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| Re: Who cares about Halo's story? Article | |
| Posted By: scarab | Date: 12/31/06 3:56 a.m. |
In Response To: Re: Who cares about Halo's story? Article (Rockslider) : I have to admit, that oversized triffid in Halo 2 had me a little mystified
The lowest spot for me was travelling down that pointless shaft to get to the lab. My partner was watching me play and said, "You're not enjoying this are you?" I said, "how do you know?" The reply was, "I can see your face". : As for my own position on the story business, I've enjoyed reading plenty of
: Occasionally you hear people talking as if it's automatically a good and
Games and especially fps games are probably the worst medium to pick to tell a complex, character driven story. In addition, if you want to explore a character's character then the worst thing you can do is make him/her a player character. 90% or more of that character's time on screen is spent under the player's control. That's wasted time when you want to express what's going on inside his/her head. To make it worse, if you want to show what the character is thinking then you have to steal control from the player to make the character emote/react in the ways that you (the story teller) want. (Ignore what the player might want to do.) To be fair, Bungie didn't steal the Arbiter from us to show what he was thinking. They just left us guessing. A whole bunch of stuff happened to the Arbiter. But what on Earth did he think about it? Us players can have our opinions but none of us know. As a player character, he had a bunch of tasks to perform, to keep us players busy. So we performed them to reach the end of the game. The Arbiter knew why the Brutes had turned. He could have told Half-Jaw but he didn't. That would have meant wrestling control from us and making us watch character exposition. Bungie decided not to harm gameplay but, in the process, they sacrificed the character side of the equation. OTOH, the players were forced to perform tasks that many of us didn't want to do. So both parts suffered: character and gameplay. Games are all about the player. If you think that your story is more important than the player then you really should use a different medium. If you want to tell your story that much then write a novel or make a film/tv series, or a play, whatever. : It's up to the developer to decide what sort of
For me, h2 didn't deliver on the mental side and it didn't deliver on the physical. But that's old news, we have Halo 3 to look forward to. Bungie are already tackling one of the biggest problems: making the Brutes interesting to fight. I think that they have made great progress with the look of the Brutes. They have probably improved death animations (ragdolls don't die in interesting ways, they just fall down). We'll still have Grunty dialogue, with Joe!!! Bungie have made interesting adversaries before, maybe the Brute makeover will be a resounding success.
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