Halo Is Casual Trash

When Halo: Combat Evolved first launched for the Xbox, I was fairly impressed that someone finally managed to translate standard FPS mechanics onto a console. Some people claim that GoldenEye 007 was the first console FPS success story, but GoldenEye had wonky controls due to the N64 controller and it's single analog stick, which made aiming difficult and circle strafing nearly impossible.  The Xbox, with its two analog sticks, neatly avoided this problem. Shortly after Halo's release, every console FPS borrowed its control scheme.

However, by being on a console, compromises had to be made. I do not fault Bungie for making concessions to have Halo run and play well on the Xbox. After all, they managed to basically take the mechanics of Quake and mapped them to underpowered hardware that uses a gamepad. As a result, the game speed had to be slowed down, the players moved slower, the jumps floated in air a bit longer, the weapons were easier to handle. Halo: CE is basically dumbed down Quake.

What I do fault the developers at Bungie for is the intentional game design that made Halo easier, safer, and less technical to play. A core principle of Halo's design is that children, aged 12 and up, should be able to pick up the game and play at a decently competent level, without feeling that the game was 'too hard' or that multiplayer was 'unfair'. By raising the skill floor of Halo, the consequence was that the skill ceiling got lowered at well. If you were amazing at highly competitive shooters like Unreal Tournament and Quake 3, then Halo would seem too simple, shallow and slow.

I will now enumerate everything that makes Halo a shallower, more casual experience than its "arena shooter" predecessors. Remember that Halo was intentionally designed to be similar to older shooters, but easier for a new audience of gamers.

Shields over health:  Shields exist only to make it impossible for a victim to die in a single burst of fire. The attacker must first break his target's shields before he can do any real damage. Armor has been a concept in FPS games since DOOM, but in DOOM they only mitigated damage taken to your health, in Halo your shields are effectively a second health bar.

Passive Shield Regeneration: Means that now there is no consequence for taking a large amount of fire, because you can recover your full shield bar by just waiting around for a bit. Instead of incentivizing the player to run into battle, it actually does the exact opposite. On easier difficulties this means you have no real challenge and no need to play with forethought, and on Legendary difficulty this becomes a real problem as the only way to really make it past most waves of enemies is to pop out of cover, take as much damage as you can while killing one or two enemies, then ducking back into cover to regenerate your shield.  This is especially frustrating against higher tier enemies, since on Legendary they will have double or triple your amount of shield, so fighting against them becomes a war of attrition while your struggle to deplete their shields before you can go in for the kill. This is what made the "noob combo" such an overused tactic, more on that later.

Weapon Reloading: You may argue that reloading a weapon is more "realistic", but the Halo game universe is one in which mankind has mastered faster than light travel, has ships that can travel between solar systems, and super soldiers that can live inside a suit of powered armor indefinitely. Star Wars has interplanetary travel, and no one needed to reload their blasters. Star Trek has the same, and no one needed to reload a phaser. You may note that the Covenant weapons, which don't need to reload, still overheat. Reloading and Overheating exist for one primary purpose - to delay an attacker from killing an opponent and to force them into an artificially vulnerable state.  In effect, it slows down combat.

Against shielded opponents, you cannot kill them in a single magazine, and must reload or switch weapons in order to press your attack. Many weapons are designed around this concept and the metagame is designed around you choosing two different weapons to kill an opponent.  Which leads into the next problem

Two Weapon Limit: DOOM allowed you to carry 7 weapons at a time, Quake 3 went up to 13. Halo lets you carry only two, due basically to the limitations of the gamepad, but also to restrict your options in an engagement, and to discourage you from simply switching weapons to keep killing your foes. By forcing you to carry two weapons at a time, you are pigeonholed into a certain strategy for facing your foes.

In single player this is far more frustrating than in multiplayer, since you will be carrying the weapons with the most utility most of the time, and powerful, specialized weapons become a hindrance, especially if you want to conserve their ammo for use on the more powerful enemies. You will be fighting weak, low tier enemies more often that the higher tier Elites or Brutes, but when the high tier Elites or Brutes do show up you find yourself without a good power weapon to counter them. The low tier enemies carry only pistols and other weak weapons, and the power weapons are carried only by the power enemies, so when you kill them and take their weapon, you suddenly find yourself with a power weapon but no one to use it on, but hordes of weak grunts that will waste your ammo until you run out and run into another strong enemy with a power weapon. That's just bad game design.

In multiplayer its just an artificial, cheap way to force you to stop chasing enemies, and to retreat into cover to reload and exchange weapons in order to face the next encounter. This also means that against multiple opponents, your chances of survival are lessened since you will simply run out of bullets before you can kill more than 2 foes.

And now the "noob combo." High shield enemies with powerful weapons are no fun to fight against if you don't have an appropriately powerful weapon. Luckily, the developers at Bungie gave players an easy counter in the form of the humble plasma pistol - the charged up shot can completely disable a target's shields and leave them vulnerable for any secondary weapon to finish this off. Using a moderately high damage weapon like the magnum pistol, or DMR/Battle Rifle in Halo 2 and beyond, made this a ridiculously effective strategy. Its usefulness carried over into multiplayer as well, and is derided by many players. And its easy to see why, it shortcuts the balance of the game and lets you use two simple, common weapons to outdo some of the most powerful ones. And yet if this option was not in the game, then the metagame balance would be constantly skewed towards however holds the more powerful weapon, which is why the "noob combo" persists in every Halo game. It must exist because the entire franchise's game design is fundamentally flawed.

Halo did manage to do a lot of things right. It was a technical marvel on the Xbox, it had a rich, intriguing science fiction world, the music was top-tier, the characters believable, enjoyable and fleshed out. However the moment-to-moment gameplay, the "30 second loop" of combat falls short of its peers, other FPS games that were out on PC at the same time. Unfortunately it spawned a generation of children that believe that Halo was the best shooter ever, and its wild popularity caused every subsequent FPS to ape the Halo mechanics of regenerating health and two weapon combat. Even before Call of Duty 4, Halo: Combat Evolved had such an impact that it managed to casualize the whole First Person Shooter genre.

It's still enjoyable in mild doses, but the same can't be said about its sequels. There's nothing good about Halo 2.

Quake 4 Review

UPDATE: I'm posting from an iPad and Blogger is absolutely horrible for editing. This is like the third time this post has gotten completely wiped.

 And now to the review:

 Quake 4 is a game that I had to force myself to finish. Technically the game has a lot going for it: Quake IV is build off idTech 4 and showcases the fantastic lighting work that engine is capable of, it has good modeling and texture work, the movement and weapon mechanics are solid, and it even has a few outdoor zones with DOOM 3 did not. However it is marred by technical issues as well; the biggest is the severe frame rate drops that happen every time there are multiple enemies or too much geometry on screen, or if you're just moving too fast. To save on rendering resources, the dynamic lighting is lessened in this game from DOOM 3, and some lights and shadows are 'baked' into the environment, but its not something you'll easily notice. Though the game has high quality textures on the player, weapons, and foreground objects, this is offset by low quality, blurry textures on distant land and the skybox, which is really noticeable in the later levels. Also on the 360 some enemiess just look nondescript gray, but I assume this is a console specific problem since I've seen PC screenshots where this is not the case.

 But let's talk about the gunplay. Quake IV has ten weapons that are all carried at the same time and can be switched to on the fly. They are all unique and serve a specific combat niche. This is a major improvement from modern shooters which limit you to only two weapons at a time and as a necessity most of their weapons are fully automatic and very similar to each other with minor differences.  Like most games in this genre, I found myself hoarding ammo for the most powerful weapons and defaulting to the shotgun, machine gun or the pistol for most of my encounters. I could take out even the strongest enemy in the game with just the pistol by dodging correctly, timing and aiming my shots, and using the charged up pistol shot, which is significantly more powerful than the standard fire. For me, this is a hallmark of good game design, as opposed to other games which arbitrarily make your starter pistol totally useless in any real fight.

I have nothing bad to say about the gunplay, but the enemy AI is a different matter. It's so bad it completely drags down the whole game. The AI is not advanced at all, and will either shoot at you while standing out in the open, or run in a straight line toward you to engage you in melee. This has led to many, many encounters where I simply backpedaled while firing and managed to kill my opponent without getting hurt myself. There are three enemy types focused around this attack and all three are "damage sponges" with high hit points but unsophisticated attacks, which make them very dull to play against.

The standard grunt comes in two types - machine gun wielding Strogg and shotgun wielding Strogg. Now, in video games, its much simpler to simply program the AI to "see" the player at all times, even through walls. It's simple to have them aim and rotate onto the player's position with perfect accuracy in instant time, and its far less costly to implement bullets as hit scan calculations, where there is no real bullet but the game simply calculates if the target was in the line of sight of the shooter's aim at the time of firing and then scores the hit instantly.  This makes the enemy AI kind of cheap to fight against so the developers of Quake IV offset this by making them attack in patterns. The shotgun wielding Strogg will try to close the distance and somersault to the player before firing. This makes him laughably easy to predict and kill. The machine gun Strogg will fire in patterns from right to left or in short bursts directly at the player. The direct bursts are unavoidable, but the right-left spray will never hit. They are not complicated and easy to defeat.

Acknowledging how cheap and uninteresting the hit scan and melee enemies are, none of the bosses use hit scan weapons but fire large, slow moving projectiles in patterns you may recognize from a 2D game like Mega Man or Ikaruga. Again, not hard to avoid and the boss battles just turn into a "shoot it until it dies" affair.

Level design is the second totem of First Person Shooter gameplay, and here it is also a mixed bag. The early levels are bland corridor shooters, the later levels open up, are less linear and have wider spaces for you to use your toys of destruction in. It's why most reviewers say that Quake IV "gets better later".

Overall Quake IV is not a bad game, but its a good game that's being severely held back. Also, when it came out in 2005 its competition was Half - Life 2, which didn't have as good shooting mechanics but had large levels and implemented an amazing physics system that was utilized to provide lots of unique fun, F.E.A.R. which implemented bullet time mechanics and had amazing enemy AI, and Halo 3, which was popular for no real reason.  Quake IV sort of got buried under its competition and it can be seen as sort of the last gasp of the old school, corridor shooter from the 90's.  Fittingly it was made by Raven Software, whose other collaborations with id like HeXen and Return to Castle Wolfenstein are some of my favorite games ever, and which somehow avoid the pitfalls that Quake IV fell into.

The 360 version of the game also came bundled with a port of Quake 2, which for me was why I even bought it to begin with.

On Hardcore Shooters

When I was in High School during the early 2000's, Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament and Counter Strike were all the rage. At our homes my friends and I played Half Life, and on our school computers we installed and played Unreal Tournament on our free time, until everyone found out about it and got out of hand, and we got shut down. From there we gravitated to LAN Cafes, which exploded in popularity and we played Counter Strike beta for hours upon hours every weekend. When console shooters like Halo and Call of Duty started rising in popularity, I thought they were fun but ultimately shallower experiences, and I basically ignored them and focused more on playing games in other genres like RPG, fighting, and 3rd person action. My college anime club had a launch day tournament to celebrate the release of Halo 2, which prompted me to get that game (the Xbox was a birthday gift), but the subsequent multiplayer experiences were so terrible that Halo 2 made me quit online multiplayer for a whole decade. Only recently did I return to online shooters, via Metal Gear Online 3, which I became obsessed with. Since then I have gone back and tried to involve myself in other contemporary shooters such as the Battlefield, Overwatch, DOOM 2016 and Halo, but these games are always compared unfavorably to the games I played in school by the larger gaming community and are generally considered "casual" shooters. I largely agree, and this has caused a hunger to find FPS games with high skill ceilings, deep gameplay mechanics, and which require technical skill in order to reliably defeat the competition. This blog will generally document my journey to find a modern "hardcore" shooter, assess the games I've played along the way, and maybe even recommend a few good ones that got buried with time or were never fully appreciated to begin with.