How Halo 4 Got Me to Care About Master Chief - Wired

An early scene from Halo 4, available Tuesday for Xbox 360. Image: Microsoft

Note: This story contains mild early-game Halo 4 spoilers.

A weird thing is going on between me and Halo 4. I want to keep playing it.

I know this is going to sound like crazy talk to many of you. But I could never get into Halo, despite its monumental popularity. Sorry. Couldn’t do it. I tried and I tried. I didn’t really expect Halo 4, released on Tuesday for Xbox 360, to change that. In many ways, it doesn’t feel that much different from the last few Halo games, which in large part is exactly what its developer was hoping for: Halo 4 is the first game in the series to be developed since the series’ creator Bungie split off from Microsoft. It’s the creation of the new studio 343 Industries, an internal Microsoft group tasked with keeping the Xbox’s signature exclusive franchise afloat.

In other words, 343′s job wasn’t to bring me into the fold but to keep the millions of Halo lovers from leaving. If Halo failed, what would that mean for the Xbox brand in a world where game platforms have fewer and fewer exclusive experiences? They need to preserve what players like about it.

The appeal of the Halo series, it seems to me, is about the joys of expert-level play. About throwing yourself into a truly difficult situation and coming up with a winning strategy that is truly your own. A chess game against an opponent of variable difficulty. Halo games all give the player the option to choose the game’s difficulty, but tell you that the game is meant to be enjoyed on “Heroic” setting, one notch above “Normal.” (You read that right: You’re not meant to play on “Normal.” If this confuses you, welcome to my world.)

Anyway, if a fierce challenge is what fires your rockets, that’s great. There are certainly enough of you out there. Meanwhile, I long ago realized and accepted that I play videogames to get tricked into thinking I am awesome. As near as I can figure, 30 years of playing videogames has led to no measurable increase in my proficiency at them. I suck, and will forever. So the games that grab me are the ones that are carefully choreographed to make me think that I am a huge genius even though all I’m doing is the exact thing the designer wants me to. I am bad at shooting, but tremendous at suspending my disbelief.

So why is Halo 4 any different?

It’s not because it radically changes the gameplay in an attempt to bring in sucko players like me. If anything, what I’ve heard from actual Halo experts is that it’s even harder: “Easy” feels like “Normal”, and “Normal” is the new “Heroic.” (And even given this, you’re still not supposed to play on “Normal.”)

But Halo 4 is engaging me in a way that no other Halo game has, through its story.

I played through Halo and Halo: Reach recently, and I am being totally honest with you when I tell you that, with a gun to my head, I could not recall back to you the plots of these games. Much effort has been expended on fleshing out the Halo universe. There are six games, 12 novels, six comic book series and Peter Jackson nearly made a movie about it. And it’s all just utterly lost on me. I think the extent to which Halo’s story affects you is proportionate to the amount the gameplay appeals to you.

But from the first moments, a dramatic confrontation between a mysterious officer and the woman who created the super-powered Spartan soldiers that count Master Chief among their ranks, Halo 4′s story feels different. Suddenly, there’s palpable tension between these characters. Not aliens-are-invading tension, just two people in a darkened room engaging in a battle of wills.

Then it really gets going. Immediately after the first level, Chief’s ever-present artificial-intelligence companion Cortana drops a bomb on the stoic supersoldier. AI constructs only last for seven years, and she’s past her eighth birthday. She’s going to die.

Paradoxically, the more people who die in a movie scene, the less the audience cares. Darth Vader blows up the entire planet of Alderaan, and it’s like, big whoop. Meanwhile, if an Ewok gets a paper cut, our reaction is more apt to be, “Oh no, I really hope someone has a Band-Aid!”

Halo’s stakes, up to this point, have been more about Billions Dying than they have been about Cute Thing in Slight Peril. But as soon as Cortana faces her own mortality and Chief doesn’t know how to react, Halo 4 becomes gripping. It’s the first time I ever looked at the unblinking mask of Master Chief and saw anxiety in it. If Cortana died, the world would keep on turning and no one would know. Halo 4 raises the stakes dramatically by reducing them down to the smallest stakes possible; there is no massive alien invasion but Master Chief might lose his computer friend.

This is, in my experience, a rather impactful shake-up for the series. The total break away from Bungie and the injection of new blood at every level of the game’s development wasn’t just a necessary evil, it broke Halo’s old habits â€" in a way that could hook hold-outs like me.