If you didn’t play Half-Life 1, then a lot of Half-Life 2 is going to be weird. Why isn’t my dude talking? Why am I whacking things with a crowbar? What’s this Black Mesa thing in the newspaper clippings on the wall? Is there some significance to that guy being named Barney? Who’s the weird dude in the suit I see from time to time?
My point is that Valve knows how to do narrative. They’re very good at it. In fact, they’re nearly as good as Irrational. But if your point is that Half-Life 2 has the same narrative problems as Halo 3, then you’re going to feel pretty silly when you actually play Halo 3.
Tromik, as for casual gamers buying Halo 3, that’s precisely what’s going to happen. You don’t sell five million copies of something without building an audience beyond us enthusiasts.
Comparing every new shooter with an alleged narrative to Bioshock seems to be all the rage this week. It seems to me that’s like comparing every new SF movie to Blade Runner and declaring it no good if it doesn’t hold up.
First, not every movie is Blade Runner. Second, Blade Runner was not all that anyway. And neither, really, was Bioshock. It was a great game but I don’t think it was narratively head and shoulders above any video game plot. Yes, it was presented cleverly and there was THE BIG REVEAL, but meh.
Well, like you would know anything about WDitS if you had played. Or the joke of “Barney”. Skipping those caveats, this is wrong when Halo 3 does it because: _____.
My point is that Valve knows how to do narrative. They’re very good at it. In fact, they’re nearly as good as Irrational.
I haven’t played any of Bioshock except the demo, but I can tell you that neither of the Half-Lifes and neither of the Halos I’ve played did anything as contrived and game-y as having you come across a giant needle full of glowing liquid that you know nothing about and making you immediately jam it into your arm. Unless the narrative of Bioshock is that you are Steve-O, we’re not starting very strong here with the believability. The immediate explanation of “Relax! Your genetic code is being re-written. It’s really amazing and cool. It also drives you insane and wrecked our civilization.” is a bit off-the-wall, too.
You know, that bit with the needle is probably the only part of BioShock’s narrative that doesn’t eventually make sense if you find the right audio diary.
It’s telling, Gallant, that you hear “narrative of BioShock” and all you can think of is the needle moment. Philistine. Go back to your Dragonlance novels and comic books and leave us beret-wearing intelligentsia alone with our smug opinions! You’re not even fit to use the word ‘narrative’. Just say ‘plot’ from now on.
But, half-seriously, this is the thread to harsh on Halo 3. The threads for harshing on Half-Life 2 and BioShock are two doors down.
I’m not going to harsh on Half-Life 2 or Bioshock. I think Half-Life 2 is awesome when you’re on foot and awesome for around five minutes when you’re not, and I would bet that I will like Bioshock when I get to it.
And here is a link that will address your confusion about why Cortana is important.
On the 360, though, I just don’t know. Are you going to spend $500 to play Halo 3 if you’re casual? Halo didn’t sell 5 million copies overnight, did it? I assume people waited until the Xbox got cheaper (that is, like $200 or less) and then all those casual gamers had it for Halo 2.
That type of casual gaming is so expensive that you’re probably going to have to become a hardcore gamer just to get your mony’s worth.
Well, we can get into the semantics of hardcore and casual gamers, but I’m not really equipped for that discussion. My definition of casual gamer is pretty much anyone who doesn’t play as many games as me.
Suffice to say, a lot of people who don’t know other games will buy Halo 3. They’ll play the campaign and think: ‘Man, shooters are confusing! I have no idea what’s going on with this Chief in green armor and those voices and who these aliens are and why that purple girl is going on about some Ark thing and why are they talking about Truth and Charity and Dawn? What’s a Gravemind? Where are those ships going? Who’s that guy? I guess games are all like this. Oh well.’
Now don’t get me wrong. Halo 3 is good, but in many ways, it’s a mess. I’d much rather “casual players”, whatever that means, tried something for reasons other than Halo hype.
I’d just like to say the Half Life franchise THRIVES on ambiguity in its narrative. Who is the G-Man? Why did soldiers show up to kill everyone at Black Mesa? Is the government involved? Some people keep playing Half Life game’s thinking there will be answers to persistent questions. No, there will only be more questions. Yet, this is truly a strength of the franchise. Now, if only Valve realized that you can’t have their cake and eat it to (or, that you can’t have a silent protagonist and carry on conversations with a romantic female lead) they’d be much better off.
P.S. I’ve disliked the Halo franchise ever since I spent money on the original for the PC.
I gotta disagree with you there. At least the part about Valve doing narrative. They actually kind of have a purposefully “narrataveless” game in HL2. It has very little exposition, but to a fault. How did I get on a train? How come everyone in the resistance seems to know I’ve been missing and nobody so much as gives a basic, “man, things have gone to shit while you were away. Here’s the lowdown…” Yes, they leave us wanting more, but I think they leave us wanting to know more about some pretty basic things to comprehending the world they’ve created.
What Valve does a great job of doing is putting you in a situation. But they’re shit at giving that situation context, and I would say that’s a big part of narrative. Every time I try to fill in the blanks, or I read one of those treads that tries to explain what the hell is going on in Half-Life 2, I feel like I’m just guessing. Now maybe that’s Valve’s intent, and that’s fine, but “having to puzzle out what is going on” is the very definition of “poor narrative.”
That doesn’t get Bungie off the hook, of course. I’d site an example I don’t want to be spoilerific with the game not even on sale yet.
Oh, and I want to second your whole “it’s not a review!” thing, applied to my comments. The more I think about it, the more the single player stuff feels like contractual obligation, and the multiplayer feels like the heart of the game.
Considering that you’re an individual that reviews games for a living, you have the worst definition of a casual gamer if that’s how you describe them.
I still see casual gamers as people who like Snood and PopCap games, and maybe played though an FPS in the past year, although it was probably an older one. They probably have a PS2, and have a lot of clones of games that they used to play in the arcade at the bowling alley. They buy NFL Street and maybe Juiced or Tokyo Xtreme. Oh, they probably bought one or two of the GTA3 games, but they didn’t make it more than five or six hours in. They don’t buy gaming magazines, or buy reviews, and othen make bad buying decsions. I’m amazed at how many people ask EB clerks if a game is any good or not.
Or, a casual gamer is someone who plays one game and gets great at it. Counter-Strike players, WoW players, Halo 2 players.
What’s weird about reading this post by Tom is that it doesn’t turn me off the game at all. It was only after reading it that I realized for the first time that I’ve never tried Halo 1 or 2 in single player. Ever. Which is surprising, since I consider myself primarily a single player gamer.
But when you’ve got a game that’s so much fun in Co-op, why try single player, unless you have no one else willing to play with you? And I always found someone to play with when it came to the Halo series. I’m also a big fan of the multiplayer, especially in Halo 1, but to a more limited degree with Halo 2 as well, and I thought the Halo 3 beta was just an absolute blast, and it was great to re-unite with my friends again online who I hadn’t seen in a few years. Halo is a great uniter.
So yeah, I guess everything Tom wrote about Halo’s single player could be 100% true, and it still wouldn’t bother me. As long as the fighting mechanics and AI are still fun to fight in Co-op.
Which, when it comes to gaming, is pretty much the same thing as narrative. :)
The conventional wisdom about Half-Life is that it doesn’t have much of a story, and this is correct. It doesn’t need to, necessarily. It’s a game. Half-Life isn’t about a dimensional rift destroying the world. That’s its backdrop. Instead, it’s about you moving through Valve’s game. I would argue that what you don’t know in Half-Life 2 is just as much a part of the narrative as what you do know!
The same is true of BioShock. When I talk about it’s narrative, I’m talking not about: 1) Ryan founds Rapture, 2) Rapture collapses, and 3) Jack arrives via plane crash, etc. That’s the plot. Narrative, to me, means something different. It’s the whole situation about why you’re here, what you’re doing, how you get from point A to point B, when you know what you know, how you learn it, what changes, what stays the same. In gaming, narrative is the experience that unfolds, story-like, from your process of playing. CivIV has no story, per se, but it has one hell of a narrative. Halo 3, on the other hand, has a very deep and involved story, but it makes for a crappy narrative.
So, basically, we agree, but I’m being difficult by using a word in a very particular beret-wearing way. :)
Tromik, I was being facetious about my definition of casual gamer. Suffice to say, the Halo franchise extends much farther than other gaming franchises. Ergo, it’s going to reach much farther beyond the “hardcore” than most games. I doubt you disagree.
My point is that I feel it’s a terrible emissary because it doesn’t do a good job of showing how games can be competitive with other forms of mainstream entertainment.
Yeah, but you’ve gotta be careful, because instead of sounding like a guy with some pretty cogent observations about Halo 3’s campaign, you’re right at the edge of coming off sounding like some guy in sandals and a robe with “The Future of Gaming” and “Halo 3” strapped crosswise to your back.
It’s cool. You see the vehicle. Other gamers just see the way Cortana’s Intel Inside bikini-wear couldn’t possibly cover her nipples…
