Less was More? | Rampancy

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 [url=http://earthsmightiest.com/comics/interview-with-eric-trautmann-from-che... remarks[/url] 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 [url=http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17531]here[/url] 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.

category:

game:

topic:

You can't post comments

Comments

Anonymous (not verified)

User login

Mastodon

Comments