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.
]]>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'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.
---
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.
]]>---
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.
]]>An article entitled "How Halo 3 Changed Game Development" has recently drawn some (rather sceptical) attention at HBO and here at Rampancy. The author's enthusiasm for the Halo series is unquestionable, but the article's relevance to its title is definitely open to doubt.
Rather than pandering to my inner sadist by shooting the original article to pieces, I'm going to try something more constructive. As someone with relevant experience, what do I think Bungie has to teach the rest of the industry? I can't promise any stunning revelations, but even the obvious bears repeating from time to time.
The single largest problem in games development today (in my not-so-humble opinion) is that of effectively managing and co-ordinating the efforts of the huge teams required. I believe Bungie's in-studio team for Halo 3 numbered about 100. I used to think that it was simply impossible to maintain flexibility and creativity in a team of more than 20-30. My hat is very definitely off to those who have proved me wrong, but keeping a games development team as small as possible is still a very desirable goal. It's interesting to note that Wideload, Bungie's sibling, seem to have taken this approach.
Project management for ambitious games software is one of the most difficult and delicate jobs imaginable. To do this properly, everyone involved has to steer a course between two undesirable extremes:
A) Inflexible bureaucratic rigour - a design-by-committee, built straight from the spec. sheet with no deviation allowed, and probably still not delivered on time, not least because that spec. sheet has to be written - and re-written - in ever more mind-numbing detail, and everyone spends half their working day filling in timesheets and sitting through progress meetings.
B) Creative anarchy - lots of bright ideas, constant fundamental revisions, and a completion date forever receding into the future.
B probably used to be the more dominant pattern in the games industry, but these days it's very definitely A. Readers should be able to identify examples of both approaches. Observant readers may have noted that the one thing they have in common is late delivery - or on-time delivery of a badly flawed game. I said it was difficult.
Yet work simply has to be organised, and progress monitored. The people putting up all that money have every right to be kept informed of progress, and these days a publisher practically has to buy the retail shelf-space for a new game (and well in advance, at that), so shipping dates must be met. Every really good AAA game published represents a successful navigation between these two deadly whirlpools, while racing for the finish line. Bungie aren't by any means the only company who can do this, but the magnitude of their success with the Halo series means that they attract more attention.
It's easy to describe the problem - so what's the solution? Take a look at Bungie's Jobs page, and the list of qualities and qualifications they look for in prospective employees. Taken individually, most of these stipulations are fairly familiar, especially if you've read as many recruitment adverts as I have. The relative emphasis is more revealing. Personal qualities - self-motivation, love of games, dedication to quality, willingness and ability to work collectively and harmoniously - are heavily emphasised and non-negotiable. Technical and experience requirements are relatively less specific, and there's clearly a willingness to be flexible, and consider individual candidates on their individual merits. The average HR department or recruitment agency uses the exact opposite of this pattern, and never thinks twice about it.
There's an important part of the answer. You hire people who are driven by their own professional pride and their love of games to do the best job possible, and you trust them to get on with the job, with a minimum of supervision. You turn away incorrigible prima-donnas, control-freaks, egotists and office-politicians. Telling the difference isn't at all easy - I was once responsible for hiring a full-blown industrial psychopath - but the results are definitely worth it. You don't get these results by hiring people with paper qualifications and standing over them with a whip. Taking a hint from Bungie's tantalising (or mischievous) nautical references, you could call these the submarine-crew and the galley-slave models of team management.
Putting a largely self-organising team together isn't the whole of the story, of course. You still have to deliver a finished, polished game on time, and here Bungie's record is inevitably less than perfect. I'd go so far as to say that this problem is quite simply insoluble. You can either have a finished, polished game, or you can have a game delivered to s strict deadline, but not both. The fact that a team with Bungie's collective skill, talent and experience can't reliably solve this problem should tell us something important, but denying this long-established fact ("Everything always takes longer and costs more") is an article of faith for the people wielding the whips in the galley-slave model. Their standard technique for dealing with the problem when it can no longer be ignored is to speed up the drumbeat, cram more slaves onto the rowing-benches and flog everybody harder. You can imagine how well that works, and the state of the crew when it's all over.
If you accept that this problem can't be adequately solved by deploying more copies of Microsoft Project and bigger sticks, then the only remaining way to mitigate it is to find a way to loosen up the deadline. This requires a serious effort to rethink and reshape the distribution channels. Valve's Steam is a laudable effort in this direction, though clearly not a perfect solution.
The other really valuable thing Bungie can offer to the industry is hope. I can't recall another instance where a games development house swallowed by a publisher has been able to win free again - though I must be fair, and acknowledge that Microsoft's handling of Bungie seems to have been exceptionally wise and far-sighted, by industry standards. I've experienced the swallowing process myself, and seen it happen to ex-colleagues who had managed to set up their own company. Bungie's example - and Microsoft's example - offer at least the faint possibility of escape to developers currently languishing in the bellies of their various beasts.
]]>Rather than pandering to my inner sadist by shooting the original article to pieces, I'm going to try something more constructive. As someone with relevant experience, what do I think Bungie has to teach the rest of the industry? I can't promise any stunning revelations, but even the obvious bears repeating from time to time.
The single largest problem in games development today (in my not-so-humble opinion) is that of effectively managing and co-ordinating the efforts of the huge teams required. I believe Bungie's in-studio team for Halo 3 numbered about 100. I used to think that it was simply impossible to maintain flexibility and creativity in a team of more than 20-30. My hat is very definitely off to those who have proved me wrong, but keeping a games development team as small as possible is still a very desirable goal. It's interesting to note that Wideload, Bungie's sibling, seem to have taken this approach.
Project management for ambitious games software is one of the most difficult and delicate jobs imaginable. To do this properly, everyone involved has to steer a course between two undesirable extremes:
A) Inflexible bureaucratic rigour - a design-by-committee, built straight from the spec. sheet with no deviation allowed, and probably still not delivered on time, not least because that spec. sheet has to be written - and re-written - in ever more mind-numbing detail, and everyone spends half their working day filling in timesheets and sitting through progress meetings.
B) Creative anarchy - lots of bright ideas, constant fundamental revisions, and a completion date forever receding into the future.
B probably used to be the more dominant pattern in the games industry, but these days it's very definitely A. Readers should be able to identify examples of both approaches. Observant readers may have noted that the one thing they have in common is late delivery - or on-time delivery of a badly flawed game. I said it was difficult.
Yet work simply has to be organised, and progress monitored. The people putting up all that money have every right to be kept informed of progress, and these days a publisher practically has to buy the retail shelf-space for a new game (and well in advance, at that), so shipping dates must be met. Every really good AAA game published represents a successful navigation between these two deadly whirlpools, while racing for the finish line. Bungie aren't by any means the only company who can do this, but the magnitude of their success with the Halo series means that they attract more attention.
It's easy to describe the problem - so what's the solution? Take a look at Bungie's Jobs page, and the list of qualities and qualifications they look for in prospective employees. Taken individually, most of these stipulations are fairly familiar, especially if you've read as many recruitment adverts as I have. The relative emphasis is more revealing. Personal qualities - self-motivation, love of games, dedication to quality, willingness and ability to work collectively and harmoniously - are heavily emphasised and non-negotiable. Technical and experience requirements are relatively less specific, and there's clearly a willingness to be flexible, and consider individual candidates on their individual merits. The average HR department or recruitment agency uses the exact opposite of this pattern, and never thinks twice about it.
There's an important part of the answer. You hire people who are driven by their own professional pride and their love of games to do the best job possible, and you trust them to get on with the job, with a minimum of supervision. You turn away incorrigible prima-donnas, control-freaks, egotists and office-politicians. Telling the difference isn't at all easy - I was once responsible for hiring a full-blown industrial psychopath - but the results are definitely worth it. You don't get these results by hiring people with paper qualifications and standing over them with a whip. Taking a hint from Bungie's tantalising (or mischievous) nautical references, you could call these the submarine-crew and the galley-slave models of team management.
Putting a largely self-organising team together isn't the whole of the story, of course. You still have to deliver a finished, polished game on time, and here Bungie's record is inevitably less than perfect. I'd go so far as to say that this problem is quite simply insoluble. You can either have a finished, polished game, or you can have a game delivered to s strict deadline, but not both. The fact that a team with Bungie's collective skill, talent and experience can't reliably solve this problem should tell us something important, but denying this long-established fact ("Everything always takes longer and costs more") is an article of faith for the people wielding the whips in the galley-slave model. Their standard technique for dealing with the problem when it can no longer be ignored is to speed up the drumbeat, cram more slaves onto the rowing-benches and flog everybody harder. You can imagine how well that works, and the state of the crew when it's all over.
If you accept that this problem can't be adequately solved by deploying more copies of Microsoft Project and bigger sticks, then the only remaining way to mitigate it is to find a way to loosen up the deadline. This requires a serious effort to rethink and reshape the distribution channels. Valve's Steam is a laudable effort in this direction, though clearly not a perfect solution.
The other really valuable thing Bungie can offer to the industry is hope. I can't recall another instance where a games development house swallowed by a publisher has been able to win free again - though I must be fair, and acknowledge that Microsoft's handling of Bungie seems to have been exceptionally wise and far-sighted, by industry standards. I've experienced the swallowing process myself, and seen it happen to ex-colleagues who had managed to set up their own company. Bungie's example - and Microsoft's example - offer at least the faint possibility of escape to developers currently languishing in the bellies of their various beasts.
]]>Let me start by giving credit where it's due. The line of thought explored here grew from a discussion on the HBO forum, which was itself inspired by a thoughtful article from 1UP's Jeremy Parish.
My own contribution to the HBO discussion was to speculate that unfavourable reactions from many fans to the Arbiter levels in Halo 2 led to Bungie scaling back the Arbiter's role in Halo 3, tending to impoverish the story. Anyone who followed community discussion after Halo 2's release will probably remember many comments from those who were uninterested in or emphatically hostile to the idea of putting themselves in the Arbiter's - er - hooves.
To those of us who were willing and able to make the effort, and found it rewarding, this widespread failure of empathy has many disturbing implications. The one which concerns me here is the potential effect on Bungie's future decisions regarding storytelling technique, and the level of moral complexity fans are willing to deal with. As an unashamed, card-carrying member of the 'cerebral' wing of Bungie's fan community, my personal preference should be obvious, and I'm certainly not the only one who's worried about this.
My thesis is that many of those hostile to the Arbiter aren't inherently hostile to complexity, moral or otherwise. Their problem may be more to do with the situation and expectations set up by Halo CE. If it had been clear from the start that we were going to see the war from both sides, then maybe they wouldn't have reacted so badly when they found themselves in the Arbiter's skin. That's not a criticism of those who put the story together - I'm speaking here with the advantage of hindsight. The level of emotional commitment to the cause of Earth and the UNSC displayed by many of these fans is impressive, as well as more than a little frightening, and may in part be due to the real-world events of the period.
As an aside, I've often wondered if the character of the Grunts was intended in part as the thin end of the wedge to prepare us to empathise with the Covenant species. Grunts are hard to hate, and they have many explicitly childlike characteristics - their size, emotional volatility and high-pitched voices, for example. Call me a sentimental fool if you like, but in Halo 2, when infiltrating the Delta Halo Shield Wall as the Arbiter and picking up stranded Grunts and Jackals on the way, I sometimes couldn't help feeling like a harried mother herding cute, easily-distracted toddlers through a bad part of town.
I sincerely hope I haven't spoiled anyone's enjoyment with this speculation, but if the vague possibility that you've been gleefully shooting and clubbing child-surrogate figures to death for years doesn't cause you the slightest twinge of uneasiness, then there's something badly wrong with you, in my opinion. The game requires you to kill them, but hating them is another matter.
If this admittedly macabre theory is on target, why was this device not more successful in generating a willingness to empathise? I think it's possible that the Grunts' comedic value may have undercut their other attributes - players were too busy laughing at them to take them seriously or find them sympathetic. On the other hand, that humour is an integral part of Halo, and the game wouldn't have been the same without it.
Back on my central topic, there definitely is a sizeable audience for fiction which goes beyond black-and-white comic-book morality (though that's actually rather unfair to the modern comic-book genre), Two examples with substantial crossover to the Halo community spring to mind; the first is BioShock, and the second, and perhaps more directly relevant, is Ron Moore's re-imagined Battlestar Galactica.
In conclusion, I must acknowledge the enormous risks Bungie, or any other modern game developer, run in putting together a game design and committing to a project. The running costs of a modern studio with over a hundred staff are frankly terrifying to contemplate, and the investment of human lifespan, blood, sweat and tears involved in a multi-year project implies a heavy moral obligation to ensure that these precious resources are not wasted. I don't expect them to make timid, easy or obvious choices, since that's not what they're about. I just hope that they don't have to sacrifice too much of their soul in order to survive and prosper.
]]>My own contribution to the HBO discussion was to speculate that unfavourable reactions from many fans to the Arbiter levels in Halo 2 led to Bungie scaling back the Arbiter's role in Halo 3, tending to impoverish the story. Anyone who followed community discussion after Halo 2's release will probably remember many comments from those who were uninterested in or emphatically hostile to the idea of putting themselves in the Arbiter's - er - hooves.
To those of us who were willing and able to make the effort, and found it rewarding, this widespread failure of empathy has many disturbing implications. The one which concerns me here is the potential effect on Bungie's future decisions regarding storytelling technique, and the level of moral complexity fans are willing to deal with. As an unashamed, card-carrying member of the 'cerebral' wing of Bungie's fan community, my personal preference should be obvious, and I'm certainly not the only one who's worried about this.
My thesis is that many of those hostile to the Arbiter aren't inherently hostile to complexity, moral or otherwise. Their problem may be more to do with the situation and expectations set up by Halo CE. If it had been clear from the start that we were going to see the war from both sides, then maybe they wouldn't have reacted so badly when they found themselves in the Arbiter's skin. That's not a criticism of those who put the story together - I'm speaking here with the advantage of hindsight. The level of emotional commitment to the cause of Earth and the UNSC displayed by many of these fans is impressive, as well as more than a little frightening, and may in part be due to the real-world events of the period.
As an aside, I've often wondered if the character of the Grunts was intended in part as the thin end of the wedge to prepare us to empathise with the Covenant species. Grunts are hard to hate, and they have many explicitly childlike characteristics - their size, emotional volatility and high-pitched voices, for example. Call me a sentimental fool if you like, but in Halo 2, when infiltrating the Delta Halo Shield Wall as the Arbiter and picking up stranded Grunts and Jackals on the way, I sometimes couldn't help feeling like a harried mother herding cute, easily-distracted toddlers through a bad part of town.
I sincerely hope I haven't spoiled anyone's enjoyment with this speculation, but if the vague possibility that you've been gleefully shooting and clubbing child-surrogate figures to death for years doesn't cause you the slightest twinge of uneasiness, then there's something badly wrong with you, in my opinion. The game requires you to kill them, but hating them is another matter.
If this admittedly macabre theory is on target, why was this device not more successful in generating a willingness to empathise? I think it's possible that the Grunts' comedic value may have undercut their other attributes - players were too busy laughing at them to take them seriously or find them sympathetic. On the other hand, that humour is an integral part of Halo, and the game wouldn't have been the same without it.
Back on my central topic, there definitely is a sizeable audience for fiction which goes beyond black-and-white comic-book morality (though that's actually rather unfair to the modern comic-book genre), Two examples with substantial crossover to the Halo community spring to mind; the first is BioShock, and the second, and perhaps more directly relevant, is Ron Moore's re-imagined Battlestar Galactica.
In conclusion, I must acknowledge the enormous risks Bungie, or any other modern game developer, run in putting together a game design and committing to a project. The running costs of a modern studio with over a hundred staff are frankly terrifying to contemplate, and the investment of human lifespan, blood, sweat and tears involved in a multi-year project implies a heavy moral obligation to ensure that these precious resources are not wasted. I don't expect them to make timid, easy or obvious choices, since that's not what they're about. I just hope that they don't have to sacrifice too much of their soul in order to survive and prosper.
]]>In 'Anger, Sadness & Envy No.4', Narcogen and Trindacut made some comments about scripted NPC behaviour which resonate with an article (or rant) I've been developing for some time.
Let me emphasise that this isn't a witch-hunt, and it's not targeted on any particular individual. Though I use a specific instance from Halo 3 to illustrate my point, I'm not out to pillory the person(s) responsible - we all make mistakes, and the important thing is that we learn from them. The problem I'm describing is one which I believe to be widespread in game development. It's just particularly sad, not to say alarming, to see it manifested at Bungie.
Let me begin by introducing my candidate for most annoying NPC in Halo 3's Campaign. This is the marine who delivers the Gauss Warthog as you emerge from the wall which protects the Ark's Cartographer. For those of you who haven't played through the Campaign as often as I have (no Live membership), see if any of these jog your memory:
Entering pursued by two Ghosts, he seems to find the task of driving around a perfectly ordinary rock severely challenging. He usually spends five to ten seconds edging forward and backward like a timid driver trying to parallel-park, all the while shrugging off a hail of plasma bolts from the Ghosts which would drop you, the player, a mere heavily-armoured super-soldier, in seconds on any respectable difficulty level.
Having started with a random male-marine voicing, when he finally succeeds in reaching his scripted destination and dismounts, he switches to the Australian marine voice... and stands there like an idiot yelling about the urgency of the situation and the need to do something about it quickly - rather than doing something constructive like manning the Gauss gun and taking out the Ghosts, while the poor player sits in the driver's seat watching his shield evaporate.
This whole sorry sequence is a near-perfect example of how not to use scripting within a game. Leaving aside careless errors of execution (like the voice-switch), the fundamental problem here is that rigid scripted behaviour has over-ridden the adaptive behaviour of the normal marine artificial intelligence, resulting in artificial stupidity.
Think about this for a moment. What's the difference between a good and a bad NPC AI? A good AI appears intelligent because it adapts to the player's behaviour and the situation in general. An NPC which fails to do this appears stupid, frustrating the player and undercutting the player's immersion in the game world.
An NPC's illusion of intelligence is inevitably rather fragile, given that we're still a long way from achieving true AI, and we probably couldn't implement it on the 360's hardware in any case. Nonetheless, Halo 3's marines generally do a fair job of simulating intelligent behaviour and cooperating with the player. Why, then, would any competent game-developer subvert this behaviour for no significant gain?
I believe that the answer to this question, and other related mysteries (like the infamous rulebook-busting boss-battles in Halo 2) lies in a deep cultural division in game development. As someone who spent most of a 14-year games industry career uncomfortably straddling this particular cultural chasm, I think I'm in an unusually good position to describe the problem.
The cultural division in question is the one between programmers and artists. How does this relate to the sort of problem I'm describing? Adaptive AI behaviour is created by software engineering, the province of programmers. Many artists (and game/level designers tend to think of themselves as artists, with reason) regard all 'engineering', and the people who do it, with barely-disguised contempt.
To these artists, it's an article of faith that creativity is their exclusive province, and any product or process of engineering is inevitably inferior to what they can produce. This conviction drives them to over-ride AI systems with scripting where it's neither appropriate nor necessary, and subvert the established rules of the game world on a whim. Gameplay and immersion are routinely sacrificed to their bad judgement, arrogance, vanity and insecurity.
Insecurity? To be charitable, some of these artists may see software automation as a threat to their jobs. To be brutally frank, some of them may be right. Any artist needs self-belief or (s)he will never dare expose their creations to public view and criticism, but if this is not tempered with judgement and self-honesty, the result is inevitably bad art and pretentiousness. Or, in this case, inferior gameplay and loss of immersion.
---
Postscript: Having been justly reproved for splashing my long-accumulated bile over people who don't deserve it in the least, I've apologised below, as best I can. Unless I'm asked to, I won't edit this article or take it down. Instead I'll leave it here as a lasting reminder to myself to think and think again before I rant in public.
]]>Let me emphasise that this isn't a witch-hunt, and it's not targeted on any particular individual. Though I use a specific instance from Halo 3 to illustrate my point, I'm not out to pillory the person(s) responsible - we all make mistakes, and the important thing is that we learn from them. The problem I'm describing is one which I believe to be widespread in game development. It's just particularly sad, not to say alarming, to see it manifested at Bungie.
Let me begin by introducing my candidate for most annoying NPC in Halo 3's Campaign. This is the marine who delivers the Gauss Warthog as you emerge from the wall which protects the Ark's Cartographer. For those of you who haven't played through the Campaign as often as I have (no Live membership), see if any of these jog your memory:
Entering pursued by two Ghosts, he seems to find the task of driving around a perfectly ordinary rock severely challenging. He usually spends five to ten seconds edging forward and backward like a timid driver trying to parallel-park, all the while shrugging off a hail of plasma bolts from the Ghosts which would drop you, the player, a mere heavily-armoured super-soldier, in seconds on any respectable difficulty level.
Having started with a random male-marine voicing, when he finally succeeds in reaching his scripted destination and dismounts, he switches to the Australian marine voice... and stands there like an idiot yelling about the urgency of the situation and the need to do something about it quickly - rather than doing something constructive like manning the Gauss gun and taking out the Ghosts, while the poor player sits in the driver's seat watching his shield evaporate.
This whole sorry sequence is a near-perfect example of how not to use scripting within a game. Leaving aside careless errors of execution (like the voice-switch), the fundamental problem here is that rigid scripted behaviour has over-ridden the adaptive behaviour of the normal marine artificial intelligence, resulting in artificial stupidity.
Think about this for a moment. What's the difference between a good and a bad NPC AI? A good AI appears intelligent because it adapts to the player's behaviour and the situation in general. An NPC which fails to do this appears stupid, frustrating the player and undercutting the player's immersion in the game world.
An NPC's illusion of intelligence is inevitably rather fragile, given that we're still a long way from achieving true AI, and we probably couldn't implement it on the 360's hardware in any case. Nonetheless, Halo 3's marines generally do a fair job of simulating intelligent behaviour and cooperating with the player. Why, then, would any competent game-developer subvert this behaviour for no significant gain?
I believe that the answer to this question, and other related mysteries (like the infamous rulebook-busting boss-battles in Halo 2) lies in a deep cultural division in game development. As someone who spent most of a 14-year games industry career uncomfortably straddling this particular cultural chasm, I think I'm in an unusually good position to describe the problem.
The cultural division in question is the one between programmers and artists. How does this relate to the sort of problem I'm describing? Adaptive AI behaviour is created by software engineering, the province of programmers. Many artists (and game/level designers tend to think of themselves as artists, with reason) regard all 'engineering', and the people who do it, with barely-disguised contempt.
To these artists, it's an article of faith that creativity is their exclusive province, and any product or process of engineering is inevitably inferior to what they can produce. This conviction drives them to over-ride AI systems with scripting where it's neither appropriate nor necessary, and subvert the established rules of the game world on a whim. Gameplay and immersion are routinely sacrificed to their bad judgement, arrogance, vanity and insecurity.
Insecurity? To be charitable, some of these artists may see software automation as a threat to their jobs. To be brutally frank, some of them may be right. Any artist needs self-belief or (s)he will never dare expose their creations to public view and criticism, but if this is not tempered with judgement and self-honesty, the result is inevitably bad art and pretentiousness. Or, in this case, inferior gameplay and loss of immersion.
---
Postscript: Having been justly reproved for splashing my long-accumulated bile over people who don't deserve it in the least, I've apologised below, as best I can. Unless I'm asked to, I won't edit this article or take it down. Instead I'll leave it here as a lasting reminder to myself to think and think again before I rant in public.
]]>