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“Did you fix the Library?”
That’s the first question I asked reps from developer 343 Industries at a behind-closed-doors E3 meeting to show off their work on 10-years-later remake Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. The answer I got back gave me a bit of hope. I’d have the option to fix it, they told me, or I could play one of the franchise’s most hated levels in all its soul-crushing awfulness. Cool, thought I.
Say, did anybody bring along a compass? Or, I dunno, flashlight batteries?
Hey, I’m not an absolute purist. I’m all in favor of HD remakes of classic games, assuming they do their job: successfully present an elder statesman to the current breed of gamer. Sometimes a reissue serves better than a remake, like the Ico/Shadow of the Colossus Collection. Maybe you completely rebuild and rewire the whole thing, as Tomb Raider Anniversary did. Either way, the goal should be to spot-clean weak elements, fix what nobody realized was broken that first time around, and let the original magic shine brighter than ever.
So it’s unfortunate that for their coming-out party as a game developer (minus a Halo: Reach map pack and Halo Waypoint), 343 Industries frequently misdiagnosed their patient. To the point where, if you were to judge the entire phenomenon based solely on Halo Anniversary, you might wonder what all the fuss was about 10 years ago. It might also make you seriously wonder about their upcoming Halo 4.
No, they didn’t completely destroy Halo. If you've never played the first, I highly recommend diving into this potent little history lesson. Your gaming education will be incomplete without it. Even if you only end up using the experience to slag the franchise for the next 10 years, at least you'll do it from an informed place. But for my part, I'd call the effort behind Anniversary haphazard. Maybe Microsoft hamstrung 343's efforts, maybe everybody got a little timid around a revered classic. I'm sure they all meant well...I just don't think they meant well enough.
Two things immediately jump out as improvements. First, you’re playing with Halo: Reach’s control configuration, an evolution well-suited to the Xbox 360 controller that wasn’t possible on its bumper-free Xbox 1.0 ancestor. Switch back if you want to, but you won’t want to. Second, it looks better...kinda. You can switch between 2001 and 2011 graphics at any time (save for cut-scenes and interrupted only by a brief fade to black) to see just what a difference a decade can make. By comparison, the original looks like it’s coated in a dark sheen of grape jelly.
Switching between the two views, however, doesn’t just highlight what’s changed. You also start to see what hasn’t changed at all.
This is why I can't have nice things.
Essentially, the new graphics run “on top” of the old stuff. Everything looks nicer, brighter, more detailed, with the same old chunky, stiff, way-out-of-date animations. The effect looks far better and horrendously bad at the same time. The disconnect between dialog and facial animations reminded me of badly dubbed 70's kung-fu flicks, but not in a good way. So don’t expect to see something that looks, start-to-finish, as though it was made in 2011. We're still quite firmly in 2001 here.
Fine. Maybe they didn't have the scope or budget to redo the cut-scenes and character animations. Anyway, gameplay matters more than good looks, yes?
Normal difficulty -- the same level I generally played at years ago -- now presents a threat level roughly equal to that of a narcoleptic cow. That breaks (original developer) Bungie’s fabled “30 seconds of fun” pacing down into 10-15 second hits, pretty thoroughly wrecking the game’s flow. I personally breezed through the first few levels unhindered, at top speed, and bored out of my mind. Knocking down legions of softcore Covenant fighters didn’t thrill me any more than raking leaves into a plastic bag does. Sure, I can bump up to Legendary difficulty, but what what the hell happened to the baseline experience?
Prettier this time, but Ima be blowing you up again, fool.
We’ve had 10 years to pinpoint where Halo went astray -- and yes, it did fall short in several places as most games do -- 10 years to examine each moment in minute detail, 10 years to make a few informed decisions on how to evolve Combat Evolved into the seminal console shooter of the next generation, just as it was in the last generation. Halo Anniversary feels like somebody made those decisions after 10 minutes while on the phone talking about something entirely different. The fan-favorite overpowered Magnum pistol returns, but so does the floaty handling on the Warthog jeeps, missing even the improvements from Halo 3. Quitting out of a mission after hitting a checkpoint forces you to replay the entire level. Navigating levels still gets messy on occasion. It's so bright out during famed night-snipping mission Truth and Reconciliation, you're often spotted instantly, assuming your squad doesn't break cover early. Buggy enemies and allies pop up with regularity.
Nothing feels balanced or re-balanced. No refinements from a decade's advancements in game design were applied. The Library remains as dismally un-fixed as ever. Were any of those things honestly gameplay decisions?
So yes, I'm worried about Halo 4. That will be 343 Industries' first real opportunity to make something without piggybacking on someone else's work, so it's a very different proposition. But the decisions made for Halo Anniversary make me question the sort of decisions they'll make working from scratch. The details aren't there. Bungie famously refined, refined, refined, and refined during development, and I'm not feeling that here.
Mainly, I'm feeling a missed opportunity. They prettied Halo up, but didn’t actually improve it. Or even really update it past slapping a quick coat of Reach paint on the old classic. What will happen when 343 doesn't have those bones to build on? That's now an open question.
