I’ve been playing Marathon for the first time and for the first time I love Bungie.
I’ve been playing Halo: Custom Edition (mods to the Gearbox PC port that are much more accurate than the version included in Master Chief Collection) and coming from Marathon’s simple Doom-derived shooting model, it makes so much more sense as an evolution of that style. Approaching it like a corridor shooter, I experiment with rushing and unloading clips into enemies. The play doesn’t exist in ranged precision battles, it’s about finding the right angle behind a rock to murder someone so their friend doesn’t have your back. To put it another way, once you’ve picked a target there’s not as much fidelity or play as in a modern precision-based shooter. The (single-player) game mostly lives in room-scale tactical awareness and balancing the gun, grenade, shield resources against each other. I’m appreciating it more than I ever have.
I’ve been playing Halo 3 and comparing how it evolved. By the third game, Bungie’s gone way more into precision shooting. There are precision assault rifles in both human and Covenant armories and the level design emphasizes them. Jackal snipers are deadly accurate and even normal carbine-wielding enemies are accurate at 30 to 40m. As a result, aggressive, close-combat play usually requires the level design to allow it, with nooks and alternate routes to surprise encounter groups from the side, behind, or above. They’re still very conscientious of providing this but as a whole the mid-range of 5-20m of distance is much more deadly to the player.
In Marathon and other Doom-like games, enemies have weak ranged attacks and the player fails when they don’t control the space, becoming surrounded or blocked in a corner where the slow-moving ranged attacks can find them. Halo still works in this model, and all the enemy ranged weapons are slow and rather inaccurate beyond 10m or so. The player loses a ranged fight due to density of shots (fairly slow attrition) and approaching without cover. By Halo 3, Bungie has moved closer to shooter patterns and more enemies have more effective ranged weapons, pushing away from the close-cover game of the originals.
Hopefully this doesn’t end with me playing more Destiny
I think I had an optimal relationship with Destiny; I played through single-player on launch and gave it up, picked it up a year later and had 3 months with friends doing Oryx stuff and catching up on the raids, picked up Destiny 2, ran through the disappointing campaign, and dropped it.
Just the right amount to regard it fondly and keep up the social appearance of being disappointed in it
The jackal snipers are at their peak power level in Halo 3. They nerfed them a lot in ODST and Reach (they’re still accurate but their damage level is more like a scratch, so mostly they deny shield regen and knock you out of aim mode). The constantly getting two-shotted in Halo 3 by snipers is one of the reasons I don’t think it holds up that well.
In Reach it’s the shade turrets that deny you from walking in open space and force you to sneak around. I like those a lot better better because they’re big, visible and it’s satisfying that you can’t simply counter-snipe them (which exacerbates the mindless precision shooting gallery monotony) but have to use heavy weapons, grenades or systematically gun down all the backup gunner dudes as they approach it.
will always look back fondly on the vault of glass/last word meta days of destiny but yeah it went to shit when that kevin smith looking fella seemed to take charge and they went all in on streamer coddling
tbh i’m at peace with being old and just wanting everything to be quakeworld and doom but bungie halo is fuckin’ excellent, it’s a shame a lot of people i know overlooked it because it was normige or built around a controller (i was guilty of this for a few years too, the idea you could make a good fps on controller seemed ridiculous)
They don’t even let up before they fire their second shot, it’s usually 1s after the first!
I’ve never gotten very deep into Reach (that art style, as I’ve mentioned before, is a real misstep, trying to graft the Modern Warfare operator boom onto plastic toy soldiers) but the balance seemed to support retreating from mistakes much better.
i do find reach’s aesthetic makes the operator shit go down easier
not sure how much of this is down to playing it immediately after its polar opposite in doom eternal but i keep thinking about how ce did so much with so little
I’ve been playing Halo since it came out. But attempting to survive just the beginning of the level Halo in Halo CE on legendary by myself this morning put me through an hour-long crash course in all of the points you just mentioned. Everything’s a close up skirmish in Halo CE, and the AI is really damn good at getting around your flanks. I really never noticed it before today.
The art style of Reach improves in the midgame. You go into space and fight in a vivid purple Covenant spaceship and then in a city with a Mirror’s Edge sort of aesthetic. The tone of the cutscenes remains uniformly baffling but I just skip them.
Really the reason I keep returning to Reach is not just the technical “this is an especially well-balanced generic PvE FPS" thing, although it is that, but what someone said about “it makes you feel small”. Secretly the whole game is about the interplay of different scales of military equipment and it pulls this off better than even Titanfall 2. There’s not only big and small but like human sized, elite human-sized, small vehicle, medium vehicle, big vehicle, tank and megainstallation and it’s constantly creating these satisfying gyakuten situations where you take on and destroy a vehicle a tier or two above you with clever tactics, or suddenly pilot a huge one yourself and stomp on things like ants that minutes ago treated you like an ant.
Pathways is very very hard but very good and helps to explain Bungie’s disgusting obsession with labyrinths. It also came out like four months before Doom so PC gamers can go kick dirt.
YES! great way to put it. this is why i love speedrunning so much, in the combat sections it really pushes your ability to keep your head on a swivel and use all the tools in your toolbox. like, knowing that enemies in Halo 1 turn to follow grenades (they rank them as a bigger threat than the player character) allows you to do cool distraction techniques like this video at 1:44:52.
…so yeah, chuck a grenade and the AI is caught ballwatching, but now you have to keep in mind their positions and make sure they don’t have line of sight while you run away. also the whole level of Truth and Reconciliation (32:00) is also a great example of the need for this kind of positional awareness.
agree that like how Doom is about zoning with projectiles, moving and positioning… Halo 1/2 very much has that feeling when you’re shooting dudes
Definitely, now that I’m playing it more aggressively I’ve gotten the hang of using grenades solely to suppress or flush because the AI reacts so predictably, and if I want to keep moving I might need to buy a few seconds to finish off the shield recharge cooldown.
We spent a lot of time talking about Halo when making Galak-Z but I really wish we’d had the foresight to add specific pressure tactics like that. Or look at player tools like the way the Elites always dodge-roll away from Needler fire, which is very successful, making Needlers more useful if you’re looking to thin a grunt pack around the Elite. It’s that constant problem where I understand how badly I understood things back then!
is not true on Heroic or especially Legendary. halo has always had precision game, the magnum is the ultimate sniper rifle! one of the most consistent strategies for taking out elites is to use a overcharged plasma pistol shot and a magnum headshot because close quarters combat against enemies that are faster and stronger is suicidal unless it’s an ambush play. the level design in the first game is very marathon-like in its sparseness so outside of interiors cover can be a little touch and go so it encourages this. halo 2 made the magnum shit and created the battle rifle to fill that role because jason jones lost a battle in the ongoing “are pistols the greatest” war at bungie. jackal snipers exist because one of the huge holes in the enemy variety was an answer to the necessity of magnum/sniper bullshit. halo 2 is their peak one hit kill bullshit power level and then halo 3 makes them more normal. shoot them in the fucking head (I HATE THOSE LITTLE SHITS SO FUCKIGN MUCH) and reposition yourself constantly to throw em off and you’ll be fine after getting domed a few times, if my 8 year old ass could memorize their positions on legendary in halo 2 you can too! enemies shoot fast on heroic and higher so idk about “slow and rather inaccurate beyond 10m or so,” go fire up pillar of autumn on legendary and fight the first elite and have a laugh at that one. halo’s always been tactical as fuck, normal difficulty is the baby mode to teach you the mechanics and then heroic is where the real game starts. evidently you need to play some more halo!!!
Pathways is an interesting game but it is not much like Doom at all and Marathon definitely is. Actually a pretty good summary of Marathon is: the application of Doom shooting to Pathways’ aesthetic.
shut up old man and let me make a joke so unsuspecting fools will play a game I like. marathon is like doom in that BROS like it for the WRONG REASONS!!!
