More incentive talk

by Stephen Laughlin , Long Beach, CA, Tuesday, July 09, 2013, 11:02 (4198 days ago) @ Xenos

“I think the great tragedy of Halo is that for years and years it provided wonderful single-player and co-op content, and we provided people with almost no fun incentives or excuses, almost no reason besides their own enjoyment, to go back and replay it. So Halo 1 built these 10 labor of love missions, and only if you decided to go back and replay them was there any incentive to do so.

I invite Jones to elaborate.

“If I would have done anything to Halo 1, it would have been to do something to draw people back into those experiences that they enjoyed the first time. Even in the smallest ways, just to give them an excuse to get together and do it again.”

Like the Skulls in later Halo games?

“Sure. And that was a shadow of an attempt to do that,” he says firmly. “The reason we’re doing [Destiny] is because I feel like, looking back on Halo… I described it over and over again to the team. It’s one of the great tragedies of Halo.”

This part troubles me a little bit. I along with many other people obviously did go back and replay Halo many, many times. Why? Because it was fun as hell. The AI and level designs were setup in such a way that encounters would never play out exactly the same way. Most levels were open-ended enough that exploration was always exciting and in many cases you could approach areas from multiple directions (Silent Cartographer and Assault on The Control Room were goddamn masterpieces). Discoveries like the power of grenades and the Warthog jumping came out of the game mechanics of the game itself, even if they may have been unintentional.

Jason mentions that it was just a shadow of an attempt at incentives, but I definitely thought the skulls in the later Halo games felt pretty artificial and gimmicky. I don't want to be encouraged to replay boring sections of a game for the satisfaction of earning a neato little prize or to fulfill some kind of artificial desire to "collect 'em all!". Make the game fun and I will come back to explore it again, just because.