Originally posted by BackFire
[B]Did you miss the part where there's a civil war in Gears 2?
Which hardly mattered because at the end ofthe day you ended up killing any locust you saw just the same.
You seem to confuse potential for a good story with a good story.
No I don't. I never said Halo had a good story. Matter of fact,
Halo's twists weren't "good" twists, but it had twists and underlying themes none-the-less.
My posts are strictly referring to Halo vs. Gears only. Not in general. I am aware that Halo's story is lack-luster, but compared to Gears' it's sex.
If you take out Halo 2 and all the stuff they did in that (which they subsequently dropped universally in Halo 3)
Halo 3 didn't "drop" the story it just finished it. In a trilogy it's the 1st one's job to introduce the story, it's the 2nd one's job to extrapolate on it and introduce the majority of the story changing twists, and it's the third installments job to wrap it all up, which Halo 3 did, and did soundly.
then the story becomes just as simple as Gears'.
But why would you "take out all they did in Halo 2" at all? It's a trilogy. If you want to compare one game at a time Halo 2beats out Gears 2 as well.
You seem to think that a complex story is inherently better than a simple one. It isn't. But that doesn't really matter since Halo's story is about as complicated as first grade reading material.
And if that's true, Gears' story is about Kindergarten level, maybe Pre-School.
What you seem to think is that I think Halo's story is "good". I don't. I just think it's better and more of a "story" than Gears has. Halo does, at the least, have something that you can take away from it.
No, to reiterate both story's are crappy in comparison to games that tell good stories or have good character development.
I never said otherwise, or even implied such.
It says a lot about a game when the commercials for the games give off a better sense of atmosphere and despair than either of the games themselves. The Halo commercials suggest a sense of somberness and maturity that the actual games never even attempt to reach, because they can't, the writers aren't talented enough.
Opinion. As I was telling Zack, I genuinely felt bad when Johnson died, even though I knew he was going to from the beginning and I didn't allow myself to be attached to that character. I felt bad when Miranda died and when I didn't see the ending cutscene because I skipped the credits and I thought the Chief had died, I felt bad then too. And I'm not the only person in the world who feels that way. Keep in mind that, as I said, I didn't give a shit when Aerith died, so that says something.
Halo's storyline isn't as good as many others games are. But to state that Halo objectively didn't have any somber moments or couldn't create any is flawed. If you were just stating how you felt when playing it, my mistake.
No, that's not what I meant at all, you should read what I say properly.
Read properly?
I know how to read and I read it perfectly fine. haermm Just because I didn't grasp the true meaning of your words, which can be interpreted differently, doesn't mean I didn't read it properly.
The world of Halo is not coherent. Each level feels like a disparate level made purely to create a glorified shooting gallery. It doesn't feel like a part of a cohesive singular world.
... it's not a cohesive singular world. There are different habitats following different structures and lay-outs. However I get what you're saying, and I agree to an extent.
There's the ice level, and then there's the jungle level and so on. Each level feels like a level, not a segment of the same universe, they don't flow.
That's my point from before. So I did read it right, apparently. It's not the games fault that it doesn't flow like that. The reason why there's different habitats (jungle, desert, ice), is because they're fighting over the course of an entire Galaxy, and thus over entire planets. HALO is a machine that is essentially a planet; it has it's own polar caps, magnetic fields, atmosphere, habitats, etc. Considering that the war is a galactic war, which involves space ships that can travel across an entire planet in minutes and can drop troops off anywhere, of course fighting wouldn't be confined to one city, or part of the world. That wouldn't make sense. That's like hating on Star Wars because in the beginning of RotJ the setting is on a desert, than the next minute they're on a big space station, than the next minute they're fighting on a jungle planet. It's a galaxy wide event, man. Considering that all of Gears of War 1 was spent in one city, of course the environment will look similar.
It has shit to do with the architecture of the buildings, it simply has to do with the quality of the level design. This shouldn't come as a shock, Halo's level design ranges from piss poor to mediocre and it's known as one of the consistently weak points throughout the entire series. Gears' levels segway from one to another in a convincing and effective way, each level feels like it's part of the larger world as a whole, not that it was simply created when you put the disk in the player.
Halo is structured the way it is for the reasons above, but I agree that some parts of it are shit, like the flood levels. Gears levels are more realistic but I found a lot of it to be boring and repetitive. The interior of the building all looked basically the same with few changes, for example. But that's not counting it against it necessarily.
[quote]Everything about Halo is less real. From the atmosphere (for a world about on the brink of annihilation your fellow soldiers sure are in high spirits; they constantly crack jokes and engage and 1337 speak) to the look (as AC said, it looks like a rave night club more than a war torn galaxy) to the settings to the characters. [/quote[
It is less real. Doesn't mean it's worse though.