In Response To: Re: My Thursday morning BBQ (just add flames) *lon (Sep7imus [subnova])
: This is intriguing to me, because in some ways I agree with you and in some
: ways I disagree.
: I've played through the campaign one time on Normal.
: The story seems all right, though it suffers from the same thing as (I
: assume) a lot of FPSs and the same thing as Halo: a strung together series
: of fairly arbitrary missions where you are given an objective to complete
: (often by someone whom you don't have much of a reason to trust) whose
: goal or purpose you don't really know or understand. This was the case in
: Halo when, say, you're following 343GS around the Library because he says
: so or in Halo2 when you, in both your characters, suddenly decide to do
: Gravemind's bidding. I know that as we become more familiar with the story
: and all of its intricacies, these reasons will make more sense and be more
: compelling, as they did for Halo, but for now it all feels kind of
: arbitrary. (This is, of course, most exemplified by dropping you into a
: character with whom you haven't identified in the first game.)
: But, I think that this issue, like the sense that the campaign in general
: isn't deep or gripping, will actually get better with familiarity. We've
: barely scratched the surface of the complexity of the storyline. Think how
: long it was after Halo came out that we really started picking apart all
: of its story, not to mention making vast speculations. That will all come
: in time.
: One of the responses above said that it felt like the game was pushing you
: more insistently through a more limited number of choices as to how to
: play the game. I couldn't agree less. The choices as to how to play the
: game feel almost limitless to me, much more than they did in Halo. The
: ready availiability of numerous vehicle, for one thing, gives you lots of
: choices as to how to approach a given situation. In fact, I'm sure that
: none of us played the campaign the same way the first time we played it.
: (One of the things I LIKE about both games is how Bungie uses story,
: atmosphere, and dialogue to influence your choices, without forcing you to
: do it their way: think of the beginning of The Silent Cartographer; did
: ANYONE even think of going the wrong way around the island the first time
: they played? No, of course not. I fully expect that Halo2 will turn out to
: be replete with similar moments where the action of the game strongly
: suggests that you go one way but you don't HAVE to.)
: As far as actual gameplay, I am a bit diappointed that it seems to be more
: twitchy and run-and-gun-y than Halo, which felt more tactical to me. This
: is probably because I am not all that great at the whole twitch-fest genre
: and one of the things I appreciated about Halo was that it allowed for and
: rewarded tactical thinking and a slow-paced approach. I am not concerned
: about the difficulty of Legendary because, frankly, it SHOULD be
: incredibly hard. It was on Halo when we all first started and I didn't
: finish Halo on Legendary for about a year. (Think of the alternative; what
: if Halo2's Legendary was just as easy as Halo's is now? How satisfying
: would that be?) It will get easier.
: One thing that does REALLY bug me is the pop-in of graphics. I would have
: never thought that I would have a technical gripe with the game; I'm not
: enough of a gamer to spot the kinds of technical issues that long time
: gamers complain about. But, the pop-in, and not just during cutscenes, has
: a real anti-immersive effect. It's much harder to feel like you're in the
: game than it was with Halo, and I think it's because of that, since the
: graphics themselves are much more compelling (though often a bit
: "shiny" for my taste - if we're gonna have that much detail, I
: want things to be a bit dirtier).
: Overall, I think you're comparing your initial reactions to Halo2 to your
: long-term reactions to Halo. That's not really fair. So much of what we
: love about Halo isn't really in the game. We, the community, put it in
: there. Now when you walk around TSC it's not just TSC; it's that place
: where Randall Glass first launched warthogs. Halo and Truth and
: Reconciliation are these places with precipices that taunted us forever
: until people like Frogblast got down to the bottom. The Belly of the Beast
: isn't just a hard part of the level; it's the agreed upon (mostly) hardest
: part, the one that Mike Miller did without firing a single shot on
: Legendary. Blood Gulch isn't just a box canyon in the middle of nowhere,
: it's the home of Donut and Sarge and Griff. The Maw final run isn't just a
: fun final run; it's the site of the Maw 700 and the place where (to take
: my favorite example) Team 7hr33 actually launched a warthog off of an
: exploding Flood carrier form while speeding through to the end.
: Don't worry. There's plenty of room for that kind of thing, and more, in
: Halo2. We'll just have to start putting it there.
: -Sep7imus
i don't post often, but this is truly a theraputic thread for me. i've been struggling with my true feelings for the game since i picked it up at midnight nov. 9th. i'm a halo fan first, and i'm a gamer second. it's really a relief to read other "halo fans" thoughts about this. while i found myself in agreement with ducain, this post from Sep7imus has given me light at the end of the tunnel. always a new opinion with a fresh perspective from the community, which is really why i love halo to begin with. it is an intelligent, thought provoking story, and that's the exact description of the people in its community. here's to great discussions, and future rampant speculation.
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