Diegetic death in Halo: Reach

[palfrey]

Spoiler warning: Unless you've already completed Halo: Reach, there will be spoilers within. I'm going to spend some time wittering on about other stuff first, but there will be spoilers later on. If you're intending on playing it, I'd advise doing so before reading this. I'M NOT KIDDING HERE. I WILL BE SPOILING THE ENTIRE PLOT INCLUDING THE ENDING

Comments

[amuchmoreexotic]

Good post. As other commenters have pointed out, there are many near precedents to this:

• The shareware version of Doom drops you in a room chock-full of monsters, leading inevitably to your death - but the intent here is to provoke you into buying the registered version and getting more episodes of the game (who said the episodic model was new?), not to provoke a deeper emotional response.
• The Modern Warfare games feature the diegetic death of your viewpoint character (twice in the first one: once in one of those barely interactive cut-scenes where you can only move the camera within a certain field of view [I'm sure there's a term for them], and once in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion). The difference with Reach is that these deaths are entirely scripted rather than the result of gameplay - although in "No True Russian" if you try to disrupt the airport massacre you do get killed in-engine - and you then switch to one of the other viewpoint characters and the game continues.
• Not sure about what the "pair of commandos working to stop a terrorist" game is. It sounds a tiny bit like a garbled version of the Far Cry 2 ending, except that as I remember it the choice is between sacrificing yourself for the greater good or trusting that your enemy will do it. Again, this is done in cut-scenes rather than truly diegetic.
• There are some games with a "bad ending" involving viewpoint character death which can be avoided depending on player choices throughout the game e.g. Mass Effect 2. The difference there is that you can avoid the "bad ending", whereas it's unavoidable in Halo: Reach.
• The massively underated Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth ends with the viewpoint character committing suicide in a cut-scene.

But offhand, I can't think of a game that features diegetic death in the same way that Halo: Reach does. It's just a shame that we aren't given much reason to care about the death of Noble Six.

Imagine how powerful that ending would have been if it had been happening to the Master Chief.

I guess the Master Chief is just as much of an empty cipher as Noble Six, but in the early games the supporting characters were at least archetypes rather than stereotypes, and the dialogue was written with a fair degree of humour, rather than just being a compilation of third-hand US military jargon.

I only know you through a friend, but I would be interested in talking about this more over pints!