DGC Ep 289: Halo: Combat Evolved (part two)

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we continue our series on Halo: Combat Evolved. We talk vehicles, architecture, lore, and level design before turning to feedback. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary.

Sections played:
Up to the Library!

Issues covered: the ungainly Marine vehicles vs the sleek Covenant vehicles, enjoying the shooting quite a bit, the driving model of the Warthog, camera-based driving, driving into walls and off edges, co-op driving, the freedom of driving in the sandboxes, checkpointing based on logic vs location, promoting experimentation, having the feel of an RTS and having the freedom to move around, component-based mix and match, watching an RTS fight from both sides, having the ability to use the damage model to your advantage, having two guns and not constantly refilling just one or two weapons, knowing what weapons you can pick up, orthogonal weapon design, high-level play, the feeling of the different difficulty levels, looking at the original artwork, space Egyptians, beton brut, building from an architectural principle, lower noise in the original art, the huge sense of scale, the story being told in a particular way, not wanting the lore to take precedence, archetypes and mystery, liking a reboot, losing your bearings from the repeated nature of the spaces, the granularity of its environmental modules, kitbashing in other games, differentiating through enemy mixes, Halo being best as a horror game, the Covenant had a point!, suddenly having a shotgun, AR tie-ins fueled by Doritos and presented by Mountain Dew, how Halo holds up, not loving the horror, loving the horror.

Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Andrew Kirmse, Myth, Baldur's Gate, Triple Click podcast, DOOM (1993), John Romero, Jaime Griesemer, Mark Garcia, Stargate, James Cameron, Aliens, Nic Bouvier, GoldenEye, Star Wars, RA Salvatore, Bungie, Destiny, Ridley Scott, Prometheus, Resident Evil (series), Final Fantasy (series), Witcher (series), Mario (series), Mike Wu, Skyrim, Fallout (series), Bethesda Game Studios, Flood/They Might Be Giants, Polygon, Nolan Filter, Paranormal Activity, Pokemon Go, 7-11 Presents Halo 4: King of the Hill Fueled by Mountain Dew, Geoff Keighley, Tim, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers.

Next time:
Finish the game!

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