Time Extend
How Bungie went back to the beginning for its Halo swansong
In its series swansong Halo:
Reach, Bungie went back to the start in order to say goodbye
How do you say goodbye to the series that defined your studio, and helped launch and sustain an entire console platform, after nearly a decade? If you’re Bungie, on the cusp of leaving Microsoft to embrace its own Destiny, you go back to the beginning – 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved – and then back further still.
The developer’s final Halo game abandons the ongoing storyline of Master Chief, last of the armoured super-soldiers known as Spartans. Instead, it opts for a prequel set, Rogue One-style, in the moments immediately before the first game.
Human colonists living on the eponymous planet of Reach make first contact with the Covenant alien forces. They do not come in peace. Noble Team, a squad of Spartans, is deployed to fight back. It is, ultimately, a doomed mission. The game makes no secret of this, opening on a shot of a Spartan’s helmet – neatly colour-coded to match your own customisable character – abandoned in the dust, its visor terminally cracked. Just like Rogue One, the story’s one of a small group of soldiers who give their lives to set the events of the main saga in motion.
And it’s not just Reach’s story which winds back the clock. The prequel setting allowed Bungie to erase some of the factors that had complicated the games since
Combat Evolved. Gone are the zombie-like Flood and floating Sentinels, enemies that upset the delicate balance of Halo’s gunplay. The dual-wielding of sidearms introduced by the second game, and the incendiary and spike grenades added in the third, are also dropped. It’s a streamlining of the formula, refocusing around the core ‘golden triangle’ design. This is how Bungie refers to Halo combat’s mix of shooting, grenades and melee attacks – all interlinked in a twitch-reflex game of rock, paper, scissors.
The result plays as a kind of greatesthits package. There are Bungie’s trademark painterly science-fiction landscapes; the unmistakable heft of steering a Warthog; Martin O’Donnell’s unique mix of orchestral sweeps and guitar stabs; the day-glo purple shards of a Needler seeking out their target; and the developer’s continuing love affair with the voice of Nathan Fillion. There’s a pleasing familiarity, too, to
Reach’s toybox: to knowing, for example, that the squat bumblebee chassis of a Ghost hoverbike conceals an explosive fuel tank just behind its left fin, or that a fully charged plasma pistol shot will short out an opponent’s shielding.
On top of these well-established fundaments, Bungie builds afresh. Reach’s biggest addition, Armor Abilities, takes that sacred triangle and bends it into more of a square by offering game-altering powerups (comparable to Destiny’s cooldown skills) that allow individuals to customise their playstyle, even more than with the weapons they choose. Drop Shield puts up a healing bubble that blocks projectile attacks. Hologram generates a decoy version of your character. And Jet Pack… well, it’s a jet pack. Each ability opens up new approaches to combat. The holographic decoy, for example, is a great way to draw a sniper’s fire and set up a sneak attack, to smoke out opponents from cover, or just to baffle and annoy your friends.
Multiplayer offers these Abilities as part of pre-packaged loadouts – the influence, no doubt, of Call Of Duty- style military shooters, a genre beginning its ascendancy just as Reach was being developed. In the campaign, meanwhile, they’re scattered throughout each level like old-school power-ups, their use reinforced by the Spartans who fight alongside you.
Noble Team isn’t made up of characters so much as it is assorted combinations of accents, trademark weapons and abilities. The assault specialist who shields herself as she runs headlong into combat; the leanfigured sniper in the dusky scout armour, activating camouflage while he methodically sets up the next shot; and you, the customisable Noble Six, able to switch fighting styles on the fly depending on what you find along the way.
Such a major change feels like it should imbalance that carefully honed triangle of combat. But the Abilities actually slot very neatly into the interplay between the tools
Halo hands its players. Take Armor Lock, which amplifies your shield to make you
invulnerable, but immobile – a complete change to the usual attack-retreat rhythm of
Halo gun battles. Vitally, though, it interacts with many of the existing combat systems in interesting ways. Armor Lock offers a rare counter to Needler rounds, shards of ammunition which are fairly ineffectual on impact but burrow deep into unshielded armour. Activating the ability immediately sloughs them off before they can reach critical mass and explode. It’s a similar story with the sticky plasma grenades.
It also offers a new way of handling one of Halo’s trickiest challenges: opponents who have got behind the wheel of a vehicle. Armor Lock charges up an EMP that fires as soon as the button is released, frying any nearby machinery. Alternatively, with careful timing the ability can be activated just as a Warthog or Ghost is about to run you down, turning the would-be victim into an immovable roadblock.
These are all pre-existing systems, and problems that have other solutions, but the new Abilities open the design space up further. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they’ve appeared, in some form, in both Halo games produced since Bungie left the series – the dev’s parting gift that keeps giving.
Another of Reach’s inventions, one which has proved rather less immutable, is Invasion mode. It’s the finest of the game’s dizzying array of multiplayer options. Like in most multiplayer shooters, dying and respawning can become something of a churn in Halo, especially with the number of grenades bouncing around. After losing a few hours to deathmatches, it can all start to feel a little pointless. Invasion tries to address that by replacing the usual numerical scores with a simple narrative structure. The aliens took your MacGuffin – get it back. Or, alternatively: the humans are trying to break into your base and steal your MacGuffin – stop them.
The mode breaks down into phases. Each team starts with only one portion of the map unlocked and limited tools at its disposal. As the attackers push forward, more will open up. More map, more vehicles, more loadouts with different abilities to choose from. This keeps each game fresh, and lends some tangible worth to every kill or death because it’s advancing – or hindering – a simple story the teams tell together. Now, though, this mode is mostly a historical footnote. Invasion hasn’t been picked up by any of Reach’s 343-developed sequels. And revisiting the game’s online matchmaking today, with the final holdouts clustering around the basic Team Slayer mode, there aren’t enough players for even a single game of Invasion.
Like much of Reach, Invasion felt like it was looking forward, not only to the future of its own series but also those of the shooters it influenced, before Bungie left the genre behind to create its MMORPG hybrid. In this way, at least, the concept
GOES BACK TO THE BEGINNING TO FIND NEW WAYS TO DELIVER ON THE PROMISE OF THE GAME THAT STARTED IT ALL
lives on – most recently, in Battlefield V’s Grand Operations mode. This feels like part of Reach’s attempt to close the gap between multi- and singleplayer, something Bungie would go on to do in a very different way with Destiny. It is most obvious in the campaign’s levels, almost all of which are recycled for competitive multiplayer or the cooperative Firefight mode. Far from being a sign of rushed development – even if Reach was made alongside Halo 3: ODST – it feels like a conscious decision.
It means every major combat arena in the game, whether you’re fighting AI-controlled aliens or humans on the other end of an internet connection, is built to be approached in multiple ways. Each is a miniature sandbox, packed with nooks and crannies to explore, weapons tucked away on high ledges, vantage points and hiding spots. In the campaign, you generally approach these spaces before enemies are aware of your presence, giving you time to pick a solution to the puzzle it presents. Will you charge in with the half-full weapons you’ve already got, or sneak around the edges to scoop up the waiting sniper rifle and Active Camouflage pick-up?
The systems connecting Halo’s weapons, abilities and other tools mean that each approach feels fundamentally different. Stumbling across a shotgun (or a Drop Shield, or an enemy Elite wielding a plasma sword) has a palpable effect on the way you play. It feels designed for replaying – an endless loop of that famous ‘30 seconds of fun’ – which in multiplayer, is exactly what happens. It’s the core of all the Halo games that led to this point, but also a precursor to the design of much of Destiny.
It’s tempting to draw a comparison between Noble Team’s hopeless last stand, and Bungie taking a final run at the traditional firstperson shooter structure before leaving it behind for a more lucrative framework, one that hooks players in with the promise of persistence and everincreasing numbers. But Reach is, evidently, a game made on the developer’s own terms. A swansong that goes back to the beginning, finds new ways to deliver on the promises of the game that started it all, and tries to establish a future divergent from the one Bungie will be building itself – even if some of those ideas never actually get taken up by those it hands the series off to.