Halo 2 was a monster.
A game that could make millions of people put down Mechassault and Project Gotham Racing 2, both incredible games, and never look back has to be something special. It was such a monster, in fact, that disenchantment with the series was nearly inevitable. Expectations were simply too high.
Back in 2007, Halo could do no wrong. Halo 3 would soon release and there were rumors of a return to the RTS roots, something that, as a strategy game lover, I was super excited about. Despite all of this promise, Halo was about to stop being awesome, and start being really disappointing.
Halo 3 was not super epic. It did not have the crazy climactic battles that we expected from Halo 2's finale. The multiplayer was rife with stupid decisions. It wasn't a bad game, but it didn't make me want to not play Halo 2. Couple the disagreeable gameplay with maps that vary endlessly on the same "mid-sized arena" idea, and you had a repetitive and frustrating game.
At least there was still Halo Wars right?
Looking at the game on paper, a Halo RTS made by the guys who did Age of Empires, it couldn't go wrong. It was gold to an RTS player and a Halo fan. Though the controls worked, the game ended up being super simple. Sure, it was Halo, but it was baby's first RTS (the diet RTS)... something that Starcraft was for me almost a decade previously.
But then, something magical happened. While everyone was complaining about the lack of matchmaking in Halo ODST's Firefight mode, the generally short campaign, the lack of master chief and dual wielding, or what have you, I was glued to my television screen. ODST, despite all of its flaws, restored my faith in Bungie's ability to make a great Halo game.
And just in time too, considering that Reach is likely their Halo swan song.
The differences between the gameplay in Halo 3 and ODST rest, in my opinion, primarily in the focus of the developers. Halo 2's schedule was so chaotic, and so many bugs wound up shipping, the Bungie wanted to make Halo 3's multiplayer super balanced and as bug free as possible. It is, in essence, a multiplayer focused title.
ODST, on the other hand, was a side project of sorts. Their goal was to create a short sneaky single player campaign in the space of a year, and that's what they accomplished.
With a focus on making a decent single player game, Bungie showed that they were still capable of telling a great story; something that was lacking in Halo 3. Whereas Halo 2 had a tightly wound and complex narrative involving multiple protagonists, Halo 3 returned to the "guy who shoots stuff saves the world" type of thing. Though FPS games are hardly known for storytelling (with a few notable exceptions), it is something that I think is nice to have. In that respect, Halo 3 was a let down.
ODST showed that Bungie was still capable of writing a story through multiple points of view, only this time instead of having two primary characters, there were four. Though it lacked the political intrigue of Halo 2's tale, it stood on its own with an interesting mystery and some really subtle moments that, for fear of typing out spoilers, I won't share. Questions are answered, the time between Halo 2 and 3 is explored, expanded, and explained, and you get some really great characters in the meantime.
As for my gripes with 3's multiplayer? We're going to have to wait on proof that they are mixing things up a bit. Halo 3 suffered because it was a tweaked version of Halo 2's multiplayer: something that, in my opinion and the opinions of several of my peers, was not broken. Bungie is talking the talk on this one, and in about a week, we'll get to see if they walk the walk. They have already proven that if they can't do something right, then they won't do it at all with the removal of dual-wielding. The game type dictated classes are a refreshing idea that hopefully won't backfire when everyone picks the class with the jet pack or the sniper rifle.
Like I said, we'll just have to wait and see. Regardless, it would seem that Bungie is doing their best to make this their best. I hope we'll see some complicated relationships between the Spartans as we did between the ODSTs. I hope that the story and level design will be up to snuff (I especially hope that there's no library level or, for that matter, Flood). I hope that the multiplayer will move to differentiate itself from Halo 2 more than Halo 3 did.
Really, all we can do right now is speculate and hope.
