Article in Edge - Looking for Flaws in the Greatest of Games

http://www.edge-online.com/features/untouchables-halo-combat-evolved via Edge via HBO

TL:DR version -- guy who worked on GoldenEye nitpicks problems about Halo:CE. Some points are valid, others seem like nit-pickyness. A good read, and one of the commenters makes good points.

Quote:

This is the fourth article in our series looking for the flaws in some of the greatest and most discussed games of all time. You can read our previous dissections by following these links: 

• Half-Life 2
• Rez
• Grim Fandango

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Fallen Angel

As veterans of GoldenEye 007, David Doak and his colleagues at Free Radical were among the few credible active makers of console FPS games when they first heard, via none other than former Edge editor Joao Diniz Sanches, that Halo was pretty good. This, in the context of all the hype, meant that it was terrific. Masterful, even.

“We were obviously very busy, but it was one of the few games I actually took the time to play back then,” says Doak. “And I spent whatever it was, a Saturday and a Sunday, to play through it in a way you don’t often do – and I really enjoyed it. But it’s a mixed bag…”

He is the first to admit that the TimeSplitters franchise owes a few things to Halo: “TimeSplitters 3 had the whole Flood thing going on, and we stole the weapon-overheating thing and the way the plasma grenade particle effect works.” So Doak knows Halo’s core loop is strong, and credits its roots as a Mac realtime strategy game for its non-player-centric action, its AI and its openness, the latter of which feels fresh to this day. 

“One of the things that’s really interesting in Halo, compared to what’s happened since, is that what you see going on is generally what’s going on. There’s not much smoke and mirrors: some ridiculous cutscene’s playing just over there, which looks amazing, but you absolutely mustn’t go over and have a look. Some of my strongest memories of playing Halo were being outside, running about, where I’d been on the vehicles and stuff.”

And the weakest part of the experience? “The presentation was good at promising a lot; the whole attract sequence, with the choir and the ring world, is gorgeous. But I could never buy into the fiction of Halo. You’re playing that opening mission, that insertion where you drop down onto this ring, and you’re thinking, ‘Fuck! This story’s going places.’ Then the badass aliens are flying around in their ships and it all feels really naughty and fun. And then these little funny guys start doing slapstick, and it’s kind of, ‘OK, I’ll run with it.’ But the more I played of Halo in terms of the pitching of the story and the characters and stuff… I suspect that on the Bungie side it was quite tongue-in-cheek, but it was really important for [Microsoft] to have this shooter that appealed to their core market, which is teenagers and 20-something lads. I don’t think those two things ever sat together really well.

“I could never really work out what was going on while I was playing, my narrative motivation. Am I a robot or just some big guy? I’m doing the classic sci-fi thing of everyone going, ‘Oh my God, there’s this great secret that’s going to change everything.’ Then [the game] reveals them and they’re not terribly interesting. It seems to make that mistake of the thing you’re doing being so important that there’s no lull in the pacing. The minute you do something that’s going to change the outcome of the war, someone appears in a cutscene and goes, ‘No, no, no – now we’ve got to do this.’ It’s just relentless.”

Doak balks at the degree to which fanboys have turned such vacuous hokum into a sprawling mythology. “‘Of course it doesn’t explain everything,’ they’ll say. ‘You’ve got to read the book.’ Well, I’m sure there are better books to read.” 

What really annoys Doak as a professional developer, though, is the first game’s later level design. “It’s the Library [level], isn’t it? That horrible fucking endless cut-and-paste. ‘Now I get to do the same thing over there.’ The opening part of the game, in terms of pacing and stuff, is just really sexy and engaging: ‘I’m not sure how the combat mechanics work, but I’m in a shooter. Shit, there’s someone flying at me! I’d better hide. I can use the vehicles as well? Ooh.’ Then it gets to this part where you’re endlessly on foot with the same bloody attack patterns coming at you again and again. And those annoying things that shoot you with lasers. That’sHalo’s biggest crime: ‘That was really good. Did you like that? Well, you get to do it again now. And again.’

“It’s funny, because that wouldn’t happen now. People would look at the drama and entertainment and novelty of levels in a game, and someone would say, ‘Look, I’m sorry, but this is just cut-and-paste crap here. Just take swathes of it out. We’re not worried about the game taking ten hours to play through.’ It’s just padding. Or something someone had done that no one had the heart to tell them to take out.”

Doak’s more than happy to laud the art style, though, even if it’s not perfect: “A lot of the things that look gaudy about the flak and particles and stuff are actually very well cued game signals when you’re playing. There’s a lot of tracer stuff going around that’s all colour-coded nicely, so it helps you unpick what’s going on and makes more confusing situations readable. But there’s a lot of what we used to call ‘programmer pink’, when a programmer makes up a colour for something with some obvious hex value.”

And while generally praising Halo’s multiplayer component, Doak admits that when he finally did get a chance to play it he was too far behind the competition to be hooked. The floaty vehicle handling is also singled out for particular criticism. “I suspect the reasons are all to do with physics performance,” he notes. “It’s a costly part of the runtime, so having everything a bit slower makes it easier. You get fewer collisions and stuff. That’s why it’s like that, I’m sure.”

He struggles with the inventory system, too, which is to suggest that the system struggles to properly accommodate its players. “I bet you the fanboys can do it with their eyes shut, but I’ve found that any attempt to manage your inventory in a firefight ends badly. You’d be hacking away at something and some guy drops a cool gun, but you know that if you go over there you’ll spend ten seconds, which feels like an hour, jigging around.”

Many of these issues have been dealt with, or at least improved, throughout the series, but others have not. Story tends to be the sticking point, and Doak’s most damning remark is the one that rings truest: “I played Reach and just couldn’t remember if I’d finished the third one. There was some big boss battle with a spidery thing that you climbed on… I can’t remember any of the rest of it.

“What they did was start to erode the thing that was interesting about the first one, which is that you’re the über-soldier. They diluted the pool… When Bungie bought themselves back out of Microsoft, people were going, ‘But they’ll never get to make anotherHalo!’ And you think, ‘Yeah, and thank Christ for that.’ Surely they were fed up of making it. They must have been.”

Tomorrow we'll sit down with Climax design director Rhys Cadle to discuss Resident Evil 4. You can read our original review of Halo: Combat Evolved here, and you might also be interested in our Halo: Combat Evolved Anninversary review.