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bloody heartland
banned
Joined: 15 Feb 2008
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 Posted: Tue Sep 16, 2008 12:21 am |
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| Greng wrote: |
| I enjoyed the library level most... don't think ANYONE liked that bit but me. Relentless waves of flood; good times. |
rocketlauncher for the win, greng |
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bloody heartland
banned
Joined: 15 Feb 2008
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| Posted: Tue Sep 16, 2008 12:37 am |
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| Maztorre wrote: |
It's kind of sad that Silent Cartographer is still the peak of the series in terms of level design and overall game structure. There's quite a straightforward formula to that section in terms of pacing and flow that Bungie abandoned in Halo 2 and didn't quite reach again in Halo 3. Gears of War, for example, is far better constructed around its central gameplay hook compared to Halo. Gears 2 looks like the opposite of what happened to the Halo sequels: it remains confident in the strength of its core gameplay and builds new game modes and adds to/balances the weaponry around that central hook. What Bungie did with their game mechanics in Halo 2/3 is ridiculous in hindsight.
The Halo series would probably have been a lot better had it launched on PC with decent mod tools. For one, they probably would have been hiring actual level designers from the community instead of 1Up writers onto their staff. |
Uuuh, not to piss on your tabloid-esque editorialising here, but Silent Cartographer had a truly disproportionate amount of time spent on it during the final (Xbox) based phase of Halo development (Halo having previously existed as an RTS and a dreamy but neblous open-world concept demo). That's why it's so insanely polished, designed and a microcosm of the whole game.
The core hook of Halo was big epic battles, emergent battle flow, limited guns, small ground forces of allies, and Things You Can Pilot. Halo 2 was pretty boring and scripted, but Halo 3 has at least... I'd say at least 4 extremely replayable missions out of 10, all based around big epic battles, emergent battle flow, limited guns, small ground forces of allies, and Things You Can Pilot. I'm thinking of the big jeep breakout in africa, the awesome mission where you cut down the anti-air defenses, and the instalation zero missions. Absolutely all of them are great, with the latter being essentially Silent Cartographer II.
Contrast with Gears of War, which has little or no variety in it's gun battles (cover! woo!) and a whole metric shit heap of lumped on gameplay elements (the light/dark missions were pretty good but I'd gladly skullfuck whoever decided the APC mission was a good idea). Halo 3 is true to Halo 1 and has some of the best first-sitting flow and ante-upping I've experienced in a game.
All the fan service shit MGS4 did - echoes of past missions, return to the origin - Halo 3 did first, and with dignity. It has some real moments of beauty and wonder in there.
Anyone seen the Zero Punctuation for Halo 3? Dude doesn't get it at all. |
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bloody heartland
banned
Joined: 15 Feb 2008
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| Posted: Tue Sep 16, 2008 12:49 am |
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| Maztorre wrote: |
| boojiboy7 wrote: |
| I thought 3 had a few levels that got close to Silent Cartographer. The Ark and the Covenant were both really well done and paced, building up to nice fights at the end. The one before the flood crash also really plays on Halo's strengths, having big open areas and letting the AI do it's thing so that the fight plays out in its own way each time. |
Yeah, 3 does strive for the same kind of gameplay again, but there's just so much fluff and bullshit going on around it just so you can get to those good parts, and a lot of it feels like legacy Halo 2 nonsense that they couldn't (wouldn't?) get rid of. By contrast Silent Cartographer is really pure and still feels extremely fresh, especially since the transitioning between exterior and interior fighting, and from on-foot to vehicle, occurs so naturally to the player. The sequels fail at making your choices seem natural, especially since they muddy the waters with linearity and scripting instead of letting the player have fun with the AI (the whole draw of the series). |
SC is scripted to high fuck - clear the beach head, spawn a warthog, reach this point, spawn an elite, go back up, new things have spawned. There's room for improvisation but the stage direction is strict.
The dual-scarab battle in H3 is a great example of choice-based gameplay - I like to hang on the side of one of those jets then land on the first scarab and clear it on foot, but there's a ton of other viable strategy trees. Likewise the first level - there's a couple of entrance points to the prison camp, and the brawls all have nice meaty, chaotic levels of emergence. Crow's Nest is all about how you engage the enemy. The Highway stage has at least two distinct bubbles of extremely choice based action... nearly every stage in the game does.
From my perspective the problems you're complaining about simply don't exist.
!BONUS EMBARRASING STRETCHPANIK POST! BE FATTITUDE FOR (prototype) GAINS!
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Thank you Rud13!
Your are officially my favourite IC member, for the whole day!
Halo is a travesty of a videogame, and frankly, while I should spend an entire paragraph saying so eloquently, I am lazy. SO let me say this.
Halo is godamned shit, of epic proportions.
People say it moved the genre forwards? It set it back at least a decade. maybe two decades.
I always compare it to Half Life, released years prior to it. Why do people praise a game that is beaten to a pulp by a game so much older than it?
Two guns. TWO FUCKING GUNS?! What the fuck is this? A NES game where I only have two buttons? Half Life 1 had like 20 weapons, which you carried AT THE SAME TIME. Read that sentence again Bungie, until you un derstand the words.
HL = 1 point
Halo = 0
The flood. WTF is this? Wolfenstein 3D? Where the hell is the AI people talk about? Rubbish! Half Life 1 had varied enemies, with either good AI (marines), or were not infinite and annoying (headcrab zombies are better than flood zombies).
HL = 2 points
Halo = -1 (yeah, I hate the flood THAT much)
Saving. Thank you Bungie, you auto-saved right when I am out of ammo, in the middle of nowhere, low on health and surrounded by a million enemies. Half Life has manual quick saving. For the WIN!
HL = 3 points
Halo = -1 (I should remove another point here, but I'm being generous.)
Level design. Levels in Halo? WTF is this? Goldeneye? HL had one giant complex, which improved the flow of the game. The pacing was crap a sresult in Halo, not to mention infuritatingly difficult in most places.
HL = 4 points
Halo = -1
Co-op characters. Could you control the marines in Halo? I don't think you could. Very annoying. But there were many of them. HL had useful allies that aided with puzzles. OK. Even ground here.
HL = 5 points
Halo = 0 (could Halo be making a comeback?)
Interactive environments. In HL, an OLDER game, I could blow up boxes, chairs, desks, glass, all kinds of cool stuff. In Halo, there was nothing. I could fire a freakin rocket into a trash can, and NOTHING would happen! How much crack were Bungie smoking? What did they do? Outsource all their programmers to central Bahgdad? Why the hell couldn't they add some interactivity to the environment?!
HL = 6 points
Halo = -1 (this is an Xbox game for gods sake!)
Vehicles. HL had those railroad things on the tracks.... Halo had really cool vehicles. Damn, and I was hoping Halo would finish this content with negative numbers.
HL = 6 points
Halo = 1 (yeah, I am being very generous here and giving it 2 points)
Conclusion:
Despite the cool vehicles, Halo still sucks. The AI is non-existent, and the enemies rely on sheer brute force to get by. The environments are not interactive. The flood is annoying. The auto-saving is broken. The two weapons thing is quite possibly the most idiotic decision in the history of gaming. EVER. Utter, utter rubbish. And a disgrace to gaming.
Why does everyone love it?
For the record, I have never played Halo multiplayer (multiplayer at my house is either Monkeyball or Saturn Bomberman). |
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bloody heartland
banned
Joined: 15 Feb 2008
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| Posted: Tue Sep 16, 2008 12:59 am |
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Yeah, when I get some more scratch together we need to brohammer the shit out of that. It feels like an apology of sorts for the drab scarab battle in Halo 2.
True fact: one of my most dearly held wishes for fanservice in Halo 3 was that Master Chief and Arbiter end up fighting back to back against the flood. When they struck that pose, I wanted to hug the Xbox, with my penis. |
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bloody heartland
banned
Joined: 15 Feb 2008
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| Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 3:17 pm |
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| That wasn't a very intelligent or compelling post rudders. |
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bloody heartland
banned
Joined: 15 Feb 2008
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| Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 6:31 pm |
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| Mr Mustache wrote: |
| Let's not blame the victim. |
Why are you here, again?
That section is perfectly doable - I think one time I drove over in the warthog, then hopped out and unloaded the rear AA gun into the banshee. It's good videogames. |
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bloody heartland
banned
Joined: 15 Feb 2008
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| Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 6:34 pm |
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| PS: since halo is a game about waging asymetric warfare, I think it's somewhat reasonable to say you're doing it wrong, or in the wrong frame of mind. Did the viet cong fight like Serious Sam? |
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bloody heartland
banned
Joined: 15 Feb 2008
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| Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2008 2:26 am |
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| les meat wrote: |
| "I can't design a game properly… I know lets make the health regenerate and the save points so close together that death means nothing" |
You're missing the point, the whole point of Halo is the dynamic the shield recharge creates. It makes for unique gameplay you wouldn't get in the standard FPS model. |
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