So before I start this up, I’d like to quickly let ya’ll know why I am writing this.  There is a gaming website called The Escapist that holds a host of great gaming or at least nerd based video series, ranging from Zero Punctuation to a certain show called Extra Credits. (They also have quite a good forums that I am beginning to check out, watch for me I’m Zamic, but that’s besides the point.) This specific show recently had an episode called “Playing Like a Designer Part 1″. It talks about a process that game designer uses to experience a game, while at the same time analyze said experience, so they can catch the most minute details.

For more check it out down below, great video. While you’re at it you should check out their other videos, after you are done reading of course. It’s a fantastic show that talks about games in a more serious manner than, “Hey looky there Bob it’s purty and the gun goes bang!” Especially if you are interested in games as a career, these guys are great for information. I’ll most likely throw a permanent link to these guys over in the sidebar.

So I’ll admit I was interested in the process they described, so I said hell with it and set out to try it. As I didn’t exactly have any new games to try it with because like most people these days, I’m broke, I decided to try it with a friend’s copy of Halo:Reach he had left at my place, as mine has been broken for a month or so now. Another friend of mine popped it into the Xbox, we turned off my computer to cut down on noise, turned off the light, turned up the sound on my old TV and prepared to critique. Before I continue I would like to point this isn’t a review per say, I am not comparing Halo to any other games, this game has been out for far too long to do a flat out review, what I am going to do is summarize all my experiences with examples from the first level. Credit to my friend who played this with me at the time, we brainstormed many of these ideas.

Right off the bat we don’t actually start commenting on what we are experiencing at the moment, we start commenting on what we remember experiencing our first time through, and from the playthroughs we have made since then. As we are running through we realize that Bungie had missed a lot of chances to really pull the players into the game. For those of you have never played Halo: Reach the first level, Winter Contingency, throws the player into a deserted area of Reach that has fallen off the Comm grid. Noble team has to investigate before they get to any actual combat. The first time through, this is interesting. However on multiple playthroughs the dialogue, warnings and few clues presented by Noble Team become simple background noise as players rush ahead as quickly as possible, eager for a fight and the points that come from said fight. An easy example is through a certain hallway you hear a scrambling in a duct and one of Noble team warns you to be careful. What happens if you aren’t careful, what happens if you fire randomly at the walls, jump around, throw grenades? Nothing. Nothing at all.

So chalk that up as revelation #1, make gameplay line up with dialogue, don’t just have an imagined threat, if someone yells to be careful, give the player a consequence for not being careful. What is more immersive, having someone yell be careful, hearing a skittering in the air vents, then just walking on to the next room where you have a generic fight with a group of enemies you were expecting, or rushing on past that room and having an alien leap down and nearly kill you because you gave away your position? What if you actually put some effort into sneaking, and were able to sneak up on the alien descending from the roof and be able to assassinate him? To me at least, that would be a hell of a lot more engaging and would at least break up the rush from fight to fight.

Credit to halolordkiller3 on Photobucket

So after those comments we made it to the first combat sequence. We had decided that we would try and make this experience as immersive and intense as possible, so we had the difficulty set on Legendary and no skulls on whatsoever, particularly no Grunt Birthday Party regardless of how amusing it is. Kind of hard to take things seriously when you see confetti and hear cries of joy whenever you shoot a grunt in the head ya know? Add onto that the unspoken idea of taking the combat seriously, and we were gaming soldiers ready for war. We quickly slaughtered our way through the first fight, rarely needing to use cover. The next fight we got our asses handed to us a few times, the AI being entirely brutal, but eventually we figured out a winning strategy. I’ll be coming back to that AI bit in a little bit, but we proceeded on. We began using a technique where of one of us pulled direct attention from behind a piece of cover while the other flanked, taking out enemies in the back and assassinating elites, with that under our metaphorical belts, we were able to quickly clear out the proceeding bases. With very few deaths as well, and we were never said back to the previous checkpoint. The best part? We actually used words like flank, yelled out to each other where incoming enemies were coming from, when we threw grenades, when a high profile enemy was killed. And we had a hell of a lot of fun. By the end of the level we both had to admit we had way more fun playing that level than we ever had before. Now it may sound like this is praise for this game. It is not. Let me explain.

We had to make this experience for ourselves. Don’t get me wrong, I am glad that Halo:Reach is a game that we were able to have this dynamic FPS experience, not just killing enemies, but also using strategy to increase our chances of survival and, to be a little scientific, having more of our brain power actually involved in the game, in other words creating more immersion. In general I have enjoyed playing the Halo series, but nothing stands up to how much fun it is to assassinate a powerful elite while your buddy takes cover and fires from the hip to get their attention. I found myself far more excited when I saw enemies on the horizon because I knew it was a new problem to solve. It was an awesome experience, and I found myself bringing those habits into multiplayer, and enjoying that much more too. But as I said, my friend and I had to make this experience. I had played Legendary before, and we sure as hell didn’t play like that. It was basically trial and error. The worst part of this, is there is a solution, there is a way to actually make your players think and play like that.

Here’s where we get a little game designy. The first idea that pops into my head of how to make my experience with my friend a universal one is this. You start a player off, give him an easy fight at first, but then begin to ramp it up. Have the first few easy fights teach them the basic controls, but then have the player and their entourage get pinned down. Have a massive enemy group beyond some cover that if the player just rushes in guns blazing, will die automatically. If say, the player is fighting alone, have an NPC(Non-player character) yell to them to flank the enemy, pointing in a general direction, and instruct them to sneak up from behind. If he has a friend with him, have the NPC tell one to go up to a forward position to pull fire, while the other flanks. Since any other action gets the player killed, after a few fights like this, this will become habit for the play, and with this habit, the player will be forced to think more strategically as to environmental layout of the next fight. Credit to Extra Credits by the way, they did a bit on how to make tutorials engaging and useful, and this is a pretty good example of what they were explaining.

The obvious thought to this is, “Well doesn’t Gears of War style play do this? Requiring you to stick to cover?” No. By requiring you to attach to chest high walls like a bug on fly paper defeats any challenge. It becomes easy to spot places to take cover, where to flank, so on, making a possible exciting moment boring and linear.

Next bit to nitpick, exploration. Bungie dropped the ball on this one. Hard. In the first section of the level before the first combat sequence, you see the bodies of a marine who was “interrogated”. Pretty grisly to say the least. What your teammates forget to mention is the pile of civilian bodies off to the side in the dark. That was freaky. But we’d never seen it before, meaning the impact was much less than if we had seen it on our first playthroughs. We never would have noticed it if weren’t specifically looking for the smallest details. For all the good it did, they might as well have not put it there. Later on in the level when we had to clear out the forts, my friend and I proceeded to search it, for ammo and to see if we missed anything on our other playthroughs. Inside we found dead bodies of marines and overthrown furniture, all signs of a big fight, all signs the marines didn’t go down easily. But on a normal playthrough who would have paid attention to this? Nobody. You can’t simply expect most gamers to explore games just because.

Here’s a scenario, what if instead of just having to clear the bases of enemies, what if you had to clear the bases of enemies, and then search the bases to see if you can discover why the Covenant are here. Maybe to recover some Covenant tech. The reason is irrelevant. What if you had to search each building, and inside wasn’t just a couple dead marines and a few pieces of furniture, but marines brutally killed, splashes of blood on walls, broken pictures of families, bullet holes and plasma burns covering the ceiling. We all know the Covenant are the bad guys, but wouldn’t that make you want to make you kill the bastards, make it feel more personal? That’s what good immersion is meant to do, and I think Bungie missed a great opportunity to add a little where it is greatly needed. Beautiful environments and graphics only go so far.

And for my last trick of the night, I will go to an old favorite of every game critic who is worth his sack of potatoes. SUPER INTELLIGENT AI. Tell me if this has happened to you. You are sneaking up on an enemy, haven’t fired a shot, haven’t made a sound, you have teammates firing at him from the other direction, and when you come within ten feet of him he turns around and murders you. Or how about this one, you are fifty feet away, its dark, you’re in a bush, and somehow, SOMEHOW, every single enemy sees you when you move an inch closer, and all of a sudden you’ve got a gap where your heart used to be. Lemme guess, happened to you a lot? Why am I not surprised. This not just a Bungie problem, I’ll give them that, this is a lot of game developers. So to any game developers out there who may be reading this, yes we want challenging combat, but that DOES NOT mean you need to give enemies X-RAY VISION. Intellegent AI=/= Superpowered AI. This often got in the way when I tried to flank an elite, only to have him turn around, and in one fluid and beautiful motion, turn my head into a splattering of red pixels on the pavement. It’s a pain. Literally.

To sum this up, this is just one person’s look at a rather popular game. Some may say that the game isn’t meant to do what I mentioned, and that expecting more than what it is is unreasonable. Is it really? Is it really unreasonable to ask that game developers do more than make sure that when you pull the trigger something dies? That is a gross over-simplification, but as the consumers we have to point out what we want if we want anything to change, and I sure as hell want games to advance, and reach their full potential. Catch you next time.