What Makes a Good Campaign

Boredom has recently driven me to finally play Reach again, which of course means doing all the daily challenges. Needing to kill a few more Covenant leaders, I played the final level, "Lone Wolf". Despite having played Reach multiple, MULTIPLE times, I still can't help but feel sad at the end, where Noble 6 meets his end.

That's right. Feel.

Feeling in a campaign stems from the attachment of characters in the duration of the campaign; Reach does an excellent job of doing this by establishing 6 very different personalities that are very hard to mix up. Each character has their own special role, for example, Jun is the sniper/marksman of the group. By developing a way to differentiate the characters, I can actually tell which characters are dying, as grim as that sounds. The more the player cries when a character dies, the better the game did at creating a connection between the two.

In Hollywood-esque blow-every-single-living-thing-explosions-everywhere type of games (*cough* COD), the focus is diverted from the characters into the massive amounts of boom-booms happening every second. I'm sure that if I was prone to epileptic seizures, games like COD would definitely put me under in less than 5 minutes of playing. Of course, this is generally what drives a large majority of players to play the campaign (few as there are). COD's campaigns usually feature about 3-5 major characters, with more recent COD games staying within the same point-of-view, that is, the same character. Back in the old school COD days before classes were even conceived (or competitive multiplayer in general), COD games would switch from multiple perspectives, switching between different countries fighting WWII. This was a necessary action back then, and this also allowed for lengthier campaigns. However, characters weren't very established; the player's names was rarely mentioned, and I would often be confused if I was being ordered to do something (RAMIREZ! FACE ME WHEN I ADDRESS YOU!).

Despite this lack of colorful characters, the original COD campaigns were considered classics at the time, being actually longer than 6 hours, and having an actual historical background. COD games have seemed to drop into a more unrealistic sense, more and more every year, especially with Black Ops in 2010. What seems interesting about the new COD titles is the growing convoluted-ness of the stories; this doesn't necessarily mean that they're bad, and on the contrary, makes multiple run-throughs a necessity if the campaign is ever to be understood.

More tomorrow, for I am tired, and my wrist is giving me pains....

(-_-) zzzzzzzzzzzz.....