The closest contemporary to Halo 3: ODST’s Superintendent that I can think of are the ethereal messages that materialize around the island of Blackreef in Arkane Studios’ Deathloop, guiding the character Colt on his journey to kill the Visionaries and break the time loop that traps him there.

Replaying through Halo 3: ODST recently, I found myself impressed by how thoroughly the Superintendent’s presence has been woven into the environment of New Mombasa, and I wondered why so few games since have found a way of incorporating waypoint markers and directions into their worldbuilding. While the missions of Halo 3: ODST are experienced through the perspective of the Rookie and his squadmates, the cutscenes that set up those missions are relayed through the perspective of the Superintendent AI, who remains an unspoken yet ever-present character within the game’s world. While this is a cool detail in and of itself, it’s even more fascinating that the Superintendent AI also directs you to collectible audio logs housed in phones and kiosks scattered across the city, each of which tells a side story centered on a young New Mombasan girl named Sadie with a powerful bond to the Superintendent AI. While at first these appear to be innocuous environmental details, it slowly begins to set in that these supposedly automated traffic warnings and directions are actually attempts by the Superintendent AI to communicate with and guide you through the city, alerting you to roaming Covenant patrols and alternate routes to safely avoid detection. Several of the video billboards throughout the city begin to change, as if reacting to your presence. As you make your way through the city-hub to your destination, something strange starts happening to the environment around you.

This waypoint directs you to the first of several artifacts left behind by members of your ODST team, prompting playable flashback missions as seen through the perspective of one of your four teammates.

Once you interact with a nearby payphone that begins ringing on its own, a waypoint compass will appear at the top of your HUD, and an interactive map of the city-hub will become accessible through the game’s menu. After you defeat these enemies, your heads-up display will direct you to interface with the Superintendent - an artificial intelligence responsible for New Mombasa’s urban infrastructure - in order to gain a better grasp of where you are and what happened to your team. Awakening inside a drop pod that crashed into a building following the Covenant slipspace rupture seen in Halo 2, the Rookie falls from the pod and is forced to heal themselves and fend off a group of Brute soldiers and Grunt underlings. The opening minutes of Halo 3: ODST placed players in the role of “the Rookie,” a silent protagonist and a recent addition to a shock trooper team. But what endures as my favorite part of Halo 3: ODST is something that has never quite been replicated by any other Halo game, or really any other game I’ve encountered, and that is the narrative design of ODST as seen through its diegetic waypoint system. There’s a lot to love about the game, from its free-roaming open-world setting that allowed players to realize the experience of fighting the Covenant in a futuristic city first glimpsed in Halo 2’s E3 2003 demo, to its emphasis on tactical stealth and survival as opposed to the series’ more offensive-driven combat loop, to its moody, noir-inflected, orchestral jazz score.

Halo waypoint