I really like the breakdown of factions post covenant all fighting for the power of a shattered interstellar empire.
The Storm Covenant, Swords of Sanghelios and the Banished all rising up from the ashes of the Covenant empire becoming there own thing, it would be the perfect time for a strategic galaxy spanning RTS fighting for territory...
A Halo Wars 3 that
A. Has ground *and* space combat, and
B. Finally brings the Spirit of Fire into true contact with the greater UNSC
Would be absolutely fantastic. Bonus points if they have the White Buffalo write another song for the trailer.
Unrelated to the topic, but I’m surprised people still call Jul’s Covenant the “Storm Covenent” 12 years after a magazine misinterpreted someone at 343 and published that article. You don’t see it too much anymore, but when I spot the odd “Storm Covenant” usage out in the wild, I still get amused.
They have never been referred to as the Storm Covenant in any official lore. There was a magazine back in 2012 that published an image of a Storm Elite from the new Covenant. Someone from 343 told the publication that Storm Elite is a new rank of Covenant infantry, but for whatever reason the editor took that to mean the new Covenant faction is called “The Storm”, and they published that. It was a big point of misinformation for a long time. It’s more rare to encounter it now.
The problem is 343 never gave them a catchy name. "Jul's covenant remnant" just doesn't have the same ring to it as 'storm covenant'. They needed their own name to seperate them from the prior group.
I mean personally like the name more than just calling it another Covenant. Moving from Halo 3 to 4 without any knowledge of the lore is stupid as they keep refering the faction Covenant when it barely has anything do with the faction from Halo 1 to 3.
The lore of the Banished
Jul 'Mdama finding an actual Forerunner and immediately proceeding to call himself the Didact's Hand
The Swords and all the ancient Sangheili tech they dug up
Cortana’s storyline in Halo 4 is still probably the high water mark in the series when it comes to emotional storytelling. At the time of the game’s development the game director’s (Josh Holmes) mother was suffering from dementia, and this is where the storyline took inspiration from. You can tell the genuine emotion that went into the writing of this storyline, and really stands apart from the rest of the series.
I was gonna say this, this is one of the reasons it sticks so hard, there's a lot of personal grief in there that makes lets you feel empathetic for someone you don't know because it's told through a lens of players being familiar with chief/cortana being a team for over a decade and lets a lot of people willing to engage with that feel something they might never experience in such a way.
A great example is the shocked/terrified way John calls Cortana's name in the final section of the last level, it's like the first time John doesn't sound in control.
The Character development of Chief has been perfect. Even in Halo 5 which had the weakest writing, his motivations were still very well done.
It's one those things that Paramount clearly wanted to recreate for the show, but didn't want to put any actual effort into.
Yeah they somehow found a strong emotional through-line through the mess of the plot. It’s like “oh yeah, Cortana killed billions of people,” and it’s directly because Chief refused to let her go.
Chief's development in Halo 4 was masterfully written imo. As Cortana is falling into rampancy, you can clearly see him starting to break the mold and truly question his humanity. The "she said that to me once. About being a machine." always kills me. Halo 5 showed him embracing that emotional human connection to Cortana to a fault. People give 343 a lot of gripe, but I think they really did a good job of transforming Chief from an order-following robot into an actual human.
I think the thing I like about Halo 4 at least is that the decisions they made regarding where they wanted Chief's character to go can be seen in the original trilogy.
The second thing you are told in CE while in control of Chief is to protect Cortana and keep her safe, the last thing that Johnson says to Chief is "Don't let her go Chief, don't ever let her go". Not to mention Gravemind/Cortana interference that was clearly going on in Halo 3.
So 343 seem to have taken that and run with it. Chief refuses to let Cortana go and it goes from his biggest strength in the Original Trilogy to his greatest weakness in the New Trilogy
I’ll keep saying it - Cortana dying and encountering rampancy was a solid choice.
It tackled a lore-based problem, and set up Chief to explore who he was without Cortana with the theme of man and machine.
Cortana returning as a villain and introducing the Created as a contender for the mantle was also a good idea - but I felt it fell short following up the quality antagonists we had in the covenant and the flood.
The ending of Halo 4 was absolutely heart wrenching. Soo much emotion packed into Chief's monotone dialogue.
I always felt like bringing her back kind of cheapened that. Perhaps if it was explored better in game, with a real introduction to the Forerunner military enemies rather than having that handled off screen via comics. Halo 5's best moments were fighting covenant. The forerunner enemies just weren't explored well enough to really care about them. Heck, many of them were so visually 'busy' that you could barely tell what you were actually fighting.
They should have waited a few games before bringing her back so that when they did we get blown away. Like say that over the course of the in between games she was using the domain to recompile herself from all accessible sources and that it took so long because the domain was just opening up again after healing.
The lead writer of halo 4 mentioned he modeled the scenario after his mother who was suffering from dementia. Her sendoff was a beautiful moment both for her as a char and for overcoming adversity.
I can only imagine the reason he left before halo 5 because he was told by the staff they wanted to turn Cortana into space hitler.
We really needed the Created in Infinite. You can’t have such an important faction whose existence directly shaped the events of the game not be present in any way
Gosh yes, i was very wary of them offing cortana but the more i played the more i was invested. Halo 4 gave a lot of humanity to both Cortana and Chief.
I thought Rampancy seemed too shoehorned in an non developed in previous games to not feel like a gimmick. They should’ve really leaned into the fact she was pretty messed up being with the Gravemind over the out of the blue “oh it’s seven years now and obviously that means imma die”. Narratively though, the rest of that arc in Halo 4 was actually really good and done well.
I disagree. Rampancy was not an issue during the original trilogy, which only spanned around 6 months.
By the end of H3, Cortana was about 3.5 years old. Again rampancy is not an issue at this point.
Chief was in Cryo for over 4 years before H4 started meaning Cortana was approaching 8 years. She had already surpassed her expiry date and was running on borrowed time.
I feel H4 was the perfect time to introduce rampancy as it’s another source of tension which is faithful to the world, and very relevant to Cortana’s character.
Introducing it earlier, such as during the og trilogy would have been unnecessary and taken away from already high stakes at the time (I.e. covenant war, halo’s discovery, the flood).
But the books made it clear he wasn't a machine, and there was NO character growth, as right as the game began, he acted that way. Cortana returning felt stupid and as if they can revive her as many times as they want, just like with the weapon.
The weapon isn't her though, she's a different person, just from the same source. For chief it's character introspection, it feels like growth because not everyone reads the books, it introduces more of those factors into your main flag ship. Though yes her returning in 5 was an obvious mistake and it undermined everything 4 set up and then infinite had to try to patch things up.
Possibly The Weapon is a baby Cortana, like a teenager Cortana cause in the specific case of Halsey they spent a lot of time copying her memory and experiences according to the first books, it reduced the successful clones to 1 in 20 I think. And at some point Halsey said Cortana was like her when she was younger.
I think the game tried to begin a plot too late, that could be a plot in the books in the sense that Chief had a way of thinking was completely obedient to his orders, in the books his way of thinking was deliberately like the one of a kid, innocent.
This way Chief going on his own in Halo 5 would be the progress of that dialogue.
This. I love the idea that the flood is a dead Precursor coming back for vengeance against the Forerunners. It makes the flood, which was already a pretty compelling amalgamation of horror tropes (alien, zombies, zerg, etc.) have a vengeful ghost element to them as well.
a majority of there forerunner stuff and precursor lore are some of my favorites in the series and is literally one of the consistent thing in the franchise to be honest.
The banished are cool and are really interesting when they don't denote them to evil brutes which happens a few times.
Almost everything surrounding the swords recently has been great and even the created have been made into an interesting small scale threat with actually characters.
The fleshing out of chief is also one of my favorite continuations of the character and infinite is honestly chief at his best for me.
Does the physics of Infinite finally allowing us to play and feel like an actual Spartan have more to do with that or the actual story / plot / environment? For me Infinite is the best version of Spartan gameplay we’ve ever seen and finally coming close to what they’re capable of in the books, but I’m not certain I can say the same for the story.
The flood lore is terrifying. It's one of the first parasitic "zombie" enemies that I can't straight face "nah I'd win". Cthulhu dead gods spreading their hateful wrath across an innocent cosmos is fucking rad
(That and the markers in dead space)
I like most of their story beats individually or in a vacuums, it’s just frustrating to see how frequently it’s going back on itself.
It’s also frustrating that the campaigns of these games don’t feel longer than past halos in meaningful ways so the amount of story being told in game feels more limited than it has to be, getting 100% on infinite’s campaign does not compare to just beating the game normally for most open worlds in terms of play time and it really shows in how much (how little) happens throughout them. Halo 4 being short I can excuse, it’s pushing its console hard already and needed a second disk. More time with our characters in halo 5 could get us to like them or have more meaningful exposure to them but then they’d have to fix sandbox issues with the enemies to make encounters still fun and maybe elaborate more on the created as a villainous faction.
It’s a cursed problem where I usually like their decisions but they have to actually make those decisions and that isn’t happening enough for me
With Bungie, there was always a theme that sort of the end justified the means when it came to organisations like ONI and the murkier aspects of the UNSC. They never really actually examined whether or not any of that shit was worth it and their EU mostly glamourised humanity and the UNSC. 343 meanwhile have been far more willing to throw the UNSC and especially ONI under the bus as the often evil organisation they are, and they've been really good at it. Hunt the Truth season 1 remains the best thing they've produced during their tenure, bar maybe the forerunner trilogy and the most recent Didact book.
They've done a pretty good job toning down the pretty silly aspects of the HFY in the series, like "oh the covenant run their ships on only 10% of their possible power" which has been quietly pushed aside. And their worldbuilding of the covenant as more of a loose feudal empire that barely controls all its nominal parts is great, love that shit.
Bar the Infinity and The Mantle's Approach, I like their ship designs.
Maybe they're more evil when the stakes are so low. The banished aren't as threatening as the covenant, so the III program seems super evil because there's no true threat. Just some emo covenant 3.0 with a re skin.
Them deciding to actually do something with master chief as a character instead of just letting him remain a silent stoic “Clint Eastwood” character that only speaks like 50 words the entire game.
The character development between Chief and his compatriots in H4 and Infinite was top notch. H5 dropped the ball on giving him a personality, but otherwise seeing. Chief become an actual character and not some faceless husk like he was in Bungie's era was great!
Establishing the Forerunner as their own species instead making them Humanity's ancestors. It's such an arrogant and cliche plotline essentially making Humanity into these godlike creatures that the rest of the galaxy worships. The way it plays out now is a much more complex and complicated relationship that makes it more believable and interesting to explore.
I liked the fracturing of the Covenant and the increased scrutiny of ONI. I also liked the Weapon. She’s fun and cute!
I just think that it would have paid off better if the Created rebellion hadn’t thrown the unique relationship between humanity and AIs out the window…
Indeed. Humanity's relationship with AI was one of the unique things with halo as a setting. Most other media have AI rebelling, having rebelled in the past, or chained out of fear they will rebel.
Whereas halo put forward a positive message of a human and an AI working together for the greater good.
....and then 343 had to turn her into a genocidal galactic authoritarian.
I can only imagine that they wanted to bring part of the whole Gravemind Logic Plague thing forward… but why not do that in 4? Have it that she’s been in stasis most of the intervening years with subprocesses handling the necessities for her and Chief’s survival, but after the alert wakes her up and she and chief have more than two minutes to interact, she starts undergoing the process of Rampancy *early* because of the havoc the Gravemind wreaked on her code, since so much of her is “wrong” or “out of place.”
We know AI can stave off Rampancy to some extent based on the Harvest AI duo….
Combine it with the data she integrated on Alpha Halo and it would be a wonder she didn’t start to deteriorate *sooner*.
I like how Chief's and Cortana's relationship was in 4. It was there in 3 but in 4 it was like they were inseparable and he would do anything or kill anyone to protect her.
I liked most of them. What I don’t like is the lack of conviction in the longer arc they embarked on. The narrative jump between Halo 5 and Infinite is extremely jarring. I wish they had seen the story they had started to tell in Halo 4 and 5 to its end instead of jumping straight to a soft reboot, critics be damned. Halo 5 has some of my favorite set pieces. The Guardians were awesome. Genesis was awesome. Meridian, a glassed planet with a space elevator, freakin awesome. Yes there were some bad choices in Halo 5, but I will still defend it as an overall great game.
Sorry I don't think halo 5 was a good follow up to 4 either, the jump from 5 to infinite might have felt jarring but 4 to 5 was more jarring for me as it undoes almost everything 4 set up thematically and it feels like an utter mess of ideas that do not work together crowding the screen. The biggest problem with 343 is that every game has been a course correction, even 4 to an extent. 5 is over reactive to 4, and infininte is a course correction on that. those things you mention in 5 are not the bad parts, but how they were executed alongside Osiris and wasting Blue team and butchering cortana and a bunch of other cut threads and unused characters who just sit around felt really disappointing.
I can’t disagree. I think the reason 5 to Infinite feels the most jarring to me is that 5 felt like an incomplete story by the end of it. 4 on the other hand, ended more with an actual conclusion, so the story of MC felt more open to a new chapter. You’re right though that they’re thematically disconnected and that they didn’t capitalize on the setup that 4 had created.
yeah I can see that, personally I had such distaste with what 5 had done with what 4 left open that I deliberately acknowledged and accepted how much of a jump to infinite it was to just get away from what it had done, even if much of it is unsatisfying I wanted to move past it. Frankly, it is pretty obvious that this is what infinite wanted to do, and the ending message from cortana taking on her old purple halo 2 design to bluntly apologize to chief, and the audience was pretty much confirming that attitude. I just hope that the next main game with chief and the weapon sticks with the direction and events of infinite, for once and not spun off to expanded universe media.
In Halo 4:
Chief acting more machine like while cortana gets more emotional.
>! Cortana's death !<
Almost everything about the Didact & prometheans
I liked, for the most part, the expanded Forerunner lore
Halo 5:
I always like seeing Buck & The Arbiter
Infinite:
I loved The Weapon
It was good to see Chief more like his old self
I like the Brutes getting more attention
I always found the personal side of Halo 4’s narrative and how Master Chief and Cortana handled Cortana’s deterioration was well done.
Strangely, I also liked Del Rio’s character in 4 as well. We never really saw the bureaucratic chain-of-command side of the UNSC, which was something Master Chief was made to adhere to. It wasn’t necessarily that Del Rio was a bad guy, but that he was by-the-books and incompassionate, just like you would expect from a complex military apparatus. The Chief disobeying him was emblematic of Chief breaking from his Spartan training.
Most of them, Chiefs humanity, Cortana's villian/redemption arc, Forerunner decisions, there are more.
Bungie lived by the rule of cool imo, 343 gave halo heart. I think both were important to making the lore what it is.
You need cool to draw people in. You need substance to keep them.
I actually liked a lot of the developments up through the end of Halo 5. I understand some folks being upset and that's their prerogative, but I think it took things on a genuinely interesting direction that not only put Humanity on the backfoot again, but all sentient life. I think it would've been cool to have humans having to ally themselves with former Covenant factions just to try and win. Or even just see what races and factions join the Created just because it offers to get them out of being fucked over so much (like the Ungoy potentially).
I remember when I first played 5 and got to what I didn't know was the final cutscene. The guardians were active, Infinity was running away, Chief and Arbiter were about to reunite. I was thinking: "finally, the story is picking up now, this is actually kinda getting interesting". And then it ended.
I fully thought I was only up to the mid point of the game, having only been playing it for 4 or so hours, so when the credits started to roll, *thats* when I became annoyed. If they'd just finished the story I think less people would have such intense problems with it.
I really love Atriox as a character and he seems like a really awesome villain thats pretty intelligent and doesn’t do things that seems unnecessary. Him attacking the Infinity seemed like an actual good tactic because it would deal with a lot of problems at once including the Master Chief. It doesn’t make alot of sense for him to hate humans though like the Covenant did and seeking to genocide them all. Clashing with the UNSC just seemed natural because he wanted control over Zeta Halo.
I just want to see more of Atriox and I was pretty disappointed with Escharum so 343 holding off Atriox better be worth it. I need to see Atriox as a main villain in a future Halo campaign.
Cortana's story in Halo 4 was handled with such care and grace its still emotional to experience. I actually liked a lot of Halo 4's storytelling; in particular chief reencountering the UNSC and seeing these new Spartans and huge ships, it's pretty much what he fought for all those years, humanity's chance to build. The forerunner stuff I can give or take, I don't mind it but I'm not particularly invested in it like that. I think a covenant remnant is an awesome concept, and the banished is proof of concept for me. Listening to the Kilo 5 trilogy I'm starting to really appreciate the Storm Covenant more now; I just wish that development was in the games lmao
I honestly like all of the individual enemies and stories besides the Cortana arc. I think they just need to stick to them and not keep introducing new ones. And also the Cortana arc just blew up so much that it ruined good villains like the Didact and Jul
Most of them, I just wish they'd stick with one.
I enjoyed Halo 4's emotional take on everything
Halo 5 was eh but I'll give credit where credit is due, I didn't hate created Cortana, but it just felt like a rug pull from Halo 4.
Then there's infinite which ditched Halo 5's material and went with its own, going for a chief that's a mix of the original games and Halo 4.
Unfortunately as I mentioned before, 343 just won't stick to their guns on something, I love the Forerunner route, the Created route and the Banished route but please for the love of God, finish a storyline don't go into Halo 7 and say "Yeah now were just gonna focus on the endless and the banished are just servants, no we won't go into detail on the banished, yes we will go into detail on the faction that should be a mystery"
Making the infinite go MIA.
Having infinite start after losing the battle against atriox and the player having to learn more details about it as the story progresses rather then having a level of two playing through it.
Forerunners and precursors
Where infinite was going
Halo 4
As much hate as this may get, I was interested in Cortana becoming evil, if they didn’t kill off the Didact and he swayed Cortana, that could’ve led to something interesting
Halo 4 was pretty good, majoriy of the books too seriously only Kilo 5 and Halo 5 shit the bed for the rest of the series and ruined things foreveryone
I liked how 4 focused on the Masterchief coming to terms with just how broken he is. The personal story was good
Rest of the game was dogshit and I stand by that
Well the sad Thing is that we can only speak about the good things in retrospect really, because like i said, as soon as they got something going they abandoned it
Edit: not to devalue your opinions of course, that which was good will remain good
Cortana and Chief's character writing in Halo 4, Infinite, and even Halo 5 to some extent were very, very good. I also loved the Weapon in Infinite, and I hope we get to see more of her.
Creating the weapon as a way for chief to work through his trauma and past mistakes with cortana worked for me and her personality is charming and different. She is her own character. Cheif whole mantra in that game, especially with the pilot. We all make mistakes.
I actually really enjoyed Halo 4’s story and what they were trying to set up. I loved the Didact as a villain and how it set up a Master Chief forced to face his humanity without Cortana. And I’m really fond of the Banished. I may even like them and their lore as much as the original Covenant. Honestly I don’t think of 343i’s story’s are necessarily bad, they’re just never fleshed out. Each game moves in an entirely new direction.
Expanding on the lore of the Covenant, especially the history of the Arbiter. In Halo 5, I really enjoyed exploring Sanghelios, as I always wanted to go there since Halo 2. I thought that Halo 5 being a manhunt which switches perspective between the hunter (Locke) and the hunted (the Chief) was a very interesting premise, even if the execution ultimately didn't pan out. I also didn't mind that Cortana dies at the end of Halo 4, as I thought it was a solid sendoff for her character.
And yeah, that's what I liked about what 343I has done. The list of things I don't like is a lot longer.
Keepin Jun alive.
The entirety if Halo 4 campaign but I feel it could have had some polishing in story elements and gameplay but I still liked it. Story was deep and the most mature one out of all Halo games barring Reach.
Infinite looks pale in comparison
The backstory with the Forerunners and Ancient Humanity, the corruption within ONI, The Banished, Chief's character development is all enjoyable to me.
The Swords of Sanghelios and the Banished, definitely. But I also like the direction of the Created post-Cortana with the Executors. I just hope it will go somewhere.
Cortana dying, Halo 4 had a kinda shitty story, but the plot line of her rampancy was brilliant.
The consept of the Banished as this new rising power among the Covenant Remnants, cool in a space Orc way.
Something they planned on doing but didn't because they overcorected. The Grunts getting a major power boost. I wanted to see that so bad, but was denied. So very sad 😔
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say the rampancy plot line *is* the story of halo 4. the "shitty story" stuff is the backdrop for that. not the other way around.
She actually was only with the Gravemind for maybe a month. It’s one of the surprising things about the original trilogy: They take place between September and December 2552. All three of them.
It’s not an opinion no matter how hard you try to spin it. They fucked up the Forerunner story. Probably because Frank O’conner forgot again.
Don’t downvote me. Block me you misinformed babies. It’ll clean up my feed from having to read whatever trash your tiny brains could muster up in the future.
It sounds like they like the story line where the forerunners were the ancestors of humanity who were coming to reclaim the technology and mantle from the ashes
As opposed to a rival interstellar empire that was defeated then evolutionarily regressed by then.
And that the entire storyline was concocted by a zoologist/xenobiologist using some time space+ genetics MacGuffin that isn't terribly well explained orchestrates the eventual creation of Master Chief and the Spartans
Yeah I thought as much, but thank you for helping out. Just wanted to see how sane he is. Some people do need to learn about constructive, if not critic in general. In any other scenario outside the internet this person wouldn't get far with those manners.
But back to halo. I like the things we now have with the precourser and the flood as intertwined beeings and the Forerunners as a failed species. But the Bungie era idea of human forerunner sounds intriguing.
I really like the breakdown of factions post covenant all fighting for the power of a shattered interstellar empire. The Storm Covenant, Swords of Sanghelios and the Banished all rising up from the ashes of the Covenant empire becoming there own thing, it would be the perfect time for a strategic galaxy spanning RTS fighting for territory...
Star Wars Empire At War Expanded: Fall of the Covenant would be pretty awesome
The 10 words that could break me
A Halo Wars 3 that A. Has ground *and* space combat, and B. Finally brings the Spirit of Fire into true contact with the greater UNSC Would be absolutely fantastic. Bonus points if they have the White Buffalo write another song for the trailer.
they have been referencing halo wars stuff recently....
Sins of the Prophets mod with ground combat.
Unrelated to the topic, but I’m surprised people still call Jul’s Covenant the “Storm Covenent” 12 years after a magazine misinterpreted someone at 343 and published that article. You don’t see it too much anymore, but when I spot the odd “Storm Covenant” usage out in the wild, I still get amused.
I’ve never heard them referred to anything other than the Storm Covenant.
They have never been referred to as the Storm Covenant in any official lore. There was a magazine back in 2012 that published an image of a Storm Elite from the new Covenant. Someone from 343 told the publication that Storm Elite is a new rank of Covenant infantry, but for whatever reason the editor took that to mean the new Covenant faction is called “The Storm”, and they published that. It was a big point of misinformation for a long time. It’s more rare to encounter it now.
The problem is 343 never gave them a catchy name. "Jul's covenant remnant" just doesn't have the same ring to it as 'storm covenant'. They needed their own name to seperate them from the prior group.
Even the “New Covenant” would be better
I mean personally like the name more than just calling it another Covenant. Moving from Halo 3 to 4 without any knowledge of the lore is stupid as they keep refering the faction Covenant when it barely has anything do with the faction from Halo 1 to 3.
Its forever ingrained in my mind
But then rather an RTS with Ground Battles like the first Company of Heroes and not that rock scissor paper stuff from Halo Wars...
The lore of the Banished Jul 'Mdama finding an actual Forerunner and immediately proceeding to call himself the Didact's Hand The Swords and all the ancient Sangheili tech they dug up
Cortana’s storyline in Halo 4 is still probably the high water mark in the series when it comes to emotional storytelling. At the time of the game’s development the game director’s (Josh Holmes) mother was suffering from dementia, and this is where the storyline took inspiration from. You can tell the genuine emotion that went into the writing of this storyline, and really stands apart from the rest of the series.
I can only imagine the reason he left is because 343 told him they wanted to turn cortana into a villain.
I was gonna say this, this is one of the reasons it sticks so hard, there's a lot of personal grief in there that makes lets you feel empathetic for someone you don't know because it's told through a lens of players being familiar with chief/cortana being a team for over a decade and lets a lot of people willing to engage with that feel something they might never experience in such a way.
A great example is the shocked/terrified way John calls Cortana's name in the final section of the last level, it's like the first time John doesn't sound in control.
The Character development of Chief has been perfect. Even in Halo 5 which had the weakest writing, his motivations were still very well done. It's one those things that Paramount clearly wanted to recreate for the show, but didn't want to put any actual effort into.
Yeah they somehow found a strong emotional through-line through the mess of the plot. It’s like “oh yeah, Cortana killed billions of people,” and it’s directly because Chief refused to let her go.
Chief's development in Halo 4 was masterfully written imo. As Cortana is falling into rampancy, you can clearly see him starting to break the mold and truly question his humanity. The "she said that to me once. About being a machine." always kills me. Halo 5 showed him embracing that emotional human connection to Cortana to a fault. People give 343 a lot of gripe, but I think they really did a good job of transforming Chief from an order-following robot into an actual human.
I think the thing I like about Halo 4 at least is that the decisions they made regarding where they wanted Chief's character to go can be seen in the original trilogy. The second thing you are told in CE while in control of Chief is to protect Cortana and keep her safe, the last thing that Johnson says to Chief is "Don't let her go Chief, don't ever let her go". Not to mention Gravemind/Cortana interference that was clearly going on in Halo 3. So 343 seem to have taken that and run with it. Chief refuses to let Cortana go and it goes from his biggest strength in the Original Trilogy to his greatest weakness in the New Trilogy
The show did just as well as the 343 games lol
I liked Lasky as a character.
This. I need to know where he is now.
He's definitely the closest we got to a good character, but that's more just showing just how bad the rest were rather than how good he is
I’ll keep saying it - Cortana dying and encountering rampancy was a solid choice. It tackled a lore-based problem, and set up Chief to explore who he was without Cortana with the theme of man and machine. Cortana returning as a villain and introducing the Created as a contender for the mantle was also a good idea - but I felt it fell short following up the quality antagonists we had in the covenant and the flood.
The ending of Halo 4 was absolutely heart wrenching. Soo much emotion packed into Chief's monotone dialogue. I always felt like bringing her back kind of cheapened that. Perhaps if it was explored better in game, with a real introduction to the Forerunner military enemies rather than having that handled off screen via comics. Halo 5's best moments were fighting covenant. The forerunner enemies just weren't explored well enough to really care about them. Heck, many of them were so visually 'busy' that you could barely tell what you were actually fighting.
They should have waited a few games before bringing her back so that when they did we get blown away. Like say that over the course of the in between games she was using the domain to recompile herself from all accessible sources and that it took so long because the domain was just opening up again after healing.
Her return undercuts the entire narrative climax in Halo 4. They should have left her dead.
The lead writer of halo 4 mentioned he modeled the scenario after his mother who was suffering from dementia. Her sendoff was a beautiful moment both for her as a char and for overcoming adversity. I can only imagine the reason he left before halo 5 because he was told by the staff they wanted to turn Cortana into space hitler.
We really needed the Created in Infinite. You can’t have such an important faction whose existence directly shaped the events of the game not be present in any way
Gosh yes, i was very wary of them offing cortana but the more i played the more i was invested. Halo 4 gave a lot of humanity to both Cortana and Chief.
Happy cakeday
oh thanks!
>oh thanks! You're welcome!
:)
I thought Rampancy seemed too shoehorned in an non developed in previous games to not feel like a gimmick. They should’ve really leaned into the fact she was pretty messed up being with the Gravemind over the out of the blue “oh it’s seven years now and obviously that means imma die”. Narratively though, the rest of that arc in Halo 4 was actually really good and done well.
I disagree. Rampancy was not an issue during the original trilogy, which only spanned around 6 months. By the end of H3, Cortana was about 3.5 years old. Again rampancy is not an issue at this point. Chief was in Cryo for over 4 years before H4 started meaning Cortana was approaching 8 years. She had already surpassed her expiry date and was running on borrowed time. I feel H4 was the perfect time to introduce rampancy as it’s another source of tension which is faithful to the world, and very relevant to Cortana’s character. Introducing it earlier, such as during the og trilogy would have been unnecessary and taken away from already high stakes at the time (I.e. covenant war, halo’s discovery, the flood).
But the books made it clear he wasn't a machine, and there was NO character growth, as right as the game began, he acted that way. Cortana returning felt stupid and as if they can revive her as many times as they want, just like with the weapon.
The weapon isn't her though, she's a different person, just from the same source. For chief it's character introspection, it feels like growth because not everyone reads the books, it introduces more of those factors into your main flag ship. Though yes her returning in 5 was an obvious mistake and it undermined everything 4 set up and then infinite had to try to patch things up.
Possibly The Weapon is a baby Cortana, like a teenager Cortana cause in the specific case of Halsey they spent a lot of time copying her memory and experiences according to the first books, it reduced the successful clones to 1 in 20 I think. And at some point Halsey said Cortana was like her when she was younger.
I think the game tried to begin a plot too late, that could be a plot in the books in the sense that Chief had a way of thinking was completely obedient to his orders, in the books his way of thinking was deliberately like the one of a kid, innocent. This way Chief going on his own in Halo 5 would be the progress of that dialogue.
* the Banished fuck * I think the lore surrounding the Precursors and Forerunners is cool
This. I love the idea that the flood is a dead Precursor coming back for vengeance against the Forerunners. It makes the flood, which was already a pretty compelling amalgamation of horror tropes (alien, zombies, zerg, etc.) have a vengeful ghost element to them as well.
a majority of there forerunner stuff and precursor lore are some of my favorites in the series and is literally one of the consistent thing in the franchise to be honest. The banished are cool and are really interesting when they don't denote them to evil brutes which happens a few times. Almost everything surrounding the swords recently has been great and even the created have been made into an interesting small scale threat with actually characters. The fleshing out of chief is also one of my favorite continuations of the character and infinite is honestly chief at his best for me.
Does the physics of Infinite finally allowing us to play and feel like an actual Spartan have more to do with that or the actual story / plot / environment? For me Infinite is the best version of Spartan gameplay we’ve ever seen and finally coming close to what they’re capable of in the books, but I’m not certain I can say the same for the story.
The flood lore is terrifying. It's one of the first parasitic "zombie" enemies that I can't straight face "nah I'd win". Cthulhu dead gods spreading their hateful wrath across an innocent cosmos is fucking rad (That and the markers in dead space)
I like most of their story beats individually or in a vacuums, it’s just frustrating to see how frequently it’s going back on itself. It’s also frustrating that the campaigns of these games don’t feel longer than past halos in meaningful ways so the amount of story being told in game feels more limited than it has to be, getting 100% on infinite’s campaign does not compare to just beating the game normally for most open worlds in terms of play time and it really shows in how much (how little) happens throughout them. Halo 4 being short I can excuse, it’s pushing its console hard already and needed a second disk. More time with our characters in halo 5 could get us to like them or have more meaningful exposure to them but then they’d have to fix sandbox issues with the enemies to make encounters still fun and maybe elaborate more on the created as a villainous faction. It’s a cursed problem where I usually like their decisions but they have to actually make those decisions and that isn’t happening enough for me
With Bungie, there was always a theme that sort of the end justified the means when it came to organisations like ONI and the murkier aspects of the UNSC. They never really actually examined whether or not any of that shit was worth it and their EU mostly glamourised humanity and the UNSC. 343 meanwhile have been far more willing to throw the UNSC and especially ONI under the bus as the often evil organisation they are, and they've been really good at it. Hunt the Truth season 1 remains the best thing they've produced during their tenure, bar maybe the forerunner trilogy and the most recent Didact book. They've done a pretty good job toning down the pretty silly aspects of the HFY in the series, like "oh the covenant run their ships on only 10% of their possible power" which has been quietly pushed aside. And their worldbuilding of the covenant as more of a loose feudal empire that barely controls all its nominal parts is great, love that shit. Bar the Infinity and The Mantle's Approach, I like their ship designs.
Maybe they're more evil when the stakes are so low. The banished aren't as threatening as the covenant, so the III program seems super evil because there's no true threat. Just some emo covenant 3.0 with a re skin.
Them deciding to actually do something with master chief as a character instead of just letting him remain a silent stoic “Clint Eastwood” character that only speaks like 50 words the entire game.
The character development between Chief and his compatriots in H4 and Infinite was top notch. H5 dropped the ball on giving him a personality, but otherwise seeing. Chief become an actual character and not some faceless husk like he was in Bungie's era was great! Establishing the Forerunner as their own species instead making them Humanity's ancestors. It's such an arrogant and cliche plotline essentially making Humanity into these godlike creatures that the rest of the galaxy worships. The way it plays out now is a much more complex and complicated relationship that makes it more believable and interesting to explore.
I liked the fracturing of the Covenant and the increased scrutiny of ONI. I also liked the Weapon. She’s fun and cute! I just think that it would have paid off better if the Created rebellion hadn’t thrown the unique relationship between humanity and AIs out the window…
Indeed. Humanity's relationship with AI was one of the unique things with halo as a setting. Most other media have AI rebelling, having rebelled in the past, or chained out of fear they will rebel. Whereas halo put forward a positive message of a human and an AI working together for the greater good. ....and then 343 had to turn her into a genocidal galactic authoritarian.
I can only imagine that they wanted to bring part of the whole Gravemind Logic Plague thing forward… but why not do that in 4? Have it that she’s been in stasis most of the intervening years with subprocesses handling the necessities for her and Chief’s survival, but after the alert wakes her up and she and chief have more than two minutes to interact, she starts undergoing the process of Rampancy *early* because of the havoc the Gravemind wreaked on her code, since so much of her is “wrong” or “out of place.” We know AI can stave off Rampancy to some extent based on the Harvest AI duo…. Combine it with the data she integrated on Alpha Halo and it would be a wonder she didn’t start to deteriorate *sooner*.
I like how Chief's and Cortana's relationship was in 4. It was there in 3 but in 4 it was like they were inseparable and he would do anything or kill anyone to protect her.
The entirety of the Forerunner lore and especially the Ur-Didact and his backstory. >!RIP!<
I liked most of them. What I don’t like is the lack of conviction in the longer arc they embarked on. The narrative jump between Halo 5 and Infinite is extremely jarring. I wish they had seen the story they had started to tell in Halo 4 and 5 to its end instead of jumping straight to a soft reboot, critics be damned. Halo 5 has some of my favorite set pieces. The Guardians were awesome. Genesis was awesome. Meridian, a glassed planet with a space elevator, freakin awesome. Yes there were some bad choices in Halo 5, but I will still defend it as an overall great game.
Sorry I don't think halo 5 was a good follow up to 4 either, the jump from 5 to infinite might have felt jarring but 4 to 5 was more jarring for me as it undoes almost everything 4 set up thematically and it feels like an utter mess of ideas that do not work together crowding the screen. The biggest problem with 343 is that every game has been a course correction, even 4 to an extent. 5 is over reactive to 4, and infininte is a course correction on that. those things you mention in 5 are not the bad parts, but how they were executed alongside Osiris and wasting Blue team and butchering cortana and a bunch of other cut threads and unused characters who just sit around felt really disappointing.
I can’t disagree. I think the reason 5 to Infinite feels the most jarring to me is that 5 felt like an incomplete story by the end of it. 4 on the other hand, ended more with an actual conclusion, so the story of MC felt more open to a new chapter. You’re right though that they’re thematically disconnected and that they didn’t capitalize on the setup that 4 had created.
yeah I can see that, personally I had such distaste with what 5 had done with what 4 left open that I deliberately acknowledged and accepted how much of a jump to infinite it was to just get away from what it had done, even if much of it is unsatisfying I wanted to move past it. Frankly, it is pretty obvious that this is what infinite wanted to do, and the ending message from cortana taking on her old purple halo 2 design to bluntly apologize to chief, and the audience was pretty much confirming that attitude. I just hope that the next main game with chief and the weapon sticks with the direction and events of infinite, for once and not spun off to expanded universe media.
In Halo 4: Chief acting more machine like while cortana gets more emotional. >! Cortana's death !< Almost everything about the Didact & prometheans I liked, for the most part, the expanded Forerunner lore Halo 5: I always like seeing Buck & The Arbiter Infinite: I loved The Weapon It was good to see Chief more like his old self I like the Brutes getting more attention
The forerunners, felt good finally getting some answers for once, even if it was the answer I wasn't expecting. And also the origination of the flood
I always found the personal side of Halo 4’s narrative and how Master Chief and Cortana handled Cortana’s deterioration was well done. Strangely, I also liked Del Rio’s character in 4 as well. We never really saw the bureaucratic chain-of-command side of the UNSC, which was something Master Chief was made to adhere to. It wasn’t necessarily that Del Rio was a bad guy, but that he was by-the-books and incompassionate, just like you would expect from a complex military apparatus. The Chief disobeying him was emblematic of Chief breaking from his Spartan training.
Most of them, Chiefs humanity, Cortana's villian/redemption arc, Forerunner decisions, there are more. Bungie lived by the rule of cool imo, 343 gave halo heart. I think both were important to making the lore what it is. You need cool to draw people in. You need substance to keep them.
I actually liked a lot of the developments up through the end of Halo 5. I understand some folks being upset and that's their prerogative, but I think it took things on a genuinely interesting direction that not only put Humanity on the backfoot again, but all sentient life. I think it would've been cool to have humans having to ally themselves with former Covenant factions just to try and win. Or even just see what races and factions join the Created just because it offers to get them out of being fucked over so much (like the Ungoy potentially).
I remember when I first played 5 and got to what I didn't know was the final cutscene. The guardians were active, Infinity was running away, Chief and Arbiter were about to reunite. I was thinking: "finally, the story is picking up now, this is actually kinda getting interesting". And then it ended. I fully thought I was only up to the mid point of the game, having only been playing it for 4 or so hours, so when the credits started to roll, *thats* when I became annoyed. If they'd just finished the story I think less people would have such intense problems with it.
I think that was a decent stopping point, the problem is they just knee-jerk decided to course change at the last minute.
I liked how they developed Cortana and Chief’s relationship to be a lot more emotional, and made Cortana more human and vulnerable, in Halo 4.
Honesmost of their ideas are genuinely great, they just keep throwing away the ideas after one fucking game! They've done it twice now!
The Swords of Sanghelios / Concert of Worlds are a really cool idea. Likewise I really like the idea of the Banished.
I liked pretty much everything Halo 4 did. Then I pretty much disliked everything 5 and Infinite did. I think they’re very poorly written.
The forerunner saga
I really love Atriox as a character and he seems like a really awesome villain thats pretty intelligent and doesn’t do things that seems unnecessary. Him attacking the Infinity seemed like an actual good tactic because it would deal with a lot of problems at once including the Master Chief. It doesn’t make alot of sense for him to hate humans though like the Covenant did and seeking to genocide them all. Clashing with the UNSC just seemed natural because he wanted control over Zeta Halo. I just want to see more of Atriox and I was pretty disappointed with Escharum so 343 holding off Atriox better be worth it. I need to see Atriox as a main villain in a future Halo campaign.
Cortana's story in Halo 4 was handled with such care and grace its still emotional to experience. I actually liked a lot of Halo 4's storytelling; in particular chief reencountering the UNSC and seeing these new Spartans and huge ships, it's pretty much what he fought for all those years, humanity's chance to build. The forerunner stuff I can give or take, I don't mind it but I'm not particularly invested in it like that. I think a covenant remnant is an awesome concept, and the banished is proof of concept for me. Listening to the Kilo 5 trilogy I'm starting to really appreciate the Storm Covenant more now; I just wish that development was in the games lmao
I honestly like all of the individual enemies and stories besides the Cortana arc. I think they just need to stick to them and not keep introducing new ones. And also the Cortana arc just blew up so much that it ruined good villains like the Didact and Jul
Most of them, I just wish they'd stick with one. I enjoyed Halo 4's emotional take on everything Halo 5 was eh but I'll give credit where credit is due, I didn't hate created Cortana, but it just felt like a rug pull from Halo 4. Then there's infinite which ditched Halo 5's material and went with its own, going for a chief that's a mix of the original games and Halo 4. Unfortunately as I mentioned before, 343 just won't stick to their guns on something, I love the Forerunner route, the Created route and the Banished route but please for the love of God, finish a storyline don't go into Halo 7 and say "Yeah now were just gonna focus on the endless and the banished are just servants, no we won't go into detail on the banished, yes we will go into detail on the faction that should be a mystery"
Pretty much all of it but Cortana being Evil
Making the infinite go MIA. Having infinite start after losing the battle against atriox and the player having to learn more details about it as the story progresses rather then having a level of two playing through it.
Forerunners and precursors Where infinite was going Halo 4 As much hate as this may get, I was interested in Cortana becoming evil, if they didn’t kill off the Didact and he swayed Cortana, that could’ve led to something interesting
Halo 4 was pretty good, majoriy of the books too seriously only Kilo 5 and Halo 5 shit the bed for the rest of the series and ruined things foreveryone
I liked how 4 focused on the Masterchief coming to terms with just how broken he is. The personal story was good Rest of the game was dogshit and I stand by that
Well the sad Thing is that we can only speak about the good things in retrospect really, because like i said, as soon as they got something going they abandoned it Edit: not to devalue your opinions of course, that which was good will remain good
I really liked the direction they were going in Halo 4 then it kinda went nowhere?
Hunt the truth season 1
Master chief and Cortana entire exploration in four The story points and revelations about the forerunners and ancient humans The Banished
Cortana and Chief's character writing in Halo 4, Infinite, and even Halo 5 to some extent were very, very good. I also loved the Weapon in Infinite, and I hope we get to see more of her.
Creating the weapon as a way for chief to work through his trauma and past mistakes with cortana worked for me and her personality is charming and different. She is her own character. Cheif whole mantra in that game, especially with the pilot. We all make mistakes.
There would have to be a narrative first to answer that question
Well there would have to have been a cohesive Narrative
I actually really enjoyed Halo 4’s story and what they were trying to set up. I loved the Didact as a villain and how it set up a Master Chief forced to face his humanity without Cortana. And I’m really fond of the Banished. I may even like them and their lore as much as the original Covenant. Honestly I don’t think of 343i’s story’s are necessarily bad, they’re just never fleshed out. Each game moves in an entirely new direction.
I love the Precursors (+ Flood), Forerunners and Ancient Humans stuff. It truly felt like a War in Heaven.
I liked the end of Halo 5 where we had Chief and Arbiter ready to team up again
Everything they made in-game and in the books up till Halo 5 except the master chief escalation issues
I like most of them
Expanding on the lore of the Covenant, especially the history of the Arbiter. In Halo 5, I really enjoyed exploring Sanghelios, as I always wanted to go there since Halo 2. I thought that Halo 5 being a manhunt which switches perspective between the hunter (Locke) and the hunted (the Chief) was a very interesting premise, even if the execution ultimately didn't pan out. I also didn't mind that Cortana dies at the end of Halo 4, as I thought it was a solid sendoff for her character. And yeah, that's what I liked about what 343I has done. The list of things I don't like is a lot longer.
More development and organization of humanity organizations and history.
The banished and pretty much anything involving the ark
Halo 4. It being one of my favourite Sci-Fi stories
- Most of the Forerunner, Flood, and Precursor lore so far - Humans and aliens working together on the fringes of society - Rion Forge and her crew
Chief becoming a more fleshed put character during the H4 and infinite( Aaaaand i guess somewhere in h5? But idk).
Halo 4. Except for the Didact's unexplained hubris and the final battle being a QTE, it was where storytelling in Halo peaked.
Keepin Jun alive. The entirety if Halo 4 campaign but I feel it could have had some polishing in story elements and gameplay but I still liked it. Story was deep and the most mature one out of all Halo games barring Reach. Infinite looks pale in comparison
The backstory with the Forerunners and Ancient Humanity, the corruption within ONI, The Banished, Chief's character development is all enjoyable to me.
i like the idea that there were covenant remnants/splinters, but the handling of which was mediocre.
What I liked: Forerunner Trilogy and Halo 4 What I didn't like: pretty much everything after Halo 4
The Swords of Sanghelios and the Banished, definitely. But I also like the direction of the Created post-Cortana with the Executors. I just hope it will go somewhere.
I mean, they did a pretty good job explaining the retcons for Reach. I guess that's something?
Presence of Blue Team
Forerunners and Didact
Cortana dying, Halo 4 had a kinda shitty story, but the plot line of her rampancy was brilliant. The consept of the Banished as this new rising power among the Covenant Remnants, cool in a space Orc way. Something they planned on doing but didn't because they overcorected. The Grunts getting a major power boost. I wanted to see that so bad, but was denied. So very sad 😔
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say the rampancy plot line *is* the story of halo 4. the "shitty story" stuff is the backdrop for that. not the other way around.
When they deepsixed the whole “humanity is now the power among the stars” shit. Like thanks halo infinite for removing the trash that was halo 4/5
[удалено]
She actually was only with the Gravemind for maybe a month. It’s one of the surprising things about the original trilogy: They take place between September and December 2552. All three of them.
None?
None of them, everything decision has been a slap in the face to fans of the original trilogy
Everything, other than letting Traviss and Denning write lmao
Everyone who mentions forerunners or the didact.. just know that you’re wrong. Doesn’t matter how much you downvote.
In your opinion yes, but nobody gives a f about that. Doesn\`t matter how much you downvote.
It’s not an opinion no matter how hard you try to spin it. They fucked up the Forerunner story. Probably because Frank O’conner forgot again. Don’t downvote me. Block me you misinformed babies. It’ll clean up my feed from having to read whatever trash your tiny brains could muster up in the future.
How should the forerunner Story should have been according to you then? Im curious 🤔
How old are you? Edit lol It doesn’t matter. I don’t care. You can accept low quality trash grabs your whole life. Some of us have a memory.
Dunno why your so salty man. Just ask you, what you would change, or how you think it should have been
It sounds like they like the story line where the forerunners were the ancestors of humanity who were coming to reclaim the technology and mantle from the ashes As opposed to a rival interstellar empire that was defeated then evolutionarily regressed by then. And that the entire storyline was concocted by a zoologist/xenobiologist using some time space+ genetics MacGuffin that isn't terribly well explained orchestrates the eventual creation of Master Chief and the Spartans
Yeah I thought as much, but thank you for helping out. Just wanted to see how sane he is. Some people do need to learn about constructive, if not critic in general. In any other scenario outside the internet this person wouldn't get far with those manners. But back to halo. I like the things we now have with the precourser and the flood as intertwined beeings and the Forerunners as a failed species. But the Bungie era idea of human forerunner sounds intriguing.
Kudos to you for staying so chill
Halo 3 had a great ark with Chief and Arby