This is just an idea I have had pop into my head by playing Gears of War 3. The campaign for GOW is sublime and multiplayer is as well (I know it is an opinion but forums are about expressing your opinion). In Gears of War it feels like a big blockbuster in the campaign which Halo has always seemed to of lacked. I am in no way saying the campaign is awful and the storyline isn’t good, but it doesn’t seem to make you involved in the game which Gears of War does beautifully.
My theory is that we make it more like GOW and put the feeling of big blockbuster.
By the way I am not saying that we should use the same game mechanics.
Halo 3 to me felt like a big blockbuster. But Reach, 3, and ODST are the only campaigns I played so far. Out of those 3, Halo 3 has the best campaign. Every time I watch the cutscene before the Ark mission, or the last cutscenes with Master Chief almost falling off to his death, the funeral, and the last cutscene always gave me chills and excitement. To me that is a big blockbuster.
> Halo 3 to me felt like a big blockbuster. But Reach, 3, and ODST are the only campaigns I played so far. Out of those 3, Halo 3 has the best campaign. Every time I watch the cutscene before the Ark mission, or the last cutscenes with Master Chief almost falling off to his death, the funeral, and the last cutscene always gave me chills and excitement. To me that is a big blockbuster.
I always thought that Halo 3 was an amazing campaign but what the parts that gave me chills usually had the best music, after the saddest part in GOW 3 I almost cried.
> > Halo 3 to me felt like a big blockbuster. But Reach, 3, and ODST are the only campaigns I played so far. Out of those 3, Halo 3 has the best campaign. Every time I watch the cutscene before the Ark mission, or the last cutscenes with Master Chief almost falling off to his death, the funeral, and the last cutscene always gave me chills and excitement. To me that is a big blockbuster.
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> I always thought that Halo 3 was an amazing campaign but what the parts that gave me chills usually had the best music, after the saddest part in GOW 3 I almost cried.
Yeah same here. But just seeing everything come together before the Ark mission, and during the part where they deploy the tanks was awesome. The score, and the image was iconic. I haven’t played any of the Gears of War games, but I always wanted to. I guess one of these days I have to check out the first two games, so I don’t feel too completely lost with the third one.
> Halo 2 was like an epic blockbuster. Anyone who has played it and has a brain knows that, even if they didn’t like it.
Never played it, will eventually (and I know I’ll like it). Anyone who have played it and didn’t like it is their opinion, doesn’t mean they don’t have a brain.
i respect your opinion. however in my opinion the halo trilogy ce-3 was more epic than GOW. halo 2 was like a blockbuster to me the first time i played it through. Halo has been my favorite storyline for 10 years now.
> i respect your opinion. however in my opinion the halo trilogy ce-3 was more epic than GOW. halo 2 was like a blockbuster to me the first time i played it through. Halo has been my favorite storyline for 10 years now.
For me I’ve always loved the Halo storyline but I’ve found the GOW campaign itself more addictive and saddening when someone dies. While when Johnson died I was just like OK, but I see where you get your idea
Previous campaigns were dull, but the answer isn’t “make it more like a blockbuster!”
That’s what Reach and Halo 3 tried to be, spectacular but more importantly superficial. The plot was just about non-existent in order to make room for the arbitrary “hero moments” that so much hollywood action dreck is based on. Gears, to get away from this, does do a good job at grounding the story, adding depth, but still allowing for the spectacular, but only through a very careful balance between all the factors of cinematic action, dialogue, and gameplay which I don’t think can so easily be replicated without just falling off the deep end in one respect or the other. More likely, you’ll just turn Halo into a Transformers or, worse, Attack of the Clones pushing it to be just like these other great things but forgetting that in order to be great you have to strike out on your own and try to achieve and indivualized balance that works best for the product.
And in this case, I feel the answer is to look to books than to the movie industry. The plot structure of a 10 hour campaign, for one, fits much more easily into the former than the latter, and gradual character development as opposed to a blockbusters much more “condensed” variety of story telling also works better for the length as well as the players involvement in the story, and unlike gears which focuses on a single world’s conflict as embodied by four or so dudes Halo can get so much more traction out of this. We can still have the big explosions and epic battles, but not for their own sake but for their contribution to the work as a whole as element upon element builds from tiny pieces a much larger work of fiction.
Space Marine, interestingly enough, went roughly in this direction and I have to say that it worked out quite brilliantly. It’s not something you saw picked up in the reviews (someone who plays games for a living lacks subtlety, after all) but at least for me that campaign stands as the best FPS campaign I’ve played in years, gears of war included, because despite those “big moments” it parsed out it’s plot much more in the way of a novel than a film and used setting in much the same methodical fashion to slowly build what a “blockbuster” game or film will shoddily try to throw at you in a short few seconds, much to it’s success.
Of course that still isn’t to say “make Halo 4 like Space Marine,” the point of finding your own balance still stands, but this is to offer an example of what good you can do by not going the route of the big action flick.
You mean written by a capable author? Definitely. Having Karen Traviss write not only the books, but Gears 3 as well was the best move Epic could have made.
Now if 343i got Greg Bear or Eric Nylund to write the new Halo trilogy, we’d be golden.
While I really enjoyed Gears of War 3, I was disappointed with the campaign. I am not saying it was bad or incomplete… it just felt off, at the end. I don’t feel Halo should take much from Gears of War.
That said. Every game should learn from the set pieces/environments in Gears of War 3. A stunning game. Truly.
GOW3 was the first game I have ever played in my life to make me cry. The character development throughout the whole trilogy in fact was, quite the best I have ever seen. Never really felt that way about any of the halo games unfortunately.
Reach was really lacklustre campaign wise. The voice acting wasn’t convincing and the plot was sort of meh. You never cared for any of the characters when they died, because you never knew them.
And for the record, 2 was amazing. From what I remember, it’s been so long. Just turned 14 when it came out.
> You mean written by a capable author? Definitely. Having Karen Traviss write not only the books, but Gears 3 as well was the best move Epic could have made.
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> Now if 343i got Greg Bear or Eric Nylund to write the new Halo trilogy, we’d be golden.
Well I know Greg Bear is writing the Forerunner Trilogy and Karen Travis is writing Glasslands.