Posts on Current Forum | Archived Posts
|
|
|
||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
| Frequently Asked Forum Questions | |
|||
|
||||
|
|
|||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| Search Older Posts on This Forum: Posts on Current Forum | Archived Posts | ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| Discovering the Halo Story: the meta-meta-game | |
| Posted By: Ciarán <halo@ciaran-walsh.com> | Date: 1/29/08 11:23 a.m. |
In Response To: Criticism of Bungie storytelling (phatcorns) Halo 3 is a great achievement. It is a game with many aspects to it, each of which have different appeals. Some players are into the multi-player aspect, even to the extent of never touching the single-player campaign. Some players love expressing their creative side using Forge to create new mutiplayer experiences, or creating machinima, or creating screenshots and clips to share with others. Some players just want to run through the campaign and get their achievements and "finish the game", while others enjoy co-op and the meta-game with campaign scoring turned on. Each of us is some mix of these kind of players, and Halo 3 has something for all of us. And then there's the aspect of all the Halo games that I like to call the meta-meta-game, which is about working out the details of the Halo universe and the story told or alluded to in the games. Everyone who plays the campaign is exposed to this meta-meta-game to some extent, in that you are given enough plot to move you from level to level and objective to objective, with hints here and there that there's more to be found if you want to go look. As you go deeper into the meta-meta-game, you are rewarded with more understanding, but often more questions too :) You can expand the game by including the novels, the graphic novel, the comics - and the Halo Story Page and forums like these. The more you dig the more you find, and the more you come to appreciate the universe that Bungie has created, and the curiosity and inquiry that it engenders in the story fanatics :) You "win" the meta-meta-game by learning and understanding more, and interacting with the other like-minded players that have begun to look behind the curtain and not take this first-person shooter at face value. Just look at this thread and the discussions about the Flood and Gravemind for example. There have been many threads like this in the past, and I hope for more in the future. Bungie's storytelling is multi-layered, and is only part of what they want to achieve with the Halo games. First and foremost they are games, and the multi-player social experience, the fun of playing Halo, either on your own or with friends, that is a big part of what they wanted to do, and I think they got that right. I keep going back to play Halo 3, and I kept going back to Halo 2 in its day. So did most of XBox Live, before Gears of War turned up :) But beyond the fun of the game, there's the fun of trying to work out the story. In the same way that if the game was too easy it wouldn't be as much fun, if the meta-meta-game was too easy it also wouldn't be as much fun. The muti-layered approach Bungie takes is partly by necessity. They need to draw people into the game and immerse them enough to want to continue, to find out what happens. And this has to work for people that never played Halo:CE or Halo 2. So at that level the story has a light touch to not get in the way too much, providing enough of a thread to string a series of fun tactical encounters together that bring you from the crash-landing in the jungle to stepping back into your hibernation capsule - coming full circle. At the simplest level it's "go here, do this, kill the aliens, and repeat" - and because we're a soldier doing our duty, we do what we're told, we don't really question why, we're just a tool fulfilling our purpose. John's story is simple enough, and in many ways not the most interesting part of the Halo universe. He's too much of a golem, to borrow Jillybean's phrase. In addition to the main story thread needed to move the game along, Bungie adds further layers to the story, some more obvious than others. These are conveyed through cutscenes that can be skipped, terminals that can be ignored, manuals that can remain unread, books that can remain unbought, and so on. They cannot tell the whole Halo story through the game - it would get in the way of the fun - and so they have to rely on the other media to flesh things out, media that are not so interactive and perhaps more suited to one-way conveying of information. At the same time the game has hints and pointers in it that can prick your imagination. For example, when you're busily destroying the power source in the Scarab to blow it up, you can do this without stopping to think why it was built this way, and what is the shield actually protecting, and why does it look like there's orange worm-like strands behind the shield that are uncannily like those found in the Hunters, and why are they writhing around, and who actually is driving this thing anyway, and isn't its main weapon like a big version of the Hunter's gun? OMG, maybe the Scarab is really a big version of a Hunter!?!? What are the Hunters anyway? How can I find out? Where do I go to get more info? And so you get drawn into the meta-meta-game, and end up in places like this :) With this perspective I think you could say that Bungie tell the story reasonably well, given that the constraints of producing a fun game come first. As for immersion, well I find myself pretty immersed in the FPS part of the experience, and I don't think the story-telling draws me out of that too much. For example, for me one of the emotional highlights of Halo 3 is when you finally reach Cortana and rescue her. Even though it was a cutscene, it was me that had fulfilled the promise and rescued her. It's not the same kind of immersion that I found in some of the Myst games, which really didn't lead you too much, and left you always in the first person, leaving it up to you to discover more as you went along, but I think for an FPS game it's immersive enough. As another example of how immersive Halo is, I remember firing up my original XBox for the first time and loading in Halo, and watching the initial cutscene. My first thought was that the cutscene graphics weren't that amazing, when after a little while I realised that this was actually the game engine, and my thoughts became "Cool!", since to me that meant that the action wouldn't be interrupted in the same way that a pre-rendered cutscene with completely different levels of detail, etc., would have done, taking me out of the game experience. The cutscenes use the same models and characters, and flow relatively seamlessly from the gameplay - with the glaring exception of the texture popping in Halo 2, which was a real dissapointment for me. On balance, I think Bungie's choices and compromises they made in the storytelling throughout the Halo series of games were probably good enough, and there's enough other sources of story information available for those who want to go and dive more deeply into the Halo universe, in formats where the Bungie writers can more clearly express their vision. Of course, like all good showmen, Bungie have left us wanting more, and have intentionally been vague at times and left room for speculation. After all, would we be having these kinds of discussions if we knew all the answers? "Through a crack too wide there comes no wonder" Ciarán.
| |
|
| Replies: |
The HBO Forum Archive is maintained with WebBBS 4.33. |