Today, we welcome back the soon-to-be-married Totilo to discuss the virtues and vices of Bungie's Halo 3 multiplayer beta, created for the Xbox 360. The beta officially began on May 16th, but we and a slew of our fellow journalists got our hands on it early; first at a series of promotional events on May 11th, after which we were given an early access code to download the beta for ourselves. In the first part of our "previously recorded" email exchange with Totilo, we examine why in-person multiplayer gaming might be more engaging than its online counterpart and attempt to determine which sport or cultural phenomenon Halo most resembles.

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To: Stephen Totilo

Fr: N'Gai Croal

Date: May 9, 2007

Re: I Want To Be Alone

Stephen,

One hour into my Halo 2 refresher course--the high-pitched voices of barely pubescent boys coming through loud and clear in my headset--I find myself wondering whose bright idea it was to make the Halo 3 multiplayer beta the subject of our second Vs. Mode pairing. (Damn my fellow Canadians at BioWare for their tardiness with Mass Effect.) As if it weren't enough that our first exchange revealed my complete ignorance of the Zelda franchise, this one will expose my deep-seated indifference to the online component of action games. That's why every fiber of my being is screaming, "Let's scrap our plan and pick something else." Still, there's something perversely appealing about being forced to find something interesting to say about an aspect of action games--online multiplayer--that, while I recognize its importance, generally leaves me cold. Besides, isn't that why they pay me the big bucks? So, once more into the breach.

It's not you, Halo 2. It's me.

The first online game that I remember playing was back in 1989 or 1990. I don't remember the name of the game, but it was a top down tank combat game for DOS PCs, and it had a two-player head-to-head mode that could be played via modem. A classmate of mine had the same game and there was something subtly magical about the way a blazing-fast 2600 baud modem could collapse the 30-minute walking distance between our suburban houses into a you-are-almost-there experience. Unfortunately, I didn't have two phone lines, so the thrill of trash-talking my friend was limited to pre-game and post-game chatter. That's why we spent a lot more time playing the decidedly analog tabletop game Axis & Allies in my parents' rec room than we did playing tank vs. tank over the modem; the former offered a much more social experience than the latter.

During my time in college from 1990 to 1994, I didn't spend much time playing games. My freshman roommate had a PC, and when he wasn't using it, I alternated between playing two simulation games: an Apache helicopter title and a college hoops coaching game. As for multiplayer gaming, I do remember a number of occasions where myself and four other guys in my freshman dorm would cram into the computer cluster, commandeer all of the Macs, and play Risk over the LAN. A good time was had by all, made more fun by the side-by-side game time banter.

When I got out of college in 1994, I went to work at the Washington Post in the wonderfully vague role of content producer for the newspaper's nascent online service. We worker bees were mostly in our 20s and 30s, and when we weren't swapping stories about how far we'd gotten in the greatest game ever made--yes, that evolutionary dead end called Myst--we were silently counting down the hours, minutes and seconds until quitting time. Because right at 6 pm, all thoughts of work were obliterated as we fired up Doom on our office PCs and gleefully blasted each other to smithereens for the next ninety minutes, the only sounds being those of our playful insults and cheers bouncing off the cubicle walls. Ditto for Doom II.

In the spring of 1995, I joined Newsweek and pretty much stopped gaming recreationally. It wasn't until August of 1999, when, curious about how much game development had evolved since the days of Myst and Doom, I got my editors to send me on a three-week tour of the industry. Beginning with Bungie in Chicago and ending with Dennis "Thresh" Fong in Berkeley, I also hit id software, Ion Storm, a slew of Gathering of Developers' studios, Sony, Sega and Microsoft. Since this was just a few weeks before the launch of the Dreamcast, for which NFL 2K was one of the flagship titles, it piqued my interest in online console gaming. But after a few random football matches with strangers, I lost interest. Many more of my multiplayer experiences on the dearly departed Dreamcast were had playing Soul Calibur, and later Virtua Tennis and Dead or Alive 2, with my opponents seated right next to me. (Ditto for PC multiplayer; I've pretty much thoroughly avoided playing such games online, but a fellow tech journalist who lives in Manhattan has for years periodically hosted LAN parties that last into the wee hours of the morning. Good, good times.)

My heretofore unexplored lack of interest in online multiplayer didn't change much with the release of the PlayStation 2 or the Xbox; save for playing a handful of games with publicists and fellow journalists at industry events and online hands-on sessions (i.e. SOCOM, Halo 2, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Doom 3), or dabbling with a few more titles shortly after they shipped (mostly Madden, Burnout and NBA Live), I was pretty much M.I.A., or AWOL, depending on how you look at it. And with the exception of a few quick bouts of Gears of War and Resistance: Fall of Man, the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 simply haven't forged in me the love of online multiplayer that warms the hearts of so many gamers, like Level Up's own Xbox 360 correspondent Rolf Ebeling. But in the interest of Vs. Mode, I'm willing to use the Halo 3 multiplayer beta as a springboard to see whether there's a place for me somewhere in this vast connected arena.

Cheers,

N'Gai

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To: N'Gai Croal

Fr: Stephen Totilo

Date: May 19, 2007

Re: Is Halo 3 Baseball, Basketball or 'Survivor'?

N'Gai,

It's been 10 days since you wrote me. Like a certain Nintendo-made first-person adventure game, I'm late.

I've been busy, as have you. Some of that time was spent playing the Halo 3 Beta, which went live since you wrote me. A lot of other things have happened in gaming since then. Sega, Square, Sony and Ubisoft showed off their 2007 games line-up in press events in America and Japan. Tecmo announced the return of Tecmo Bowl. Blizzard announced a sequel to StarCraft. The official release date for Halo 3 was announced. And the people who track video game sales in America, the NPD group, reported a shocking disparity in Pokemon sales: the series' 2007 Pokemon Diamond outselling the counterpart Pokemon Pearl 1,000,000 to 700,000 in the games' first month. (I'm a Pearl man myself.)

Just 10 days brought all of that.

I'd like to say it's your email that got me thinking about all that can happen during the passage of time. You certainly were in a reflective mood yourself when you kicked off this exchange. You even made me a little nostalgic: in that August of 1999 you cited we were just becoming friends, you were just beginning to find excuses not to play Zelda, and your dreadlocks were just beginning, measuring at a couple of feet short of their current J Allard length.

But it wasn't your email. I've always been reflective, nostalgic...and I guess a bit of a sap. As a kid I used to get depressed on New Year's Eve. With the rest of my family in the living room I would go to my room and sadly remove the last year's 12-month calendar from my wall, flipping through the pages one last time to glimpse receding memories.

So...Halo 3. What does any of this have to do with Halo 3? It's got everything to do with Halo 3, because I'm thinking about the passage of time and the amount of stuff that happens during such passages. How much do we expect to have happen in gaming between May 9th and May 19th? How much do we expect to have happen from 2004 to 2007? How much can gaming change, and how much should a game series change?

I've heard a lot of people talking about how surprisingly similar this multiplayer-only Halo 3 beta looks and feels to multiplayer of the first two Halo games. I've heard a lot of grumbling that those similarities are a problem.

Now you didn't play Halo and Halo 2 much. Neither did I. I beat the first game in single-player. I went halfway through the second. I played less than 10 hours of multi-player of either game. Never mind that. I've played enough and you've played enough to know what this Halo 3 multiplayer beta indicates: they haven't really changed the game.

Like the first two installments, Halo 3 plays out as a quickly-paced first-person shooter that rewards strategic team play. A good offense requires map memorization and a skilled hand at making your character hop and shoot at the same time. A good defense requires management of the series' signature regenerating-health system. Halo experts will scoff that I'm oblivious to some profoundly subtle developments in Halo, some key tweak to character turning speeds or Warthog handling.

The introduction of new X-button-triggered gadgets like the bubble shield and the trip mine is the one definitive addition. At best that's like the NBA's 1979 introduction of the three-point shot. It may tweak the game, but it's not overhauling it.

The passage of time just hasn't changed Halo series a lot. Is this a problem?

When last we debated, I railed against repetition in game sequels. My Kratos critique was that God of War II, although lot of fun, was too safely cut from the cloth of the first game to impress and impact me the way I hoped it would. Ready to call me a flip-flopper? I'm here today to tell you that I like that Halo 3 is playing it safe. I like the lack of radical change.

The difference between God of War and Halo multiplayer is that one is an adventure of narrative and gameplay. The other is enjoyed as a sport. I crave constant re-invention in the former. I assume perfection and stability is possible in the latter.

Sometimes a sporting formula just works. Take baseball. About a century ago someone figured out that 90 feet was a good distance between home plate and first base. Since then pitchers and batters have gotten stronger. Runners have gotten faster. Baseball strategies have changed. Pitchers' mounds have been modified. Yet nothing has ruined those 90 feet. It still is just long enough--and just short enough--to make for exciting plays. The dimensions just work.

Is Halo baseball? Has Bungie already nailed the 90 feet?

Or maybe Halo is basketball back in 1953, just before the introduction of the 24-second shot clock. Before the clock was added basketball was played at a slower pace. The sport was still about tossing a bouncing ball through a hoop, but the shot-clock forced play to be much more swift.

The Halo formula might well be baseball already. Then again, it might be basketball before the shot clock was added.

Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Halo isn't a sport and maybe it shouldn't be treated as if it can be as pure as one. Maybe it's more like "Survivor." You know the show, right? A bunch of people are sent to a jungle, get forced into all sorts of odd tasks and get to vote each other off, one TV episode at a time? I used to watch it regularly, and back when I did I noticed that the rules changed regularly. Those fundamental voting rules didn't, but many of the specific day-to-day ones did. Challenges changed. Tribes were shuffled. Monkey wrenches were thrown.

Halo multiplayer games have always been full of tribal challenges: Capture the Flag, Slayer Deathmatch, King of the Hill. We've got VIP mode and Oddball mode. The challenges get mixed every time, even if getting voted off the island consistently involves getting tagging from a hop-and-shoot enemy. If Halo isn't baseball; if Halo isn't basketball; if it's "Survivor," then, yes, it could use more of a remix.

Brian Crecente from Kotaku told me that he is disappointed that Halo doesn't allow players to fire from a protected hiding spot behind cover. He believes Gears of War popularized that element of shooter action and that Halo 3 could use that... or something. On his blog, he wrote:

"I suppose I shouldn't have been expecting them to re-invent the wheel, but it would have been nice to see some sort of shift in gameplay, something that Halo 3 most certainly doesn't do."

He's looking for a significant change. Me? I'm thinking the Halo formula is pretty well locked, more of a Mario Kart or Gran Turismo than the constantly reinvented multiplayer of Splinter Cell or the still up-for-dabbling Burnout.

I leave you with this question: what do we need from our multi-player sequels? Constant change? Consistent execution of a proven formula?

What do you think? And how about you open this up to that other element of Halo 3's similarity to the previous games: the looks. Should they have overhauled the graphics?

-Stephen