: The arrows make me laugh every time I see them. I mean...wow.
: Sure, gamers have the full spectrum from smart to stupid on their side, but
: that's almost insulting. :)
Consider though: the arrows don't point where you're supposed to go, the arrows point to the Control Center. On one level, you happen to be going to the Control Center. On another level, you're going in the opposite direction and following the arrows would be counter-productive. And that's only those two levels which have arrows at all.
Granted, Halo 1 does have a rather railish feel to it, but I honestly like it for the most part, when you're supposed to be going to a specific location or objective, there are things in the game which make it easy to go there, if you follow them, if they make sense to be there. The level "Pillar of Autumn" is particularly good about that; there are all sorts of arrows on the floors pointing every which way, at every intersection, telling you where each hall goes. Some of the places they point, you have no need to go to, but there's arrows telling you how to get there. When I saw that, I didn't think "cheap gameplay device" but "good ship design idea". Or in Oni, the elevators that actually - GASP - had signs above them that said "elevator", to distinguish them from all the other doors.
In the real world, buildings and ships really DO use the same type of door and hall over and over again, distinguishing them not by having "the round red door leads to engineering and the blue square door leads to the bridge", but the door to the bridge will say "Bridge", and the door to engineering will say "Engineering", and somewhere will be a map or guide telling you which halls to take to get there. It breaks from some FPS standards, but I rather like it. I just wish more real-world designers would copy ideas from gamers sometimes; vehicle control schemes, navigation techniques, etc. Game design really is the forefront of all sorts of interface design.
