Level Best - MINERVA: Metastasis
(Adam Foster, 2005–2007; 2013 on Steam)
“The true method of knowledge is experiment. So, strapped to the underside of a stolen Combine helicopter, you’re part of my latest scientific investigation.
Objective: To infiltrate and observe this peculiar little island a few miles off shore, its heart burrowed out by our ever-loving benefactors…”
One of Half-Life 2’s finest achievements in modding is also one of its oldest. Where many mods aspired to replace as many content assets and systems from the original game as possible to achieve novelty, MINERVA: Metastasis innovated in other ways. Releasing its first part in 2005 as an early proponent of episodic gaming (like its contemporary, Half-Life 2: Episode One), it feels at once of a piece with Half-Life 2 and something subtly more alien.
Metastasis opens with an invocation of the centerpiece of the scientific method: experiment. Drawing from experiences such as the otherworldly, maze-like floor plans of Doom and Marathon to the grounded, recursive, and restrained spaces of the original Half-Life, the mod represents an experiment in level design that would prefigure later trends in level design.
Released the year prior, Half-Life 2 constructed its world beginning with the winding player’s path sprawling across blank pages and empty map editor space. Architecture, terrain, and set dressing grew outward in prototypical orange and grey, the map becoming realized from the inside-out like a cocoon and enshrouding the utilitarian tunnels and bridges that connected discrete encounters and spaces, themselves conceived in near or total isolation. At its most undisguised, the nature of the world is nakedly that of perpendicular, sight-line-blocking hallways connecting insular boxes.
Metastasis prominently broke with this approach and worked instead from the outside-in, from a world that was already architecturally, if not whole, coherent; its ingresses and exits becoming functional and rational simultaneously to (or before) the path was discovered by Foster and wound through, enclosing and focusing an existing space that would otherwise be open-ended.
What resulted was a locale that felt like a real place, even if you looked closely and sought out the seams and idiosyncratic compromises or stopgaps, and a level that was more efficient, compact, intricate, and crisscrossing than anything in Half-Life 2. He had realized Detail in Depth.
“I tend to start with a setting then hope everything else will steadily fall into place. … If the setting isn’t coming up with sufficiently interesting gameplay or storytelling opportunities, then tweak it, recrystallise and see what new patterns form.” — Level With Me, Adam Foster (Part 1)
“I imagine some people mistake my weird approach to design as building entire levels before shoe-horning gameplay into the architecture, whereas to me, it’s more both the plausible design and gameplay-oriented features going together simultaneously. Gameplay might suggest a lookout point at a certain position, then the world design will give stern recommendations as to what it should be. Or the world design might suggest a certain feature, then gameplay leaps on board and says ‘yes please’. But that believable world design is very, very important to me.” — Level With Me, Adam Foster (Part 2)
Consciously or not, it anticipated the future of an industry whose worlds would become expansive and more open, our future: where the player’s path spreads so thin and diffuse that not even designers could account for its every turn and bend. This approach forgoes path coherence for the grainy nebulae of player heatmaps in what may be called Detail in Breadth.
In this sense, Metastasis had one foot firmly in the future even as it committed to bespoke linear and recursive pathing like its parent, pushed it further, and gestured to another science-fiction contemporary.
The first map in Metastasis is a love letter to 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved and its finest chapter, The Silent Cartographer. The loosely pentagonal island in Halo CE was another experiment that prefigured the open world revolution.
Several paths cut across the cliff-bounded island heart and allowed the player to locate their objectives in a somewhat nonlinear order as they traced the wide-open circuit of beaches, reconnoitered the caves and retraced their steps. But the mission objectives were to be pursued in a set sequence, and whatever the approach taken, the level path entails a bounce; the door that locked in the player’s face at the last moment and the titular Cartographer rebounded them until the deceptively open island was crisscrossed and their internal compass no longer betrayed the straight line of progression: a sense of place realized.
Where Carcinogenesis (the first chapter’s name) prominently differed from Silent Cartographer and remained true to its forebear is that its sweeping island instead executed a loop, threading a winding linear path around the shoreline in one set permutation that hedged against the player becoming lost but lent a tangible feeling of the same openness and recursive trailblazing.
Taking all the maps of Metastasis together, the structure itself entails a bounce. From touching down on the surf-eroded, sandy beach to plumbing the depths of the abyss that sinks beneath the crown of the island, the trek back reverses through familiar corridors and facilities (and motivations) bent and twisted by the facility-encompassing blast that signals endgame.
That this turn could be incredibly transformative, despite re-utilized and “solved” surroundings, is borne out by the numbers of players that have gotten lost in those corridors in the years since. I’m one of them, for all the care invested into cues like directional steam plumes and Minerva’s periodic hinting reminders.
The player becoming lost is an enduring concern in game development, especially when navigating with a first-person camera and in Foster’s development process. Players of first-person shooters are notorious for the difficulty in prompting them to look up, down, or at any arbitrary point within the world that holds vital information. He cites direction as one of the distinguishing characteristics of a good map:
“Direction! The player must know what they’re aiming for — even if it’s something as abstract as ‘go down’ or ‘escape’. Also, a good sense of ‘place’. I don’t want to be in a game, I want to be exploring an interesting, well-imagined world. If there’s no real connection between different rooms, then that sense of location just fades away…” — PlanetPhillip interview
Direction is a thorny problem to crack even when one is aware of it, and there’s often no substitute but diligent testing to suss it out: Experiment, in a word. Developers like Valve have it down to something akin to a soft social science with in-person observed playtests. For the shoestring-budget modders of the time like Foster, sparse opportunities like playthroughs on Youtube or written reports were often heavily relied upon. To be in the space now, the explosion of recorded influencer content and streaming since Metastasis released offers more access to playtesters than ever.
The unseen character of Minerva herself is the linchpin upon which Metastasis’ story turns, repurposing Half-Life 2’s chapter title system to deliver her dialogue and exposition with a snappy letter-by-letter fade that accompanies the garbled keening of a dialup router. She’s a smattering of nods to Greco-Roman myth, Iain M. Banks, Bungie’s Marathon AIs and Cortana.
Minerva channeled Cortana most directly in teasing her game with proto-ARG cryptic missives. Before Halo 2’s I Love Bees ARG, there were the enigmatic Cortana Letters; Foster himself would later prove integral to creating the masterfully intricate ARG interwoven into Portal 2’s announcement, leveraging the antiquated hardware and obscure communications protocols with which he was familiar.
From the perspective of myth, there is another link with Cortana. She borrows the name of the medieval, blunt-tipped Sword of Mercy, upon which the inscription reads:
“My name is Cortana, of the same steel and temper as Joyeuse and Durendal.”
It symbolically links Marathon’s Durandal to Halo’s Cortana, both long-running Bungie series, though this is but one of many parallels Bungie carried forward into Halo. When the studio moved on after 2010’s Halo Reach, many expected the trend to carry on into the Destiny series with Joyeuse, the famed sword of the revered Frankish king Charlemagne. Her sibling blades were those of paladins in his service: Ogier the Dane bore Curtana, and Roland bore Durendal.
This thread stopped short of Destiny, but nine years before, Foster took up the needle in introducing Minerva:
“I am Hypatia, murdered for her beliefs, discoveries ignored by fools, name stricken from record. I am Joyeuse, an infinitely cutting blade wielded by an ignorant tyrant, for a cultural renaissance based upon military might. I am Athena, hunter and scientist, covertly guiding long-dead warriors for my quiet purposes.”
Popular memory hails Charlemagne as an enlightened and cultured ruler, a key figure in the move from chieftains and retinues to kings and nobility, and a Pope-crowned pretender to the occupied Roman throne. But he was first a conqueror renowned for his viciousness, the aspect Minerva mirrors: no more is she the weeping Cassandra whose words of warning went unheeded, now she is the ruthless and cunning Pallas Athena who raises her spear in vengeance of defiled temples and prophetesses, loosing it like a thunderbolt from the heavens to grind the strong down into the sea. If the island is this tale’s Ajax, it delighted Atropos to cut the thread of each upon the same fate.
Minerva textures the gun-augmented scientific survey with mythic remembrance and misremembrance, which is only appropriate for the posthuman entity named for the Romans’ own Athena-at-home. Even more fitting then, that the usurper Minerva names the player as her accomplice Perseus, who in cultural memory eventually usurped the part played in the Pegasus myth by Bellerophon.
In the mod’s fourth and final chapter, aptly named for the horse of legend, Minerva dispatches a second helicopter to airlift the player clambering out of a hell of twisted steel and all-consuming fire. It is a katabasis that recalls the words of Vergilius’ Sibyl of Cumae, foreshadowing that of the hero Aeneas:
“Trojan, son of Anchises, sprung from the blood of the gods, it is easy to go down to the underworld. The door of black Dis stands open night and day. But to retrace your steps and escape to the upper air, that is the task, that is the labour. Some few have succeeded, sons of the gods, loved and favoured by Jupiter or raised to the heavens by the flame of their own virtue.”
Even if not loved by the acerbic, ascended self-styled demigoddess, she supplies a winged steed to perhaps the nearest thing she has to family on this wasteland Earth: a fellow faceless survivor, impromptu test subject, and posthuman aberration. Minerva projects deific majesty and condescension even as she lurches into invective and cursing, exposing a seeming kernel of humanity that still lingers in whatever form she takes, wherever she resides, and whenever she is in the fractured cosmos.
Mestastasis’ planned followups, Out of Time and an unnamed third part, would have doubtless expanded upon the character and her continued schemes to thwart the Combine and other trans-universal threats that reared their heads. The second and third parts aren’t likely to be seen following Foster’s joining up with Valve. His dance card for level design is quite full, so Acolytes are left to search for his fingerprints in Valve projects since.
Can they be found in the tale of Prometheus’ ill-fated theft of knowledge (a clever foreshadowing of Chell and GLaDOS’ being “cast into the bowels of the earth and (being) pecked by birds”) falling from the mouth of one of Portal 2’s defective turrets? And speaking of my own mythic misremembrance, after over a decade, my recollections of the “Oracle” Turret’s cryptic allusions had morphed the plight of Prometheus into an even more literal parallel in the shape of the fall of Ikaros. Is Prometheus one of Foster’s contributions, and are there further telltale fingerprints in Half-Life: Alyx? This writer likes to think so.
But looking back to MINERVA, Foster has teased one or two more clues about Minerva’s apotheosis and eventual end, and this is likely to be the closest thing most of us get to closure for the story of the hemitheos that began with Someplace Else for the original Half-Life:
“MINERVA’s plot was, quite sneakily, entirely parallel to everything which happened in the Half-Life universe. It was ultimately going to end with Minerva and the player character averting some universe-destroying catastrophe by collapsing a parallel dimension — including that weird alien world glimpsed through the portal in Metastasis. Unfortunately, they’d be in said dimension at the time — deleting themselves from any possible direct influence on the events of Half-Life 2.”
“When I last heard from her, she was fiddling around with some archaic, alien technology on a near-inaccessible supersymmetric triplet of Earth. I suspect her intention was to destroy an entire third of a universe, rather than let the Combine take control of whatever weaponry had been left lying around. Monstrously large-scale destruction? It’s kind of her thing, really.” — Level With Me, Adam Foster (Part 1)
Perhaps the most enduring lesson taken from MINERVA: Metastasis is the one Foster reiterated time and time again, and which he summed up in his identification of the project as an “anti-modification”: unlike so many of its predecessors and peers, it restrained its ambitions, controlled its scope tightly, and was ultimately released instead of dying the slow death of delay and disinterest.
In an era of unprecedented ballooning AAA game budgets, scope creep, rocky and unfocused development, and numerous unfinished, unstable games released at steep prices, that lesson couldn’t be timelier and more crucial.
