When Halo came onto the scene, most first-person shooters relied on ‘push-forward’ design, a philosophy aimed at keeping players from backtracking or hiding from enemies, not by forcing them but by encouraging them to keep going – this kept shooters fast-paced, which generally meant they were more enjoyable.
While Halo: Combat Evolved didn’t end push-forward design, its additions were the undoing of the philosophy.

Sidenote: this is Part 9 of my series, The Birth of First-Person Shooters; if you missed it, the link to Part 8 can be found here. For newcomers, the link to Part 1 is here.
This article stands alone just fine as well, you do not have to have read the previous parts to understand what is being said.

 

Game: Halo: Combat Evolved

Developers: Bungie, Westlake Interactive worked on the PC ports

Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

Director/Project Lead: Jason Jones

Lead Producer: Hamilton Chu

Multiplayer Project Lead: Michael Evans

Lead Designer: John Howard

Programmers: Chris Butcher, Bernie Freidin, Charlie Gough, Mat Noguchi, Matt Segur, Eamon McKenzie, Ben Wallace.

Lead Writer: Joseph Staten.

Art Director: Marcus Lehto

Composer: Martin O’Donnell

Sound Designer: Jay Weinland

Platform and Release:

Xbox – November 15th, 2001 in North America; March 14th, 2002 in the European Union.

Microsoft Windows – September 30th, 2003 in North America; October 10th, 2003 in the European Union.

Mac OS X – December 3, 2003

 

Halo did what it’s predecessors did, doing some things better, while changing others and adding its own flair on top.
Deathmatches were still part of the expected package when it came to first-person shooters, so Halo kept them; adding in vehicular combat and increasing the size of the multiplayer maps to proportions then unseen in first-person games. The gunplay was smooth and responsive (in part, this can be attributed to the ‘blindspot’ in Xbox controllers), models were well-designed and just as well-animated, the vehicles were worlds better than the tank seen in 1997’s Shadow Warrior (arguably the first FPS to include vehicular combat) – and, to boot, it also had a fantastic campaign.

Halo performed so well it became known as the flagship title to the Xbox, despite the other exclusives available to the console, and some even attribute the success of the first Xbox to Halo’s popularity.

 

Halo introduced a lot of subtleties to first-person shooters, many of which can still be seen today – hitpoint regeneration among them.

In Wolf3D, Doom, Quake, Unreal and many others, your health didn’t regenerate; most gave players an extra layer of hitpoints called armour, to allow them to survive longer in tougher situations – but you still had to collect your health and armour in the form of pickups. Combat Evolved opted to call your armour a ‘shield’ and gave it regeneration, meaning that it would gradually return over a period of time (provided you aren’t taking damage, of course), you still had to collect health kits whenever you were low on health, but you didn’t have to worry about your armour, because it would come back on it’s own after (or sometimes during) a combat encounter.
This spurred something on within the genre; after Halo, other shooters started to give players regenerating health, meaning the need for health pickups was no longer necessary; this led to a variety of changes being made to the genre, but we’ll get to those in Part 10.

 

I haven’t been able to find many accounts of Halo’s development, but there are videos floating around online of the developers giving commentary over the campaign – and all I can say is that Halo was pushing a lot of limits, not just in terms of the hardware it would run on but also in terms of the hardware it was developed on.
The way the developers talk about it, Halo was a sheet of iron that was glued to wood and cloth with the wrong kind of superglue, only to be taped together in all kinds of ways.
Animations that wouldn’t work, low-poly models that had to move realistically, graphical glitches that could never be fixed, limitations on the amounts of animated models in any given shot and sounds firing off when they really shouldn’t – all problems that the players never really seemed to notice, much less care about.

Something else I can definitely say is that Halo had a massive development team; at least, massive for the time. When developing Doom just eight years prior, id Software had less than twenty employees, but while researching Combat Evolved, I discovered that Halo had a development team with somewhere in the range of sixty members.

 

So instead of talking about the game’s development, I figure I should talk about the technology it ran on; because, one, I haven’t spoken about technology for a while in this series, and, two, this is the first console exclusive I’ve brought up in the Birth of First-Person Shooters series, so its only fitting I discuss the Microsoft Xbox.

The original Xbox first released on November 15th, 2001 (in the United States, with its Japanese launch in February of 2002 and its launches in Australasia and the European Union in March that same year) and it was a pretty tough competitor in the 6th console generation; sharing the markets with the Playstation 2 and the Nintendo Gamecube.
The Xbox was the first console to feature a built-in hard drive, each unit carrying 8 gigabytes of memory (as you’ll recall, the Playstation 2 made use of external memory cards, each of which could only carry 8 megabytes).

Sidenote: there were consoles prior to 2001 that had internal memory, the Sega CD and Sega Saturn both featured internal battery-backup memory, while the Amiga CD32 had internal flash memory; but, as you’ll note, neither of those are actual hard drives.

Second Sidenote: Don’t worry, no need to send me an angry email saying I didn’t explain something to the fullest (because I do get those from time to time).
‘Battery-backup memory’ is essentially RAM (Random Access Memory), which is sort of like a second hard drive but it only stores information while it has power, and loses all that information the moment it loses power, ‘battery-backup’ can be found in many devices, usually providing them with just enough power to keep track of the time (this is how phones, tablets and computers keep track of the time and date when they’re turned off), in the case of some video game consoles, it was used to power the memory cards so that they could keep your save-games even when you turned your console off.
If something has ‘flash memory’ it basically just has the equivalent of a mini hard drive, it’s what we call ‘non-volatile storage’, meaning it retains data even without a power source.

The Xbox was basically an attempt at bringing a gaming-oriented home computer into the market (that’s essentially what consoles are, through no technicalities or loopholes, they are computers) but I mean it in a different way; the Xbox was a large and heavy console, and a lot of that size and weight can be attributed to two of its components – the DVD-ROM drive (the disc-reading part) and the hard drive; which weren’t actually made specifically for the console, they were stock standard computer parts. Apparently, the reasoning behind this is that normal PC parts were cheaply produced and easily updated.

Something which really owed to the Xbox’s success was Xbox Live which came in November of 2002, the reason this was so great was because the Xbox had a built-in Ethernet port, allowing you to plug it into your router or modem (or directly into another Xbox). Halo 2 is where Xbox Live really exploded into popularity, but the launch of an online service and a library of great games, Microsoft was able to gain a firm, and early, foothold in online gaming.

I’d discuss the development of the Xbox but that is a topic for another time.

 

Halo: Combat Evolved started development in 1997 as a real-time strategy game, gradually morphing into a third-person shooter, and eventually becoming the first-person shooter we all know and love.
There are two reasons Halo makes it into my Birth of First-Person Shooters series, the first is that regenerating shield, the second is its near perfection.
It didn’t popularize anything, it didn’t introduce anything that people thought was revolutionary or would stick around; it just took what had been done before and did it better… so, so much better.

We all thought those shields would be a one-off, that we’d only see them in Halo games; and for the most part, that’s true, there aren’t too many first-person shooters out there that make use of regenerating shields, but almost all of them took the idea and changed it…

 

“What if, hear me out on this, what if a player’s health could regenerate?”