rant

So a couple days ago I wrote a bit on how Bungie got the rug pulled out from under them at E3.

As near as the Intertubes can piece it together, a few days before E3, Microsoft let Bungie know they wouldn't be included in the press conference. Bungie then enacted contingency plans for their own announcement, which is what precipitated the countdown on Bungie.net.

On Tuesday Microsoft told Bungie they wouldn't be allowed to do that, either, and since Microsoft is Bungie's publisher for Halo games, and Microsoft owns the Halo intellectual property, and the announcement concerned Halo, Bungie had to do what Microsoft says, prompting Bungie president Harold Ryan's apology to the fans, which can also be interpreted as a nice polite way of flipping the bird to the publisher.

 Click here for the complete text.

Now, I'm not saying the whole Keep It Clean debacle doesn't deserve a couple thousand more words (which it surely will get) but I felt I couldn't let E3 week go by without comment on one of the announcements that Microsoft did feel was important enough to show-- namely, the impending renovation of the Xbox 360's dashboard interface in the fall of this year. Besides, I took a straw poll in HBO's irc server and this is the topic that won.

Then words begin to fail me and I long instead to wax poetic about publishing deals and PR tactics.

What to say, what to say...

I wrote a review of the Aeon Flux theatrical film a few years back on my own personal blog, and as a fan of Peter Chung's original cartoons, I was extremely disappointed. I wrote at the time that:

It is as if Paramount took a group of writers, locked them in a dark room with copies of the animated series, but gave them enough time to view only a small portion of them all, and then required them to write their notes about the series in crayon on the back of index cards. These index cards, out of order, were then handed to a completely different group of people, who then went on to make this film.

I can't help feeling that Microsoft has taken a team of interface designers, a Wii, and an Apple TV and done the same thing here. From the cartoony avatars you can see they're aware of the Wii. From the clean, white, sliding 3D interface you can tell they've seen an Apple TV, or at least Apple's Front Row program. Somehow, however, they either didn't quite grasp how or why those things worked and what was good about them, and managed to come up with something that bears only a passing resemblance to those two products, and are in the process of abandoning an interface that-- in classic Microsoft fashion-- after seven years has finally reached a "good enough" level of functionality.

If I'm lucky enough to have anyone at Microsoft involved in this project reading at this moment, let me emphatically state: please do not do this. As a last resort, I'd exhort you to make this interface optional. I know this to be a fruitless request since making things options rarely solves anything. All I can say, though, is that if this is the interface the 360 will be using in the future then I can see myself using it a lot less, and at least putting my console back to booting from disc on startup and bypassing the dashboard as much as possible.

If you haven't seen this thing yet, drop on over to GameTrailers, they have HD and SD versions of the walkthrough. Go ahead. I'll wait.

 Click here for the complete text.

Ah, the heady days of the early and mid 90s, when Bungie was an independent developer and publisher, master of its own destiny. They developed what they wanted to develop, announced when they wanted to announced, and shipped... well, when the boxes were done.

Those days must seem so simple compared to now.

Because what's going on now is apparently a Bungie announcement scheduled for E3 today-- one likely related to Halo in some way-- has been postponed indefinitely by Bungie's publisher.

That would be Microsoft, for those of you keeping score at home, even though the name "Microsoft" does not appear anywhere in the carefully-worded missive from Bungie president Harold Ryan.

Most fans, of course, don't care what happened or who is at fault. They just knew they were supposed to be seeing something exciting and new within the next twelve hours, and now they won't. For a form of popular entertainment whose fans vacillate back and forth between endurance trials of development waits-- three years for each of the last three Halo games-- and the instant gratification of online multiplayer matches where average lifetimes can be well under thirty seconds, such an indefinite delay is a great disappointment. Even if we don't know what it was we were supposed to be expecting.

So what were we expecting, when can we expect it, and why was it delayed just twelve hours before it was to hit?

 Click here for the complete text.

...is apparently how long humanity fought the Covenant over Harvest. It is not, gratefully, the amount of time you'll have to wait for Halo Wars from Ensemble Studios to come out, since supposedly the game is now set for a release sometime in Spring 2009.

So, a little less than one... long... year.

Xbox360Fanboy has the latest Halo Wars trailer, which follows in the vein of the first in showing no gameplay whatsoever, but focusing on cinematic visuals, of the kind more appropriate for a game that actually uses those kinds of visuals. You know, a shooter, and not a strategy game.

TeamXbox also has the trailer and new screens, while the official site has 12 new shots in an "E3 2008" gallery.

UPDATE: I've added those shots into Rampancy's Halo Wars gallery.

This trailer also replaces the original score of the first trailer, which was best described as trite and lackluster, and instead inserted the familiar strains of Marty's "Halo Monks".

Also, despite "Contact Harvest" by Joe Staten saying that Brutes were the primary foot soldiers in the first assaults on that colony, this trailer once again only shows Elites-- no other Covenant units are shown.

It's also difficult to reconcile the idea of a 5-year battle over a single world with everything the Halo series has told us about human-Covenant engagements. While the addition of the Spartans into humanity's troop mix gave them parity, if not an outright advantage, on the ground, we're told that the Covenant always retained air superiority, and since ultimately most colonies were wholly or partially glassed, this was always the deciding factor.

So the story of Halo Wars will have to come up with some good reason why the Covenant wait five years before glassing Harvest, or for some reason choose to assault it without ever glassing it.

One of those shots shows a good look at some of the UNSC... well, there's nothing to call them but mechs, since that's what they look like. Frankly, the devs can go on all they like about how the mechs aren't Spartans, aren't as strong or fast or dangerous as Spartans, and play a different role on the battlefield than Spartans... and it just doesn't matter worth a damn.

You can't look at one of those things in a screenshot and not think "wow, if a Spartan is this good and only a bit bigger and taller than an ODST, then that thing must be awesome. Its visual presence on the field demeans the Spartan, and I don't see that being something that can be explained away.

The divide between story and gameplay has been a regular topic of discussion around here, so this Moving Pixels blog entry seems like it might be of interest. Called The Great Divorce, it imagines Plot and Gameplay as a couple undergoing marital strife. Give it a read, great fun.

Game Over. Insert Coin.

The balance between carrot and stick, reward and punishment, in game design was so much simpler back in the arcade.

Take the gamer's money and give them a limited number of chances to progress, usually called "lives" since failure nearly always means death. When the player runs out of lives, they can pay to keep playing if they agree within a given time period. If not, the game resets itself to the start.

In some ways, it's a magnificently simple and beautiful state of affairs compared to what PC and console gaming has become, where the entire price of a game, hardware included, is bought and paid for in advance, and "pay for play" means online access fees and MMO subscriptions.

How, in an environment where you can't hit the gamer in the pocketbook for failing to demonstrate the requisite skills, can you punish them? Should you even try? Arcade games were designed to be "finished" only by the best of the best, but today's story-driven, cinematic AAA titles cost millions to make-- is it wise to reveal the entirety of one's design only to a select few? Might that not tempt designers to leave the ending out (I'm glancing in your direction, Halo 2, and yours, too, Indigo Prophecy) and focus energies on the beginning-- the part that most reviewers will see?

Is death in games supposed to be punitive, or is it there only to prevent the player from progressing through the game until they've demonstrated a certain minimum level of proficiency? If it is supposed to be punitive, what does it say about designers' opinions of their own game if the worst punishment they can come up with is playing the game more? Isn't the idea of dying, the message of failure, more important than the actual consequences? Or is it? Can a game design aspire to have replayability and still consider repeat play as a punishment for dying? What other punishments can there be? Should there be any punishments at all? Can any punishment be as useful or effective as requiring the player to insert another quarter, and if not, should gaming return to the arcade model, or should it abandon player punishment altogether?

 Click here for the complete text.

Hey Narcogen,

I am greatfull for all your insights and comments to a new person like me, but in most of them , theres not enough information. E.g. On my rumors blog, about the golden warthog and stuff, you only answerd with little things like theres no golden warhog or yellow banshee. I am the type of person who owns canpaign, and gets bored quikly, so i search the web for cheats,secrets,easter eggs and rumors. So as you can see, i am very intrested in all these rumors and i would like it alot more if you could slow down and take more time with these. Now i relise that you have more important things to do than comment on my blogs, but i put them up for a reason, and i go through alot of detail to bring other interested people, simple,easy and detailed steps to do things that they would like.Now on a diffrent note, i never got to play Halo2 online, which i am dissapointed about, so couldnt get caught with mods and alterd saves, but you said very rudely, that Neither Bungie Nor Rampancy were intrested about fans with mods, when, i dont have a mod, i legally own, or hire games and respect companies that put there money and time into games for the genrel public. Also, my friend is the type of person who would play 1 level repetantly. Like on campaign, he always like, OH I WANNA PLAY METREOPPOLIS, YEAH, THAT ONE DOOD!!. So i dont like you saying that about him or I.

Skull-Seeker 4 life!!!

HBO today points to an interesting blog entry by an English teacher in Korea, playing Halo 3 (apparently for the first time or nearly so) in Korean without English subtitles, and so without much insight into the story or what the player is supposed to do:

Gears of War was subtitled, but Halo 3 had full Korean menus and voice acting. This meant we had NO idea what the story was the entire time we were playing. If we were required to do something, we had to figure it out, usually by destroying things or pushing buttons. This lead to a lot of backtracking, guessing, and traveling to corners of the map "just to see" if this way where to go.

Diehard Halo fans, of course, probably can tell just from the visuals, combined with knowledge of the previous two games, what is going on a lot of the time. Here Halo 3 is a victim of its success: it is played by many, many people who are not hardcore gamers or hardcore Halo players.

So for every Halo fan like me, who liked the idea of the highway tunnel chase in Outskirts but disliked its cramped spaces and linearity, there are probably more than a few like this player-- who doesn't know where to go in a level without verbal cues, and dislikes exploration.

In some of the pre-release weekly updates about Halo 3 Bungie talked about doing some playtesting and putting in some ledges to clearly indicate which way the player should go. I admit that in some levels it is easy to get lost-- some of the jungle areas in Sierra 117, just about anywhere in Cortana-- but I view exploration as a privilege, not a punishment. I'm going to go to all corners of the map eventually just to see what's there, because I think the Halo series, like Bioshock, for instance, is a game that understands one of the first and foremost tasks is establishing a sense of place. 04, Delta Halo, the Ark: these are real places to me. I feel like I've been there. I want to go back there. I keep looking around the corners hoping to find something new, even where I know there won't be anything. I just keep hoping.

Meanwhile other gamers know that they're supposed to follow the signposts, and consider time spent looking for one to be wasted, and time spent returning to a location you've already seen to also be wasted.

I look at it this way: if the player objects that strenuously to returning to a place, then perhaps the place isn't fleshed out enough. Then again, some people don't want to explore real spaces and just want to get on to the next bit of shooting. Oh well.

OldNick is at it again, this time wondering if sometimes less is more, if somehow the Halo series became something a bit less by trying to become something a lot more.

Perhaps this is what Jason Jones meant about Halo 1's "beautiful simplicity" compared to Halo 2 (and, one would assume, Halo 3).

Despite the grumpy and dissatisfied tone I seem to have established in this blog, in vilifying various Bungie design decisions, I certainly don't regret the time I've spent playing, reading, thinking and writing about the Halo series. Now that the trilogy is done, however, and we've had time to digest Halo 3, I think it's time to start putting the whole experience into some kind of perspective. In previous entries I've talked mainly about technical factors in level design, gameplay and story construction. This time I'm interested in something less tangible - atmosphere, and the campaign experience as a whole.

Over the last few months, while reading discussion of story decisions, cutscenes, music and the in-game experience, I've found myself trying to tag and characterise each of the Halo games, considered as artistic achievements. My list of bullet points turned out to look like this:

Halo CE - most atmospheric, most replayable, most rewarding experience.
Halo 2 - most ambitious and artistically successful cutscenes.
Halo 3 - most spectacular.

Almost all sequels suffer by comparison with their originals. Discovering a new universe is almost inevitably more memorable than revisiting it, however glad we may be to return. I don't think that this is the whole explanation here, however. Halo CE's campaign provides a different kind of experience, which isn't really replicated in the sequels - until we reach the final level of Halo 3, which begins by very deliberately evoking the first game.

I'll return to that point later. First, I need to describe that elusive quality I'm talking about. Let me repeat, I'm not talking about gameplay here, or even fun, but something much more rare than fun. Fun is the minimum necessary ingredient of a worthwhile game, but it doesn't come anywhere near explaining why Halo CE has grabbed and held our collective attention for so many years. The game captured our imaginations, and if my analysis of the way that happened is correct, then two sobering conclusions follow. First, that it was a happy accident; the silver lining of a notably dark cloud. Second, that the chances of a similar accident recurring are very low; much current 'best practice' in FPS design seems to be headed in the opposite direction.

If you've been around the Halo community long enough, I'm sure you remember people describing how they stood for hours on the beach in 'Silent Cartographer', staring out to sea. The snowy canyons and mysterious Forerunner architecture of AoTCR and 'Two Betrayals' - the core of the whole game - were also powerfully atmospheric, evoking desolation, isolation, mystery and sense-of-wonder. The start of the 'Final Run' section of the latter level, where the player climbs the ramp from the last tunnel to quiet background music and the distant sounds of a Covenant-Flood battle is, in its understated way, one of the most evocative moments of the whole game. These are just a few examples, but they should serve to remind you of the quality I'm talking about here. If they have no special meaning for you, then you may as well stop reading now - none of the rest of this will make much sense.

Halo 2 and Halo 3, for all their various achievements and undeniable playability, rarely, if ever, quite recaptured (or at least, sustained) this quality, in my own experience - except briefly at the start of Halo 3's final level, where the original game is very directly and deliberately evoked. Not only are the environment, ambience and music familiar, but the player is exploring, solo, the Arbiter follows silently, and there is no unavoidable nagging from Cortana or anyone else. Peace, at last!

That's a broad hint as to where I'm going with this analysis. Chatter from other characters, while it may be amusing, is generally destructive of atmosphere, unless very carefully handled. Sparse dialogue isn't inevitably fatal to the effect, but it needs to be written and delivered with close attention to the specific mood and moment. In this context, it's interesting to note Eric Trautmann's recent remarks on how he and Brannon Boren were given just three days (with no access to the game itself) to rewrite all in-mission dialogue. As Trautmann justifiably says, it's remarkable and very much to the writers' credit that the result was so successful. It's my assumption that such extreme deadline pressure forced the writers to focus on bare essentials - what absolutely had to be said in order to propel the story, guide the player, and convey character (Ken Levine's even more recent BioShock-related remarks here also bear on this important point).

In Halo CE's case, enforced restraint (and inspired handling of game audio resources in general) achieved an almost uniquely successful result. I'm going to argue that this enforced restraint was equally beneficial to other aspects of the game. As information has slowly been released over the years, it's become more and more apparent that Halo CE was strongly moulded by shortage of resources, and that the game only really came together in the last few weeks of development.

Not many game concepts have changed so radically during development as Halo CE's did. It's widely known that early builds used a third-person player view, but less frequently remarked that the game genre was initially seen as RTS (real-time strategy), a development following logically from Bungie's Myth, rather than Marathon series, or that the original intention was that much or all of the Halo ring's surface would be accessible and playable - a highly ambitious, but not totally infeasible technical challenge. Building environments on this sort of scale demands a completely different approach from that used to put together a conventional shooter level - a very heavy reliance on automated software to generate or flesh out the level environment, and (most importantly) large-scale re-use of architectural models. You can afford a few custom-designed one-of-a-kind structures (e.g. Halo's Cartographer and Control Room), but every other installation has to be re-usable, or ideally built from a modular kit of parts which can be assembled in multiple different ways.

Halo CE's development clearly went along this path for quite some time, before some combination of technical obstacles, conceptual change and mounting pressure to deliver resulted in a switch to a more conventional FPS game, set in more conventional FPS environments. The important point is that when this switch occurred, Bungie had already made a substantial investment in procedural landscape generation and modular modelling, and it would only make sense to re-use as many of these resources as possible.

Some of the signatures of this re-cycling are obvious, others less so. I'd argue that much of the landscape-rendering and procedural landscape generation experience was recycled to support Halo CE's then-sensational outdoor environments. The modular modelling influence is more obvious, and more controversial. Some players objected strongly to the modular room and corridor architecture in AoTCR/Two Betrayals, but the ship interiors, the containment facility in '343 Guilty Spark', and of course the notorious Library, all make very extensive use of modular kits, and not all of these are regarded as unsuccessful. In fact, I'd argue that this sort of repetition, used wisely, yields both aesthetic unity and enhanced realism. The only way to establish a consistent architectural or cultural style is by re-using similar or identical elements throughout a structure, and real buildings are often designed in a modular way, for good functional and economic reasons.

Halo CE was also notable for its re-use of levels, in whole or in part, the most famous example being 'Two Betrayals' re-use of a slightly modified 'AoTCR'. Likewise, 'Keyes' reuses many elements from 'Truth and Reconciliation' and 'The Maw' recapitulates quite a lot of 'Pillar of Autumn'. Some players felt short-changed on this account, but by no means all. Registering a change or development by revisiting a familiar environment and seeing obvious differences is a fundamental and important technique in telling and constructing a story. If you give up this device entirely, or severely restrict its use because people with short attention spans demand wall-to-wall novelty (and then complain that the game's too short), or others cynically interpret every example of re-use as laziness, then you seriously compromise your ability to tell complex stories.

So what am I saying here? Let me spell it out: we treasured the experience of playing Halo CE's campaign largely because we were for the most part left to explore and experience on our own, without constant commentary, distraction and nagging from NPCs. Almost every list of advice for the aspiring fiction author lays heavy emphasis on the maxim 'Show, don't tell' - the author's most powerful ally is the reader's imagination, and you must leave this room to breathe, rather than smothering it with too much information. The Halo experience was something we created for ourselves, in our own minds, with the overall mood set by aesthetically unified level design and non-verbal cues from the soundtrack and music.

My conclusion is this: Halo CE's unique appeal largely derives from the constraints under which it was developed, and the creative way in which this enforced restraint was turned to advantage. Creative restraint doesn't come naturally to game developers. Their innate ambition and exuberance, and the marketing department's demand for sensational novelty, conspire to erode most games' artistic unity. If you see your goal as filling every moment of game time with action, humour and deadline-pressure, then you sacrifice atmosphere and emotional effect in favour of an unrelenting and ultimately monotonous pace. Some might argue that this sort of crowd-pleasing approach is unavoidable under modern commercial pressures, but surely Halo CE is the most powerful counter-argument you could wish for. We're all here because this seemingly deeply-flawed game exerted such a powerful fascination upon us that we're still hooked, seven years later. And it did enjoy some modest commercial success, after all. You'd think that such a successful formula would inspire a certain amount of analysis and imitation, but if I'm right, the artistic lessons which Halo CE offers have been largely ignored or misinterpreted - even by Bungie.

I've said it once and I'll say it again. Halo 3's maps plain suck. They're bad in just about every way. With the soon to be released DLC I'm hoping and praying that Bungie can redeem themselves and even get me interested in Halo 3 again. So what do I think is wrong with Halo 3's maps? Well read on.

There has to be some attention given to the make up a Halo game here. It's an interesting thing to consider Halo 1 maps in relation to those that had vehicles. Only the two big maps (Blood Gulch and Sidewinder) had them and the rest of the maps played without vehicles.

What happened in some respects in Halo 2 and 3 is that the addition of vehicles on smaller maps ruined a lot of them. The smaller environment and tendency for these to be more open then the hoard of Halo 1 maps that were indoor room based means that vehicles did one of many bad things.

Maps like Ascension and Snowbound come to mind. One vehicle only that was more then a transporter (like the Mongoose) but rather a killing machine. Coupled with at times one weapon that could take these down that was often in the hands of the team that had the vehicle. It's not so much the vehicle that ruined the maps but rather the fact that Halo weapons for the most part are useless against them.

Anyway I won't go on but rather get back to the map design problems I see. I want to post a little bit about the major shift in Bungie to maps devoid of teleporters and what they can bring to a map.

With Halo 1 most maps had teleporters. HEH comes to mind as one that didn't but I can’t think of any others off hand. What they brought to the game was creative thinking and changed the way in which a game played. When I first started playing Team Fortress 2 I was fascinated with the way they brought teleporters into game play and maps. For those that don't know one of the classes (this being the Engineer) could make a teleporter entrance and then an exit anywhere on the map. All the time giving the players a new way in which to construct a path and different method of map navigation.

I can only think that there was some kind of thinking behind this for Bungie. I'm puzzled that more hasn't been asked of this by the fans. Instead it's not mentioned at all really. Simply ignored altogether.

Perhaps the major problem I have with Halo 3 maps is the size. They're all big and getting from one side to the other seems to take too long. Movement is slower then ever and the terrain of a Halo map now more restrictive then ever. It's as if Bungie wants everyone to stay put in the one place. Even making the one thing that can transport quickly (man cannon) nothing more then a target identifier.

I've always been a big fan of symmetrical maps in Halo. A lot of other FPS games don't tend to use this as a basis of good map creation but with all Halo games I often tend to think that this is the best way to go.

The difference is that Halo is a game with a high focus on objective game types and therefore a symmetrical make up always works well for balance. With Halo 2 and 3 Bungie has moved largely away from this design. Focusing instead on Offense/defense game play on asymmetrical maps (Burial Mounds, High ground etc). The symmetrical maps have remained (Narrows, Isolation and even in most ways The Pit). What has happened however is that making something symmetrical has not always been just an argument that it is balanced. Protection, cover and equal distance for objective movement can be taken away by default map weapons and things like spawn forcing.

Adding asymmetrical elements is great and does help with recognition of different parts of the map. Like the differing bases in Sanctuary. For the most part I think that both maps in Halo 2 and 3 are poor at best. Some are okay while a fair portion of them are terrible so far as design. Having said that the maps in Halo 2 are a great deal better then those in Halo 3. I'll run through a couple of the problems with examples and comparisons.

Firstly I will compare Lockout to Guardian. These two maps are very similar in structure and size and even Bungie has stated that the much loved Lockout will not make a come back to Halo 3 because we have Guardian.

Lockout is a fun map but only really useable for Slayer. Like Guardian it's asymmetrical and therefore the balance doesn't exist to make capture the flag and other objective game types fair and balanced. Both maps are basically made up of a centre area which is largely exposed. Surrounded by four other areas of game play.

On Lockout while in any one area (Sniper Tower, Lift Tower, BR Tower and "Library") you have a view of the other areas with differing amounts. What remains is that you can fire upon all the other areas in some way and this means the game has both a very present close quarter action and mid/long range duels.

Guardian on the other hand fails in this area. The sniper tower has a good view of the Lift Tower (directly opposite) but the other areas are primarily hidden. What happens is the good mix of combat in differing distances is replaced by a map that is largely close quarters. These kind of maps not only limit mid and long range weapon use (and therefore the desire to pick these weapons up) but also encourage players to arm themselves with the huge amount of close quarter weapons and camp.

The idea was still there to make the map like Lockout but a few things were badly designed. For a start the grassy area is sunk very low. Meaning not only is it unrewarding to fire on other areas from it but it has to have a huge amount of cover leaving it secluded. The same goes for the area where the flare spawns. That whole area is a jumbled mess of halls and rooms with extremely limited ability to involve combat with any other area outside of it. In short the general line of sight in Guardian detracts from advanced game play and shooting skill. Making the map a campers paradise where the hunter is in fact the hunted.

Burial Mounds gets much undue criticism. However the map is very good and the problem lies more in spawning. The defensive team needs to have a good line of sight on the offensive base. This means that the offensive team is at the mercy of the defensive team in the area of spawn killing. I'm yet to see a FPS game that has been able to overcome the problems of spawn. Halo 1 had it's fair share and in truth Halo 2 and 3 are no worse then the first game. It's just that the games are played differently and therefore the maps highlight the problems with the spawn system.

Getting back to Halo 3. Probably the two maps that stand out the most are Construct and Epitah. I believe Bungie got carried away with both these maps. It's a good idea to limit the amount of levels in a map but Construct is just oever the top. Another good idea is something that I think HEH did well and maps like Midship. What Midship did was make going from one side of the map to the other a decision based upon various things. The quick route was always the more exposed. While the route with the best cover and vantage points was always around the outside and therefore the slowest. This map shows the simple elements that make a leveled map work and work damn well. In hindsight Midship is proably the best map of all the Halo games. Wizard in Halo 1 (renamed Warlock for Halo 2) also did this well.

This simple idea that works so well makes me extremely puzzled when I consider a map like Construct. Here is a map that is not symmetrical like the last two I mentioned. Therefore making it useful for merely slayer, oddball and things like VIP. However what has become apparent is that "capturing" the top level is basically how to win the game. Not only is the top level a safe haven from a line of sight from bottom up (because it's so far up). But it also makes advancing on this level a very hard thing. Theres a long exposed walk or 3 lifts which can be camped with relative ease. It's a classic example if map making gone wrong. It also makes a majority of the map rather pointless and just a spawning point for the frustrated.

Now I'm not saying that every map has to be the arena style of Midship but rather every map has to offer various things. For starters a vantage point like one that can exist in a leveled map must have it's short comings. Whether that be restrictive movement, or simply limited cover or increased exposure. With Halo 1's maps there was something about this aspect. To a degree there was no real benefit in many of the maps in being in the one area for too long. Yeah okay top of Prisoner and the like are exceptions. However the maps for the most part were much better in terms of navigation, alternative paths and getting the plus and minus thing going that I mentioned about different areas. The power up/power weapon spawn system had something to do with it but in the end Halo 3's maps compare poorly to the first two games. Good luck Bungie.

I'm returning to a fundamental theme of my first entry: the tension between the need (or desire) to tell a story in a particular way, and the need to keep the player involved and immersed - by maintaining the consistency and believability of the game-world. Once again I have specific Halo examples in mind - the boss-battles in Halo 2, and Halo 3. Obviously, this means Halo 3 Campaign spoilers, so stop reading here if this is a problem for you.

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What exactly is a boss-battle? Looking at Halo 3, each Scarab encounter might be considered a boss-battle, and the final encounter with 343 GS is most definitely a boss-battle. In each case, you're fighting an opponent with vastly superior fire-power and very specific vulnerabilities. That's about as good a definition of a boss-battle as I think we're going to get. Personally, I find that the Scarab-battles are enjoyable to play, whereas 'fighting' 343 GS is a chore which detracts from my enjoyment of, and immersion in, the game.

The critical differences between these encounter-types seem to boil down to flexibility and consistency. Taking flexibility first; though there's ultimately only one way to destroy a Halo 3 Scarab (by attacking the power core), there are so many ways to achieve this that the player has great freedom of action and scope for tactical invention. There's only one way to kill 343 GS, one weapon which can do it, and one place from which it can be done. That's not gameplay - it's ritual.

The consistency issue is rather less clear-cut. Though the Scarab's tactical weaknesses and vulnerabilities (for example, the slow traverse speed of the main cannon, the squat-when-legs-damaged behaviour and the rear armour weakness) are slightly artificial, they're not flagrant violations of the physics and conventions of the game-world - just typical examples of compromises which must be made to balance gameplay and stay within hardware limitations.

The case of 343 GS, however, is significantly different. Guilty Spark's beam-weapon is so powerful that the player can only survive by dodging. In order to make this easy and convenient, Guilty Spark's normal ability to pivot rapidly on the spot has to be degraded so far that he'd have trouble tracking an elderly tortoise with his all-conquering red death-ray. Then there's his irresistible field, which could so easily push the player straight over the edge of the catwalk, if 343 GS just moved a few metres to the side. This field seems to exist primarily in order to keep the player confined to one small area so that he'll be able to pick up the Spartan Laser from Johnson before Guilty Spark recovers from the first blast - which has such notably different effects from the subsequent ones. This encounter isn't just artificial and contrived - it's blatantly artificial and clumsily contrived.

Before going on to the questions I've just begged - why Bungie would do this, and how they could have avoided it - it's worth comparing my two examples with their counterparts in Halo 2. Halo 2's Scarab could only be boarded from tall structures (requiring very specialised level-design), and was completely invulnerable to the player ("Bullets won't stop it, rockets won't stop it - we may have to use nuclear force scripting and a cutscene!"). The Halo 3 Scarab has been comprehensively redesigned with an eye to improving gameplay, reusability and functional transparency, and I think most players would regard it as a resounding success. How does Halo 3's Guilty Spark boss-battle compare with its Halo 2 counterparts; the encounters with the Heretic Leader, Prophet of Regret, and Tartarus? My own reaction would be - it's easier, quicker and less annoying. Clearly, that's an overall improvement, but it's also rather faint praise - especially when we consider why the Guilty Spark boss-battle should exist in the first place.

We can now answer that last question with some confidence, thanks to N'Gai Croal's recently-published interview with Joe Staten. Staten's comments regarding the Halo movie attracted the most attention at the time, but the following section was what caught my eye:

"I think that was one of the more satisfying moments in Halo 2: jumping on the Prophet of Regret's throne and beating him up while he's yelling at you. That was something we always wanted to pull off in the first game, but didn't have a chance to do that."

Joe Staten's idea of fun is obviously a little different from mine, but the implication is clear. Staten. and presumably others at Bungie, consider that the player will so thoroughly enjoy taking personal revenge on certain characters that it's worth expending developer effort on special-case code - and completely violating the canons of Halo gameplay - in order to achieve this. While most of us would probably agree that - in the abstract - personally fighting and beating an arch-enemy could be satisfying, I'm fairly certain that for many of us, 'satisfying' isn't the adjective which springs to mind when we think of these encounters. In the case of Guilty Spark, the combat is so heavily constrained (presumably to minimise player frustration) that it becomes, quite simply, perfunctory. The lack of challenge translates directly into lack of satisfaction, thus rendering the whole encounter largely pointless.

As for the alternative to a boss-battle, that's obvious - a cutscene. Truth's death is handled that way, and though I don't rate that particular cutscene very highly, I still think it's preferable to Player vs. Regret, Round 2. The Guilty Spark battle is, in fact, already just a brief interlude of (limited) player control between two cutscenes - and I'd argue that the whole sequence would work better, and be more involving, if the combat was represented as a climactic action scene. By way of compensation, the cutscene could end after Johnson's death, leaving the player to press the final, fateful button and make his own way to the door.

Some (perhaps many) of you may wonder why I've expended this much time and effort on this subject. There are two parts to the answer; the first is that I've enjoyed the Halo series so much that any perceived blemish - especially if it's the result of a design decision - is especially disappointing. The second part of the answer is that this is a good example of a type of error (as I see it) which I observed many times in my own games industry career. Sometimes I was been able to talk people out of it, sometimes not. This final section is effectively a compendium of all the things I wish I'd said in the course of those arguments.

Fundamentally, I dislike the Guilty Spark boss-battle because it's clumsy and inelegant - the relevant paragraph above spells out why, and I won't repeat it. It's a multiple violation of the most basic maxims of design, valid in literature, art, engineering, formal logic and many other disciplines - economy of means, and self-consistency. These two concepts are closely related, and in practice it can be hard to draw a dividing line between them. The first principle turns up everywhere from Occam's razor (Do not multiply entities beyond necessity) to the KISS rule; 'Keep It Simple, Stupid'. The second principle - self-consistency - is an absolute rule in any rigorous or quantitative discipline, but also appears in many artistic contexts - the Classical Unities, the scorn visited upon an author who lazily introduces a deus ex machina, and the 'fair puzzle' rule of the classic detective story, for example.

Neither of these maxims is an absolute in game design (or any other artistic endeavour), but experience suggests that you should think long and hard before - and after - you break them. It's worth remembering that when programmers do this kind of thing, the resulting code is almost always infested with bugs. Restating my point (one last time) in terms specific to game-design: Whenever you're tempted to include a feature which will require special-case code, used nowhere else in the game, treat this as an urgent warning sign. Red lights should be flashing and sirens whooping in your head. Step back and think about what you're trying to achieve in broad terms, rather than blindly pursuing one specific scenario. Is there really no way to accomplish your underlying purpose within your existing game systems? Or is there a consistent way to extend these systems which will pay off in richer gameplay throughout the game? Since this sort of case should usually be identifiable early in the design process, there should be time available to come up with a superior solution.

Well, I just got Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii, and figured out that Nintendo still uses the life system. Now, I don't really support this system for a couple of reasons, which I will tell you. Firstly, let me describe how Galaxy's system works, this being a primarily a halo forum. Basically, you get an extra life (1-Up) by getting either green mushrooms, or, 50 of the game's currencies, Star Bits and Coins. You lose all Coins when you die, but you don't lose any Star Bits. This difference is also put more sharply into contrast when getting Star Bits is easier than getting Coins (You have to touch Coins to collect them, but you can pick up Star Bits with your Wiimote), that and there are way more Star Bits than Coins. E.g. Kill a Goomba by spinning, and you get 3 Star Bits, stomp a Goomba, and you get 1 Coin. I suppose there is justification for this, as Coins give you your health back, but enough about that. Now for the problem. I think this was a bad system to use because there are two main "Life-Sets" to pick from. The two Life-Sets are: LOW LIVES: This means you just play at 4 lives. This gets to the action faster, but is only recommended if you know what you're doing. AND There's also the next set,1-UP WHORE(Pardon my Wortish): This is a person who gets a LOT of 1-Ups. This means that you: before going anywhere, you have at least 9 lives given to you by the Mailtoad, you repeatedly collect the 1-Ups in the Comet Observatory by entering the Library or some other place repeatedly and then going to those places which hold said 1-Ups. Now this puts a SHARP contrast on gameplay, because if you play like me (at least one death on each stage and I died 12 times while Manta Surfing) then you don't really need to care about lives if you follow the second option. This is where the Star Bits come in. There are some parts CRAZY LOADS of Star Bits around resulting in extra lives abound. I have one question to ask. That is WHY NINTENDO, WHY? WHY MAKE IT SO RETARDED? I will explain my shouts, don't worry. Now for my real main problem. This system does not let you feel free. That's right. Think about it. To all you people who are going "Whaaaaaa?" I will explain. If you have a set amount of lives, then will you want to check out that interesting planet with the pits of lava? Mostly you might just say "No I only have 2 lives so I can't, I need them for the boss. This, as a gamer, does not provide me with many options. How would you feel if Halo 3 had an icon displaying say Chief Headx4 as your lives? Wouldn't make you want to go off that ramp on the scarab, would it? You might just choose the normal option and be boring.
Don't get me wrong, I think that both Galaxy and Halo are awesome, Halo 2 if you want an exact one, but I'm wondering if Nintendo was thinking about this as they implemented it.

Give me your thoughts, rants, and STFU N00BS ZOMGs.

WortJenkins

Im sure all of you halo 3 fans have gotten al the skulls, well i havent! and thats becuz i cant figure out how to get the catch skull. Ive spent freaking like 3 houre doing every atempt to get the skull, if you HAVE gotten the skull plz send me the directions clearly, and well spoken, TYVM

For those who have played all the halo games have you heard the woeds 'wort wort wort' from an elite in halo 2 but unsure on 3