Ask a Halo fanboy anything! Removing common misconceptions.
- Thread starter Jabberwock xeno
- Start date
Recommended Videos
I love the Halo franchise, including the books and collection of short films, but I have a supreme loathing towards not just fans, not just Xbox live players, but the Halo and XBL FANATICS! The complete douchebags that make up absolutely everyone I've ever met in an online match! The idiots who think that because they owned you at Halo you are the scum of the earth. Now my biggest problem is that these aren't just the occasional trolls. These are the vast majority. You're a Halo fan? So am I. But these people flock to Halo to show their 1337|\|355 like moths to a flame.
Please try to be respectful.bluewolf said:
It's not COD fans, it's just people. Just like how theres a stereotype of us, thatt's a stereotype of them.
The you'd know they aren't real halo fans.Nieroshai said:
They gravitate towards whichever game is popular at the time. If you remember, after modern Warfare 2, a lot of those people were gone from halo 3 matchmaking. I'm sure COD fanboys are nice people too, and hate those whiny guys just as much as we do.
Real halo fans are much less disrespectful, particularly the canon ones in the universe forum, which is so polite and intelligent it feels like Victorian england.
Yeah, but please note the difference of A) 7 years and B) Different generations.Jabberwock xeno said:
http://www.bungie.net/forums/topics.aspx?forumID=1Nieroshai said:
It's not as good as it used to be, but only because there's less theories due to cyrptum (people would write up the 2 page theories on forerunner this or flood that etc)
You just have to know which threads are a waste of time or not, you'll get a sense for which ones are good or not after a while, here's some good ones, keep in mind that they may be old though:
http://www.bungie.net/Forums/posts.aspx?postID=49097209
http://www.bungie.net/Forums/posts.aspx?postID=36054830
http://www.bungie.net/Forums/posts.aspx?postID=35949941
http://www.bungie.net/Forums/posts.aspx?postID=40929715
People didn't jump on the story bandwagon, they jumped on the plot bandwagon. There is a difference between having a well developed story and a well developed plot.Netrigan said:
A plot is a logical progression of events. Read the return to wolfenstine synopsis again. 90% of it is "Blazkowicz does this" or "Blazkowicz does that." Plot is the what.
Compare that to the story, the logic and circumstances that control the plot. Return to castle wolfenstine can literally be sumed up as "there is a nazi a plan to resurrect Heinrich I, a legendary and powerful Saxon warlock-king. Stop them!" Story is the Why.
What separates a game like Halo from a game like return to castle Wolfenstein is that the story doesn't exist solely for the player to do stuff in a given context. What do I know about the nazis that I already didn't? That they're a bunch of boogey men? Fine. And there was some uber boogey man from way back? I'll give you that. Do I know anything else about him? Does the game tell me where all of this uber magic stuff came from? Well, sure, it might say "the past," but what about that past? How did people live? How did the civilization operate? If they're so badass, why don't they rule the world now? The game essentially runs on the answer "Cuz them nahzees is evil." Just because "X does Y because Z" is clearer than plain "X does Y" doesn't mean that it's any more worthwhile. One of the reasons I'm skeptical when video games try to use Nazis (or any other historical group) as a comic book style villain is that it's so easy to justify anything that they do. Want demons? The nazis did it. Want a zombie apocalypse? The nazis did it. Want a bunch of cyborgs? The nazis did it. The problem with this is that it completely destroys the reasoning for Germany going to war in the first place. People don't just start wars for the Evulz. As a rule of thumb, if a plan sounds like something the underpants gnomes from south park would come up with, maybe it's time to rethink the plan.
Even half-life, a game praised for it's story, can be summed up as "Teleportation experiments open a portal to a bad place with bad monsters. Close the hole. Also, watch out because the government wants to kill everyone. Ok, now you need to kill a big monster on the other side because it's keeping the hole open." However, it still has to potential to end up with a good story because it implied a lot. Whether or not valve will follow through is another question. I enjoyed the original half-life way more than any of the halo games, but I'm not under the impression that it has a more sophisticated story. And before you say g-man, remember that there isn't any reason to assume that his presence is anything more profound than the combine, or that the combine have any more profound truth about them than what has been revealed. I haven't played portal 2 yet, so I don't know it's been touched on, so maybe valve already addressed all of my concerns.
In the halo series, there is a reason I'm fighting a war. I learn why halo exists and I learn what it does. There is a reason why the covenant hate humanity. I learn why the forerunners are all gone. The covenant aren't in it for the Evulz. The flood isn't just in it for the Evulz. The forerunners didn't just make a giant weapon thing for the Evulz. Ask any question and there is either an explicit or implicit why. Halo isn't Bioshock (and don't mention system shock, it falls under the same category as half-life), it isn't Deus Ex, and it isn't Marathon, a game Bungie made back in 1994, but I'm not going to consider it at the same league as Quake or Duke Nukem.
As for this, I didn't quite take the video seriously when Bob casually brushed off the moral ambiguity of the series with a "yeah, I know, but..."Shirokurou said:
Truth be told, you can twist a series to have what ever message you damn well please. Bob just decide to go for a low criticism and compared it to fascism. It's always fascism...
Also, making the stupid "his eyes turned blue" argument pissed me off. His eyes were already blue, damn it!
It's actually sort of intentional, as moviebob and even Yahtzee has pointed out. ("trained to be suicide bombers")Shirokurou said:
They were raised to be faceless, personalty deprived tools of war, the covenant is composed of a slave army, more or less, outright says this in the video, but brushes it off that nobody lies halo for the story.
There's an entire group of websites with people. which will dissargee with him on that, and i'm one of those people.
Halo basically has an action movie plot. While investing an alien artifact, the ship gets destroyed. They escape, regroup, go on the offensive. While investigating the alien artifact further, they unleash the horrible menace it was built to keep in check. Some more running around and fighting, new alien menace is destroyed.Waffle_Man said:
No human character is defined beyond their function in the story and are generally a collection of soldier archtypes. Even Cortana, the most fully realized character in the entire story, exists primarily to provide regular exposition dumps to the player. She has no hopes or dreams, she's just a pleasant and entertaining personality to interface with the player.
Wolfenstein has a story. Not a particularly great one and it's over-filled with plot complications, but it's still a story. There's a reason why you're doing what you're doing and the settings flow out of that story instead of just being a collection of random maps (although in proper action movie logic, it's easy enough to script-doctor a cool set-piece into the narrative). I've been watching old Doctor Who episodes and I could say the same about a lot of those stories. A very simple story padded out with endless plot complications (because the story style is derived from cliff-hanger adventures). By story's end, you've have achieved the goal established at the very beginning, with lots of twists and turns along the way... and a fun time was had by all.
I've sat down and watched the story/game-play videos of the Halo trilogy on YouTube. It's very much in the same tradition, with the first game having a fairly tight focus (Parts 2 & 3 suffer from believing its own hype and trying to cram a really convoluted story into a medium that is ill-suited to tell it... not unlike the Matrix trilogy). A fairly tightly plotted story in a first-person shooter at that time is a bit of a rarity, but mostly because games where trying to fit as much gameplay into their stories as possible (hence endless plot complications). As developers followed the Halo formula, you start seeing tighter plotted and *ahem* much shorter games. Halo only has 10 chapters, whereas 20-30 was common at the time.
So, if you say that Halo was the first really good story ever told in a FPS, I'd say "bull" and "shit". I can probably come up with a half dozen emotionally effective stories that pre-date it.
I would be willing to concede that it is perhaps an evolution in video game story telling as they presented a much tighter narrative with less extraneous plot complications (a development that may have led to much shorter single player campaigns)... although I'm not overly impressed with their effort because of the lack of interesting characters in the story.
Can we stop arguing please?Netrigan said:
I've said that Halo's up front story in game is sub-par, it's the extended canon that's good.
ALL of the flaws you just pointed out are not present in the books.
Now, can we PLEASE move on?
As in what?Shirokurou said:
Spartans with Nazi's? No.
Spartans as a faceless supersoilder collective? Yes, but only because that's techinally the most practical solution to the crisis the UNSC was facing at the time.
The UNSC has no problems with divirsty, it's just that a group of oliders like that is the best solution.
I touched on this earlier in the thread, but since it's such a central issue to the debate, I feel inclined to continue.Netrigan said:
Storytelling is very commonly approached as little more than a quantitative sum of plot and character drive. This is flawed for numerous reasons. Firstly, because the sum of the parts of something often has very little relevance to the quality of the whole. And secondly, because plot drive and character, taken alone as independant entities, only make up a tiny chunk of what can contribute to storytelling.
Halo's storytelling uses characters as proxy's and plot for little more than an outer shell of structure. The meat of the storytelling comes from the interactions, in juxtaposition and resonance, of sound design, visual design, gameplay, and narrative flow. With massive emphasis on the gameplay, by the way; this is, after all, an interactive storytelling experience, and if you're watching a video instead of playing, you're missing out on everything intense, everything exploratory, and many things visceral.
For a similar example outside of video games of something that sought to tell a story without exploiting complex characters (it doesn't even have specific characters for most of its running time) and without a complex plot, check out Battleship Potemkin [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0015648/] (And if you were to actually watch it at some point, I would very strongly recommend the version on Netflix instant watch; it uses a reconstruction of the original soundtrack, which is awesome). Despite these things that would certainly be very problematic by the typical plot+character rubric, it spent a quarter century being hailed by film critics as the most brilliant film storytelling ever, and while it's certainly YMMV, I and many others think it's still a fascinating watch today, even if you don't necessarily agree with its political agenda.
edit:
You seem to be the only Halo defender in this thread out of several who outright considers the storytelling in the games sub-par. Myself and at least one other disagree, so it seems that the disagreement has not been settled, hence, the debate continues.Jabberwock xeno said:
Also of perhaps relevant note towards my arguments: I've only played the games. The books are not being considered in my discussions.
Well, there's your problem!Netrigan said:Sadly, I never played any of the booksJabberwock xeno said:
I realize that it's the game that you are talking about, not the books, but they are really that good.
Tupolev said:
I say that in terms of charcter depth and motivations, and partly because I realize that my efforts to explain how the story is not sub par is futile.
Anyways, this thread is about asking people I, or other Halo fans questions, not about how good or not good the story is.
I will at least concede that the game has GOOD music, but tailoring that music to the game is another thing. To illustrate this point, I'm gonna make up lyrics that fit the nature of the music, and dialogue that fits the nature of the gameplay.Jabberwock xeno said:
Music: "The rain dances in the wind....a memory of the past...
slowly moving through time....though the day will not last..."
Gameplay: "DIE, HUMAN! Grenade! *BOOM* Eat...THIS! *thwack*"
So yeah, its soundtrack on its own is nice to listen to. While you're playing, it just feels horribly unfitting.