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| Story and Gameplay Integration | |
| Posted By: Narcogen <narcogen@rampancy.net> | Date: 1/12/07 2:31 a.m. |
In Response To: The Halo Campaigns. My review. (3Suns) : You know, it is interesting. In another thread about a month or so ago, : Sep7imus mentioned that he felt Gears was very much along the lines of : "get bomb, ok now, take bomb to cave, ok that didn't work, now go try : this" kind of thing. The "that didn't work" angle I find interesting. At some point, I'm going to do a review of the level objectives you're given in Halo 2, both in cutscenes and in the game menu, and see how many you actually achieve. Not as many as we might assume, I think. (I wish I could find his post. The sentiment was
That's pretty much FPS play. I remember Ferrex remarking awhile ago on what his job was vis a vis player interaction. At the time he was working on those times when the player is interacting with the environment using a gun. Which is pretty much all the time. Think about what Halo allows you to do:
Anything involving vehicle or machine (elevator) operation is a subset of "move". So does running away, taking cover, etc. Shooting, throwing grenades, and operating vehicle weapons falls under "attack". Level objectives are, essentially, strings of these actions. Move there, attack them, press this. The art in it all is not in trying to come up with something different, but making the same things look different, so that you don't feel that you're just moving, shooting, and pressing buttons. : For me, the Halo campaigns are "Ok, now, run over there and flick that
There is something similar about the Master Chief (in the game) and the Marathon security guard as protagonists. They are almost completely bereft of initiative. They never decide to do anything. They are told. Usually by an AI. Marathon uses that mechanism, in part, to tell a story about heroism and fate. Perhaps Halo is building to that as well. You could also argue there's a meta-story there, a story about storytelling, in which the story of the Master Chief is the story of being a classical hero, a person who has to achieve great acts at the behest of others for reasons he doesn't quite understand himself, and who does not have the freedom to do it his own way, or to decide NOT to do it. We do see a bit of initiative from the Chief in a couple of cutscenes-- when he suggests using a grenade to blow the engine covers during The Maw, and when he suggests "giving the Covenant back their bomb". Of course, that's not within the context of gameplay. [snip] : The main reason why I feel that way about the Halo campaigns and I don't feel
Do you mean the story of Gears is dumbed down to the level of its story, unlike Halo? Or that Gears' gameplay is more complex, and better matches a complex story? : Halo is a FPS, which means the player is supposed to be the Master Chief.
In a sense I agree with what you're saying; but I have to admit I cannot think of a way of achieving this without more radical changes to gameplay than you suggest. Combat objectives could allow for more player initiative if level geometry was more open, allowing for multiple paths to the same objective. But I know what developers will say to that. If each and every combat encounter had two separate paths, you'd be able to finish the game and see only half the content, essentially. I think that makes developers nervous. Content takes time and money to develop, and once that time, money and energy is invested, they want the player to see that content. So instead of making a game you could play twice and never see the same thing happen, they string all the encounters together in a linear fashion to make sure you see it all. : In Halo, everytime a cut scene (in which Great Stories are told, and
In essense, Halo's story embodies the conflict you're identifying. How a character whose only special characteristics are strength, speed, resolve, and resilience, will have a massive effect on the fate of the universe (or not). Think of another epic story, like LoTR. The heroes there are hobbits-- absolutely ordinary individuals. They pick up an object on one side of the map, and deposit it on the other. Most of the time they are guided or instructed by others wiser than them. Sometimes they're captured and have to escape. Sometimes they must depend on companion characters for guidance, even when they can't fully trust them. Choice, most of the time, doesn't enter into it. : I never played Marathon, but I think that the way in which the story was
Marathon's story is deeper mostly because it is told in text. The distribution is also a bit better. In Halo, you're usually getting a cutscene at the start and the end of each level. In Marathon, you get terminal texts throughout a level, so the separation between stretches of gameplay and stretches of storytelling is less. That said, the integration of gameplay actions and storytelling in Marathon is nearly identical to Halo's. In Marathon you shoot things, go places, and push buttons. In Marathon you have an inventory, so you can pick up things and carry them places, which in Halo's campaign you don't have, but that's a minor point. : Anyway, in Gears, your action is the story. You are living it as you go.
The Chief is a grunt, too. He's a petty officer. He commands a squad of Spartans, but that's it. And in the context of the game, there are no Spartans. He never gives orders to marines (although Cortana does). He doesn't come up with brilliant plans. That's Cortana's job. He comes up with brilliant tactics. Some of them you come up with yourself. Some, like the stuff you have to go through in the engineering section in the Maw, the game gives to you, and you have to execute. : Hmm... maybe it is just the caffine in the chocolate I should never, ever
There are lots of comparisons to System Shock and Marathon, and since Bioshock is supposed to be the spiritual successor to System Shock, that makes some sense. I'm quite looking forward to Bioshock, myself.
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