3 came around with a lack of bosses other than an anticlimactic tussle with 343 Guilty Spark. There's just no pleasing them, really.

Yeah, I knew as much. The Halo fandom really makes things pretty shit for a casual fan like like and is a good portion of the reason why the series really started falling apart. It wouldn't really have been that hard to add fights in during Halo 3, the timing was all there, with the lead-up to attacking Truth or the total lack of onscreen Gravemind (save for a few tenacles). Heck, even the Chieftain acting in Truth's personal guard could've been a good "upgraded" boss if he'd had any sort of personality whatsoever.

[JointStrikeFighter]

Sure, he didn't need to be some sort of broodingly intellectual examination of the nature of man, but if you want us to buy him as Space Jesus like in the Believe ad campaign, then you'd think he should have some kind of charisma.

It would help too if he had any abilities reflecting his space jesus image instead of being a walking gun turret.

[Ford Prefect]

Halo 3 would have been immediately improved by simply having the Chief and Arbiter connect in some way, but obviously the Arbiter gets totally ignored and the unresolved elements of his character arc anti-climatically handled in twelve seconds, as a side-note to something else.

And yeah, giving the Chief some real elements of a heroic figure in terms of abilities would be good. I mean, when it comes down to it, the Chief essentially acts as a more resilient marine. He runs around, drives vehicles and shoots things. I mean, one of the things which Halo trailers talked about was that the Chief was trained in all forms of human and alien weapons ... except that other people end up using Covenant weapons anyway, so ...? I mean, Jesus Christ, he doesn't have to split a mountain half or be fucking invincible or anything, but Zak put it quite well: he's a walking gun turret. I basically always used the energy sword/gravity hammer because it actually felt like what the protagonist of an epic space quest would do.

[JointStrikeFighter]

Also the hammer was massively cheesy

[Stark]

I've said it before elsewhere, but it shocked Sherry that the Rbiter was ignored once Halo3 got going. After MCs reaction she got me to explain the thing with elites, and she was expecting some drama if only in cutscenes.

Amusingly RAAM gets more dialog the Arbiter.

[JointStrikeFighter]

When was the last time you heard the wind say hostiles?

Theres nothing wrong with MC being a walking gunturret but again in halo it's done really uninterestingly. If MC was like the sniper scenes from black hawk down it would be really cool; very dynamic, fast reloads, aimed shots across a wide frontage, burning through shitloads of ammo but instead its just really...static.

EDIT: I kind of always envision the chief fighting in a very mechanistic fashion; alot of snapping movements, kind of like the gun-kata scenes from Equilibrium, but with actual aiming :V This never actually happens.

[Stark]

It's sad that 'being the ultimate sniper' would gave been a better use of armour lock.

It's probably the emphasis on the golden triangle and the Xbox1 controller that limited MCs abilities. Even in Reach you can only have one, even though using 1 per gun to show MCs superiority would have been easy.

[JointStrikeFighter]

Hey is the flashlight still fucking useless in Reach?

[Stark]

It's sad that 'being the ultimate sniper' would gave been a better use of armour lock.

It's probably the emphasis on the golden triangle and the Xbox1 controller that limited MCs abilities. Even in Reach you can only have one, even though using 1 per gun to show MCs superiority would have been easy.

The flashlight is an IR + NV in Reach. MC woulda loved that!

The version of the story Sherry half-heard is awesome. Sarah the carton my hurry to stop the art pirates or she'll never join body corporate before she loses her luggage!

[DPDarkPrimus]

I heard one of the ideas for the smaller team Halo game (that eventually turned into Halo ODST) was making a game following the Arbiter, the Shipmaster, and the Elites after the events of Halo 3, like, returning to their homeworld to liberate it from the Covenant or something.

That would have been fantastic.