The Tragedy of Halo 3: ODST

Back in 2007, when you thought of Halo, you thought of this guy: Master Chief. He’s a seven-foot tall, genetically enhanced super soldier, and primary protagonist of the franchise. Which is why it was so bold of developer Bungie to make a game where Chief didn’t appear at all. At the height of Halo mania in 2009, the studio released Halo 3: ODST - where we ditch Master Chief in favour of the titular Orbital Drop Shock Troopers.

These guys are human, they can’t duel wield weapons, and they have to pick up med kits to patch up injuries. But what really set ODST apart from the first three Halo games, was its wildly different tone, and structure. So you primarily play as the rookie. And, at the start of the game, you and your crew - Buck, Dare, Romeo, Mickey, and Dutch - all drop down into the alien-occupied city of New Mombasa. But an EMP blast sends your drop pod off-course, and knocks you unconscious for six hours.

When you finally wake up, the city is practically deserted and your crew has disappeared. It’s now your job to scour the streets and figure out what happened. It’s here that the game slips into an eery, melancholic vibe. It’s dark. Pitch black in places. There’s a smoky jazz soundtrack, reminiscent of film noir. And you’re completely alone, meaning it’s often better to sneak past Covenant forces, than fight them head on.

Throughout New Mombasa, you’ll find scraps of evidence from your missing crew mates. Like Dare’s helmet, lodged into a computer screen. Or Romeo’s sniper rifle, dangling from a telephone wire. And finding one of these things kickstarts a flashback. Which are actually, the game’s missions. These fling you into more traditional Halo fare. You know, flanking snipers. Defending a point with a turret. Dogfights with Banshees.

A boss fight against a Scarab. Shotgunning a Warthog with the, uh, questionable friendly AI. They’re short, sharp, tasters of classic Halo action - like a greatest hits album. When you’re done, though, it’s back to New Mombasa. For the first time in a Halo game, you can actually explore these streets with complete freedom. You can hunt for audio logs, which tell the story of the Covenant invasion from the perspective of a civilian named Sadie.

You can find supply caches to gear up. And you can find the clues, and play the flashback missions, in practically any order you like - making it also the first non-linear Halo game. So the first two missions - Tayari Plaza and Uplift Reserve must be played as so. But the next four - Kizingo Boulevard, ONI Alpha Site, NMPD HQ, and Kikowani Station - can be played in any order you like. And when you’ve finished that lot, you can play the final two sections, and finish the game.

There is a lot to like about ODST. For starters, there’s a prevailing sense of mystery in the game, which is a great way of keeping players engaged. Each mission comes with the unresolved tension of not knowing what happened to each crew member. Like: how did Romeo’s rifle end up here? Well, you’ll need to play through this mission to find out. And the entire game comes with these lingering questions of how many of your crew are still alive?

And will you meet up with them again? A similar premise, and that sense of mystery, can be found in the wonderful Gone Home. Here, you play as Katie Greenbriar, who comes home to find her family’s new house completely deserted. By reading notes, letters, books, cassettes, shopping lists, and more, you can piece together the narrative of what happened to her family. I think video games, as a medium, are particularly good at this sort of archeological story-telling because you get to explore the world freely.

So you will find clues completely out of order. Or maybe not at all. And to figure out what happened, you must put these bread crumbs together yourself to form a coherent story. Everyone who finishes Gone Home will know what happened to Katie’s sister Sam, because her story is told quite explicitly - but the more subtle narratives of Katie’s mother and father might be less obvious if you’re not paying attention. And the darker side story of Uncle Oscar is actually completely missed by a lot of players.

Likewise, Halo ODST’s full story can only be completely understood if you take the time to track down the audio logs. And playing the missions out of order brings up questions that get answered in other flashbacks. For example, if you play Kikowani Station first, you may wonder why Romeo is injured. That will end up being explained later, at the end of the earlier mission NMPD HQ. Setting the story in the past also lets you explore the city and pick missions as you please - because flashbacks are actually a great way to reconcile a strictly authored narrative with more freeform exploration.

That clash, between story and exploration, is why The Legend of Zelda changed course. The first game, on NES, was completely open: you could explore Hyrule however you wanted, and dip in and out of dungeons at your leisure. Starting with A Link to the Past, though, the games got more strict about structure, with Miyamoto telling a magazine back in 1992 that the “the problem with making an ‘open-ended’ version of Zelda was the messaging and plotline.

If you ignore structure like that, then the plotline can quickly get screwy and NPC messages start to not make sense”. I wonder what the Japanese word for “screwy” is… Anyway. It would take Nintendo about 25 years to finally stumble upon a satisfactory answer to this problem, in Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Like ODST, Link is also in a deserted, war-torn world, and he’s missing his pals. And the game’s narrative is almost entirely told through flashbacks that can be found by stumbling onto memorable locations in the game’s world.

Having the story be set in the past means the narrative can’t change, and thus it doesn’t matter in what order the events happen. Now as much as I admire ODST, it unfortunately runs into some significant issues. For starters, you might not even realise that you can do missions out of order. After each stage, the game helpfully plops a waypoint onto your compass that will take you by the hand to the next beacon. Which plays out the story in chronological order.

If you want to change that order, you’ll have to manually pop into the map screen and switch the waypoint. Where you’ll notice that the layout of the city means that for some mission starting points, you’ll actually have to walk straight past others. You have to be quite stubborn to break the game’s default sequence. Compare this to Zelda, where the Divine Beasts are found in the four corners of the map. And how the four waypoints appear on your mini-map at the same time, to encourage you to travel across Hyrule as you see fit.

You could, of course, ignore the waypoints in ODST and just wander off the beaten track and explore the city yourself. But, you won’t want to do that. New Mombasa is a nightmare to explore. It all looks the same, it’s full of dead ends, it’s too dark to see most of it, and it’s crawling with enemies. It’s also obvious that Halo’s engine wasn’t made for open world exploration, so the city is blocked off into tiny hexagonal chunks, separated by giant blast doors that mask the loading screens.

This simply isn’t a place that’s calling out to be explored, unlike, say, the excellent hub world in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Also, those moments where information from one flashback gets changed or confirmed or recontextualised by another, are few and far between. Compare this to the excellent detective game, Her Story. This is a game about watching a woman give interview testimony - but in seconds-long clips that you drag up with a search query.

The game actually lets you see the entire story in any order. You might even stumble onto some of the most telling video clips right at the start! But the tale is so complex and interwoven that you can only get the full picture when you put together all of the disparate facts. Information you hear in one clip changes meaning, when paired up with the context of another clip, and there’s a fascinating escalation of revelations that comes from piecing together all of these mixed up clues.

ODST never really has that - maybe because it’s only got four missions to play with, or maybe because it just requires very clever, very creative writing to set up these interlocking clues. ODST also has a pretty flat difficulty curve, which might be seen as a necessary evil when it comes to non-linear games. Because if players can pick any mission, the stages have to be equally challenging since any level could be your first.

This is complete bunk, of course. Games are dynamic things that can change depending on what the player has seen and done. As I’ve shown before on this channel, Uncharted Lost Legacy secretly swaps around these three puzzles so whichever of these three towers you climb first, you’ll always find the easiest version of the puzzle waiting for you at the top. ODST could have done this with things like the number or strength of the enemies.

But as far as I can tell, the game doesn’t do this. The final issue that ODST has to deal with, is the fact that because these missions are predetermined flashbacks, this does limit your ability to make choices during those sections. It’s why you get a game over in the 1960’s thriller Metal Gear Solid 3, if you kill Ocelot - because he needs to be alive in 2005. And we can actually see the difficulties of dealing with this in ODST itself.

So, as Rookie in New Mombasa, you’ll come across a wrecked Warthog. And then, after finding the drone fighter optics and playing through Dutch’s mission at the Uplift Reserve, you’ll see that this wreck is actually Dutch’s Warthog that he crashed into the wall. However, you can also change vehicle during that mission and finish the chapter on a Ghost - and while the final cutscene is changed to reflect this, the wrecked Warthog is not.

I know this is silly, but it’s a good example of how playable flashbacks can get complicated. And I’m not really sure how to fix this, to be honest. If you stop letting players make choices so as not to change anything that happened, the game might become as restrictive as a Rockstar story mission. But let players mess with events in the flashbacks too much, and you’ve got to change events in the future to reflect this, taking us right back to that complex branching narrative stuff that scared Miyamoto in 1992.

It’s probably better to solve this creatively, and simply limit the connection between the flashbacks and the present day events. So I think Halo 3: ODST is a really potent idea for a game. Exploring a dead world and finding clues about what happened there is obviously a popular structure for video games - but then having those flashbacks actually be playable is a stroke of genius. You get two very different types of game - a bombastic action adventure, and an isolating open-world detective game - that slowly come together as the enticing central mystery unfolds.

But ODST doesn’t quite stick the landing. For the issues I talked about in this video, and others. You don’t spend enough time with these characters at the start to really care about their fate, and they’re difficult to tell apart. And these chaps are not actually that different from Master Chief, making the whole ODST thing kinda superficial. You can still rip off turrets and flip over Warthogs, after all. But I’ve got cut ODST some slack.

It actually started life as a piece of DLC - just one that grew in scope and ambition until it was better to release it as a standalone game. So it obviously didn’t have the same time and budget as a proper Halo entry. But, most importantly, there’s the fact that all of the games I talked about in this episode - Gone Home, Her Story, Lost Legacy, Breath of the Wild - they all came out years after ODST. Proving that in this case, Bungie was way, way ahead of its time.

Hey thanks for watching! Bit of a random topic for you today, but you never know what to expect from Game Maker’s Toolkit. GMTK is almost exclusively funded by people who support me on Patreon, so you don’t have to watch ads, or bits where I talk about audiobooks or VPNs or mattresses that conform to the shape of your butt.