HALO 4 & CEA NEWS
Brian Bendis, of Marvel Comics fame, once characterized Halo as this generation’s Star Wars. But while he was talking about its impact on gaming culture, the parallels don’t stop there, particularly when considering its quality. Almost to the letter, the 6 major games of the Halo series correspond to the saga. You have the highly regarded, but wholly referential first foray (Combat Evolved); the expansive, game-changing second (Halo 2); the disappointing, but bigger budgeted third (Halo 3); two lesser regarded sidetrips (ODST and Halo Wars); and a final, breathtaking, epic return to form (Reach).
Halo 4, in that regard, shows the series moving into completely uncharted territory. As Bungie’s last dance, Reach closed the door on a decade of work turning Halo into the touchstone for an entire generation of shooters. Microsoft, not about to let the crown jewel of their first-party lineup go gentle into that good night, passed the torch to 343 Industries, their own in-house development studio. Even with its numerous dizzying highs, players have always had a general idea of what to expect from the Halofranchise. Halo 4 represents the first time those ideas have been chased with question marks instead of periods.
We can all rest assured Bungie hasn’t handed the keys to the castle off to amateurs, at the very least. 343 Industries is a motley crew of expatriates from all corners of FPS gaming royalty: Microsoft’s own first-party A-Team joined up with a few hired guns from Bungie, the vast majority of now-shuttered Pandemic Studios (Mercenaries, SW: Battlefront, The Saboteur), and Certain Affinity, which itself was formed by an ex-Bungie employee, and has been responsible for everything from Call of Duty map packs, to assisting Valve with porting Left 4 Dead to the 360. On top of that, the studio started hiring new blood as far back as July 2010 for the sole purpose of beefing up development on the new Halo title.
The biggest question mark of all is whether that new blood means a new direction or new ideas. The company’s first benevolent act for Halo fans is giving the first Halo a fancy HD makeover for an XBox Live release. Halo Anniversary, due in mid-November, looks stunning, a fact thats even easier to validate since the game gives players an on-the-fly option to switch the graphics back to classic 2002 style whenever they want. While the XBLA title is indeed a godsend for fans, it’s hard to say what this portends for the future. Beneath the pretty veneer is the same old game that wowed console gamers back in 2002, and PC gamers condescendingly patted them on the head for, and started looking for graham crackers for them to hand out before nappie time. And while the Call of Duty and Gears of War crowd still rule the roost as far as sales are concerned, there’s still a level of sophistication to FPS gaming now that the firstHalo remains behind the curve on. Anniversary simply bodes well that Halo 4 will look spectacular.
The big problem with Halo is having something worth forming a game around, and while many gamers are content for Halo to be a multiplayer game first, single campaign later, it’s still only half the game, or at least should be. Once again, Star Wars is a quality guide here. All the sales in the world don’t amount to much without having a solid core to branch off of. When Halo 1 was first released, online multiplayer was still as foreign to console players as that monolith in 2001 was to the apes. It excelled in being accessible, and for a sense of scale to the in-game world not yet seen in the genre on consoles yet. Halo 2 earned its stripes at the time for an ambition that exceeded Bungie’s grasp, even with the insane amounts of work that went into meeting its release date, resulting in the infamous truncated cliffhanger ending. In scope, in gameplay, and in storytelling, the game makes the original look positively quaint. The multiplayer was an extension of that ambition, bringing staples of the PC online experience kicking and screaming into the new frontier.
Halo 2‘s multiplayer would’ve been stellar independent of the core game, but the fact is, it succeeded because Bungie had crafted a universe worth playing in to begin with. Halo 3, ODST, and Wars added twists and turns to the core gameplay, but while Halo 3 coasted on sales well into the millions based on pure unadulterated hype and a false sense of finality, many of its fans were nonplussed by its anticlimactic single-player, ODST was a wheel-spinning exercise, and Wars was an entertaining but threadbare experiment.
If there is hope to be found in Halo 4, it’s in the fact that Bungie felt it important to have 343 Industries observe during the creation of Reach, a game which recaptured the fire underneath the franchise, which seemed muted during the previous three titles. Reach is the first game in the series to truly feel like a planet-scale war is taking place, a war with weight and consequences for the player, culminating in the fact that the player, inevitably, loses that war. Everything about the game, including its multiplayer, stemmed from its story, the fatalism of the invasion of Reach, not the other way around, as it seems many console shooters develop these days.
Is this the kind of thing we can expect from the new title? Maybe, maybe not. However, the upside to Halo 4 is thatHalo 3‘s Legendary ending stranded Master Chief on a completely alien world. Judging from the trailer, and the concept art, we’re looking at a game with a blank slate. No Covenant. No Flood. Just Master Chief, Cortana, and, from what it looks like, in a continuing Star Wars theme, a Death Star with an exhaust port the size of Mongolia. The future of Halo is unclear, but the opportunity for the franchise to become something even greater than its origins in the hands of its new caretakers is now.
