Does it matter if Half Life had better Story telling? It was still a bad story and if you disagree then you never played the game! Half Life was all about immersion and action pacing which it does well.
Halo was very meh to me. The story was bad and had a terrible ending. I was also stunned by how short it was. I felt like the ending came out of nowhere. I was expecting maybe 2-3 hours more of game play but nope.
JangoWuzHere
Halo short? Is 16 hours of gameplay for an FPS short to you or you played it on easy? Half-Life story is boiler plate but the way it was told {hence storytelling} through the enviroments and first-person perspective was truly phenominal for it's time.Now about Halo's story.
Third, it took familiar, old ideas and made them interesting again. Lone space marine vs. alien hordes had been done before. However, casting the aliens as religious fanatics was unusual - and remember, Halo came out not too long after 9/11. Of course, given that the aliens had vastly superior technology, relied on air/ space strikes, and were vulnerable to guerrilla warfare on the ground, you could see the game as a political metaphor from both sides. The "sleeping menace" idea (the Flood) had been done, but usually it's the player character's fault that some ancient terror gets awakened, and usually the player character is responsible for cleaning it up. In Halo, you basically just run away from the ancient menace. The "unstoppable superweapon that is our only hope against the Evil Ones" had been done before, but the twist that the Halo rings would stop the Flood by killing everything else in the galaxy, and that you therefore DO NOT want to activate the ancient superweapon that is the only hope of stopping them, was unique. Zombies had been done before, but fast zombies created by alien parasites that used weapons and attacked your enemies just as much as they attacked you? Hadn't been done before, and, though it's common now, virtually no FPSes had three-sided battles when Halo came out. Eccentric ancient guardian who tells you how to stop the Evil Ones? Done before, but 343 Guilty Spark was unique in that he was trying to save the world by destroying it, and wasn't actually truly good - or truly bad, for that matter. Fairly sexualized female character who advises you? Done in countless games, but Cortana was unique in that she actually acted intelligent, had an independent personality, and had a friendly but completely non-sexual relationship with the main character. Lots of stuff was borrowed from Aliens (dropships, badass black sergeant, space marines in gray armor), but it was integrated seamlessly.
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