Shake Appeal
Member
...annnd part of the reason for this is because since day one they have relied on short inter-level cutscenes to both carry the plot and impress Sai-kun by showing Master Chief runnin' around, doin' stuff. It's simply too much work for some hurried, in-engine camera-work to bear, and the story's coherence suffers as a result.KevinRo said:
(I want to preface this next little rant by saying that I am a big fan of the Halo games and the Halo universe, and often defend the story from non-fans.)
Whether Ghaleon wants to admit it or not, much of Halo's storytelling is downright terrible, with major plot points buried in comm chatter and minor details given the full, glossy cutscene treatment, for no reason other than they will look cool. There is a great deal of technobabble, jargon, obscure (and obscurist) reference to extraneous story material, and at no point is any restraint placed on that adolescent sci-fi/fantasy urge to heap lore on lore on lore at the expense of clarity and good aesthetic judgement.
Most of the characters have, at best two dimensions to them, and most of the character-driven, 'emotional' moments are so forced as to be unbearable. Prime example: Miranda Keyes is a nobody and should never have had any story significance placed on her. That said, there are a few characters that we (or some of us, at least) do care about, and what Bungie (and people shitting on the way Valve tells stories) fail to realise is that these few characters also happen to be the ones who are inextricably tied to the player's game experience.
Sergeant Johnson's story is vaguely affecting because we as players have played through the games with him; in fact, the very reason he has a story role at all is because players instinctively seized on the tough-talking, wise-cracking guy who often fought alongside them in the first game, who contributed something to their playing experience. Cortana is similar, although the emphasis they tried to put on her relationship with 3 was largely wasted (and to even make vague reference to the Orpheus myth is to suggest a resonance and depth that is simply not there). That Bungie quote about her being "every girlfriend we ever had" is still laughable to me: at best, she's a familiar voice with glowing blue tits. They even succeeded in making that familiar voice annoying by having it whine at you every five steps. And then the whining doesn't evey pay off: Cortana turns out to be fine, after all! Stupid player! What were you even worried about?! You don't get to care! Bungie tells you when to care!
There is a reason Alyx Vance is widely loved: because her relationship with Gordon Freeman is also her relationship to whoever happens to be playing Gordon Freeman. Valve understand that this is how attachment to videogame characters can be fostered: by putting them into the player's gameworld, to build a videogame facsimile of an actual relationship over hours of actual play (ever wondered why those Little Sisters are so darned adorable?). Alyx Vance shoots for you when you can't. She solves puzzles. She helps you out of jams, and you help her out of jams. You play catch with her dog, for Chrissake. As a result,
the death of Eli Vance works because not only have we met the man in the game, walked and talked with him, listened to his hopes and fears, but more importantly we know his daughter, have spent time with her over hours of real gameplay... and when we see her break down in that moment, and are unable to comfort her...
the death of Miranda Keyes amounts to Bungie telling us to "pleasepleaseplease care about the fate of the girl from all those cutscenes".
More problematically, the pacing and plotting of the Halo games is wretched, and irrevocably weighed down by poor planning and the needless intricacy of its background material. By the time Bungie got to the end of Halo 3 and started to tie everything off, they were probably terrified that they would have to pull all of the books, comics, ARGs, lunchboxes, and, oh yes, games, through the eye of the needle at once, all the while retconning furiously and on the fly to satisfy a legion of devout fans who are, well, insatiable. They just about pull it off. But KevinRo is right to say that the plot by then confuses or leaves cold the 'average player'. Frankly, it deserves to. It takes multiple plays of the games, pretty tedious extracurricular reading, and a desire to actually discover more about the world, to piece Humpty Dumpty back together again. Is it worth so? I think for the most part it is, but then I'm an oddity.
I won't bother addressing the terminals, because I think this is an area Bungie actually did very well with (albeit borrowing more from the methods of some sort of fragmented, po-mo literature than any distinctly gamelike methods of storytelling, and again the piecing-together of the metanarrative requires great investment and dedication on the part of the likes of Vociferous to be made coherent for the rest of us). But I will say that when the greater scope and themes of your story (The Fall? The insidious evil within [be it blind faith, hubris, or the machinations of the Flood]? The redemption/return of Man?) are buried in narrative vending machines off the main path, and the ugly mechanics of getting the in-game plot from A to B are pushed right in the players' faces... your priorities are fucking backwards, dudes.
But to adopt an urkism, I could dong on Halo's storytelling all day long, and I'd still come out loving the games afterwards. It's low-hanging fruit, after all, and nowhere near the worst offender out there (don't get me started on Metal Gear, or just about any JRPG). It just pains me greatly to hear people trash the efforts of games which I think are far more evolved and advanced in how they think about, and enact, their stories. Because I care about where this medium is going, and I think those games which are trying to find gamelike/interactive/'ludic' ways of telling tales (Bioshock, Braid, Portal, and to a lesser extent Half-Life 2 and its Episodes) are those that should matter more right now, and the ones we should be rewarding with acclaim and hard cash.
