Halo 3 is a sucky single player game
There, I said it. And believe me, I understand that when you say something like that, you’d damn well better mean it, and back it up, because I’m just begging to be called bitter, reactionary. I just want to hate what everybody else loves. I am small-minded and I should just get over it.
But that’s not the case. I popped Halo 3 into my 360 fully expecting to love it and then I just… didn’t.
I am an avid FPS gamer, coming from the Doom tradition and yes, from the PC tradition. I love to bust in, guns blazing, reaction speed amped up to max, in the zone, a God of destruction. I’m looking for that same forced brain overclock that Geometry Wars provided, or Tetris Attack, or Soul Calibur. I recently got that fix playing BioShock and I was hungrily anticipating it from Halo 3.
But Halo 3 smacked me down, with shields. Pat Lipo will have me believe that Halo’s shield system enables me to perform heroic acts! Because I don’t have to worry about health, I can leap into the fray and be the demon that deep inside I know I am. But, for me at least, that’s not the case at all. Every time I start having fun, Halo holds up a little Stop sign, “Whoa there buddy! Sure you’re having fun now, but hiding behind a rock is fun too! Why not take a breather?” I can’t make my way through the furious battle over to that health pack and continue the carnage. I can’t load up on first aid kits and burn through them in a glorious rampage. I have to go and hide. Rampage for 15 seconds then hide and wait. I’m not a hero, I’m a huge fucking pussy.
But all of my friends have had a great time playing Halo3, what gives? Of course there’s multiplayer, which is fast and furious and which everyone loves. But they tell me that they loved the single player campaign as well. Here’s the thing, though, NONE OF THEM ACTUALLY PLAYED SINGLE PLAYER. “Oh the single player campaign is great, just make sure you play it co-op!”
And sure enough, co-op is the way to play. In co-op I can go in with guns blazing, wasting ammo and disregarding shields. And I die. I die and respawn and die again. And that’s sweet, because my stepson, who really actually does enjoy hiding behind a rock and only timidly peeping out to take a shot when he feels safe and comfortable, is hiding and staying alive and enabling me to die without facing any consequences. So there’s the rub: Halo needs to provide a single player experience that is as close to the co-op expreience as possible and it just doesn’t.
[Ed: Check out Patrick’s followup here.]
October 18th, 2007 at 4:48 am
So Halo doesn’t flow because it doesn’t force you to wander through empty levels to collect health packs and because you can’t get to a point where you have a savegame with not enough health(packs) that forces you to play a part of a level over and over again that would be easy if you managed your healthpacks better earlier? Isn’t that what we all love in first-person-shooters: searching and managing of health packs?
October 18th, 2007 at 7:40 am
Playing Halo, I found that I was playing and re-playing the same part of a level over again way more than I end up doing in “non-shield” FPS games, because I would invariably die before hitting the next checkpoint. Obviously your play style leads in the other direction. I just don’t want to be so careful on a moment-to-moment basis, it’s simply no fun for me.
Perhaps you’re right that searching for health packs is no fun. I felt like BioShock did a good job of that, though, by giving me enough cash during the battles that I could almost always replenish my supply of first aid kits between large battles. In a way, that’s the same effect as the shield system, except on a much larger scale, which might be an interesting avenue to pursue.
October 18th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
If you’re able to optimize the system in such a way that your character effectively becomes invincible (i.e. enough health packs to survive any encounter), doesn’t that make the game boring?
The Halo shield system allows the player take risks without punishing the player and forcing you to start over every time you fail. I’d much rather stay in the heat of battle and recharge my shields than restart from the last checkpoint. When you do fail, it’s generally your fault rather than the fault of the designer who didn’t do an adequate job of placing health packs in the environment, a difficult task in an of itself considering the wide range of player skill levels.
The shield system can act as an equalizer for players of different skill levels. Less skilled players have the opportunity to take a more cautious approach to encounters, like your stepson did, and still complete the game. More adept players don’t need to recharge nearly as often. The recharge system assures that every player will return to full health after each encounter, so you don’t have to worry about players getting to the next encounter with very little health.
Have you played the single player games in Call of Duty or Gears of War? Both of these games use a similar health system. Did you like them, or did you feel that they too were constantly forcing you to stop and hide?
October 18th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Those are good points, Sam, and I’m not sure I have a good answer for the “effectively invincible” question. My feeling is that I should not have enough health to be invincible but enough that I can go out and really perform sone gloriously foolhardy acts. It may be that I would be happier with the shield system if my shields didn’t tick down quite so fast.
I will say that I played Gears of War and I wasn’t nearly as frustrated by the shield system. I think that there were a couple of factors that helped make hiding more _active_ and therefore less boring. First off, Gears is all about jumping from hiding place to hiding place and, from those hiding places, attacking. It’s “active hiding”. While I’m crouched behind the pillar I’m looking for the next point to take, I’m popping up for aimed shots, I’m spraying with an arm out, lobbing grenades or I’m using the active reload. Gears just didn’t feel like I was being forced out of the action in order to recharge.
October 18th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
I just want to throw in some agreement here.
Now keep in mind that I suck as an FPS player. (Note for those keeping score though, Peter does not.) But here was my Halo experience: Run into an area, kill a guy, run away, wait, tap foot, run back into area, kill a guy (maybe 2 this time), run away, wait, tap foot, etc…
Honestly, and I feel like a big fucking shill for saying this, the best health system of seen lately was in Strangehold. Ok, so it made no fucking scense why Tequilla could heal himself at will. But from a pure game theory perspective it was brilliant.
The system, for those unfamiliar, is that the player fills up a meter by killing people. He gets more points per kill if he kills people in a manor the game deams as awesome so if I stand there and shoot a guy I get the baseline but if I dive on a cart and roll across the room guns blazing I get bonus points. Now, amoung other things, a segment of this meter can be exchanged for health at any time.
What this meant was the exact opposite of Halo. Halo rewards you by hiding. If I hide I get health back. Strangehold doesn’t penalize you for hiding… nothing happens at all. But what it does reward you for is fighting. It rewards you for playing.
So, lets say you’re in danger in each game, shields down (if in Halo) and low on heatlh. What’s the best plan? In Halo: run and hide. In Stranglehold: Go for broke, jump off the wall, slide down the banister, and either go down in a blaze of glory or, somehow, manage to pull it out and kill enough guys awesomely that you can heal through the danger.
Franly Strangehold certainly has it’s flaws. But here the guys in Chicago absolutely nailed it.
My main point being that if the best strategy is not to play the game than haven’t we failed as game designers?
-Rick
October 19th, 2007 at 8:42 am
Interestingly, way back when in the era of the original Halo the player was granted both a health bar and a shield bar. This, I feel, allowed both styles of gameplay. When I had full health I’d constantly find myself charging into the fray like a crazed fanatic spraying blasts with whatever weapon i had to hand confident that, even if my shield fails, I’ve got something to fall back on. Then when my health (invariably) went low I’d have to use a much more tactical approach, hiding behind cover and selectively picking off my foes. Well … that is until I found a health pickup and the fanatic reared his head again …
I really liked that system more, at least for the single player campaign at any rate, I wonder what swayed Bungie away from including the health bar and health packs in the sequels.
October 20th, 2007 at 11:51 am
Very interesting discussion, guys! Rick’s post has actually clarified something for me that just hadn’t ever clicked before, which is why I love PainKiller! PainKiller is all about rewarding the style of play that I love. The way they do it is similar to Stranglehold (though they do a bit better job of working it into the fiction). What happens is, after you kill an enemy, their corpse dissipates, leaving a “soul” behind. Collecting these souls replenishes your health. So, there are two important things going on here. The first is that I gain health by killing things so if I’m on a streak I get to keep going nonstop and the second is that the health drops where the bodies fell, so I am encouraged to run headlong into the fight because I won’t get the health if I hang back and take potshots. Now that I think about it, I LOVE this model. I really enjoyed playing PainKiller but I’d never really understood why. This approach really addresses a lot of the problems I have with both the shield system and the “healh crate” system.