Replay: Halo 3

Why am I only replaying the Halo 3 campaign for only the second time now, almost a year after it came out? That is the question I'm asking myself. I can't remember how many times I replayed the original Xbox Halo campaign, but the number is probably near or over 10. I've replayed the (not quite as satisfying but still fun) Halo 2 campaign at least four or five times.

It is not that I'm spending significant amounts of time on the multi-player... yes, Halo/2/3 multi-player is certainly nicer than Counter Strike and with the right people playing (i.e. not teenagers) its engrossing fun for a while, but multi-player isn't my favorite game play style.

I've been a big Halo fan from the get-go. I got the original Xbox to play Halo. I bought the PC version of Halo and upgraded my PC in order to be able to play it. I got Halo 2 the day it came out, and thought it was a way more enjoyable game than the similarly-timed Half-Life 2. I bought the Xbox 360 specifically to be able to play Halo 3. So I'm kind of bugged that I find I'm not playing Halo 3 all the time. I played it when it came out and enjoyed it, deliberately ignoring the critics. But playing through the first three levels for the second time last night left me... empty. There is something in the original that isn't quite there in the Halo 3, but what is it?

From a superficial standpoint Halo 3 should beat the pants off of Halo. Graphics technology from 2007 compared to 2001-era graphics, in a machine with vastly more CPU and GPU power. Improved AI. Wider and cooler array of weapons and vehicles. And the same company is at the helm, this isn't just a quick retread by a different company working on a time-limit (you know I mean you Obsidian!). All of these things matter - and in their little way they do add to the fun. But the problems lies elsewhere, and is to big and too general to be papered over by superficial gimmicks like detachable mini-guns.

Its not that Halo 3 is bad game, or not fun, its just that some part of the gestalt is not quite right, not as good as the original Halo.

Let us go through the list of things I've considered and see if they stand up under scrutiny.

1. Rushed and over-specified storyline, with
   
2. Spotty and inconsistent voice acting.
3. Play balance is off kilter for single player.
4. Linear game-play and levels that lack the expansiveness and freedom of Halo.
   

Lets consider 1 and 2 today, and return to items 3 and 4 in a later post.

Voice Acting: Early in the game, Cortana's frequent apparitional interruptions of the Master Chief are both annoying and curiously flat emotionally. Lord Hood's various statements (voiced by Ron Perlman) are pretty flat and lifeless even when they are meant to be rousing calls to arms. Later in the game, e.g. when the Master Chief is rescuing Cortana from High Charity, Cortana's voice is over-dramatic. Is this the writing (some of the lines are pretty sophomoric), or the deliberate direction given to the voice actors?

Although this is annoying and somewhat immersion-breaking it doesn't really bring down the game play. There is some truly horrific voice acting in games (e.g. Bloodrayne 2) that are still fun.

Story line: The story line is a real weakness in Halo 3.

In the original (Halo: Combat Evolved) there was no back story, and the story and game-universe unfolded as we played: A beleaguered human race under attack by a federation of alien religious fanatics who could not be talked or reasoned with, a fleeing human ship finding, exploring and destroying a mysterious alien artifact: Halo. What the story didn't reveal itself was left up to the mind of the player to fill in. By not saying too much the writers of Halo made their imaginary universe seem more real.

By the time Halo 3 comes out the Halo franchise has been stuffed full of pulp novels and comic books. There is now an elaborate back story whose level of internal self-consistency and quality is decidedly non-uniform (too many cooks spoil the broth). The enemies (both Covenant and the Flood), now fleshed out by all the genre merchandising, speak better English and are much chattier. Rather than the implacable alien foes of Halo: CE we now have enemies who appear merely misunderstood, petulant, or had bad childhoods, or something. The Elites don't bat an eye at co-operating with the Humans, nor express a moment's regret at abandoning the only religion they've supposedly had for thousands of years? Its just not believable. Its cheesy.

As with Halo 2 the game tries to tell too much in one game. Halo 3 has the Master Chief returning to earth, dealing with the Prophet's invasion of Africa, activation of the portal to the true Ark, attack of the flood, visiting the Ark, invading and destroying High Charity, activation and destruction of the replacement Halo ring. It is way too rushed.

Now I understand the dramatic impact of driving the story fast: get to Truth before he activates the rings and wipes out all life in the galaxy. No time to dawdle around exploring one thing at a time. But that could have been accomplished better in a single environment, be it Earth or the second Halo (had they been sensible about not rushing things in Halo 2 either). Halo was cool because you got to explore, at your own pace, all the different environments afforded by a ringworld, and they were often wide open and non-linear (I'll discuss level design some more in the next post on Halo 3). One had variety within a unifying theme.

But the writers of Halo 2 and Halo 3 seem to have run out of imagination regarding the rings - instead we have Earth, the Ark, etc etc. Multiple epic image that are never well fleshed out before being abandoned for the next new thing. Coupled with the rushed pace of the story line, all we end up with is a blur of images (most of them painted on sky boxes) as we move the Master Chief along the fixed linear line imposed by the story from Earth to the Ark to High Charity to the new Halo...

So the quality of the story line is inferior in Halo 3 compared to Halo: CE. Is this enough to damn the game? After all, when you start to get picky there are few games who's story lines stand up to close inspection. Half-Life, Half-life 2 and its subsequent episodes are all entertaining, but are hardly masterpieces of writing or paragons of internal consistency. When I next post on Halo 3 I'll discuss what I think of play balance and level design in Halo 3 with respect to Halo.