Is it Just Me?

I liked Halo 3. I love Gears of War 2. But, is it just me or did these games both take a million years to come out with…absolutely nothing new.
Now I understand in the case of Halo 3. The previous Halo was on the Xbox, not the 360, so I’m sure a new engine had to be created. And yeah, the graphics were better. Very crisp and clean visuals. But the game play is pretty much exactly the same.
Gears of War 1(GoW1) was made on the Xbox 360, so Gears of War 2 (GoW2) and received a token graphical update but pretty much looks and plays like GoW1.
Now I get it. If you have a franchise that works and works well you don’t fuck with it. Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill have skirted the line of changing things around and both have been caught between various degrees of success and epic fail!
But what I don’t get is why it took so damn long for both Halo 3 and GoW2 to come out. Both games are, ridiculously short. I could have finished Halo 3 in a single day. GoW2 seems a bit longer but I think I could have had it beat in 2 days. Fortunately the online play gives both games considerable survivability. But I still can’t get my head around why it’ll take so long to construct these games.
I presume that level design is an important feature and takes a long time to make. I remember Doom 3, a FPS and the game was HUGE compared to these games. I suppose Doom 3 has a lot of endless corridors which help pad the levels considerably, but still, it took me weeks to almost finish that one. Dead Space took me only 13 hours to complete if the clock is to be believed but it took me days and days to finish because I had to move at a more careful pace and died a lot.
What I guess I find funny is that Halo and GoW are acclaimed for their storytelling. But…these are really basic stories. They are exciting in that you really like the main characters. Master Chief and Marcus are both tuff guys and you get into the role because these are just two soldiers who absolutely refuse to die (despite the fact that both really should have many times over). The Halo series is a very simply constructed story, at least after the first game. And the GoW series introduces so many little plot threads that never get explained, it comes across as sloppy writing rather than what I think that they are trying to do, which is, sell more games in the future with promises of explaining themselves. But I can’t help but think, if GoW had better storytelling in the first place, they wouldn’t need to tie up loose ends. Good storytelling makes a reader/player invested in the story in the first place.
To give an example of the frayed storytelling (look a metaphor, I think), you start GoW1 in the middle of the war. Without any explanation in game as to why this war is being fought. It just is. You look awful human to me, so we presume you are human…but who actually knows. It really wouldn’t be the first time a game tries to trick you. As you fight people talk about the Locust Invasion. You quickly learn, more through osmosis than clear storytelling, that this doesn’t mean that the crops are in trouble. The Locust are aliens. Okay, fine. You start fighting them and while some of them are yelling you realize that a) they are speaking English and b) they are using guns not unsimilar to your own. Is this a story thread? After two games, I don’t think it is but it could be. Oh and they are talking about cities that I’ve never heard of so I have to conclude, we aren’t on Earth.
Since this is all super confusing, maybe it’s time to pause the game and watch the intro movie for explanation. They talk about E Day (Emergence Day) on Sera (which is the planet), the day that the Locust first showed up. Now there is war. That’s about the entirety of the short, opening cut scene.
So you are thrust into GoW with a shaken understanding of what it is your exactly you’re fighting for other than to avoid extinction. It’s a very private tight story focused on Marcus and his squad of Gears (soldiers with cool armour and cooler weapons). And while they all remain a mixture of charming and dicks, you can immerse yourself in their individual plight but I found it extremely hard, from what the game delivered, to figure out the setting (seriously, why are the enemy speaking English). I mean sure, I should care about them not dying but I couldn’t figure out why, if these are humans, they can’t just abandon their planet on spaceships, since they must have used them to get on the planet in the first place. In fact, the Locust feature no space ships themselves making it…another unresolved plot thread.
Since the storytelling in GoW 2 isn’t very deep (although it’s very well acting, IMO) it’s a surprise to me that it took so long to put out. I’ve seen some screenshots between GoW1 and 2 and yeah, 2 looks a lot better. But GoW1 looked great. So I’m a bit disappointed that GoW 2 didn’t bother making their story better.
That being said, a big part of their story involved the secondary character, Dominic, where Marcus plays the role of witness to the tragedy going on in Dom’s life. That was a bit of a surprise although kinda refreshing. It’s a bold maneuver that I think pays off. If it happened to Marcus then you’ve got a character in which the world revolves around. So that was a very good touch.
Halo, storywise seems to have the opposite problem that GoW has. The first game was reasonably deep, with a story that was clear and concise. Halo 2 had an alright story that ending in a big screw you to the players. Halo 3 had a very vapid, forgettable story which had it seem like there wasn’t really a story at all. Something about the Death Star being rebuilt and somebody trying to use it. So I get that the time it took between Halo 2 and 3 was to port it over to the power of the 360 but you think they could have spent some time on the story. I don’t mind the story that they choose but the framework seemed weak. You are location A. You discover that you need to do C. Suddenly you’re at the location of B so it’s just a hop-skip and a jump to get to C and get your objective, where you find out that you need objective E. Suddenly, you’re at location D and it’s just a hop-skip and a jump to get to objective E. Wash, rinse, repeat and you’re done. It really seems that they could have done a better job with the story.
Fortunately for both games, you like the main characters. Marcus is seriously bad ass and has such a great emotive voice that you have to like him. If I were him I would have punched out one member of the Delta squad a long time ago, but Marcus is the leader and keeps professional. More than any of them, he keeps his eye on the ball. Nobody appointed him the protector of the human race, and he wouldn’t even admit it, but he’s the most focused to winning the war. Master Chief seemed more bad ass at the start when you find that you’re a cyborg and soldiers are cheering when you approach to help them fight but as the story goes on…I wonder…did anybody else think that he had the hots for that tiny woman A.I. that he was always saving? I mean, it’s kinda cool if they did something with it, unrequited love and all. Regardless, Master Chief is given the weight of the world because he’s a cyborg and thus, he can do things that others cannot. To me, that’s an entirely more believable synopsis than a single human soldier who can wade through bullets and being eaten twice (in GoW 2). But who cares cuz it’s just a game.
I cannot believe that Halo or GoW is done. So I will look forward to next time when both, I hope, have a better story to go along with all that intense high octane action.