Source: EUROGAMERS
Not for the first time, Halo's scriptwriters turn to Cortana for the answer: Master Chief's luminous AI companion, the damsel-in-distress within. Her voice has always been the steady hand on Halo's tiller, guiding the player through space and time - a mostly reliable narrator who offers exposition at every turn and, most importantly, brings a human voice into a soundscape otherwise filled with explosion and death.
It's the end of Halo 3 and the
world has ended with a bang, not a whimper. More specifically, it's ended with
our protagonist Master Chief riding a jeep off a flaming planet into the bay of
a derelict escape ship: a catastrophic boom, not a whimper, perhaps. The aliens
retreat, the flames turn to ember, the hoarse choir sets down its sheet music
and space is, finally, still. Microsoft's flagship trilogy ostensibly drifts
into history while developer Bungie, after working out its contractual
obligations, wanders off to work on something new - something to prove to
itself that Halo, the console shooter that changed everything, isn't the end of
its story.
Master Chief, though, has nowhere
to go. He has no home for Christmas, no lonely wife to reacquaint with, no
overgrown garden to tend to, no son to teach how to throw a plasma ball.
Beneath the rank and uniform he may be named John, but that ever-present helmet
snuffed out the pilot light of his humanity long ago. He is a voiceless weapon,
drawn in times of intergalactic crisis, sheathed when calamity has passed. So
he's left in stasis, a dreamless sleep in a forgotten ship watched over by his
only friend and companion, an AI girl called Cortana.
Five years pass - an age in video
games - and in this time Activision's Modern Warfare series rises to
prominence, knocking Halo down the most-played charts. A time of crisis; a time
for an old hero to take back old ground. It's the start of Halo 4, and Cortana
unsheathes Master Chief.
But while this one-man army has
renewed purpose and a new crisis to tackle, that lack of humanity is hidden in
plain sight. For a game so focused on saving the universe, the Halo series is
curiously devoid of people to save. It's filled with others to destroy, of
course, this time in the form of the Prometheans, an alien race of bipedal
insect knights and exploding robot dogs that fight against (and alongside)
Halo's more familiar enemies, the Covenant.
They provide the ingredients for
the sprawling three-way battles the series is known for and - while their
ability to warp and fly is an irritating combination - in their assured design
new developer 343 Industries shows that it's up to the task of expanding the
boundaries of the Halo universe. And it's a universe filled with weapons, more
weapons than ever before, the Prometheans adding their armoury of esoteric
rifles and machine guns to the already enormous array of killing tools. But people
to save? You won't find many of those here.
You can save yourself - but with
instant restarts and checkpoints, death is a setback that can be measured in
short seconds and the stakes are necessarily low. You can save your comrades,
the nameless cannon-fodder marines that accompany you into the fray from time
to time. But when their passing goes unnoticed, either by the game's story or
its systems, there's precious little motivation to take a bullet for these
ciphers.
Which begs the question: why?
When the only people you meet in your relentless dash from Pillar to Outpost
are high-ranking military officials or untrustworthy scientists, where's the
motivation? Why not let the aliens rule this space junk, these empty planets,
these clinically clean ships? There doesn't appear to be anyone else around to
protest anyway.
Not for the first time, Halo's scriptwriters turn to Cortana for the answer: Master Chief's luminous AI companion, the damsel-in-distress within. Her voice has always been the steady hand on Halo's tiller, guiding the player through space and time - a mostly reliable narrator who offers exposition at every turn and, most importantly, brings a human voice into a soundscape otherwise filled with explosion and death.
Cortana is dying. More accurately,
she is descending into rampancy, a form of AI Alzheimer's. Her deterioration -
wonderfully articulated by actress Jen Taylor - is the driving force behind a
story that is otherwise bulky but weightless, a tower of myth devoid of
meaning. So you must save Cortana but, in the end, it's Cortana who saves Halo
4. In a story in which you play the role of a weapon trying to save an absent
people, she provides a whisper of motivation in a chamber of emptiness, a touch
of love in a universe of bullets. Cortana answers the question why, even as the
rest of the game's bloated narrative struggles to say anything at all.
The four years of stasis have
brought more than just the decline of Master Chief's only friend. Modern
Warfare's influence has somehow seeped into Halo's feel and aesthetic. It's in
the beginning, as you haul yourself up an elevator shaft on the crumbling
Forward Unto Dawn ship, dodging incoming projectiles with QTE-lite inputs. It's
in Master Chief's iconic suit, now Teflon-coated like Sam Fisher ready for a
night on the tiles. It's in his weight, still unmistakeably floaty when you
jump but heavy-footed when you run. It's in the tactical packages dropped into
multiplayer when you score the requisite kill streak, and in the perks and
customisable dog-tags: all the borrowed trappings of Infinity Ward's success
added to the Halo recipe. It is, most obviously, in the control scheme, which
for the first time allows you to discard your Halo muscle memory in favour of
Modern Warfare's, aiming down the iron sights with a squeeze of the left
trigger.
But if Infinity Ward's presence
is felt in the details, the broad sweep of 343's Halo 4 is still pure Bungie.
It's a beautiful game, with none of the garish colours that spoiled the remake
of Combat Evolved last year. From lush, swampy foliage to craggy bronze
mountains, Requiem - the planet on which much of the game takes place -
presents diverse, picturesque landscapes. Halo has never looked better. And the
moment-by-moment play has all of the recognisable satisfaction: the meaningful
choices of what items to take and what to leave behind defined by the
two-weapon limit, the rhythms of advance and retreat defined by the recharging
shield. Halo's old inventions, untouched, distinguished.
Nevertheless, your assigned tasks
are over-familiar. Much of the game is spent racing from one location to the
next in order to press some crucial button or to destroy some important shield
generator. These objectives always come in threes, the repetition artificially
extending the length of what is a somewhat short campaign. 343's eagerness to
show that it can impersonate the Bungie touch is so overwhelming that there's
little room for novelty. A driveable bipedal robot dubbed the Mantis is the
most obvious invention, aside from the Prometheans and their guns, but
elsewhere the developer handles the universe conservatively, as if hoping to
learn imitation before attempting true extension - at least in the
single-player campaign.
In competitive multiplayer, by
contrast, there is a tightened focus: evidence of Microsoft's desire for Halo
to be taken more seriously in the eSports arena. Load-outs are more important
than before, with far fewer guns available on the battlefield for collection.
Rising up through the rankings unlocks new weapons, perks and armour options,
many of which have tangible competitive benefits (such as the ability to run
indefinitely or to deploy a sentry turret). It's undeniable that multiplayer
Halo has lost some of its purity in this fashionable move - although the
playing field will even out after a few weeks when dedicated players have
unlocked all of the perks.
Spartan Ops, another import from
Modern Warfare, offers Halo 4's most ambitious post-launch framework for
on-going adventure. A series of discrete 15-minute missions for up to four
players, each with an accompanying short film that develops the story, will be
released in weekly instalments over the coming months. The five missions that
comprise episode one are available at launch, providing yet more co-operative
engagement for friends, this time with badges and meta-objectives to keep you
playing. In their straightforward simplicity these missions offer some of the
most enjoyable co-op moments in the game - an example of 343 sensitively
folding new influences into the Halo mix.
At the end of Halo 4's campaign,
after the credits have rolled, 343 Industries posts a short message thanking
fans for trusting the company with their beloved universe and asking us to
remember that this is just a first step. It's a telling memo that reveals a
certain nervousness about the task at hand: a plea that we understand the
weight of responsibility these creators have felt in adopting Master Chief.
They can rest easy. Halo 4 is
authentic, and assures 343's role is more than a mere tribute act. Their
delicate yet sprawling work may be more continuation than true expansion - and
perhaps the true test comes in the next step - but for now, Halo returns with a
bang, not a whimper.
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