THE DESIGN OF 'HALO'

our mission begins with two Pelican shuttlecraft flying over the water of an alien ringworld. The beach is held by alien forces and you’ve just been tasked with breaking through the front lines and finding The Silent Cartographer, an important map room. You exit the dropship, assault rifle at the ready, and charge into battle with your fellow space marines. Bullets and plasma fly through the air in every direction, explosions rain showers of dirt and sand. You dodge obstacles and weave between bursts of projectiles while firing at the enemy squads, watching the ammo-counter on your rifle rapidly tick down to zero. The battle concludes shortly after, and a dropship brings you an all-terrain vehicle, the Warthog, and you drive further inland to find whatever secrets the enemy is hiding. Welcome to the beginning of the fourth level of Halo: Combat Evolved, the first in the groundbreaking series.

While describing a scene from a video game might seem an unwieldy replacement for simply playing the game, typing out all the actions performed in the game gives us a clue as to just how much effort there is in the design of a game.

Halo was developed by Washington software company Bungie, and was first released on November 15th, 2001. The game completely reimagined the scale that major gaming studios were then working. Bungie’s game boasted leaps in developments in every major category of game design: massive levels with an impressive open-ended world for the player to explore, in-depth audio design by Bungie’s lead audio designer, composer Martin O’Donnell. The sweeping score is by O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori, who boost the emotional experience of gameplay immensely. The game’s art direction was led by John Howard and artists Marcus Lehto and Shi Kai Wang. The immaculate art style and a character design has become one of the most iconic visages of video game culture: Halo’s heavily helmeted space marine.

Halo: Combat Evolved is impressive in many ways, but its visual design and the way it interacts with the game technically is the game’s most significant contribution to video game culture.

In the monumental task of bringing a world visually to life through computer graphics, it's not enough to color and light every asset. Characters should look realistic and believable in their world. Not just so they can mechanically turn a corner in a hallway and blast your player into oblivion— the world itself needs context. Not every aspect needs to be overly realistic or detailed, but the context does need to feel as if it exists outside of the level you’re playing, that the level is part of a greater whole. The player needs to feel as if they’re stepping into a foreign world, when in reality they are in a three-dimensional area floating  in a digital void. The digitally-created world simulating enough reality is critical, especially for the immersive payoffs that video games offer in particular. You can’t feel like the badass savior of humanity if it’s obvious the enemies you’re fighting are just well-dressed pixels, even though that’s exactly what they are.

Except for gameplay mechanics, these ‘immersive payoffs’ are the goal of every game. All the big elements— recorded dialogue, sound and music, character and scenery, and the storyline— add up to contextualize the player’s immersion in a created fiction. Although that’s true for all blockbuster releases, and although I’d love to talk about all of them (boy, would I), we’ll stick to the original  release, since what is true of the first is true of the rest.

he visual design of Halo: Combat Evolved does much more than just look pretty, it serves the distinct purpose of providing the player with information through visual cues. Enemies are designed to allow players to understand what they are capable of without having to read a tutorial. At first glance the player gets a rough idea of what the enemy can do, and within seconds understands that enemy's capabilities. Even as enemies get stronger or acquire more advanced weapons, the player can assess exactly how to play against them.

Perhaps the least threatening alien invader in the long-running series, perhaps all video-game history, is the Grunt. The opposite of intimidating, Grunts are small creatures who communicate in high-pitched squeaks, are barely capable of holding a gun, and are terrified of almost anything, let alone the seven-foot-tall space marine that is your player. Grunts make up for what they lack with sheer numbers. There are about three or four Grunts for every other type of enemy unit. Design-wise, the player can easily tell that the Grunts aren’t worth their focus unless appearing in large numbers, leaving the player to pay more attention to the bigger stuff, meaning  the enemy elite. The elites are tall in stature and their powerful weapons help them stand out as the priority concern among lesser enemies. The player understands this intuitively, and immediately, from the design: elite enemies have more muscular features, heavier armor, carry energy shields similar to your player’s, carry more powerful weaponry (including plasma rifles and energy swords— sufficient visual cue you should tread carefully). Naturally they require more effort to defeat, and we know this well before the bullets start flying. 

This lack of visual communication is a problem that persists in video games today. Variously leveled enemies will attack differently, but are indistinguishable in design until it’s too late. Here I’m thinking of the juggernauts in the first Modern Warfare who blend in quite well with regular soldiers. In Space Hulk: Deathwing the tyranids are all similar in stature, despite presenting varying levels of difficulty. When visual design properly conveys this kind of information it allows a smoother learning process for the gamer, rather than having to restart a level so many times. Failing a level is frustrating, but there’s a major difference between losing because of your own mistake, and losing due to poor game design. Losing through your own fault is part of the experience, a challenge that keeps the gameplay alive and engaging. Poor design choices leads players to put down the controller or pick up another game. Minor changes in detail on the enemies don’t necessarily solve the issue, either.  An enemy distinguished only by a unique ammo belt and rolled up sleeves does little to set them apart in a crowd, and the player is still confused. 

Halo: Combat Evolved finds an elegant and effective way around this problem by using completely different species of alien as enemy types. This way it becomes much easier for the player to focus on the game without having to figure out what enemy does what. Instead of frustrating the player, the focus on the design immerses the player further into the game’s world, and we feel ready to inhabit the role of Master Chief.

he difference between saving the galaxy as an ass-kicking space marine and just holding down the trigger is the level of immersion the game was designed with. Immersion in the created world is what keeps players engaged and willing to play. This aspect is so appealing it often overwhelms us to the point of distraction within the game. Without it, the underlying structure of your game becomes harder to conceal and the combat experience falls flat once we realize the limitations of graphics. Much like seeing a magic trick done and knowing already how it works, we tolerate lesser games rather than experience them. In those games poorly-programmed AI often has enemies running in circles following a bad script; poor audio design makes punching sound like slapping someone with a wet towel.  It’s not an accomplishment to kill an enemy that hardly fights back, or when a rolled up newspaper deals the same damage as a gun. Shortcomings like these take you out of any immersive experience and whatever reward you get from playing quickly fades. A space marine killing-machine needs to feel like terrifying aliens can eat them for breakfast.

Realistically, of course, nobody knows how it feels to be a super soldier space marine, making the graphical simulation of that role even more desirable. Although it's hardly realistic to believe alien invaders will come in color-coded armor telegraphing their strength, total realism is for schmucks and we the players couldn’t care less. Using audio and visuals to communicate with the player, we help them experience something they’ve never come close to feeling before. The different colors of armor and different builds in alien opponents help you discern how tough the enemy is, the different colors and speeds of the plasma bolts shooting by telling you which enemy shot them and from what weapon. A civilian would have no clue as to the difference between one plasma bolt and another, nor would they have a clue what a particular uniform or armor ornament might mean— but a super soldier would know immediately, and the designs and visuals translate the experience of that knowledge. 

The first characters to step onto the screen are part of Earth’s human forces: all of humanity's brave fighters have a realistic sense about them. The human weapons and vehicles all have very rigid and utilitarian designs, complemented with plain colors: grey, black, metallic silvers, and a classy olive paint for the outfits and vehicles to help remind us that these are army badasses. The United Nations Space Command (UNSC) has a sense of familiarity about them— the troops, guns, and vehicles don’t seem too foreign from something we might see today, and ‘United Nations’ gives us the clue as to how this fictional fighting force originated back on Earth. The marines fighting alongside you are clearly inspired by the colonial marines from James Cameron’s Aliens and anyone who’s seen the movie might feel this was a strange spinoff.

Then there’s the Master Chief himself. The Chief was hardly the first badass in a space suit, but you’d have to scramble to find a better example. Olive armor and a black undersuit identify the Chief with the marines beside him, but the bright gold visor at the top is a clear reminder that this guy is above the rest. Add the classic assault rifle to the outfit and you have one of the most iconic characters in gaming history. 

Contrasting with the Earth familiarity of the UNSC, the alien alliances that make up The Covenant have an aesthetic that is completely foreign but elegant. Their vehicles and weapons feature sleek curves and graceful lines, with colors that contrast with environments, as if to show off rather than conceal— regal purples, deep blues, and bright reds. Covenant weapons have strange shapes, seeming to be of one piece with the arm and hand rather than held. Picking one up for the first time is a foreign experience: you’ve picked up a gun, but the first time you use it, you have no idea what it’s capable of. Covenant vehicles float above the ground, and have rounded edges and profiles. In contrast, the UNSC vehicles are rugged and geometric in style. These two design philosophies alone offer plenty of variety for the characters and environments you’ll see in the game, and that’s not mentioning the architecture designs from the Forerunner civilization, or The Flood’s combat forms in the latter half of the game that seem pulled straight from John Carpenter's The Thing (deeper Halo lore that will have to wait for another time). These experiences make the immersion much deeper and keep us invested because we feel like we  actually are Master Chief, and not just a person holding a controller.

The art and design of Halo balance aesthetics and practicality, the reason the game was such a hit two decades ago. The game definitely wasn’t the first to do so, but the level of immersive design remains a major benchmark for game standards and such a strong influence that after all these years, the game continues to be updated and re-released, hopefully for years to come.