A conversation about the Halo games over in the ‘games completed’ thread led to us discussing that Halo has a problem for players understanding its wider plot due to too much of it being detailed in the tie-in media.
Halo 4 and 5, and to a lesser extent Halo Reach are the ones to probably suffer the most from this. Going to need to spoiler some things to explain the specifics...
- Spoiler: show
- Reach puts a lot of emphasis on Dr. Halsey (creator of Cortana, and the Spartan project) but also the difference between the spartan 2’s (like master chief) and the later Spartan 3s. That’s *all* stuff that’s from the novels, and the game assumes you just know it. Not knowing it doesn’t make the game hard to follow, but it does rob some of the story beats of their dramatic impact.
4 and 5 go further, in that a lot of the forerunner stuff is coming from the newer novels.
For 4 the game makes almost no sense if you haven’t read them. Also you lose the impact that Captain Lasky of the UNSC Infinity knows the chief already if you didn’t see the TV Mini series ‘Halo: forward unto dawn’ (which is great, by the way).
For 5 you’ve got this new team hunting the chief down, one of them is a character from Halo ODST, which is a spin off but that’s probably ok. But the main guy, Locke, you’re expected to know about from having watched the tv series ‘Halo: Midnight’
I love that they do these tie-ins, but they have to find a way to make them less essential.
And that got me thinking, what games have actually done this well in recent years? Way back in the day the scene setting novella bundled in with the game was a pretty common thing. The original Elite has a good one, as does Hired Guns.
Mass Effect I think did it pretty well. The three novels that came out for the original trilogy use some of the characters from the games but are designed to embellish things rather than be required. The first is a prequel to the first game, and each after that was set between a game. (You could argue there was more ‘important’ stuff hidden in the games DLC than the tie ins)
Gears of War was doing it pretty well for a while, they mostly concentrated on the things that happened before the first game, but in recent years they’ve started to fall into the same trap as Halo. Assassin’s Creed is probably worse, but only if the present day storyline stuff is something you’ve been caring about, where a lot of the characters come originally from the comics.
Anyway... thoughts?