I wonder how difficult it was for 343 Industries to take over Halo with Halo 4. The new “Reclaimer Trilogy” may have originated in a flat refusal to let those sweet, sweet Halo dollars slip through Microsoft’s fingers, but it’s pretty obvious that the folks working at 343 love their Halo. Not just the multiplayer, either – right after starting up Halo 4, you’re prompted to install the Halo Waypoint, an application including vast reams of Halo lore, background, and side stories that are either true labors of love or very, very convincing imitations.
So you can’t fault these guys for not putting in their best effort. They’ve been saddled with an enormous, fairly thankless task – taking over a much-beloved flagship franchise as the New Guys after the original creators decided they’d had enough. And Halo 4 is eager – really, really eager. Bless its heart, it wants to be the Reclaimer to this new Mantle of Responsibility.
343’s first effort is a worthy game, and proves that the change of developers may actually bring new improvements and ideas to the franchise. But their desire to give their game its own identity clashes with their need to play it safe to retain old fans and fixtures. Like any novice effort, there are some kinks to work out.
Part of the problem is that H4 has to justify itself like no other Halo game has to date. Halo 3 ended on a very satisfying note. All major antagonists had been defeated. Most of the major plot arcs were resolved. There were other stories to tell – and, as Halo: ODST and Halo: Reach showed, they were poignant, powerful narratives that could refine their characterization as well as experiment with game mechanics.
Halo had become a genre with its own tropes. Covenant bad, humans (and Sanghelli, sometimes) good, Forerunners mysterious, Spartans stoic. Sticky grenades annoyingly lethal. Vehicles entertaining. And the paradoxical thing is that once you’ve decided what you are, you’re much more free to explore new things – something Bungie used to give Reach and ODST real depth. Because Halo 4 has to break new ground to justify itself, it has to spend much of its time establishing itself all over again.
The main campaign begins years after Halo 3, as a faction of fanatical Covenant separatists discover the Master Chief (who we can really start calling John-117) and his AI companion Cortana aboard the wreckage of the Forward Unto Dawn drifting in orbit around a mysterious artificial planet of massive scale. Chief wastes no time swinging back into the groove – but Cortana’s having problems. Halo AIs have an expected lifespan of seven years as their expanding minds literally tear themselves apart, and Cortana’s on year eight. Her every attempt to keep her sanity only frays it worse. There is no known cure.
And the middle of unexplored space surrounded by enemies is not the best place to call tech support.
After an emergency descent, our heroes find themselves on the surface of the Forerunner planet Requiem, trying to prevent an allied human ship from crashing onto the plant so they can return home. Alongside the familiar Covenant are “Prometheans,” strange mechanical beings created by the Forerunners, artificial intelligences manifested in physical form. The lord of these mad constructs loathes humanity, remembering it as an arrogant upstart from the days of the Forerunners, and would happily scour it from the stars – and now it can do so.
The conflict should be immediately apparent. As a shooter, Halo 4 requires hostile foes, dramatic setpieces, and all the military sci-fi trappings fans have grown accustomed to. As the first entry in a new blockbuster trilogy after the old trilogy so conclusively destroyed the existing antagonists, it’s required to introduce new antagonists and raise the stakes.
But all the best Halo stories, from the lonely ODST and mournful Reach to the tragic love story revealed in Halo 3’s terminals, have been personal. And the love between Cortana and the Chief (platonic, though it flirts with romance) is the emotional heart of the entire franchise and Halo 4 in particular. Their dialogue, the former trying to prepare her friend for her inevitable death, the latter grasping at straws to find a solution, are the seeds of a great story, but one that Halo 4‘s franchise-building responsibility weighs down.
The chief conflict in the game is one that the player and protagonist can’t actually confront. The latest doomsday plot against Earth feels trite in comparison – yet it’s the only one the game allows you agency in solving. The Prometheans, the Covenant, even the mysterious Didact controlling both – these are distractions – obstacles, roadblocks to Master Chief’s real goal. Only the last is even an active character, and he has all of two scenes with the Chief, who as a stoic soldier is probably the worst protagonist to demand answers that could give our villain any relevance.
Without that emotional anchor, Halo 4’s gameplay flaws – many of which are legacy flaws as old as Halo itself – become much more grating than they would otherwise be. Too much of the later game consists of moving alone through beautiful corridors of polished metal, exchanging potshots with pickets of the same enemies you’ve fought for the entire game. There’s little progression – no bosses, no new enemies, no new weapons, few new contexts or environmental factors – to speak of past the third act, so while any one firefight may be entertaining, a dozen of them tarnish quickly. And the on-foot finale is a real anticlimax when it comes to the war – though again, it has its appeals in how the Cortana-Chief story arc is ultimately handled.
This shouldn’t be taken as a blanket condemnation of the gameplay, though, which is generally solid. The vehicle sections offer a bit of much-needed variety, particularly while piloting the new Mantis walker. These sections provide the sense of scale and purpose the on-foot ones sometimes lack, and friendly soldiers are far more entertaining to fight alongside than solo. The game has been polished in many small ways – but the encounter design that could use some work, something 343 will no doubt continue to hone as they grow more confident of their skills.
One final note is worth discussion, the new Spartan Ops multiplayer mode. This episodic story mode replaces the old Firefight mode introduced in ODST. It’s an interesting idea, and –in theory!- allows 343 to tell the sorts of world-building tales so successful in ODST and Reach. However, making the player characters mutes is a strange choice, and will no doubt limit their storytelling ability – as many MMOs have shown, there’s nothing quite so annoying as a quest NPC who issues orders to the player but never actually does anything themselves to help us.
Halo 4 was probably always going to be an awkward entry in the series no matter what it did. It simply had too much to prove to too many people; it had to both be bold and conservative at once. A few hiccups and hang-ups are expected– particularly when its creators had to prove they weren’t just tossing aside the old stuff.
But 343 is clearly willing to try new things to perfect the game they love. Maybe now they’ll be freer to do so.
