Project Name: An Examination of “The Silent Cartographer”
Role: Writer
Essay:
When it comes to playing the perfect game level, I would have to say that The Silent Cartographer from 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved is easily a contender for that spot. For anyone who may not be familiar with the title, it’s a Science Fiction-based, first-person shooter, which pits the player as a biologically and technologically advanced super soldier against a massive alien armada called the Covenant. It’s usually credited as the first to allow LAN as well as split-screen play on the same console at once, introduce a regenerating health mechanic in the FPS genre, and popularized the genre on the console platform, which has remained a mainstay over the past decade. But, all of these achievements don’t hold a candle to the original game’s level design, and the Silent Cartographer stands tall among the rest.
Throughout the course of running the map’s critical path, the level designers are constantly hinting at what’s in store later on, and do a great job at making the player feel like something is always amiss, even when in and incredibly familiar scenario. In the case of The Silent Cartographer, this theme begins at the start, with a short scene right before you’re dropped off with a large group of soldiers to storm the beaches: a very common trope in pretty much any military-centric game. After the player completes this very basic task of rooting the Covenant from their encampment atop the dunes, the player is then told to wait for about a minute or so for some campy banter while a dropship delivers a Warthog: essentially a machine gun-mounted Humvee. Naturally, during this waiting period the player is going to do at least some sight-seeing and exploring. The first and most obvious landmark that the player is going to notice is the awe-inspiring edges of the massive ring-world stretching seemingly endlessly into the sky on either side of them. Afterwards, coming to discover for themselves that amid the scenery of a nice beach, vegetation, some red stone cliffs, and some rocks, there are deliberate metallic structures. None of these structures can be explored, however, seeing since they’re placed much too high up for the player to have a hope of reaching, you’re just forced to sit there and ruminate with that fact in the back of your mind. With that thought in the player’s brain, the Warthog eventually shows up and the player is encouraged to progress and explore further. After a few minutes of romping through Covenant encampments both running and gunning them down, on the horizon is finally one of these metallic structures at ground-level that the player can actually explore. When the player finally reaches this structure, the catharsis of arrival is immediately broken by a pair of Hunters –the game’s largest and toughest enemies- which lumber out and immediately engage the player. In this scene, the level designers drive home the point that these structures are in the most literal sense: “filled with surprises” and that the player must beware what lies below in the catacombs; setting the tone for the rest of the still ongoing series. This natural and player-driven way of introducing new surroundings serves to provide a meaningful experience that’s still gratifying many years down the line.
After establishing the overarching themes in the first third of the level, the designers spend the rest artfully expanding and solidifying them. Once the player enters the aforementioned structure, they are thrown into a synthetic world: metal walls, floors, and ceilings, artificial dim lights, and hologram projectors decorating the rooms. It is naturally made incredibly clear to the player that although this ring-world looks like what we imagine other inhabited planets to look like, that the illusion is only skin-deep. After a few well-paced shootouts to liven up the exploration, the player finally finds the door lock that opens up the path to the actual Cartographer mechanism itself. The player backtracks through the structure again to resurface next to their previous Warthog to spend a few minutes traversing the island again to yet another thematically similar structure which the player must run through, activate another console, and return to the surface to be evacuated.
The Silent Cartographer’s objectives are incredibly simple “go here, do this” quests, but the level design itself keeps the tasks from feeling samey and boring. There’s a mystery to be solved, shootouts to take part in, and places to explore, all the while the player is passively exposed to this very strange but interesting juxtaposition between the natural and artificial world, quite literally. The player is allowed to experience the mysteries of the Halo ring-world for themselves, rather than having hours of some non-interactive cutscenes and having their hand held at every opportunity. The level designers trusted in their work to allow the players to have a meaningful, layered experience that was a fun shoot ‘em up at its simplest, and a lesson on natural contrast at its finest.