When reading contemporary reviews of Halo 3, I found talk of Bungie’s testing and refining process in developing the game particularly interesting. Rob Fahey’s review for Eurogamer, for instance: “Each level provides the illusion of choice and of a vast, navigable play-area, while carefully funnelling you through set-piece after set-piece using subtle cues and clever design tricks […] we never managed to get lost or stuck – a sentiment mostly echoed by everyone else we know who’s had their hands on the game”.
Mostly echoed, but I wasn’t surprised to find myself the exception here. My real-life poor sense of direction extends to games and has frequently had me taking to guides for the likes of Ico not for puzzles, but for basic navigation. It struck again big time in Halo 3, and many times I found myself wandering strangely empty and familiar places and eventually resorting to reloading from the last checkpoint to try to get myself pointed in the right direction again. I don’t particularly hold it against Bungie, but it’s a nice illustration of how trying to keep the strings from showing can kick some players out of the illusion. It’s a small but still present accessibility issue, like the potential for nausea from first-person movement which I am gratefully much less prone to (though some of the smaller and more confused Flood spaces later in Halo 3 began to trigger that a little too).
The other thing is that the use of these little cues, this nudge process (to give it the name which would soon be popularised and make its way to the heart of government in the UK and elsewhere) casts a fair bit of light on Halo 3 as a whole. There is indeed set-piece after set-piece, but these usually aren’t highly scripted so much as set into formation. There are groups of enemies with weapons ready to steal which might help you deal with different enemies nearby, and the order is up to you. There is often a great gun for a situation just near to the checkpoint you will be reset to, but you still have to notice it and identify its use. Levels frequently ramp up difficulty not so much by providing tougher opposition as by spreading the checkpoints during the process further apart.
Together with a return of the smooth and rapid Halo gameplay (the easily swapped weapons, the ability to leg it to safety and quickly fully recover health that lets you rapidly turn a position of weakness into strength), this makes for some excellent action. The game supports you all the way but leaves the big triumphs feeling like your own. In making them feel even bigger, Halo 3 also introduces some advances. There are now fixed turret type weapons which you can not only use but rip out of their housing and take with you, a delightful way of indicating the strength at your disposal. Things are not just bigger but more interconnected, and trying out very different strategies, from slowly and methodically picking off enemies to trying to bypass them all, is often very enjoyable.
Halo 3 does a nice job of varying things, too. Unlike Halo 2 you play as Master Chief all the way through, but as you fight aliens from both the high-tech Covenant and the parasitic Flood, there are still very different challenges and atmosphere. The Flood-focused parts with soundtrack of tuning-up strings and focus on quick melee attacks bring a level of horror and messiness distinct from the rest of the game’s default epic tenor. The way the story uses frequently shifting alliances with each of the factions builds in the changes nicely. You’re just along for the ride, but the designers give you reasons to trust in how thought-out it is.
When the gameplay experience is clearly so carefully manipulated, surrounding elements stand out even more obviously as being so too. For much of Halo 3, you are not alone against the aliens but part of an organised force. An organised force which relies on Master Chief to do pretty much everything, up to and including pressing buttons to open doors, but an organised force nonetheless. In the spirit of a sense of camaraderie, there are a lot of lines recorded for them to say. Most of those lines are about how awesome you are.
So many times, I threw a grenade to be greeted with a cry of “man, that rocked!”, or “right on!” or “you need to do that like all the time!”. Partly the result is this weird sense of war as a total lark, as a game not just for me as the player but for its combatants in-world. It puts a bit of a strain on any sense of solemnity and emotion elsewhere in cutscenes, already lumbered with choral intensity over blank helmets. More often, though, the game’s supporting people are there as a way of emphasising just how special and awesome you are. The Covenant’s frequently heard identification of you as “The Demon” backs that up just as strongly in mirror image. Aliens fear him, people want to hang out with him. In other games, particularly those based on real-life historic events, this overpowering of the player can work towards breaking the fiction completely. In Halo 3, it doesn’t because the principle is built into its world from the ground up. Whenever Master Chief’s not on screen, all the other characters should be asking “where’s Master Chief?”.
Amid the world of heroically taking down alien threats, what Halo 3 does with it is mostly a step up from some of its rivals, particularly in the way the shifting alliances add at least a slight complication to any peoples being presented as definitionally bad. The extent of its remove from the real world helps. And when it has a section of a mission titled “Real men don’t read maps”, it is presumably intended ironically, because the goal of that particular section is to reach The Cartographer and find out where in the universe you need to head. Coming back to the complete focus on bigging up the player, though, even if the message is that Master Chief is a real man and is reading a map, it’s still relying on the concept of this figure as a real man. The cues are there to be followed.
Halo 3 released in the UK in the same week as FIFA 08, and yet it was still no surprise that it was the week’s #1 game. We in the UK didn’t quite match up to the US, where it became the fastest-selling game ever, but here it came in behind only Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. An astonishing 1 in 3 UK Xbox 360 owners of the time bought Halo 3 within a few days. It is in many ways a shining example of a blockbuster fulfilling its potential smoothly, living up to expectations and then some, with a really impressive grasp on its medium. Nonetheless, it’s not hard to see the problems in the commercial pinnacle of a medium being a machine built top-to-bottom to constantly reassure members of its most over-catered-to audience that they are awesome and that the world should bend to their will.
Top of the charts for week ending 29 September 2007:
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