Halo 3: ODST is Bungie’s attempt to move away from the traditional Halo formula with baby-steps. Featuring a slightly larger cast of named characters, ODST takes the player out of the Master Chief’s armor and places them into the roles of slightly more conventional soldiers with a smaller-scale objective than saving Humanity from certain extinction. In equal parts of remarkableness and inexplicability, the game’s main character, “the Rookie,” is even less talkative than the Master Chief and even more one-dimensional while exploring a limited open-world and killing aliens as needed.
A representative clip of Halo 3: ODST's overall tone.
Atmospherically, ODST’s departure from vibrant, natural, colorful, light environments to a dark, muted, and abandoned city works quite well. A jazzy and somber tone to the more conventional music of past Halo games helps nail down the film-noir theme of ODST as the player roams the city alone trying to find and piece together various clues of what happened to his squad. Enemy encounters in the open-world are also paced slow enough to make the city feel more like a ghost town. Isolation is further underscored by the removal of a vocal Cortana-like companion for the player to give hints and explain what the next course of action should be.
This brings up a fun contradiction I find when evaluating ODST: the Rookie’s squad-mates all have distinct voices delivered by an all-star (science-fiction) cast and have varied personalities, with some slight character development occurring. The best character though is that of Virgil, the A.I. that handles the logistical operations of the city and has no voice of his own outside of manipulating the environment and setting way-points for the player to follow. Virgil’s primary involvement with the player is aiding them in finding audio clips of a side-story that occurred hours before the game proper during the invasion of the city, and of which Virgil is also a participating character. Had Virgil been as involved in the main game as he was in the audio clips ODST would have probably been closer to a great game instead of just being good. Despite this missed opportunity, Virgil is the only character I’d like to see appear in any type of a future game and I’d bring him along in my head over Cortana in a heartbeat.
As far as the side-story goes, I’ll be replaying ODST soon to finish the story as I crossed the “point of no return” in the game and couldn’t hunt down the remainder of clips. If you enjoyed the audio drama of the ILoveBees ARG prior to Halo 2’s launch, the story presented in ODST is definitely in the same vein, is just as enjoyable, and would justify the purchase of the game.
Adequate is probably a sufficient descriptor for ODST’s narrative though. When not playing as the Rookie and exploring the city, the player is participating in flash-backs from the perspective of one of the other squad-mates which feel more similar to previous Halo games. The problem is that while none of these characters, Rookie included, are Spartans like the Master Chief, they seem to perform near-identically. That none of the characters are defined by any game-play short of weapon load-outs diminishes their uniqueness. There’s a part where one of the squad members suffers an egregious wound, but instead of doing something interesting like making that character playable in a reduced capacity or to fulfill a different role in the operation at hand, this character just gets relegated to cut-scene dressing.
There is also a really lame choice that the player can make by either doing something specific in one of the levels or refrain from. Either action, or inaction, will result in a corresponding achievement. Aside from the gamerscore bump though, this has practically no impact on the game and feels tacked on and incomplete. But I guess it’s better than nothing and I’m interested to see if it doesn’t signal progress in the future.
That last sentiment is probably the crux of my thoughts on ODST in that ODST feels like a proof-of-concept that Bungie put on a disc. That Bungie dubbed ODST an expansion initially reinforces this view of the game, and given the fact that ODST is a suffix of Halo 3 and the design and relevance of the game I think it would be hard to argue against. While the multiplayer Firefight mode looks promising, there’s no online matchmaking for it which immediately cuts down its viability as a popular and accessible online game mode. With everything in mind, the value of ODST just doesn’t feel there at the $60 price-point that it was released at, and I’m really glad that I waited to pick ODST up as a part of Amazon’s black Friday sale last year. What ODST has done successfully, in addition to being a satisfactory game and selling another copy of the ODST soundtrack, is given me a glimmer of hope that Halo: Reach will be something more than a Halo title that has assimilated elements of Modern Warfare. I’d really like to think there’s something to this potential I saw briefly in ODST.
A representative clip of Halo 3: ODST's overall tone.
Atmospherically, ODST’s departure from vibrant, natural, colorful, light environments to a dark, muted, and abandoned city works quite well. A jazzy and somber tone to the more conventional music of past Halo games helps nail down the film-noir theme of ODST as the player roams the city alone trying to find and piece together various clues of what happened to his squad. Enemy encounters in the open-world are also paced slow enough to make the city feel more like a ghost town. Isolation is further underscored by the removal of a vocal Cortana-like companion for the player to give hints and explain what the next course of action should be.
This brings up a fun contradiction I find when evaluating ODST: the Rookie’s squad-mates all have distinct voices delivered by an all-star (science-fiction) cast and have varied personalities, with some slight character development occurring. The best character though is that of Virgil, the A.I. that handles the logistical operations of the city and has no voice of his own outside of manipulating the environment and setting way-points for the player to follow. Virgil’s primary involvement with the player is aiding them in finding audio clips of a side-story that occurred hours before the game proper during the invasion of the city, and of which Virgil is also a participating character. Had Virgil been as involved in the main game as he was in the audio clips ODST would have probably been closer to a great game instead of just being good. Despite this missed opportunity, Virgil is the only character I’d like to see appear in any type of a future game and I’d bring him along in my head over Cortana in a heartbeat.
As far as the side-story goes, I’ll be replaying ODST soon to finish the story as I crossed the “point of no return” in the game and couldn’t hunt down the remainder of clips. If you enjoyed the audio drama of the ILoveBees ARG prior to Halo 2’s launch, the story presented in ODST is definitely in the same vein, is just as enjoyable, and would justify the purchase of the game.
Adequate is probably a sufficient descriptor for ODST’s narrative though. When not playing as the Rookie and exploring the city, the player is participating in flash-backs from the perspective of one of the other squad-mates which feel more similar to previous Halo games. The problem is that while none of these characters, Rookie included, are Spartans like the Master Chief, they seem to perform near-identically. That none of the characters are defined by any game-play short of weapon load-outs diminishes their uniqueness. There’s a part where one of the squad members suffers an egregious wound, but instead of doing something interesting like making that character playable in a reduced capacity or to fulfill a different role in the operation at hand, this character just gets relegated to cut-scene dressing.
There is also a really lame choice that the player can make by either doing something specific in one of the levels or refrain from. Either action, or inaction, will result in a corresponding achievement. Aside from the gamerscore bump though, this has practically no impact on the game and feels tacked on and incomplete. But I guess it’s better than nothing and I’m interested to see if it doesn’t signal progress in the future.
That last sentiment is probably the crux of my thoughts on ODST in that ODST feels like a proof-of-concept that Bungie put on a disc. That Bungie dubbed ODST an expansion initially reinforces this view of the game, and given the fact that ODST is a suffix of Halo 3 and the design and relevance of the game I think it would be hard to argue against. While the multiplayer Firefight mode looks promising, there’s no online matchmaking for it which immediately cuts down its viability as a popular and accessible online game mode. With everything in mind, the value of ODST just doesn’t feel there at the $60 price-point that it was released at, and I’m really glad that I waited to pick ODST up as a part of Amazon’s black Friday sale last year. What ODST has done successfully, in addition to being a satisfactory game and selling another copy of the ODST soundtrack, is given me a glimmer of hope that Halo: Reach will be something more than a Halo title that has assimilated elements of Modern Warfare. I’d really like to think there’s something to this potential I saw briefly in ODST.
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