Expansion of IP: Halo 3: ODST, Halo Wars & Dead Space: Extraction

Original Intellectual Properties are the holy grail of any media endeavor. At their best, they allow the IP holders the opportunity to continue to expand on the concepts originally presented while hopefully growing the value of the franchise. At their worst, they are annually exploited revenue streams that devalue the brand and eventually saturate the market, leading to diminishing returns.

As a launch title for the original Xbox, Halo immediately established itself as the hardware’s killer application, with tight (for a console) FPS controls, a compelling and enigmatic main character and an epic battle to be fought. Two sequels would follow, pulling the franchise across into the new console generation with Halo 3 on the Xbox 360 and driving massive revenue. Halo has truly become Microsoft’s golden goose for their hardware, and though developer Bungie would eventually buy back their independence, more Halo games appear to inevitable, with or without them.

Halo Wars is the first non-Bungie developed title in the franchise expansion. No tentative first step, the game takes the iconography and back story of the original trilogy of games to flesh out a solid Real Time Strategy experience. Sporting the best RTS controls for a console ever, the game leverages the mythology to great effect, pushing the narrative forward while maintaining enough RTS gameplay staples to comfort the non-Halo player. Technical issues amount to unit pathfinding problems at best, which is negligible given the terrific presentation and unending polish.

Set five years before the original Halo, the war with the Covenant is fresh, and armies of Spartans still populate the galaxy. The proliferation of the Spartans leads to some memorable cinematics and allows for their use as “hero” units in the game but it also serves to dilute to power of the first three games. As the last of his genetically engineered kind, the Master Chief was the stoic bad-ass main character that has long been the staple of action games. However his relationship to the A.I. Cortana provides a human vulnerability that lends the character some depth and sympathy usually lost in FPS games. This prototypical dynamic relationship is also explored cinematically in the story moments of Halo Wars but to lesser effect. The wise-cracking ass-kicking Forge is a reject from the cast of Predator as is his hard-bitten but soft on the inside lady scientist side-kick. To add insult to injury, the Spartans are presented in a late game cinematic as a group of unstoppable fighting machines, executing maneuvers one could only dream of doing while playing as the Master Chief. Not only does the game make him one of a crowd, he is no longer even the best, he is now just the one who survived.

Halo 3: ODST sidesteps the issue entirely. By removing the Spartans and the Master Chief from the game it attempts to create a new look at a familiar setting. Unfolding during the events of Halo 2, a group of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers are flung into the battle for New Mombasa, an African city devastated by Covenant attack. Separated during the insertion drop into the city the shockwave generated from a Covenant warship jumping into slip-space (don’t ask), the game opens with the player taking on the role of the Rookie. Waking hours after impact, the player must navigate the ostensibly open-world of the city, searching the night for his team. No longer playing as the Master Chief, the player quickly becomes accustomed to being an under-powered under-protected soldier facing the same enemies fought in previously games. As each team-mate is located, playable chapters unlock, allowing each character to be played in turn through daylight missions. Essentially a well-meaning attempt to expand the franchise, Halo: ODST is an experiment gone wrong. The single biggest flaw is also its initial selling point: this is a Halo game, so much so that is looks and feels like dropped levels from previous releases circling the noir-ish core. With only the patina of the new splattered on the game, it feels like Halo Lite and that is just not satisfying.

Halo Wars is a far more compelling and evolutionary step for the franchise, taking the concepts in the new and different directions while staying true to the mythology, much as Dead Space: Extraction does with this nascent IP.

Unlike its progenitor which debuted on Ps3 and XB360, Extraction is Wii-exclusive prequel to the events of the first game, Dead Space. A third-person action horror game set on a massive planet cracking spaceship ravaged by monster creating infection, Dead Space tread new ground in its visuals, but had a hoary and tired story. To crack the nut of emulating the spectacular visuals of the next-gen consoles on the under-powered Wii, Extraction is a first-person “rail shooter”. Like a light-gun game, the player uses the Wii-mote to controls the aim and firing of weapons, while all else is scripted in the game engine. This was a bold and wise move on the part of developer Visceral, as this is the easily the best looking Wii game in a long time, if not since launch. The only graphical flaw I found was the lack of anti-aliasing, something not as noticeable in standard def but grossly irritating on an HD display.

Telling the story of the infection overtaking the planet’s colony as well as the ship itself, the narrative plays like an interactive movie, filling in the pieces left out of the first film. The gameplay is tightly paced, the writing sharp, and the narrative supremely executed.

Gory and violent, Extraction is a text-book example of expanding an IP without diluting the original concept.