It’s very, very easy to say terrible things about Halo 3, and there are doubtless thousands of gentlemen currently doing so across the internet. It’s entirely the wrong approach. Halo 3 is Quite A Good First-Person Shooter. Much of the bitterness towards it stems simply from Bungie giving their hordes of fans exactly what they want, and not bothering to cater for the unconverted because, well, there’s only four of them. Progressive it isn’t, but sensible it surely is.
The real reason to kill it with fire is less for its own qualities and more for its status. Its ubiquity makes it something of a figurehead for gaming. And so a non-gamer’s best idea of modern gaming is one that reinforces so many negative stereotypes of the form – all space-lasers and evil aliens, mindless violence, teenagers hurling abuse at each other, and grown men whooping when they pick up a bigger gun. When I’m trying to convince someone of the many wonders within the medium, what I’m fighting against is the preconceptions they’ve developed because of Halo 2 and 3’s omnipresence.
It’s like trying to convince a new girlfriend that your group of friends are smart, interesting people she’d get along well with, but when the first one of them turns up, he immediately drops his pants, bends over and sets fire to a fart. I’m not so precious that I can’t enjoy a big, dumb shooter, but I’m not fine with it being so hugely successful that half the industry tries to ape it – so we don’t get another Thief game, but we do get another Turok one. There’s this endless queue of men clutching matchsticks, with their trousers around their ankles.
It’s worth noting I don’t have any kind of serious reservation about Halo 3’s multiplayer. It’s a slick and easy take on console deathmatch, and the community stuff it’s doing with replays and matchmaking is close to unparalleled. While I’d personally much rather be playing Team Fortress 2, I entirely appreciate why a vast number of people prefer Halo 3’s straighter, broader multiplay. It’s single-player that’s refusing to be dragged into the modern age, whose success and acclaim risks holding back mainstream gaming from great things.
I’ve come to expect a sequel to do more than revisit the first game with a few bells and whistles. I’m aware that’s possibly a false sense of entitlement, and certainly it’s a feeling informed a little too much by Half-Life 2. Sure, that’s a game as hamstrung by conventional FPS values as is any Halo, but crucially one that’s a very different breed of game to its more claustrophobic, puzzle-heavy forerunner, even going so far as to be set in what’s essentially a completely different universe. It experimented. I wasn’t surprised that Halo 2 was as flat and unadventurous as it was – its driving force was simply to get a sequel out as soon possible. But with new technology, an infinite budget and a huge gestation period, I was genuinely convinced Halo 3 would take the series to new places.