The Joy of Structure: Halo Infinite's Campaign and Open World Aesthetics

Open worlds are a fantastic idea, aren't they? They promise unlimited freedom, emergent gameplay and tons of fun!

That is, in theory. As a gamer of a certain age, I'm old enough to remember the meteoric rise of open world games back in the early-mid 2000s. Sure, there had been open world games before then like The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall, with its frankly bananas map and the Fallout-to-be that was Wasteland, but let's not split hairs here: these games were incredibly limited in what they could do and the worlds that they could produce.

Smash cut to 2005 and you had the joys of not one, but three open world GTA games in which you could simulate murder, the huge world of World of Warcraft to explore and grind in and Fable's intensely British, late-era Monty Python, world of Albion.

Yet my first open world game wasn't any of these. It was the sublime surreality of everyone's favourite yellow family that introduced me to open worlds.

The Simpsons Hit and Run: Joyful Chaos

The Simpsons had a troubled history when it came to video games. Despite the 90s making the series almost as popular as ATMs that spit out free money and sponge puddings, it didn't have a single good game in this whole decade. It had Bart vs. the Space Mutants, but calling that a difficult game is akin to calling a swift punch to the nose a face massage.

The 2000s, at first, looked like they'd be no better, with The Simpsons Wrestling being an insult to both the sport of oily kings and the beloved TV show. It may be no coincidence that 2001, the year this game was visited upon us by a vengeful ghost, was also the year that WCW folded.

Little did we know that two years later, we would be enjoying The Simpsons: Hit and Run and wondering why there hadn't been a Simpsons game like this before. In Hit and Run, you step into the shoes of Marge, Homer, Bart, Lisa and Apu.

Despite the game missing a trick, and not allowing you to blast around Springfield as Maggie, it was sublime. The game placed you into a huge (for the time) map of Springfield, featuring pretty much every notable landmark from the series including the elementary school, the Kwik-E-Mart, and the nuclear power plant. You could drive around in a huge variety of cars, both well-known ones and more obscure vehicles like Chester Lampwick's rocket car, which was naturally kept in front of his solid gold house.

The story was also pretty good too, essentially boiling down to Kang and Kodos running an intergalactic version of The Truman Show. It's better than the plot of The Simpsons Movie, and this is a hill I will die on.

However, Hit and Run wasn't a perfect game. It was an early open world game and it suffered from a certain lack of structure. It gave you a fair number of things to do, including interesting platforming challenges, races, and more. Yet, to paraphrase a term from Biblical scholarship, it was weakly-structured.

Weakly-Structured vs Strongly-Structured Open Worlds

What do I actually mean when I talk about weakly-structured and strongly-structured open worlds? What are the differences between these two fairly oblique terms? I mean that there are two different approaches to open worlds, one which is generally more interesting, and one that is less so.

A weakly-structured open world is something like The Simpsons: Hit and Run or Far Cry 3. You have a lot of things to do, but there doesn't tend to be a whole lot of variation in what you do in each scenario. When we play Far Cry 3, we can come across and gun down enemy patrols, take down bases, and, when we're ready for a little structure, we can go and do the main missions, which are often less inspired than the emergent gameplay that, uh, emerges from our open world mayhem.

A strongly-structured open world is a game that offers you a wide range of things to do but each of these things are hand-crafted. This kind of thing is more common in open world RPGs. The dungeons in Skyrim don't have a set pattern like the bases in Far Cry: you don't shoot an alarm panel from half a mile away and then blast Dwemer spheres with a silenced sniper rifle until the game tells you that you've done enough to complete the dungeon.

What a surprise it was then, that Halo Infinite offers us a strongly-structured open world in the form of an FPS.

Halo Infinite's Design Choices

When I first booted up Halo Infinite, I wasn't quite sure what I was going to get. I only had a vague idea of what was awaiting me on Zeta Halo, especially since the last Halo game that I'd played was Halo 3.

What greeted me was an open world that was meticulously well-designed. Sure, there are still enemy patrols that you can stumble upon and blow up, but the core activities are hand-crafted. Bungie was always good at creating emergent gunfights that nevertheless were crafted, thanks to a fantastic attention to environmental detail, something that Gears of War would incorporate into its gameplay. Thankfully, this is a skill that 343 Industries has managed to learn too.

Yet the structure goes a lot deeper than that. There are three core activities that you can do on Zeta Halo, aside from the story missions: you can take down high-value targets, conquer enemy bases, and rescue squads of UNSC marines. So far, so Far Cry, right?

Actually, no.

The high-value targets are more than a checkbox you need to tick in order to get a fancy gun, they all have their own well-designed fights. In one instance, you need to take down a pair of hunters, rather than one single target, in another, the target is in a Wraith tank, which requires a unique tactical approach. The rescue missions also either feature marines in a defensible position that makes sense or restrained, requiring you to bust them out before killing the enemies.

Then we have the bases. Every base in the game has a unique objective, and while they tend to involve blowing something up, it always makes narrative sense. Not only that, but there are certain flags that trigger partway through each mission, summoning enemy reinforcements that spice up the fight. They're a fantastic achievement that almost feel akin to Breath of the Wild's shrines in gameplay terms. Each one is different, interesting, and requires a different approach.

Don't Fear Structure

At the extreme end of weakly-structured games, we find open world games that pretty much lack a story and are digital toy boxes. Stray too far towards strongly-structured and you end up with a linear game, which comes with its own advantages and disadvantages.

For too long, games like Far Cry and other Ubisoft-esque sandboxes have essentially stagnated, not moving on from the model that gave us the 3D GTAs, and indeed The Simpsons: Hit and Run.

Structure is a scary word for open world devs, as it can seem to run counter to what open world games are all about. This couldn't be further from the truth. For story-based open world games to grow as a medium, we need to move away from the old style where structure was thrown to the wind in favour of pure emergent gameplay. There's a healthy balance to be struck somewhere in the middle, where games like Breath of the Wild and Halo Infinite find themselves, giving us curated experiences that are far from cookie-cutter, and allowing us to approach them in a huge variety of ways.

Structure doesn't need to be feared, it needs to be embraced.