Halo 3: ODST an example of masterful storytelling · 26 September 2009, 21:20
One of the hallmarks of the Halo series of video games has been the story being told. Not just of the adventures of Master Chief, super soldier, but the bigger, far reaching story about humanity’s struggle against a covenant of alien races bent on genocide.
But the Halo games are successful because while there is an epic tale being told on one level, the games themselves are telling smaller, personal stories within that larger narrative. Halo 3: ODST is no exception, as it tells the very intimate tale of what happens to a squad of six Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, soldiers of the United Nations Space Command.
The game is set on Earth in the year 2552, the same time the events of Halo 2 and Halo 3 occur. The city of New Mombasa has been assaulted by the alien alliance known as the Covenant. The story starts with the aforementioned squad – consisting of an intelligence officer, four veterans, and a rookie – being deployed from a low orbit. Their intended target is a massive enemy space craft hovering over New Mombasa, but as they descend, the ship escapes through a wormhole, scattering the squad’s drop pods.
When you awaken, as the Rookie, six hours have passed since the drop. New Mombasa is nearly deserted. In this first hour of the game, ODST is eerie and melancholy – a requiem. Moving through the streets and fighting off scattered enemies, the Rookie searches for the other squad members and tries to make sense of what’s happened.
When the Rookie finds the squad members’ drop pods, your perspective shifts. You find yourself in New Mombasa six hours previous, immediately after the drop, and you embody the veteran soldiers as they attempt to regroup. These chapters are the more traditional Halo combat sequences that will have you taking the fight to the Covenant troops, using a variety of weapons and vehicles in an attempt to take back the city.
It’s a complex structure to tell the story, moving back and forth between real time, as the Rookie unravels the mystery of what happened to the squad, and events as they unfolded after the botched drop. There’s an additional plot, too, about a girl named Sadie who got caught up in events during the initial attack on New Mombasa. Sadie’s story is told through audio files that are collected from the environment by the Rookie.
But the atypical structure works beautifully. The slower segments when you’re playing as the Rookie are perfect pauses during which you can process the information you’ve collected, and feel a connection to the characters you’ve been playing.
The story is aided by excellent sound design – the Rookie’s segments are accompanied by a slow, jazzy soundtrack that borrows from noir mystery films – and exceptional voice acting by the likes of Alberta natives Nathan Fillion and Tricia Helfer, as well as Adam Baldwin and Alan Tudyk.
While the campaign mode of ODST is smaller and less ambitious than the trilogy of Halo shooters that preceded it, you’ll find there is plenty of play left with Firefight, a multiplayer mode that has you and up to three friends defending yourselves against a larger number of increasingly difficult enemies. The objective is simple: survive for as long as you can.
Despite how much fun it may be to team up with friends and see how well you can hold your own in Firefight, though, the reason I spent a full day with this game as soon as it arrived was to play the campaign. Halo 3: ODST is further evidence that the developers at Bungie are much more than simply skilled game designers. They are master storytellers.
Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight
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