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The Culture War thread has been heavy on War and light on Culture of late so I thought I might offer this as something of palette cleanser.
I've been playing through the original Halo trilogy in split-screen co-op mode with my kids and while I hesitate to call one of the most successful franchises in video game history "underrated", I do feel like people sleep on just how tight and well executed the story-telling in it was.
Clint Hocking, whose work on the Far Cry franchise probably deserves its own essay, is credited with coining the term "Ludonarrative Dissonance" to describe a situation where in a video game's narrative elements are contradicted by the game's ludic elements IE the player experience. What Halo has is the opposite of this. A "Ludonarrative Harmony" if you will, where in the experience of playing the game reinforces its narrative themes and vice-a-versa. So lets talk about those themes...
The Year is 2552 and humanity is at war with an interstellar empire calling itself "The Covenant", a war that humanity is loosing. (Gamers of a certain age, please stand for your national anthem)
Our story begins with a lone starship, the Pillar of Autumn, fleeing a terrible battle and choosing to strike out into deep space rather than risk leading the foe back to Earth. The first lines of dialogue we hear in the entire franchise is our captain asking, "Did we lose them?" only to receive a negative response. In their flight our unwilling Argonauts have come upon the titular Halo, a Bishop Ring with a suspiciously Earth-like environment complete with California Redwoods and 9.81 ms^2 gravity. The ring was built by an extinct race known as "the Forerunners" (names in the Halo series tend to be a bit "on the nose") who the Covenant worship as divine beings. Mankind's Science and Intel officers believe that the ring might hold some secret that could change the course of the war and given that this is a war that humanity is not only losing but losing badly anything that might change the course of the war is naturally a top priority. And thus, we are introduced to our player character...
"Spartans" are surgically enhanced super-soldiers who are apparently kept on in suspended animation until they are needed. A "break glass in case of emergency" type deal. You, the player character, are woken to act as vessel/avatar for the Pillar of Autumn's resident AGI Cortana. Cortana being entirely software, cannot leave the ship or even press a physical button without someone to carry her and act on her behalf, and so she needs your help to investigate the ring, and by extension, hopefully save humanity.
Ultimately, Halo is "a big dumb shooter" in the same way that Gladiator is "a big dumb action movie". That is to say that, yes, it is big, it is dumb, but above all it is fun. and yet there's also a lot more going on under the surface for those inclined to dig which is where I feel the idea of "Ludonarrative Harmony" comes in.
One of fundamental problems that games like Wolfenstein and Call of Duty have is that it's very difficult to provide a narrative justification for why the player, an ostensibly base-model homo sapien, should be able to mow down multiple battalions worth of Nazis without getting mowed down in turn, or why some basic-bitch E-5 is constantly being offered the chance to shoot the cool gun or drive the fancy tank like they're some kind of make-a-wish kid. Halo neatly sidesteps this issue by giving a clear narrative reason for why you, the player, are so much more capable than the NPCs around you. You're a 6.8' hyper-athlete in power armor who has a benevolent super-intelligence riding shotgun in your head. This is sense of capability is further reinforced by how NPCs, both human and alien, react to you. Weaker enemies flee at your approach while friendly NPCs will cheer you on and will freak out if you die. Combine this with Jaime Griesemer's now famous "30 seconds of fun every 3 minutes" principle and what you get is a power fantasy that is not only exceptionally well executed but fully justified within the context of the narrative.
While this power fantasy is what makes Halo work so well as a "big dumb shooter" it exists in tension with the broader text of the narrative. Throughout the game, we are repeatedly reminded that humanity is on the back foot, that the Covenant are both more technologically advanced than humanity and more numerous. We do not know why they seem to be intent on eradicating us, only that they are. The human forces that we encounter during the campaign are almost always outnumbered. Covenant enemies and weapons, especially on higher difficulty settings, are almost always more deadly. Musical cues are either mournful or strident and desperate. There is this subtext to much of the dialogue that the ultimate fate of our intrepid crew will not be a triumphant homecoming. We are Spartans and the ring is to be our Thermopylae (I told you that names in the Halo series tend to be a bit "on the nose").
On its face value Halo is remarkably bleak and yet it also has something that I feel is sorely lacking in a lot of modern media. Sincerity.
As I've gotten older, and especially since having kids, I have found that I have less and less patience for deconstructionist takes, and subversion for subversion's sake. I don't want nihilism and moral ambiguity from my fiction. I get enough of that from studying history. What I want from my fiction is something to inspire and/or aspire to. Yes Halo is bleak, but it is also hopeful. And yes, I recognize that this sounds like a contradiction but it's not because what Halo's story is ultimately about is what do you do when faced with frightful odds or a seemingly hopeless situation? It's about what do you when your faith is shattered, and you find out that much of what you thought you knew about how the universe worked is revealed to have been a carefully crafted lie? It's about duty and loyalty. It's about the relationship between created and creator. It's that meme about "the masculine desire to perish in a heroic last stand" in video game form. It is all of these things, and I think that is why fans keep coming back to it.
I also don't think I properly appreciated any of this until I had the opportunity to experience it again through fresh eyes.
PS: As you might imagine I have opinions about the Paramount+ adaptation and subsequent games released after Howard and Griesemer stepped down, but that's material for a follow on post
As an early Wolf3d, Doom and Quake FPS PC gamer I always kind of sneered at Halo as one of those console gamer things that were beneath a man of culture like myself.
Sounds like I missed out.
Eh. In many ways I think Halo is overrated, and The LIbrary might be one of the worst FPS levels I have ever played in my entire life. That said, I think JeSuisCharlie accurately characterizes it's strengths. I actually haven't played a Halo game since I couch cooped Halo 3 when it came out. I meant to replay them recently, and then my XBox 360 died as soon as I took it out of storage. Alas.
I could probably spring for the Master Chief Collection on Steam whenever it's on one of it's frequent sales.
Halo had little competition in the "horror game" genre, and the flood is a great horror game enemy. However I believe it was a bad FPS enemy.
I personally hated the flood as an enemy in the halo games. The game basically conditions you to fight the covenant and then does a switcheroo where all the standard tactics and tools backfire when used against the flood.
Covenant weapons that are stronger against energy shields and weaker against flesh. The hardest enemies had energy shields.
The radar was suddenly useless because it was flooded with signals.
Most enemies would engage at distance and if you had worse ranged weapons you needed to close the distance and flank them. The flood just bum rushed you, the right move was always to just immediately start beck peddling.
The flood would resurrect dead bodies. Which works as a jump scare the first few times and then just requires you to bash bodies laying around so you don't get ambushed from behind while backpedaling.
The covenant enemies in the game were perfection though. They'd support each other with covering fire, engage you at their optimal distances. The elites would use cover to regenerate their energy shields forcing you to get close to break their cover or use well timed grenades to finish them off. If you didn't kill off their support units first they'd tear you apart while the elites recovered.
Ammo for any given weapon was often limited enough that long engagements would force you to switch weapons. You start the engagement with a good long range weapon, and then close distance and use a secondary short range weapon and melee attacks to cleanup.
Most covenant weapons were not hit scan, so there was some ability to dodge. But the needler would send a horrifying swarm of tracking needles after you that made finding cover very urgent.
Yeah, that was another thing that annoyed me about Halo, is the enemy AI went the wrong direction.
Since it keeps getting compared to Half-Life, I'll keep going. Half-Life introduces fairly dumb enemies, and then introduces smarter ones. You get to warm up on relatively dumb xeno-fauna, and then they throw marines at you, which talk, coordinate, dodge grenades, flush you out, flank you, etc. Now I know people have dissected how that worked and a lot of it was scripted to create the illusion of intelligent enemies. But it was still a really good illusion.
By contrast, Halo starts you off with really good enemy AI in the form of elites, and then halfway through the game swaps them out for retards that bum rush right at you. A sin doubly compounded by the fact that the game checkpoint saves, and you are consistently stuck in really annoying locked arenas fighting off boring hoards of flood. I positively loathed it.
For whatever reason, and I haven't played it recently enough to have a strong impression of why, Halo 2 and Halo 3 didn't seem as bad in this regard, even during the sections that were heavier on flood. Maybe the encounters were designed smarter, or at least less annoyingly. Maybe they changed the game mechanics to make it less annoying somehow. I think I remember Halo's health mechanic got dropped between games replaced almost entirely by shields? Whatever the reasons, after the flood appear in Halo 1, it's a far worse game for it.
I have a similar impression, and I think it's probably just that god-awful library level in Halo 1, which Bungie learned enough from not to repeat.
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