: It's amazing how this theme keeps coming up. Whether or not Halo started out
: as a Marathon sequel is pure conjecture. I personally don't believe this
: to be the case for the simple reason - why would Bungie have made a
: Marathon sequel at this point in time? Although development on Halo began
: some years ago, the original Marathon engine was already quite dated and I
: can't believe that any game developers in their right minds would create a
: new game that depended on newbies to go back and play an old game.
: Remember that Marathon is heavily driven by its story and there would be
: just too much story to convey at the beginning of Halo were this to be the
: case. On top of that, we have Bungie making it clear that the Halo
: Universe is not the Marathon Universe and it's pretty hard to see Halo as
: a sequel. Further, although there are many similarities, there are even
: more inconsistincies and incompatibilities that any pretense of Halo ever
: being considered as a sequel becomes too hard to swallow.
: Let's step out of the realm of rabbid gamers trying to find significance in
: arcane plot elements and step into the minds of the developers. You have a
: series of very successful games on your hands, but nothing nothing that
: has ever made the big time. There are fans to be sure, but the fanbase is
: limited, and most of them use Macs while the real gamers are on consoles
: and PC's. Although your more recent games have incorporated the latest in
: gaming technology and have been successful, Marathon remains the most
: entheusiastically embraced game you have ever done. You want to break into
: the greater gaming community and you want to build on your past successes,
: but you can't expect the market you hope to sell to to be familiar with
: your earlier games.
: I believe that in this frame of reference, Bungie chose to use Marathon as a
: foundation for the development of Halo, but not as its prequel. They took
: what they thought worked well in Marathon - FPS action, science fiction, a
: compelling story, AI's and battleroids, and simplified things to make it
: easier for the masses to get into gameplay. In many ways the Pfhor and
: their client races became the Covenent and instead of them being
: enslavers, they became religious fanatics bent on humanity's destruction.
: Since modern gamers had too short an attention span to be expected to read
: a bunch of backstory on a series of terminals, everything had to be
: conveyed through cutscenes. Beyond this, Halo and Marathon completely
: diverge. The fact that the Marathon symbol was incorporated into Halo is a
: nod to Bungie's past and nothing more.
Up to this point, I'm in 100% agreement with you. Nice analysis of the motivations, and I think you're spot-on with your conclusions.
: Don't get me wrong - Halo is a very nice game. It's a lot of fun, but I find
: the cutscenes to be an incredible distraction to gameplay and I find the
: action to be surprisingly tedious in spots. As I read in a recent review
: of Doom 3, much of Halo can be summarized as - enter room, kill all the
: monsters inside, enter next room. Marathon has so much more depth,
: particularly in the development of its story, that I'll never tire of it.
: That's whay I claim that Halo is a dumbed-down version of Marathon. I
: understand why Bungie made it this way, but it's hard to extol its virtues
: when we know how much better it could have been. The one thing Halo is not
: is a sequel to Marathon, nor was it ever likely meant to be.
Bah. I spent 6 or 7 years pretty heavily immersed in the Marathon storyline. I've spent the last 3 or 4 heavily immersed in the Halo storyline.
I think that BOTH games can be described by review you mentioned (enter, clear, move on) - but I wouldn't do so for either one. I strongly disagree that there's more depth to the Marathon storyline; at heart, they're both space operas, and in fact both rather cheesy, but both are pretty engrossing (there's nothing wrong with cheese, when you come down to it), and both have plenty of backstory behind the skimpy bits you actually SEE. The difference is that Marathon's backstory was written primarily by the fans, and Halo's backstory was written primarily by Microsoft employees. I can certainly see why fans would lean towards their own work in a comparison... but if you step back and look at the bigger picture, there's really not a lot of difference between the two, in terms of complexity. If anything, Halo's storyline is MORE complex (though a good deal of it never actually makes it into the game).
