How come I still don’t “get” Halo?
I’ve played a few hours of the Halo 3 Beta this past weekend and this week, and for those of you that are interested, here are my impressions. Keep in mind that I’ve never really been a fan of Halo; the campaign for the first game put me to sleep several times with its repetitive textures and corridors, and I was never really interested in multiplayer. However, the 360 is my only console of choice this time, unlike last generation, so I will be studying Halo 3 closely.
I beat the first Halo’s campaign, bought the second one, but never got too far in the campaign nor did I play much multiplayer. Halo 2 didn’t get much playing time at all for me since it seemed too similar to the first. I never understood the popularity of Halo, but over time I’ve begun to learn – it seems like the reason why it’s so popular is the LAN play. Most people that speak highly of Halo seem to have the experience of participating in a 3-4 TV/Xbox setup with 12-16 players. Coupled with the inherent jokes that Halo is quite popular with the typical frat boy, and I can see its broad mainstream appeal. Maybe that’s why it’s so successful – everyone likes it because they can play it (and play it with their friends).
Crackdown: My Access into the Halo 3 Beta
The way I got access to the Halo 3 Beta was through the purchase of Crackdown. With it having gone on sale for $40 on Amazon, I decided to bite since it was a game I was interested in playing anyway. However, for any of you that are interested in getting access to the Halo 3 Beta, you can just rent Crackdown and you’ll get a chance to play the beta.
There’s no Serial Key or anything that is required to play the Halo 3 Beta – only the Crackdown disc is required. Just pop in the disc, and once the game loads, go to the Downloads section and choose “Play the Halo 3 Beta.” It’s about a 1 gig download, but with the new 360 Dashboard May Update, I’ve noticed that the download was much faster – maybe 10-15 minutes for that full gig to get downloaded.
Graphics/Sound
People saying that Halo 3 looks more like Halo 2.5 are correct. The graphics themselves don’t seem that interesting to me – the game running on 720p on my 32 inch LCD doesn’t look that much different than when I played its predecessors on 480i on my older 27 inch tube TVs. The game looked practically the same now as it did then. There wasn’t a huge HDTV jump in graphics quality, and like others, I was quite disappointed that it didn’t look as nice as GRAW2 or Gears of War. The graphics are quite functional, in a Rainbow Six: Vegas kind of way, but they don’t have a cinematic feel to them. Then again, I’m not sure if nicer graphics would have affected the game play. Halo’s clean graphics work, but I was under whelmed.
I have no real complaints about the sound – like the graphics, they’re functional but there wasn’t enough of it in multiplayer to really judge. There’s no music or anything when you play these online beta multiplayer modes, so it’s somewhat too quiet (like if you were to play Warcraft 3 with no music). The sound effects and everything are fine, but I would imagine the single player campaign would illustrate the best use of the game’s sound.
Halo’s respected matchmaking system
I’ve always been a fan of Halo’s online matchmaking system since it was introduced in Halo 2. It reminds me of Battle.net’s simplicity and effectiveness. In the beta, there are only a couple of match types available.
Here is what you have:
1. Ranked
a. Slayer (solo deathmatch)
b. Team Slayer (team deathmatch)
c. Team Mode (random team mode picked for each game)
2. Custom
a. Slayer (solo deathmatch)
b. Team Mode (random team mode picked for each game)
You just pick one of them, and it automatically searches for a game for you and joins it like Battle.net’s matchmaking. If you pick a Custom type game (non-ranked) it will start searching for a game and automatically fill up the slots with other people searching. With Custom games, I don’t think rank of the players is calculated as part of the search criteria, so it just grabs the first 8 players for a Slayer type or the first 12 players for the team mode.
If you pick one of the ranked types of matches, you get points and rank up based on how you play in each of the games. When you join a ranked match, it also searches for games that pits you against players of similar rank, or balances teams in ranked team games where if you’re new, you’ll probably get a highly ranked player to balance the team out.
One of the annoyances I had with the multiplayer of Rainbow Six: Vegas was how you had to search for games through a lobby. Players would just create games and wait until their room filled up. If they were lucky, their room would fill quickly, but if not, they’d wait forever. With Halo’s matchmaking system, you never have to worry about not finding a game or joining a game with friends.
Halo allows for team matchmaking and also allows for you to stay on the same team that you played on from one game to another when searching for the next game. At the end of a match, you can choose the option to stay on the team you just played on to continue playing. Pretty convenient if you’ve bonded with your team and want to continue. Although I’m guessing that if you were to stay on your team in a ranked game where you joined randomly, you’d probably go up against another arranged team.
The game also has a good veto system. From what I saw, it looks like after a game is filled and the map is loading, all the players have a chance to veto the mode or map. If more than half the players veto the mode/map, it will switch the mode/map one time and that one will be used. It didn’t give the players an option to veto the second map/mode that it was changed to.
My experiences – Game Modes
I’ve only been able to play two of the three maps in the beta so far, a snow one and a more traditional base one. I’ve also played the following modes:
Slayer
The first game I played in the beta was a Custom Slayer game, and even though the cap was at 8 people, I was playing early on a Saturday morning and my game started with only 4 players. Regular deathmatch was somewhat boring, to be honest, but it gave me a chance to relearn the controls and to test the different weapons. I would not be looking forward to playing this mode any more. Maybe the paucity of players made for a very boring game – it was definitely not a good first impression of the beta.
Team Slayer
Team Slayer was definitely a lot more fun than slayer. In fact, I must say that I enjoyed it. With 6 on 6 team slayer, the game feels a lot more substantial as your team is trying to hit 50 total kills first. Unfortunately for me, our team lost 49-50 but it was enjoyable, although somewhat simplistic.
King of the Hill
I had no idea how this mode worked when I tried it, and apparently no one on my team did either except one player. We got rocked easily, as it seemed like the opposing team was in control most of the time. The hill seemed to move around, and when it appeared there was a big cylinder highlighting the spot. I’m guessing that you’re supposed to kill the opposing team’s players and get yours onto that hill and hold it for as long as possible. Unfortunately, they keep respawning. I didn’t really enjoy this mode.
Territories
The last mode that I’ve played so far in the beta, and the one that seems most popular with the players is Territories. It is a combination of Attack and Defend and Capture and Hold all in one. Basically one team plays offense and one team plays defense and there are five nodes that can be captured. The offensive team tries to capture each point by staying near the flag – the more players trying to capture the base, the faster the meter rises. Once the meter is full, the base has been captured and stays captured. The offensive team scores 1 point for each base captured for a total of 5 maximum points. Then the two teams switch sides to give the defending team a chance to capture. This continues until one team scores a total of 10 points and wins the match. All of the other modes I’ve played so far seemed simplistic compared to this one since this required more coordination and teamwork, and hence, was more fun.
I didn’t get a chance to try out capture the flag, but it’s probably what you’d expect.
My experiences – combat
It seems like there’s a lot more weapons in this game than the previous ones, and most of the new ones are all Covenant ones. I never really understood how to use them, so I tended to stick to the regular shotgun and machine gun-like weapons.
There is a new very noticeable weapon though – it’s a laser weapon that takes up maybe the bottom right quadrant of your screen when equipped. You charge it up and it shoots a huge laser out and it not only kills anyone in its path, but it can also destroy vehicles. I was able to get a kill off of it, but it seems quite hard to use as the cool down for it and the charge time makes it difficult to fire upon moving human targets.
I’ve never really enjoyed the Halo weapons system, but I’m quite glad that melee is effective. In most FPS games, if you switch to a knife or something, you do almost no damage as compared to a firearm. To me that never really made sense since if you get close enough to an enemy where you can melee them, you should be able to do a significant amount of damage. Well, maybe not as much as the Halo 2 sword, but it shouldn’t be minor either. In the Halo 3 beta, it looks like 2 melee hits will kill an opponent – and just one if you can melee someone from behind for a stealth kill (which is awesome).
In fact, melee probably accounted for at least half of my total kills so far in the game – I’ll generally fire upon a guy but move closer to him so I can just melee him to finish him off. This has worked several times, but one opponent must have killed me several times in a game because not only was he really good, but he had a shotgun. Anytime I tried to get close to him he just shot me once with the shotgun at close range and I was dead. But that was probably my fault for wanting to melee so much.
One annoying thing about the game though is how high you can jump. It’s like gravity isn’t taken into effect when you jump as you leap so high and you’re floating down. It’s quite unrealistic to me and somewhat annoying. Of course, I guess it helps to avoid gunfire (jump around and shoot) but it just seems silly that if I get close to a guy to melee him, he can just up over my head and I’ll have to look around to see where he actually lands. This jumping is nuts!
Post game
Once a game is concluded, one of the most fun things to do is to either check the stats generated from the game, or save a video of the match so you can watch it again later.
The stats are very interesting and neat; you can check each player’s individual stats and there are icons along with the number of times you’ve killed in that way. I’ve gotten a couple of “Revenge from the grave” kills which occur when you get killed, but have thrown a grenade so the enemy gets killed after you’re already dead. I also like the Ninja icon for “stealth melee kills.” All of these different counts can be displayed for any of the players in your previous match, and should make for some very interesting Achievements.
The video recording is also very neat too. I guess Halo 3 is getting to such a competitive level that people will be studying replays and such a la Blizzard games. I thought it was pretty neat – after you finish a game, you can just save the replay, and from the main menu you can access all your saved videos. I tried checking out a video of a match I recorded and there it was – the whole match replayed from my point of view. I’m not sure if there’s a mode for several people to watch one guy’s replay, as I didn’t see it in the beta, but it would probably be a nice feature.
Overall thoughts
I have to say that even though I didn’t quite enjoy the first two games, the Halo 3 Beta looks good in my opinion. Bungie seems to have put a lot of work into the matchmaking and statistics – without these two as fleshed out as they were, I probably would have enjoyed the game a lot less. With the easy to use matchmaking feature, it’s quite possible to play the online game for hours since you never have to be troubled with looking for a match to join and waiting for players to fill the game.
Even though I’m not that into online multiplayer, the team modes were actually enjoyable enough that I’ve imagined playing them with friends through team matchmaking. With the online multiplayer so strong and well done and the single player campaign found to be including 4 player co-op, this is quite a complete package that I am looking forward to. Let’s just hope there’s interesting Achievements – I’m really hoping there’s one for beating it on Legendary mode through co-op. Then we’ll really have some fun.
