When Microsoft first got into the console video game business, my first
feeling was one of utter hostility. At
the time, I had trouble articulating it.
Looking back, I know exactly why it was.
Change.
From time immemorial, console video gaming had pretty much been a
Japanese affair, barring some notable exceptions. The blockbuster titles and longest-running
series all seemed, in most cases, to originate from Japan. As someone who was interested in anime (and
Japanese culture generally, but let’s be honest here: mostly just anime), and
had all the furious devotion of the relatively newly converted, I was perfectly
fine with this. Preferred it, really, if
we’re being completely honest. There
were a few odd Western-developed games I liked (the Legacy of Kain series for one, and of course most of the PC games I
liked had been developed in the West), but when it came to console games, all
the best stuff came out of Japan, by and large.
At least, that was the case so far as I was concerned.
I had a life-long Windows user’s healthy disdain and distrust for
Microsoft. The last thing on Earth I
wanted was them shitting up my hobby with their stupid oversized black box,
which you could probably use to lay the foundations of the house, or to kill a
person if you dropped it on them from a height of five feet or greater. It wasn’t until they got the exclusive rights
to Panzer Dragoon Orta that I felt
anything about the machine beyond a sort of frigid, haughty dislike.
Halo’s hero, Master Chief
Petty Officer John-117, and the game (later an entire franchise) he starred in by extension, put a face on all of
that.
I hated Halo, hated the very
idea of it. Fucking hated it, sight-unseen.
Considering that I rarely go more than a few weeks without playing at
least a few hours of one of the games in the series, to relax with something fun
and familiar, this is deeply ironic.
I suppose all I can really say in my own defense is that I still had a
deal of growing up to do.
* * *
At some point around the time when Halo
first came out, or when it was imminent, I read an article in a game magazine
which posited that Halo would fail
to become the face of the Xbox because its hero, the Master Chief, was a
faceless cipher. The magazine in
question was probably Game Informer, because I was subscribed to it at the
time.
The article went on to say that previous console makers all had strong
mascots, which worked to sort of symbolize the consoles. Nintendo had the rotund and friendly plumber
Mario, with his whimsical adventures in the mushroom kingdom. Sega had Sonic the Hedgehog, whose speed and
attitude helped to communicate the more “grown up” (this term should, here, be
applied very loosely) nature of Sega’s first real success, the 16-bit
Genesis. Sony kinda-sorta had Crash
Bandicoot, though having never played any of the Crash Bandicoot games, I
couldn’t really tell you how he represented the PlayStation. The idea, though, was that all of these
characters had a distinctive look and identity, a personality which you could
glean from even a brief glance. The
Master Chief was armored from head to toe, and his face was covered by the polarized,
opaque visor of his helmet. His design
was comparatively real in a way that
Mario and Sonic and Crash Bandicoot had never been, and were never designed to
be. The article argued that this ran
counter to the whole point of a mascot.
I sometimes think this was the whole point, actually.
Halo came out in a time when
the need of console makers for mascot characters was dying. Nintendo still had Mario, but in this, as in
so much else, they were and are unique.
Sega’s mascot was now appearing on whatever system would host his games,
and it’s difficult to express to anyone who wasn’t really around during the
16-bit era the feeling of strangeness you got at seeing Sonic on a Nintendo
system. Strange days.
Sony, meanwhile, had actually never had a proper mascot in Crash
Bandicoot, no matter what the Game Informer article said. He’s sometimes thought of that way, I guess, but
the first problem with this assertion is that he wasn’t actually owned by Sony. He was (and remains, I suppose) the
intellectual property of a third-party developer called Naughty Dog. He did a brief stint as a sort of spokes-creature
for Sony during the PS1 era, but faded from prominence during the PS2 era, and
is now pretty much a non-entity.
This was also the era when the notion of “AAA” games began to pick up
steam. Games were becoming
ubiquitous. Even before Nintendo went
after the Blue Ocean, it was becoming increasingly difficult to find a person
who didn’t own some sort of gaming console.
The consoles were becoming powerful enough to display some serious
spectacle, and we no longer really needed mascots to represent them any more.
Ironically, in his way, the Master Chief did sort of become representative of Microsoft’s Xbox, then. Or more accurately, be was the face of what
the Xbox came to represent, which was the ascendance of Western console game
design.
Hear me out on this.
Long, long ago, the vast majority of popular, “important” video games –what
we might (if we were feeling especially pretentious) call the “Canon of
Interactive Entertainment Software” – originated in Japan. Atari ruled the roost for a while, it’s true,
but they fumbled badly in 1983, and they very nearly took the U.S. gaming
market with them. While most publishers
were shaking their heads over what they likely imagined to be a high-tech fad,
and selling all their Atari merchandise at fire sale prices meanwhile, Nintendo
snuck in and first revived, then conquered the market. They did this by redesigning their console to
look less like a video game console than a regular home entertainment appliance
(like, say, a VCR); by positioning the product as the “Nintendo Entertainment
System” in all their marketing, rather than as the video game console it
actually (and quite obviously) was; and they did some hardcore, stone-cold,
frankly ruthless business, certain
tactics of which were later ruled illegal.
Look back on the 8-bit era and think of the classics. The ones that practically everyone played,
the ones that are on all the retro-gaming T-shirts you can buy at Hot Topic and
elsewhere. Super Mario Bros., The
Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Final Fantasy, Contra, Castlevania, Mega Man, Ninja Gaiden, and the list goes on and on. Even games that would seem to be American
were sometimes Japanese. Tecmo Super Bowl, for instance. It was developed by… well, by Tecmo. They’re
a Japanese developer, yet here they were making a game about football. American football, now. This is a sport which has very little
traction (read: no traction) in
Japan.
There were console games developed by Westerners, of course. Tetris,
for instance. But these were by far the
minority of games. Western developers
(both American and European) dominated the PC scene, at least in the West. But what there was to be had on consoles –
good, bad, and otherwise – largely came out of Japan.
This state of affairs continued on into the 16-bit generation and into
the 32-bit era as well. There were
always exceptions, but there in 2001, at the turning point, was Halo.
A true several-million-selling blockbuster, made by a Western developer
and released exclusively on a Western-built console system. I’m not saying that Halo did it all, really, but it sold systems. Its sequel sold more systems, and further
managed to sell the idea of online play on consoles (the Sega Dreamcast tried
to do this, but was in this, as in so much else, a victim of bad timing, bad
circumstances, and a long history of Sega’s bad decisions). Even if the original Xbox (fun fact: I wanted
to type “Xbox 1” to distinguish it as the first Xbox, but Microsoft has made
everything about the Xbox, even talking about the fucking thing with any real
clarity, difficult now) never made Microsoft a dime all in all, it got their
foot in the door for the 360. Halo might not have been directly
responsible for that, but it certainly helped, and quite possibly made the
difference, in the long run.
But enough about business and context.
We’re here to talk about a game, after all. Let’s do that.
* * *
First-person shooters on console systems had always, prior to this,
been sort of compromised. The typical
control setup for a first-person shooter on a PC involves using the keyboard to
move, and the mouse to aim and shoot.
Console controllers never really have been able to match this level of
precision, for reasons I’m not going to get into here. The bottom line is that with a notable few
exceptions (Goldeneye on the
Nintendo 64 comes to mind), there weren’t a lot of first-person shooters on
consoles, and most of the ones there were, weren’t very good compared to their
PC counterparts, where the genre was dominant, and had been since the days of Doom.
Microsoft was perhaps taking a risk, making an FPS their flagship title
on their new system. But then, Halo wasn’t just any FPS. In fact, when development first began, it
wasn’t any kind of FPS at all.
When development on the game first
began, it was under different
codenames at various points: first Monkey
Nuts, and later Blam! It was meant to be a sci-fi themed real-time
strategy game, and it was going to be released on both PCs as well as
Macintosh. Bungie, the developers, had been
primarily a Mac-oriented company. Game
journalists at the time, under non-disclosure agreements, seemed to be in
agreement that what they had seen of the game so far was nothing short of
amazing.
At some point (and I am struggling mightily to recall where I read
this; you’ll have to take my word for it that I have done so, somewhere, at
some point, and am not just making all of this up), the game changed. It was redesigned as a third-person
squad-based shooter, heavily focused around online multiplayer. The idea was that you would log onto the game
with teams of friends and fight each other over large, sprawling arenas and
battlefields. Footage of the game in
this stage of development looks familiar, if a bit more rudimentary than the
finished product. Later still, this
design idea was scrapped in favor of a first-person shooter. I’ve never really known why, beyond
theorizing that perhaps Bungie just had more experience with that genre, having
cut their teeth on Pathways Into
Darkness and made a name for themselves with the critically acclaimed and commercially
successful Marathon trilogy.
Along the way, in 2000, they got acquired by Microsoft, news which no
doubt came as a kind of betrayal to their largely Mac-owning fanbase. Bungie still promised that the game would see
PC and Mac release, but still.
In November of 2001, the game came out as a launch title for the
original Xbox, under its full title of Halo:
Combat Evolved. The “Combat Evolved”
bit was apparently suggested by a Microsoft executive because “Halo”, all by
itself, didn’t connote the necessary intensity, or perhaps even the fact that
this was a game about combat. Never mind
the large gentleman in green armor wielding a machine gun on the cover. Clearly, no one would understand. Online play for Halo was scrapped, as Microsoft was unable to roll out its planned
Xbox Live service with the system itself.
Instead, Halo supported what
we now call “couch co-op” either by way of split-screen view or, for the
extravagant, networking several Xboxes and TVs together to play online.
This gave the game a perhaps unexpected amount of success (and
therefore sales) in college dorms and fraternities, where large groups of young
people could haul the obscenely large system and their TVs around to someone
else’s place with a minimum of real travel.
And since the game was designed not just with consoles in mind, but (as
of the most recent revamping of the project) with consoles exclusively in mind, it played well on consoles, which made it
accessible, which led to still more sales, ultimately.
Damn it, I’m talking about business again.
* * *
The reason it’s important to understand the sort of higgledy-piggledy
development of Halo: Combat Evolved
is because this helps to understand why it’s so unique even within the auspices
of its own series. The series groundwork
is still all there, of course. You can
play Halo 3 – really, you can play Halo 4, even – and feel the underlying
DNA of the series, the mechanical core which has defined it since its
beginning, which has remained unchanged.
You can play a lot of other FPS titles which have cribbed shamelessly
from Halo and feel it. But Halo:
Combat Evolved is still a very different beast, and it’s because of all
those changes it went through on the way to becoming what it became.
What you notice, early on in Halo,
is that it’s a game of uncertain goals and direction, and of places wherein you
get lost. This isn’t because it’s a
maze, but rather because it’s the exact opposite of a maze. Many of the spaces you play in are huge, wide-open
environments without any clear sense of exactly where you’re supposed to go
next. If you wait around long enough,
demonstrating your helplessness, the game will throw you a bone and set up a
marker for you to run or drive toward, but mostly, it just leaves you to find a
path.
This is unusual today, and it was unusual then.
Older FPSes like Wolfenstein 3D or
Doom, or even Quake, are structured like mazes for the most part. Each discrete level bore little connection to
the ones that came before or after it.
It’s usually a labyrinth of tunnels, doors, a few more open areas, and
the occasional locked door, for which you typically need to go find a key. But the total playing field you might have
access to is relatively small, and there are all sorts of landmarks to help you
keep a good sense of where you are in the grand scheme of things.
In the middle and end of the 1990s, FPSes were undergoing a shift. Games like Unreal and Half-Life featured
a more narrative-driven experience. The
story wasn’t just a few quick paragraphs in the manual and a few lines of text
you got at the end of the game, but something that was happening all around you
while you played. The whole structure of
discrete and vaguely connected levels was thrown out the window. The game was typically divided into chunks
for the purposes of handling data, but the way it was presented was effectively
as a non-stop journey from start to finish, with natural transitions from one
area to the next which helped to more effectively convey a narrative, or even
just a sense of narrative. Game environments became less maze-like (and
abstract) and more linear and realistic.
The use of terrain and more tactical maneuvers became a greater concern
than simple navigation, and enemies were made smarter (usually) as a
result. The player was, at all times,
being funneled in a certain direction.
The cleverer games were just set up in such a way that the player rarely
realized just how few options he or she might have for travel. You just went where you could, and if the
game was well built, it never really occurred to you to wonder why you couldn’t
go somewhere else.
Halo existed, then, in open
defiance of this trend. It’s probably a
mistake to attribute this wholly to any intentional design, especially
considering that Bungie abandoned this design in its immediate sequel. This openness is instead more likely a result
of the game’s development. The huge
battlefields and arenas originally envisioned for the real-time strategy game
and team-oriented first-person shooter were carried over into the final product
probably as a matter of simple practicality.
If you’re redesigning your game twice during development, you’re going
to want to save some time by reusing as many assets as possible. When your project has been appropriated to
coincide with the launch of a new piece of high-profile hardware, and you now have
a much firmer deadline, you’ll re-use anything and everything you conceivably
can.
* * *
The moment-to-moment mechanics of Halo
were quite different from most other games.
I’m not sure how much of this was a deliberate choice Bungie made early
in development, and how much of this was Bungie attempting to scale back the
usual FPS design to something that would “fit” on a console.
At the core of the experience, so far as combat goes, is Halo’s “Golden Triangle” of guns, grenades,
and melee attacks. Let me explain a bit.
Prior to this, the usual approach in an FPS was to make the character a
veritable walking armory. You would
typically have over half a dozen weapons, including grenades, rocket launchers,
machine guns, shotguns, pistols, weapons more unique to the game, and usually a
dedicated melee weapon for up-close hand-to-hand attacks. Each weapon was typically bound to a number
key on the keyboard, so switching back and forth in your armory was relatively
easy, but still somewhat deliberate.
This was a problem on consoles, what with lacking number keys, and
having far too many of the buttons on the controller devoted to the more
immediate and urgent actions of running, jumping, crouching, shooting, and
whatnot. The usual solution was to have
you just cycle through your weapons, but this was a cumbersome process that only
became more so as your armory expanded throughout the game.
The “Golden Triangle” solution was ingenious, all the more so because
it was also fairly realistic.
Firstly, the player can carry only two guns at once. You can swap out any gun you’re carrying with
any other gun you find lying around, but you can only have two on your person
at a time. This means there is no
lengthy cycling through weapons. Just a
simple button press switches the weapon you’re currently using with the one you
have in reserve. Secondly, grenades are
given a dedicated button, so that you don’t have to select them in lieu of
other weapons. This made using them much
easier, and therefore more practical and effective. Third, there is no specific weapon designated
for melee attacks, but rather a button assigned to execute a melee attack with
whatever weapon is currently equipped.
Typically, this takes the form of a sharp strike with the stock of the
weapon. Unlike a lot of prior games,
melee attacks are powerful (if risky, given the close range), and can be fatal
when executed from behind.
As a result, even at its most frantic, you can always keep up with the
pace of a given fight. And there are
never moments where you might, say, cycle past the weapon you actually meant to
use. Your entire repertoire of tactical
options is right there at your fingertips, never more than a single
button-press away.
Halo is also unique (or was,
for its time) in the way it allows you to use vehicles. Nearly every enemy and friendly vehicle you
see in the game, you can and will get to drive at some point. The game seamlessly transitions between the
two, and driving these vehicles is as easy as maneuvering your character. The lone exception to this is the Warthog, a
sort of futuristic Humvee which was designed by someone who has no real idea
how loud and cramped the interior of a Humvee (at least, a military Humvee)
actually is.
You’ll drift-race your Warthog all over the place, not because it’s fun
(though it kind of is), or because it looks cool (though it definitely does),
but simply because the vehicle’s maneuvering is so piss-poor that it is
literally impossible to take a sharp turn at any kind of speed without the
ass-end of the vehicle trying to outrace its front. And as frustrating as it all is – as tempting
as it might be to hop into the gunner’s spot for a change – you will be the one doing the driving,
because the alternative is to let the game’s AI-controlled Marines drive, and
if you’re seriously going to do that,
you might as well just jump off a cliff and get it over with. The non-player characters uniformly drive as
if they have both a lead foot and a lobotomy, and even at your most new and raw,
you will be better than any of them. The
Warthog is easy to drive, but takes considerable practice to drive well.
Or at any rate, that’s been my experience.
* * *
Having played the newer games in the series (more recently and more often), it’s interesting to look back as I play through the original again, and see what’s changed.
The original Halo, in
addition to the occasional wide-open field lacking in clear goals, also had an unfortunate
tendency toward copy-and-paste level design.
It occasionally got to a point where I would get lost, not because the
environment was terribly complicated, but because I’d get turned around in a
firefight, and take off down a hallway in the wrong direction without realizing
it for some time because everything looked so repetitive.
This is helped somewhat by playing the anniversary edition of Halo: Combat Evolved, which came out in
2011 (and which is also included with the somewhat disastrous Master Chief Collection for the Xbox
One). The upgrade to HD and the added
detail in textures, polygon count, and lighting lend a lot more specificity to the
environments.
It’s also odd watching the melee attacks being performed. Later games in the series seem to have these
attacks execute with greater speed and a sense of sharper motion. By contrast, the Master Chief’s melee attacks
in the original Halo seem to be
almost leisurely; they lack the needed sense of sharp force that makes them
feel both fast and effective.
On the other hand, there’s a lot that has remained basically the
same. Weapons and gear have a different
sound, look, and feel between the UNSC and Covenant factions. Many of them work differently, with different
benefits and drawbacks, and therefore require different strategies. And, because you generally have to take
whatever you can find, it behooves you to familiarize yourself with everything.
Enemy behaviors are also a nice touch.
Enemy Grunts, for instance, will attack in groups when they have a
leader (usually an Elite) present, but if the leader is killed, they tend to
panic and scatter, though some will instead prime grenades and make a suicide
rush at you.
This is the underlying DNA I mentioned previously, the thing that’s
still quite present in the series, even as the developers add to it.
* * *
I’ve spend a lot of time talking about the development and mechanics
and impact of Halo, but none of this
is really what drew me to the game despite my initial (and poorly reasoned)
dislike in the first place.
If it hadn’t become such a phenomenon, honestly, I probably would never
have gotten interested. But it was hard
to avoid. I would go to game stores, or
places like Best Buy, and it was always there on the shelf, or else there would
be posters up and cardboard displays. I
read good things about it from reviewers whose opinions I trusted. I would even see merchandise for it on sale
at Barnes and Noble. It’s not quite at
the level of, say, Star Wars when it
comes to ancillary merchandise, but it’s something like that. It has an expanded universe of novels and
comic books which tell stories taking place before, after, and between the
games, fleshing out the mythology. There
are toys, there are Mega Bloks sets, there’s a Halo-themed version of Risk.
You can buy the soundtrack albums.
There are movies, though nothing that’s yet seen release in theaters. There’s even an anime.
Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me, and I started reading
about the games and the story they told.
And I got interested, and thought, “Man, it’s a shame that this really
great-sounding stuff is bound up in these games I hate.” And then it occurred to me that I was being really
stupid and pig-headed. If it all sounded
so interesting, why didn’t I give it
a shot? By the time this happened, you
could buy the first two games on the original Xbox for about ten dollars
apiece. The absolute worst thing that
would happen was I’d lose twenty bucks on an experiment, and God knows I’d spent
more money than that before with less information to go on.
So what’s to like?
I like a grim story that still has a thin sense of hope to it,
something with noble sacrifices and hard decisions. And I like a big, epic story in a well-built
world, with a sense of secrecy and mystery, and huge events that seem to carry
you off and sweep you along with them.
And Halo has that.
We start off in the 26th century, where humankind has a
civilization spanning many planets.
However, we have recently been discovered by a theocratic alliance of
alien races known as the Covenant.
According to the Covenant’s religion, humanity is an affront to their
gods, and must be destroyed.
The “gods” the Covenant worship are a race of beings known to humans as
the Forerunners, who had a galaxy-wide civilization and achieved an
unparalleled level of technological sophistication, and who disappeared a
hundred thousand years ago. No one knows
why. The Covenant believe that they
departed on a Great Journey, transcending physical existence .
It isn’t made explicitly clear in the first Halo, but it becomes so throughout the original trilogy. If there was ever any doubt, Halo 3: ODST will go on to spell it out
in terribly clear terms in its opening text crawl: “We are losing”. The Covenant probably outnumber humankind;
they definitely outclass us in
technology, having reverse-engineered much of theirs from Forerunner
relics. Even if they don’t really
understand a lot of it, they have it, and they know how to use it to devastating
effect. Among other things, they are
capable of turning the surface of a planet to glass.
So the story of Halo opens with
the United Nations Space Command vessel Pillar of Autumn escaping from a
Covenant attack on the planet of Reach, by way of a supposedly blind slipspace
jump (later developments in the series will suggest this arrival point was selected
based on much more than chance), and coming across an artificial ring-world
orbiting a planet. The interior of this
ring structure has a natural environment consisting of hills, valleys, forests,
lakes, and oceans, as well as breathable atmosphere. It appears to be of Forerunner origin.
Before the crew of the Pillar of Autumn can do much more than stare at
it in awe, they find themselves under attack by the Covenant, who have followed
them here. As part of the Pillar’s battle preparations,
the ship’s captain, Jacob Keyes, has Master Chief Petty Officer John-117
unthawed from cryosleep.
The Master Chief is among the few remaining Spartans. Identified as being genetically predisposed
toward all the skills of war, he was taken as a child and educated solely for
this purpose. Chemically and
cybernetically modified, outfitted with a suit of powered armor, he stands literally head and shoulders above the
average soldier in the UNSC. Faster,
stronger, with quicker reflexes and better endurance than most, Spartans are
nearly the only humans who can go toe-to-toe with the more physically imposing
races of the Covenant in a fight.
Initially, the Master Chief is given the task of escaping from the
Pillar of Autumn to the ring-world, which the covenant call “Halo”, and taking
the ship’s AI Cortana with him. Given
all she knows about UNSC capabilities and important locations, it is imperative
that she remain out of Covenant hands.
Her sarcasm and sense of humor serve as a counterpoint to the Master
Chief’s near-complete silence and stoic professionalism.
As the Master Chief and Cortana aid in and help organize the guerilla
war the UNSC winds up fighting on the Halo ring-world, they become aware that
the Covenant believe there is an ancient Forerunner weapon on this
installation, and also a way for them to follow their gods on their Great
Journey.
This is technically true, in the most horrible way possible.
Near (or just after) the middle of the game, the Master Chief and
Cortana learn the horrifying truth that, among its other functions, the Halo
installation is a quarantine facility, and is holding samples of a parasitic
organism known as the Flood. In their
blind zealotry, the Covenant unleash it, and it quickly begins to infect both
Covenant and UNSC troops alike. The
Flood consumes biomass and repurposes it,
but these are no mere shambling zombies.
Infected Flood forms are faster and hit harder than any uninfected
creature, and they typically pick up some skills (such as, unfortunately,
marksmanship) from their hosts.
As the outbreak begins, the Master Chief is confronted by a Forerunner
AI named 343 Guilty Spark, who was assigned to oversee this installation. He explains to the Chief that there is a way
to stop the Flood, but it requires a human to do this, as humans are evidently
the chosen successors to the Forerunners.
But Cortana, learning the full purpose of the Halo installation, stops
the Master Chief before he can activate this countermeasure against the
Flood. The Flood, she explains, require
sentient life to feed on and to grow, merging the infected biomass into ever
more powerful and intelligent forms.
Each soldier who falls to the Flood then becomes part of the Flood; every troop lost is one the Flood
gains. The Forerunners came into contact
with the Flood, some hundred thousand years ago, but this was not in itself what
destroyed them.
The truth is that the Halo installation, contrary to the Covenant’s
garbled understanding, does not house a weapon.
It is a weapon. More accurately, it is one of seven such
weapons. When activated, it will fire a
pulse that will, in concert with the other six Halo installations, destroy all
sentient life in the galaxy, thus starving the Flood to death. The Forerunners were able to preserve uninfected
samples of most of the sentient races they knew about, but were unable to save
themselves. And so they died, to stop
the Flood, of a self-inflicted genocide.
The hows and whys of the Forerunners’ apparent inability to save
themselves; other measures that did not work (if they were tried); the
designation of humankind as Reclaimers, heirs to the Forerunner legacy; and the
preservation of other species, are not answered here. Halo
simply presents these things as facts.
A lot of the draw, for me, before and beyond the actual narrative, is
the feeling of it. There is a sense of the far future mingling
with the ancient past, a deadly secret and a steadily mounting sense of
mystery. You experience it when you
first land on the Halo ring, in what I tend to think of as the first real establishing
moment of both Halo the game and Halo the franchise. You step out of the escape pod on a grassy
rise. You look off into the horizon, and
instead of seeing it drop off into the distance, it rises up, arcing overhead how many thousands of miles beyond, and coming
back down to become the horizon again on the other side. As you look at it, you can see water and
landmasses all along the inside of it. A
massive gas giant looms in the near distance, and a sun farther off. The environment is natural-looking, but
punctuated by the stark architecture of Forerunner structures which rise out of
the landscape. The effect is ultimately alien.
Perhaps wisely, Bungie (when they were still making the games) opted
never to explain much of this. I’ve
probably said it before, but sometimes, it’s better to wonder than to know.
This is Halo, for me. This is what
drew me. This mingled sensation of
strangeness and wonder, grim despair and hope, a salvation dearly bought, a
victory barely won, and the sense of ancient secrets at long last uncovered.
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