Through a sequence of unforeseeable events, I ended up becoming a XBox 360 owner over Christmas. I have never been one to adapt a new console platform upon its initial release, since I was burnt by NEC’s vaunted PC Engine platform as a kid. Given that, I had plenty of catching up to do.
I was a happy XBox owner, happy enough at the time that I sold my PS2 for a very cheap price including a bundle of games to a friend. That turned out to be one of the worst decisions I had ever made, because PS2 continued pumping out quality games for another two years, while XBox failed to pick up much more momentum and lacked quality title until the introduction of the XBox 360.
With that aside, Halo was the reason why anyone bought the XBox at all, even though it was not a particularly innovative game at the time. First-person shooter was already a very well developed genre, although it never fared quite as well on outside of its computer-platform origin. Halo marked the first time, that anyone was able to prove the FPS games can be done just as well on console as they have been on PC.
That brings us to the point, that Halo wasn’t a genre-redefining game of any sort; it is however, very much a genre-refining game. Very much like Blizzard software, another company that’s been known for their refinement of existing genre, Bungie Software’s accomplishment with Halo is not to revolutionize, but refine and balance everything until it is near perfect.
Small and subtle game mechanics goes a long way towards changing the overall experience of the game. At a time when most FPS was about hoarding the biggest gun and the highest amount possible (in all descendants of Doom-like games, you carried as many weapons as there are in the game at all times, and you only used weakers weapons when the best weapon ran out of ammo), Halo limited the player to carry only two weapons of their choice, with limited ammunition. You had to constantly juggle the best situation to use a certain type of weapon versus another, and that results in drastically different approaches to encounters depending on what weapons you were carrying at the time. One little change to the traditional game mechanic at the time, yielded a completely refreshing and different game experience.
Somewhere along the line, Halo 2 lost of that magic. The developers in various interview admitted that Halo 2 wasn’t quite as balanced and polished as they liked it to be. I felt some of that too, since I could never bring myself to play more than half-way through Halo 2 in numerous opportunities. There was something intangible that bugged me about Halo 2, something that made it stale & boring. A weird balance that I never quite pinned down, but can only react by quitting the campaign.
I was not exactly excited when Halo 3 came out, due to my experience with Halo 2. However, since I got my own XBox 360, there’s no reason to not own the most renowned franchise on the platform. I could’ve picked up a number of other games on the aisle, but most of which I would just rent from Gamefly and then dump once I’m done with them. Halo 3, for whatever its historical value is, should be owned regardless.
The logic behind buying Halo 3 had really little to do with the game’s playability, but in retrospect, after finishing the single player campaign entirely by my lonesome (I didn’t even do that with the original Halo, a friend and I co-oped through the entire game), this was one of the best gaming experience that I’ve had in a long time.
At no point in the game, did I feel that I wasn’t challenged enough, and I was never so frustrated by the difficulty to just “give up” either. Most importantly, is that every battle encounter had a multitude of solutions, the encounters never play out exactly the same way, you are never pigeonholed into doing anything just one way. This is where the subtlety behind the game shines. The balancing of AI, the clear mission objectives & direction, and still having the flexibility to deal with every single battle in a multitude of ways dictated by you, not the game.
By comparison, I’ve also been playing CoD4 through the single player campaign. It is the most mundane & boring single player experience I’ve had in a long time. The feel of the battles might be authentic, but at no point did I ever have the flexibility to play the game the way I want to, versus just following directions that’s being constantly hollered at me. Of course, that is the trademark of the CoD series, it’s a “shooter on rails”. You follow directions, you camp spots, you fire away at enemy from cover for 5 minutes, you move to the next spot. Plant a beacon, pull a switch, more 5-minute cover fights. There are people who appreciate that type of focused, linear gameplay.
However, it is much harder to program a game where the AI reacts to what you do, and you’re given freedom to roam and reach resolution by your own devise rather than scripted events. On that alone, Halo 3 is a much more well made game than CoD4. Toss in the balancing of all the weapons, abilities, even sub-weapons and equipments newly introduced to the game, it is really the best FPS that I’ve ever played.
Of course, this brings up the question if it’s better for a game developer to rehash old gameplay and just refine and polish it, rather than innovating and revolutionizing the industry (and possibly, most likely, falling flat on their face for doing so). That’s an entirely different topic for another day.
