A Bad Halo 3 Review – Buying Time for Level Designers | Blog

A Bad Halo 3 Review – Buying Time for Level Designers

September 25, 2007 – 10:32 am

Who would have ever thought that Halo 3 could get a bad review? Well, those who aren’t such big fans of the game of course, but even those gamers would be surprised to see that Veteran writer Tom Chick found the game’s single player campaign to be a “colossal disappointment”, as Voodoo Extreme reports. An excerpt of the man’s piece can be found below and while you may disagree with some observations made in the full piece, you will see that he is kind of right

“It’s hard to look past the blatant corridor level design. I use the term quite literally. Bungie gets a lot of mileage out of reusing entire areas. You’ll get a few instances of “go here and do this”, followed by “now go back where you were before through respawned monsters, which will save our level designers some time”. At one point, you have to revisit a copy of an area. Bungie makes no bones about it. Three teams split up, each to pull a lever in an identical area. What do you know? One of the teams couldn’t make it so you get to replay exactly the same area to pull exactly the same lever!

Then there’s the “ledge” level design. It’s really a corridor, but if you drop one side off into a skybox, it makes it seem more open. Mombasa? Ha ha. Right. I’ve seen a more convincing Africa in low-budget studio backlots.”

I for one have always appreciated game developers and especially level designers for knowing when and where to save resources with creating a rather “different” experience, using the same setting. For example, God of War – the game stands as a confirmation that, in order to create the extraordinary experience it provides, it needs a lot of processing power.

But then, what do you do about level size? If you want the game to run at 60 fps, you can’t force the PS2 to render too much space, so the developers had to work something out – they manipulated the game’s storyline in such a manner that Kratos has to return to some previously loaded areas. Everything is then ready for interaction once more, not forcing the system to load a new setting again.

That’s one of the tricks developers use to save on the game’s loading times and let the frame rate run loose. However, God of War is one game, Halo 3 is another. In a game where three teams split up to just get to a lever and pull it, period, the gameplay experience gets awfully diminished, because of stuff like this. What do you think?

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