Frankie O'Connor at Bungie gave an interview near the beginning of this year, and one of the questions I found particularly interesting, especially because I've only recently had a chance to play Gears of War myself:

XCN: Are you influenced by other games like Gears of War, would you consider implementing some things like the Gears of War cover system in Halo 3?

Frank O'Connor: We're always asked about the influence of other games on Halo and recently the 'other game' often seems to be Gears of War. Will the cover system influence Halo? The honest answer is no. The gameplay for Halo 3 was decided long before Gears of War even shipped. If we put the cover system in Halo it would ruin the game because it's not about cover. It's about big encounters and open spaces and vehicles and so on. Gears of War is about cover. Sticking something like that onto our game wouldn't be a good idea. Anyway, there is a cover system in Halo - it's called ducking behind objects and using the environment to shield you from harm. But we won't be putting a cover button in, and it's certainly not the X button that we're often asked about.

Whenever a new game comes out with an ostensibly "new" feature it seems there's an exchange that runs something like this; where a journalist asks Developer of Last Year's Hit Game if they are going to implement Cool Feature from the newly released This Year's Hot Game in next year's Sequel To Last Year's Hit Game.

Whether the feature is appropriate for that game or not scarcely matters; it's a hip and trendy feature. In the case of Gears, it's the Cover button.

Parts Bin Innovation
There's not really much new about it, though. Plenty of tactical shooters have controls to allow you to put players into positions where they have cover-- flat against a wall, ducking behind an object, prone on the floor. Even casual third-person games like Beyond Good And Evil, a personal favorite of mine, had a similar feature.

That the Halo games and Gears are both ostensibly shooters, and this led to the question, is not the interesting part. That Frankie, in essence, says that this feature won't work in a first-person shooter, but does in a third-person shooter, is also not the interesting part; that's merely obvious. What is interesting is that before Halo was a first-person shooter, but after it was a Real-Time Strategy game, it was briefly a third-person shooter. During the development process, the camera was pulled tighter and tighter to the Master Chief until you were inside his helmet; but there were always some small touches in the game that revealed its third-person perspective legacy, and made me wonder what Halo might have become if the controls, and, yes, a cover system similar to what Gears has, had been implemented in Halo's development all those years ago.

I've Got Your... Back, Soldier
In third person shooters you spend a lot of time looking at a character's back. It's really an odd perspective, if you think about it. For the male audience, looking at the posterior of a character like Lara Croft or to some she-elf as she saunters through verdant grasslands in search of prey, there's a touch of voyeurism on offer. With male players and male characters, it's just... well, not quite the same for most. That might explain why the characters in Gears have nearly all the artistic emphasis on their shoulders, jaws, and biceps. Their ridiculously wide shoulders are exaggerated by ridiculously wide NFL-style shoulderpads with blinking lights. The camera position is relatively high. Nobody wants you staring at Marcus Fenix's ass, apparently, and that's fine with me.

One shot from Halo that particularly reminded me of its third-person roots was the first cutscene on the bridge with Captain Keyes; there's a lovely tracking shot from behind the Chief where you get to see the craquelure on his polished armor. I've no doubt that the original Xbox would have had difficulty rendering this texture on-screen all the time during fierce firefights, but one wonders if all this time was spent on polishing a texture that you only look at once or twice during the game. It's very detailed and very pretty in that masculine sort of way that the COG uniforms are, which makes me wonder if, at some point, you were expected to spend a lot more time looking at those polished shoulders; the Chief's suit in Halo 1 even has this exaggerated backpack that was slimmed down considerably in the sequel, along with the rest of the suit.

Aim High, Shoot Low
One can only speculate on the reasons why Bungie abandoned the third person perspective. Their previous game, the third-person action game Oni, mixed martial arts and gunplay in a third-person perspective, and for the most part, the controls worked very well, although aiming with precision was a tad difficult, even with a mouse. I never played the PlayStation port of the game, so how well it functioned with a console controller I can't say.

With melee combat not a real emphasis for Halo as released, perhaps an aiming system that was only "good enough" for mixed combat simply wasn't good enough for a game in which the guns were the primary thing.

Gears does an admirable job of it, though. The balance of melee and gunplay in Gears is very similar to that of Halo. In fact, Gears' entire arsenal is fairly similar. You get four weapon slots, but you can't put just anything into them. You have a slot for grenades, a slot for a sidearm, and a slot for two other weapons, but not every weapon goes in every slot; the way in which these limits create balance between players and balance between the player and campaign enemies is a slight adjustment of Halo's formula: you can carry more weapons (or, actually, the same number, if you take into account that Halo allows you to carry one weapon, plus two dual-wielded weapons, plus grenades) but you are restricted as to which combinations you may make. Halo makes different kinds of restrictions, allowing some one-handed weapons to be dual-wielded, but not others.

As for the problem of how to aim accurately with a third-person interface, Gears didn't so much solve it as avoid it completely. You can fire your weapon in third person mode, which is quicker, but less accurate, as one would expect. At close quarters, with weapons suited for it (like the shotgun) it can be effective. For all other situations, you pull a control that gives you a first-person view. This control interacts with the cover control, so that gameplay eventually turns into a system of moving to cover, taking cover, and poking your head out of cover to use the first person perspective to shoot, or firing blind to put down covering fire.

Hiding Behind Stuff To Look Tough
Frankie points out, and rightfully so, that Halo's lack of a special button for taking cover doesn't mean that taking cover isn't a gameplay element. In fact, he's alleging that it requires a bit more skill, since taking cover isn't a automatic action triggered by a simple button-press. Where I think Frankie misses something is that the beauty of how cover works in Gears is not just the contextual Cover button that conceals the player behind an object, or the aim control for entering first-person view, which seamlessly brings the player in and out of cover as required. Rather, it is the way in which these things, used in together with the default third person perspective, combine to solve not the problem of how to aim in a third person shooter but the problem of how to take cover in a first person shooter.

You can, and must, take cover in Halo. Taking cover in Halo 2 is even more important, given the prodigious rate of plasma fire put out by dual-wielding Elites and the pinpoint accuracy of the dreaded Jackal sniper. Once you take cover, however, you probably can't see your enemy. In fact, it's fairly likely that although you can't see your enemy, he may be able to see you or part of you, and on Legendary, a Jackal sniper shot to the toe or elbow is lethal.

One might say this is merely realism; after all, when you're hiding behind something, you can't see through it either. Lacking the tactical depth given by other controls for taking a prone position, peering around a corner, or indeed doing anything much besides crouching, cover becomes mostly an all-or-nothing proposition. If you do it properly, you can't be seen, but neither can you see. Your best bet is to take cover in a way that allows you to flank your enemy, so that you can see him, but he can't see you.

The other factor is Halo 2's severely limited field of vision, which is why the realism argument does't hold here. If you were to crouch behind a crate in real life, you'd still be able to see to either side of the crate, and peripheral vision would allow you to see to your side. You could peer over the crate or to the sides while exposing very little. In contrast, in Halo 2, you can't peer to the sides without exposing the entire length of your body, and depending on the height of objects, you either have to stand up fully or even jump to peer above them, also exposing you as a target.

Tactical shooters solve this with extra controls for glancing, going prone, and other things. Gears solves it by the use of the third person. The beautiful thing isn't pressing the cover button to automatically duck behind something. Halo could implement that in a snap to little effect; it's only useful because while you are behind cover, the third person perspective allows you to see in front of you. You can see when your enemy pokes his head up out of cover without revealing yourself. While not strictly realistic, this compensates somewhat for the lack of true peripheral vision, and for the need to expose yourself significantly while shooting.

Always Practice Safe Context
If there's a drawback to Gears' system for taking cover it's that all contextual controls have problems dealing with certain situations. Gears uses that button for a hell of a lot of things: for taking cover, coming out of cover, diving for cover, and running for cover. What action it took depended partially on whether you tapped or held the button, but also on where your character is and what's near him. I've hit the button to take cover behind what I thought was a suitable pillar, only to see Fenix doing a ridiculous diving roll in place. Halo's contextual controls cause similar gaffes; things that remind you that you are playing a game, because if the situation had been real, no normal person would ever have made that mistake. After the light bridge in Halo 1, there are areas are which perfect for sniping. To gain a height advantage, I often stand on top of a Warthog there; as no enemy in Halo 1 has a sniping weapon, there's no reason to worry about cover. The problem is that reloading and entering a vehicle are the same contextual button, and in case of a tie, the vehicle function wins. So you either have to wait until the weapon reloads automatically, or move away from the Warthog, reload, and then jump back on top. In real life, one would expect a highly trained Spartan to know whether he wants to jump in the driver's seat or reload his rifle. Halo, though, can only guess, and in that particular situation, it's going to be wrong, just as Gears is sometimes going to differ with you in terms of what objects are legitimate cover, and which one you intended to take cover behind.

Chetz and Hax
I also find Gears' "active reload" feature amusing. I'm not an avid enough gamer to know if this is a feature Epic has aped from somewhere else, but it reminds me of nothing so much as the Halo games' unintentional animation-interruption exploits that allow players to take certain advantages over the normal shooting and reloading cycles: BXR, backpack reloading, and double-shotting. Gears has made this not cheating by giving it an interface: tapping the reload key once starts a reload. Tap again at exactly the right time, and your reload finishes faster than normal, and (through some advanced form of magic) makes your bullets do more damage. Mis-time it and the gun jams, costing you time. There are even gamerscore achievements tied to completing a certain number of these. Gears takes the controversial black magic of animation interruption exploits and made it an easily explainable feature with an intuitive interface. A pretty clever solution to the problem if you ask me.

It's All About The Features, Creep
Does Halo 3 need these features? No, as Frankie rightly says. As a first person shooter that uses third person only for vehicles, the game simply isn't set up for cover to be handled this way. However, I can hardly help but wonder myself what Halo might have been like if it had stayed a third-person shooter. Might it not have played much like Gears plays now? Perhaps. Only Bungie knows for sure, although doubtless they are too busy working towards the Halo 3 that will be to wonder about the Halo that might have been, and that's just as it should be.