Deconstructing Halo 3: A Decade Later

They let me pick. Did I ever tell you that?

Gulmer
9 min readOct 10, 2017
This aerial grenade jump performed by team red? It won’t end well…

Halo 3, the third installment in Bungie’s series just celebrated its 10 years anniversary. Back in autumn 2007, Halo 3 was riding on the well-oiled Microsoft marketing machine and receiving universal critical praise. It made headlines in the mainstream news and marked the beginning of one of the best holiday seasons for video games.

Yet even between all of these other game franchises (Ranging from Mass Effect, Portal, Uncharted, Assassin’s Creed and Bioshock to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Half-Life: The Orange Box, Super Mario Galaxy, Unreal Tournament III and Guitar Hero III — to name but a few), I’d argue that Halo 3 was the most forward-thinking game.

Halo had something they didn’t. Or something no one saw… but few. Can you guess?

Et Tu, Brute?

There are probably enough reviews, retrospectives, critical analyses and “best of” lists dissecting the core elements of Halo 3. Instead, I will try to point how some of the more subtle features contributed to the expansion of the formula, and how some were way ahead of their time from a game design perspective.

Halo 3 Title Screen — brings back some memories

The Halo 3 title screen starts with the obvious: Campaign and multiplayer have always been the two pillars of Halo. Nothing is seemingly new here: Halo Combat Evolved set the pace for Halo’s standard campaign (playable in both solo and split-screen co-op modes) and the second installment had already offered multiplayer matchmaking on top of custom LAN network play. You have to dig slightly deeper to see where Halo 3 innovated in campaign and multiplayer.

I Would Have Been Your Daddy

The Halo 3 campaign does a good job engulfing the player in the story when playing for the first time. Only when you attempt to replay any of the levels, will scoring be enabled — with end-of-level “carnage report” reminiscent of classic “arcadey” games.

This score is based on kills, time, difficulty level, and perhaps most importantly optional “skulls” permutators that the player can activate to alter some of the game parameters. But in order to do that, the player has to obtain actual skulls hidden in the various levels, effectively going on an Easter Egg hunt.

The hunt for hidden skulls in Halo 3 swept the community, as some were difficult to find and required players to interact with each other outside the game to share knowledge.

Attempting to play the game with all skulls turned on increased the difficulty significantly, and gave birth to the unofficial “Mythic” difficulty level. Both the skull hunt and the campaign scoring mode are reasons to come back to play the game, again and again, challenge your friends in the “metagame” or join them in a co-op session - and try to unlock additional Xbox Live achievements which Bungie was wise enough to tie to this mode, ensuring replayability and engagement in a game component that most players usually only go through once.

Hill Contested

Not long after being released, Halo 3’s multiplayer was challenged by the shiny new XP progression mechanic offered by Call of Duty: Modern Warfare — which pretty much dethroned Halo and became the uncontested king of FPSs for many years to come.

Yet Halo’s multiplayer formula was still very reliable, and Halo 3 managed to ensure the longevity of the multiplayer community thanks to matchmaking tweaks and improvements alongside a comprehensive rule editor. The later allowed players to create their own rule variants, with some of them even making it to official Bungie matchmaking playlists updated on a regular cadence (thus also making Halo 3 one of the earliest examples of “Game-as-a-Service”/Live-ops in the AAA industry, before these terms even existed).

These game variants had existed in prior Halo games but were significantly extended in Halo 3 in terms of what settings could actually be controlled. This enhancement, however, was just a part of something much, much bigger.

Under construction

Enter Halo 3 fourth menu option: Forge. While the three new features above were iterative improvements over existing game modes, Forge was a whole new deal and an entirely separate game mode.

In essence, Forge was a game level editor that was tailored to work with the console interface and input device. To simplify things, players weren’t able to create whole maps but instead could use a (fairly large) set of building blocks which allowed them to modify any of the existing maps - adding anything from objects to triggers to spawn points.

This obviously wasn’t the first game that allowed some form of level editing, and many games on consoles and PC predated it by over two decades (I personally recall Battle City and Excite Bike on the NES, as well as Stunts and Star Control on the PC). But what was probably unique to Halo 3 was how well this game mode was integrated: Not only could you immediately switch between editing and playing with a press of a button to live-test your creation, but you could also invite your friends to co-edit and test the level with you (online or via split-screen).

In fact, one could even run a competitive match in Forge mode with a specific ruleset, where each team has a forger that can supply them with all sorts of weapons of mass destruction and occasionally even drop a tank on one of their opponents (and of course, there’s an achievement for that as well). While not the most balanced of game modes, this was still hilarious and a true sandbox experience.

Sharing is caring

But here is the real kicker: every wild game variant you created, and every ridiculous forge map you came up with was uploadable to Bungie’s servers directly from your in-game menu, with the addition of a description and tags so that it can be easily found in the ever-growing searchable database.

Other players could then browse the list of maps from their console or even in their PC web browser and then download, play, rate, comment on and tag them. Top map and game variants even had a chance to appear in Bungie’s curated list and achieve worldwide recognition.

It’s important to note we’re talking 2007 here - before the “sharing economy” became the obvious thing that it is today: YouTube and Facebook were still in their infancy, and Steam Workshop wasn’t even a thing. Yet Halo 3 already had all these sharing features implemented inside the game and with a proper backend server architecture to support it.

If you’ve ever dabbled in the modding community before that, and knew what level of technical competency was required to get your Doom .wad files or Red Alert .mix files or whatnot to work on a someone’s computer - you couldn’t do anything but marvel at the level of simplicity Bungie managed to reach with Halo 3. It essentially “democratized” in-game content creation.

Theatrical Release

Last but not least on Halo 3’s menu was Theater: Enter this mode for the first time, and you’d realize how every game you played (be it Single player, co-op or multiplayer) had actually been recorded and ready to be replayed from this sub-menu. These files were not actually video files but rather script recordings that let the game engine recreate the gameplay from the saved scripts.

Choose any replay in this menu, and you could then change perspective to any of the players’ viewpoints, or switch to a free-form 3rd person camera mode, and navigate the level as it plays. Exploring replays let you evaluate your gameplay in competitive multiplayer, and also glance at Halo’s game world as it unfolded “behind the curtain” in campaign missions.

Analyzing replay: The grenade thrown at you earlier? It’s what flipped your Warthog, granting you a lucky kill.

Again: These recordings were probably nothing new to anyone versed in the PC gaming scene — with recorded scripts going at least as far back as Doom’s demo LMP files. But once again Bungie excelled here with the simplicity of sharing this content, and with a press of a button, you could upload your game recording online, where others could search for it or view it from your profile and download it.

Kodak moment

Theater mode also lets you line up that perfect camera angle at the right moment and render a high-resolution image, and even render and export a video file on Bungie’s servers. Video render budget was limited - but once again we’re talking about 2007: There were more Halo 3 theater films uploaded to Bungie servers than global videos uploaded to YouTube at the time.

Uploading videos and stills encouraged a whole new group of content creators to use these tools for creative purposes. Halo originally helped to popularize Machinima, but the new tools greatly simplified the process and extended the capabilities of aspiring directors. Creations varied from perfectly lined up sniper multi-kills from across the map, to multiplayer recreations of famous scenes, to virtual photographers forging up a large stage just to create an impressive shot.

“OMG RuN!!!!!!!” by ATOMIC x KILLA — Downloaded over 7 million times

This ability to replay, upload and share videos and screenshots is yet another pioneering feature of Halo 3 that was later adopted by a multitude of other games, not to mention turning into a core feature of the 8th console generation and now integrated into mobile as well.

Meta-what?

Last but not least is the part of Halo 3 which actually exists outside the game menus: Every player’s service record could be tracked online, with information on past games played, personal achievements and campaign progress, weapon usage and even kill/death heatmaps for every multiplayer level.

Cropped out: Steaktacular medals. Luke owes me a lot of steak dinners.

Bungie also shared cumulative heatmaps with the community on its website, allowing players to investigate global heatmap stats and re-evaluate their strategy accordingly.

Ten years later, many developers are attempting multiplayer gameplay without even collecting these internally, not to mention sharing them with the community. I had already mentioned the importance of analytics in a previous post, but visual feedback is taking it one step further.

Does YOUR game offer anything like this for the players? Or even for the game designers?

Wake me when you need me

Looking at the whole package, it’s hard for me to think of another game in the last decade that pushed the envelope on so many fronts at the same time. It might not have been 2007’s best game per se (competition was tough that year), but it brought such an extensive offering to the table that it’s hard not to admire it even if the game is anything but your cup of tea.

Some of the features that Halo 3 pioneered or improved upon eventually became industry standards, while other features are perhaps still streets ahead. To some extent, a few of the more ambitious aspects were even scaled back in newer iterations (under both Halo and Destiny IPs).

So while it is the first game in the series that is usually being lauded as the reinvention of FPS games on consoles, to me it seems that Halo 3 is the game that brought in the (quieter) revolution with its impact behind the scenes. Happy 10th anniversary!

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Gulmer

Personal musing on the video game industry. Principles expressed here are solely my own, and if you don’t like them… well I have others