Multiplayer Halo, at its best, reminds me of being a kid in a playground. I think a lot of games would hope for that – playgrounds are often seen as big open spaces, sandboxes, where you can hop off the rails of the story for a bit and doodle about the wider world. But I’m thinking a bit more literally here. Multiplayer Halo is like being in an actual playground, because the best Halo maps follow the same rules on which the best playgrounds are built.
I was reminded of this by Dawn of War 3, of all things, which is a game that strips away the innate flexibility of traditional RTS maps in place of three lanes with specific objectives. In doing so – despite, I maintain, still being quite fun in its own right – it killed the thing that made that genre great. Real-time strategy is about breadth as much as depth, space for invention and flexibility. Wide maps and huge suites of tools for you to use in hyper-specific ways. It’s a massive shame, but it’s not a problem unique to the RTS, as much as some might think. Which brings me back to Halo. Just as I was thinking about the shift from more open RTS maps to the more conceptually closed, I caught this incredible bit of (now months-old) footage from someone playing a the Master Chief Collection:
The Best Halo Reach Clip I’ve ever gotten. pic.twitter.com/QxnQm2rwHM
— Mint Blitz (@MintBlitz) January 11, 2020
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Magic. That’s on Halo Reach’s Pinnacle, which is a banger in its own right and also serves as a decent illustration of what I’m on about. Pinnacle is a castle. Out of a pile of indistinguishable forge-world panels rises a tower, with views across the walls and keeps of the map and a choke point of a ramp leading up to its peak. It’s king of the hill, but baked into the landscape, instead of the explicit rules. The onrushing hoards are picked off, near and far and scurrying about in the tunnels below, up the stairs to the final chamber, the last man standing fending them off with whatever he has to hand. It’s a basic map, uninspiring to look at, all metal blue-grey and generic rocky green, and, on the surface, kind of unexciting to even think about. But it’s a classic, because out of its simple shapes your mind builds a kingdom.