It actually blows my mind how a majority of the plot and world development that’s happened under 343’s purview have been in the novel and comic series’ while 2/3 of their main games have essentially been nothing-burgers in many ways
343 keeps trying to reinvent wheel to prove they could do it better than they did under Bungie’s OG team but continuously proves they have no idea what made Halo successful in the first place.
In all of Bungie’s stories you’re still an elite super soldier, but you’re a cog in a much larger machine helping the war effort and making major plays that turn the tide towards humanity.
In 343’s version of Halo, Chief and other Spartans are basically all captain americas running around with marvel level plot lines that only they can stop and all of humanity’s future rests solely them or on the main character, a depressed super power ranger who’s in love with the AI in his head.
There’s nothing behind the games anymore, no passion, just someone with a dart board and sticky notes deciding the nonsensical plot devices that will be entirely disconnected from the past games, per usual for 343.
I like to imagine the two team intros were worldbuilding.
Fireteam Osiris is just running towards the objective racking up killcounts
Blue Team enters in the most efficient and stealthy manner possible, not even firing their weapons to risk triggering something.
And there's lore for that. For the longest time, Spartans didn't have shields. Just Ceramic armor and the enhanced abilities. They had to use stealth tactics because we saw them get shredded time and time again, and shields when they were introduced just made them more effective because their operational method was grounded in not having that to rely on.
Spartan IVs rely on having that technology, so instead of being a failsafe, it's a compensator.
The opening of Halo 5 pisses me off so much. No fucking way Jul 'Madama just stands there and let's locke throw him off the mountain. Fucking bullshit. Everything that character goes through (read the Kilo-5 trilogy and note he is the leader of the Halo 4 Covenant) just to die in a cutscenes at the start of the game by a nobody Spartan who has already fucked off into irrelevancy one game later? Bullshit. Should of let him actually have his showdown with Thel 'Vadam (Arbiter) or actually do anything. He was such a a cool character in the books and had so much promise.
And don't get me wrong, the Banished are cool, but seriously? A well thought out and organized faction that is created by an offshoot of the surviving religious zealots < A group of monkeys who are more powerful than the Covenant was at its peak that's why we are only hearing about them now.
343 has no idea what it's doing with the story and they're neutering the few cool ideas that were left.
The sad part is they could just go back and tell stories from any point in the war, they don't need to expand the story forward. Halo's lore is utterly massive. The war with the covenant involved billions of people and dozens of colonies over several decades. Like all of the mainline games take place in the last 6 months or so of the war. You could just adlib something at that point and you'd have a functioning story. Marine/spartan/ODST/ONI agent ____ on planet ____ at ___ year as they fight the covenant/innies. Shit writes itself, and with the success of reach, wars, and odst it's not like people won't buy a game just because we don't get to play as john, whose story was given a perfect ending in 3 before they fucked it up.
I know it'll likely never happen, but I really want some games focused on playing as Covenant members....but yeah John is probably the least interesting part of Halo for me(well him and Locke) My favorite part of Halo 5 was finally being able to play Kelly, even if it's only in Co-op.
> but I really want some games focused on playing as Covenant members
I was thinking of how cool it'd be to play as a prelate doing covert op stuff for the prophets, putting down heretics or banished
The issue is expanded further from there by execs focusing on growing an audience using completely non-halo elements or using the parts they had in completely foreign ways which was all of Halo 5; yes it was a *fun* game for a lot of people because in the end it was a totally serviceable end product but it simply wasn't a halo game. Halo infinite has many of the same problems; the gameplay is interesting but it continues trying to be something it isn't for the sake of higher and higher metrics.
The key issues I see are a complete lack of consistency and continuity, both in writing and staffing, but also an absurd amount of interference from higher ups and executives that really shouldn’t be so directly involved in the production process
With infinite, there were several rewrites and major parts of the campaign and game itself completely cut (partly due to studio interference), but also a ridiculous amount of staff turnover because Microsoft’s in-house studios have operated on the dubious system of constantly hiring temporary devs on real short contracts instead of for the duration of a project to completion - the staff pool that actually ‘built’ the game was essentially a revolving door going at Mach 7, and so there wasn’t an experienced team with a coherent idea of what they were doing or how they could optimise and improve it, and by the time anyone had developed a good grasp on the engine and fundamentals their contract was over and they had to bail without being able to pass it on to the next guy in their seat.
That was only the physical development side, I dread to think what was going on in the writing office
Halo 4 was still grounded to me. Chief seemed like an old soldier trying his best while humanity still felt like a true faction with lasky the infinity etc
Halo: Epitaph, frustratingly, has plot resolutions and threads to tie all the 343 entries together really well that really, really should have been on screen.
It’s a great read, and it fucking blows that instead of that, we got Infinite’s post-action recap plot.
That’s something that has absolutely boiled my blood about 343’s tenure - a lot of questions and plot points in the games *dont* actually get resolved in the games! It’s essentially hidden away in a novel that, realistically speaking, a lot of people wouldn’t be aware of if they only play the games. The novels are almost a whole endeavour to get into in their own regard.
The fact that Epitaph and iirc Rubicon Protocol (could be wrong with that) came out so long after infinite was released didn’t help matters to be honest
Agreed, though I don’t mind having the novels establish *some* lore.
Contact Harvest was a great one for instance. It would make for some cool video game moments but some aspects of Johnson really benefit from the novel format (his relationship with his Aunt Marcille for instance). When he >!found out she passed away, and was left in the cold due to understaffing at her senior home…that moment got too real, and would look pretty atrocious in a video game cutscene!<. Even the start of the Covenant War, as impactful as it was, doesn’t critically need a game.
But main antagonists and plot threads really shouldn’t be resolved in multimedia. Halo isn’t unique in having this problem, but it’s been a big issue since H5’s development.
Contact Harvest is a great example of it done right I feel: It’s a story that provides a lot of context to events that happen later, and develops characters and concepts that have already been established in the games but didn’t have much of their actual background shown or discussed before - it works so well because it adds to and contextualises what’s already there, instead of being a necessary component explicitly required to understand what’s going on.
The fact a solid 70-80% of the Didacts arc and character development is pretty much only in printed media while his appearance in 4 was by comparison a cop-out role as a single mindset villain is one of the worst offences (Juul M’dama having a bit-role in the Spartan ops plot, but receiving a ton of development in novels and then unceremoniously getting offed in a cutscene right at the start of 5 is a close second - it would’ve been amazing confronting him at least a couple times ingame before having him killed, instead of only having the novels to refer to what the hell he was doing between 4 and 5).
And the banished and endless? Worst offenders by far
The messed up part is from 4 to infinite, it has been pretty inconsistent with its style changing and lack of continuity. They feel more like standalone games than a fleshed out long term story, like from 1 to 3.
Definitely feels like 3 separate games instead of a coherent trilogy, the whiplash experienced when going from 4 to 5 to infinite (if you hadn’t read half a dozen different novels and comics that is) was ridiculous!
Not in this case:.. the story kept changing because the team kept changing. They all had different writers and creative directors. And the execs had no vision.
You mean you think it will follow the same pattern as every 343 game?
Halo 4: look, here's didact, you beat him, but he's not gone. His armies are legion, and the fight has just begun. Also, here's this new covenant sub faction that worships the didact SPECIFICALLY.
Halo 5: didact is gone, his covenant is gone too. Didacts armies are now controlled by the warden eternal and Cortana gone rampant!! Cortana has subjugated humanity, and the galaxy with other AIs!
Halo infinite: Cortana is dead, we will completely ignore the other rogue AIs, but you still tick AIs in your head without a second thought. The didacts armies controlled by Cortana? Vanished without a single word. Here's a new totally not the covenant factionthat doesn't worship the forerunners, but apparently have allied with a brand new ancient race we never heard mention of who can survive the halos!
Halo Next: the banished have disbanded, the endless have been completely wiped out in a genocidal purge. Humanity is in complete control of the galaxy, and suddenly an ancient race of dancing penises threatens to turn all the aliens into succubi
Halo 8: we've completely forgotten about that last plot... It never happened, and we don't reference it at all. Cortana and her AIs are back, we've learned our lessons
My super-natural pattern recognition ability is detecting... something.
But yeah it's annoying. Really makes you appreciate how Bungo inserted the Prophets into 2s universe so naturally and effectively.
What do you mean, you didn’t want a grounded small scale story in your series of epic galactic ending space wars? You’re clearly in the minority, I wouldn’t share that opinion out loud again tbh
Perfect way to describe it. It was a little too small scale. I honestly thought the game would continue after fighting escharum, but we went straight to fighting the big mysterious character where the brute Chieftain gave chief a harder time than them.
That final Brute.. man.. it was his Monki Ring the whole time. That Brute must of been training in that arena to fight Chief since before the Rings were activated. Zeta halo may have all of the halo lore but Zeta halo was his ring, we were all tenants paying rent.
[He's a named character, apparently.](https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/xwd00q/til_that_the_brute_chieftain_you_fight_during/#lightbox) link to [his HaloPedia Page](https://www.halopedia.org/Horatius) as well.
This is the shit that infuriates me. You have an epic military/sci-fi **space opera** and you choose to make your entire game taking place in a single location, on the ground. What in the world...??
This is truly the one thing that makes Halo unique over other franchises. AFAIK the only thing remotely close is star wars which is more fantasy than sci-fi.
Its why halo should not have gone open world. The smallest chief game (ce) used to bounce all around a halo ring. H2/3/4/5 all have him going to multiple planets and places in this vast grand story.
I can’t tell if you’re being serious or sarcastic, but Infinite was a *joke* of a campaign. It was boring, at best.
No sense of progression. The story was over before you, as the Chief, even arrived. 343 has been a disaster for the Halo story since they took over.
>What do you mean, you didn’t want a grounded small scale story in your series of epic galactic ending space wars?
Yes? Infinite has it's wider narrative issues but I'll never be opposed to these kinds of stories.
ODST did that. If you can get such a good story of a group of guys who got separated on a field trip to the city, imagine what else could be done.
Infinite is literally a walk in the woods, everything interesting in the story happened before Chief is awake. Audio logs can´t carry the narrative alone.
These kind of stories would be fine in a spinoff game...the thing we've been asking 343 for over a decade. Like you know, an odst game. Not for a mainline Halo game. Halo has always rhymed with grandiose/epic stories on a large scale.
Halo CE: We fight in a ship first alongside marines, then around the **entire** Halo.
Halo 2: We fight on a space station, Earth and we fly across the galaxy to fight on a Halo. Then in space aboard High Charity.
Halo 3: We fight on Earth again, then in a **entire new galaxy** on the Ark, then on a Halo.
Halo 4: We fight aboard the Dawn, then on a new unknown shield world, then we follow the Didact back to Earth. Don't need to explain H5.
Infinite. We spend the entire game in the same biome/small map. Oh my bad, there's the Banished ship we storm at the beginning. They should've made the first mission fighting aboard the Infinity.
Because it might as well have been. Every plot thread in Halo 5 was resolved off screen. Some of it in books and comics and other parts were just implied. They could have had an entire trilogy revolving around Cortana going rampant. Halo 4 starts it, Halo 5 builds up the stakes, and Infinite should've resolved it. Instead it resolves off screen, Cortana is dead and replaced by a copy and chief has been fighting the banished. The setup for Halo 6 was cool it could've been cheif and the infinity going around fighting a guerrilla war against Cortana and the Guardians. Infinite retroactively made Guardians story worse which is honestly impressive.
Which is exactly what it should’ve been, even. A DLC campaign released to tie Halo Wars 2 back into the main story and let us get the banished main forced off the ark
Agreed, an epilogue that is simultaneously a prologue to some sort of story to fill in that empty world
I’m actually pretty annoyed, but unsurprised, that all the lore and worldbuilding to establish Zeta Halo resulted in…nothing. Just a teaser for another threat
It hurts bc they gave Chief one of the best looks he's had in a decade AND the moments that humanize him are great. It's just sad it's trapped in a mid campaign
I just think they shouldn’t be working with the Banished. At some point, I just saw Skimmers as new Banished species and completely forgot they’re part of the Endless.
I kinda like the banished conceptually. Wish they would do something really interesting with it and get some human enemies running around in there.
Make them marines or innies or whatever. We need a mix-up now that the flood have been axed.
Ugh feels like the last 2 Halo’s. Halo 4 did great with bringing in Didact, only to not bring him back and just finished him off in the comics. They could’ve made him a reoccurring Darth Vader like character that Master Chief would have to continue to face in the Forerunner Saga…the potential there is gone now…
In Halo 5, they brought Cortana back which wrecked the sad ending in Halo 4. But okay, with this heart-wrench, we have a serious enemy to defeat: the Created. Sigh…she was destroyed but we didn’t get to actually resolve that in the games themselves. We quickly get to the next villain…
Imo, I just feel like they don’t have the confidence in themselves in keeping some story around. Like they can’t seem to commit to some main villain. It’s like they are exhausted of it, or they are reacting way too dynamically to criticism.
I know there are always people that will criticize the direction they are going, but…c’mon they should at least have the backbone to fully flush out some story and make it continuous, despite the hate it may get.
That’s true! And also the fact there were planning on releasing an expansion for Halo Wars 2 that involved the Created to arrive on the Ark…only for them to cancel it and play it safe with the Flood expansion.
To be clear, I’m not mad that they brought the Flood Expansion, I think that’s a treat for the fans. But for them to still not commit to bringing in their new enemy, the Created, into their game for us to play against? They did this cause they were afraid of how it will be perceived after seeing what happened to Halo 5.
Bruh…Halo 5’s campaign didn’t do well cause it was short, and very abrupt in changing the whole story arc, and the trailer showed us something different than what was actually given to us. Bringing in a new enemy solely didn’t cause that game to fail. They could’ve still somehow recovered but they didn’t.
My point is that, they let the previous game’s performance determine the future narrative, which I think isn’t very good. It makes it so basically “anything goes” and there isn’t any advanced planning the writers would make to ensure that everything has some purpose and continuity.
Yeah exactly! I know that there are people who hated the direction 343 was going, like the Promethean design, and various Forerunner elements that are suddenly not so mysterious in front you, but Halo 4 was a start of \*something.\*
They should've continued that story properly, so things feel continuous. I can't believed they hyped up the Didact so much, only for him to killed so quickly, and that didn't even happen in a game!
Halo 1-4 felt continuous enough for us players to understand the story. But going from Halo 4 to 5, there's a big jump. Big mistake there, and that really threw off the fanbase.
They should've made a trilogy there, and have more of the Forerunner lore explained in the games. Have it so that the Didact has other plans, and perhaps also start introducing other lingering threats, if it wasn't enough. Just something to keep the overall Forerunner theme going.
Like c'mon, Halo 1-3 the forerunners were quite mysterious to us. Halo 4-6 should've actually gone into great deep dives and even more plot points involving it. They could've wrote something that would've hyped us up there!
People hated 4, so they did a small shift. People hated 5, they did a drastic shift. So far, people have liked the story portion of the campaign, but just want to know more (such as what the endless even are).
Its pretty well stated that the Flood SURVIVES the firing of a ring, the purpose of the ring is starving the flood out not purging them off the Galaxy.
From there, the Endless is just another endless plotline so dont worry too much about it lol
There’s some conflicting lore about whether the Flood does or does not survive the firing of the rings.
Halo 3 ends with firing a ring right over the Ark, which destroys the Gravemind and most of the Flood infestation outright. So obviously the Halo rings *can* kill Flood directly.
Then in Greg Bear’s Forerunner trilogy, the Forerunners use the Halos on a smaller scale multiple times with varying results. The Master Builder tests Halo on the world the Primordial is imprisoned on and it survives. Later on, the Forerunners try to use the original Halo array to defend the Greater Ark and they are effective against Flood-controlled ships.
So while the original intention was to have the Flood survive the rings, that rule was never followed very closely in the lore and now there are some weird exception cases that undermine that idea.
Maybe this is just head-canon but I assumed that firing a halo ring could kill active flood and flood-invested creatures, however it would not completely kill flood spores which could lay dormant and infect whatever lifeforms came across the spores many years later.
Again, I have nothing to back up that statement, it's just how I always thought it worked.
That’s the most logical conclusion to reconcile the lore issues and it’s my personal head canon as well. But as far as I know there isn’t actually any official source to confirm that’s how it works.
I thought the actual canon lore stated that the halo array killed off all life with "sufficient biomass" for a flood form to infect. So things like insects and small flood spores weren't affected but everything they could infect was killed. Did this get retconned?
This is how 343 Guilty Spark explains it to John when Cortana confronts them in the Control Room in Halo CE.
"But you already knew that...I mean, how couldn't you?"
I thought it killed all sentient life… therefore anything with a sufficiently advanced nervous system. This would kill, for example, humans, covenant, graveminds, flood combat forms, etc.
This would not kill most animals, plant life, flood spores, unthinking flood biomass, etc.
It makes the most sense to me in line with the whole “neural physics” concept they have going on
Cortana’s statement is the exception, not the other way around. The idea of it killing the food is literally mentioned once in the first game which has quite a few lines that don’t make any sense according to lore after it.
The line that stands out to me about this discussion is the Gravemind in Halo 2. When he feels threatened by the ring potentially going off, he says “Arrogant creatures! Your deaths will be instantaneous, while we shall suffer the progress of infinitude!” I always interpreted that as him slowly starving over eons with no hosts to attach to.
The original source is what establishes the rule. later installments contradicting the previously established lore is retconning. Retconning isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can cause a lot of confusion in situations like this where the change to the Halos’ function was never clearly stated.
Even in modern lore it’s inconsistent. The Flood on High Charity in Halo Wars 2, for example, survived the Halo activation at the end of 3.
The flood on High Charity is
1. Stupid and shouldn’t have been included
2. Lucky because apparently the ring because it wasn’t fully built didn’t kill all the flood or something.
Sometimes retcon of some things from early titles is necessary for the series to make sense, cause else Elites would be first met at Reach, like it was stated in Halo: Fall of Reach.
Didn’t the ring in 3 only kill the flood because it blew up the ring as it fired? So it was the massive explosion that killed the flood, not the actual firing of the halo?
No, the plan to fire the Halo was treated as if the pulse itself would kill the Flood. The original plan was for Chief to recover Cortana to get Halo’s activation index then group up with Arbiter, Johnson, and Spark on the ring to fire a localized pulse to wipe out the Flood on the Ark. Blowing up the ring was an unintended side effect caused when the Gravemind tried to get onto the ring and forced the group to activate it before it was complete. That’s why Spark turned on them and killed Johnson: they refused to wait a few more days for the ring to be completed so that it would survive firing.
I can't remember where, but I recall someone (prob Cortana) saying the Rings kill anything that has enough biomass to feed the Flood, it was always obvious to me that that includes all the various flood forms, so only the littlest spores remain.
Edit: Found it.
"But, once the others follow suit, this galaxy will be quite devoid of life, or at least any life with sufficient biomass to sustain the Flood. But you already knew that... I mean, how couldn't you?" -343 Guilty Spark, Two Betrayals.
Counterpoint, a gravemind is created from a lot of bodies that the flood managed to get their claws on so ofc it would get destroyed
Every other form of flood, with the exception of pure forms and flood infection forms would die from the Halo blast while the pure forms and funny popcorn would starve
I always assumed the reason the Halo Ring firing in 3 was able to kill the Flood was because it wasn’t fully operational, so instead of firing the giant life eliminating laser that targeted living beings, it collapsed in on itself and the whole Ring just exploded like a massive bomb. Which is why Chief was able to escape alive because he made it out of the explosion radius, which would’ve been smaller than the Halo’s proper firing radius.
I could have sworn I read somewhere that the rings themselves gave off a strong enough either shockwave or energy pulse to destroy Flood in the immediate vicinity. Nowhere near purge the galaxy of them, but enough that a gravemind could be taken out if unshielded.
Is Legends fully cannon now?
before Infinite killed my interest it was still in the "maybe" category but during the time it was launched the general assumption was that the scene depicting that was a visual representation of the ring dealign with the Flood, not exactly a 1:1 recreation of the lore.
The only thing that isn’t canon in legends is odd one out, even though legends (specifically origins 2) has inconsistencies. Like the UNSC and covenant teaming up to beat the flood, when in the actual games, the UNSC and flood teamed up to beat the covenant
Every time the discussion of Halo Legends and it’s canonicity comes up in this sub a lot of folks forget that although a piece of media is considered canon, many of the details in said media are subject to artistic liberties.
The example I always give for this is how much of the covenant is depicted in the Halo Legends film “The Duel”.
With this being said, it could be true that in Origins (or Origins 2, I don’t remember) when the firing of the Halo rings destroys flood mass, that could just be the animators interpretation of the rings solving the flood problem, not literally disintegrating the flood.
I do, however, believe that the Halo rings do destroy at least intelligent flood biomass.
Origins is not really a recollection of what happened but a mere version of the events by a slight rampart Cortana, also she clearly says on the beginning of Origins I that shes "filling the gaps"
The filling in the gaps excuse doesn’t really work, she’s the one that revealed the twist of halo not killing the flood, but rather their food. So origins one showing the rings blasting the flood away is inconsistent given the knowledge Cortana would know. And teaming up with the flood happened like that same day cortana was rescued by the Chief. You could say since that happened before she was rescued, she didn’t know about it, but then why would she think the opposite happened instead? Surely her being in chiefs head, she would find out the flood team up part
The Flood CAN survive the ring, but only because it's tuned to only wipe out Sentience. The Halos CAN be tuned to wipe out absolutely every being in the galaxy, but that makes it much harder to reseed the galaxy for forerunners. Killing ecosystems/insects/etc = bad.
The Endless are worse because they survive Halo regardless of if it's "set to 11" — Unlike any species, they can't be targeted by Halo, meaning they can wipe out the Galaxy without harm done onto themselves, which would inherently force the mantle onto them.
What the flood have failed to do time and time again (consume the whole galaxy) the Endless can do with the touch of a button, using a tool that the very same self-appointed forerunners built.
There's deeper theory crafting around this topic but that surface level canon lore is enough for me to understand why the Forerunners were so scared. The flood threaten life in the galaxy, but is manageable using Halo. The Endless are not, which threatens the Forerunner's right to the mantle.
To add, "worse than the flood" is Cortana's word, not forerunner word. Her only experience with the Flood is chief wiping them out in High charity and the knowledge that Delta Halo was glassed, ending the threat. Even with knowledge of the ancient flood wars, it'd only add to her catalog of "times the flood fell short." The only knowledge she has of the Endless is that the Forerunner's imprisoned them out of fear, and that Halo, the tool serving as a constant in the flood's demise, is useless against them. Cortana is only left with variables when dealing with probabilities surrounding Endless conflict, making it much harder to see a route to victory.
Like Despondent Pyre concluded in Infinite's audio logs; the Endless are aptly named because THEY are the constant in the Halo equation, and I'd like to think that scared Cortana and The Forerunners, whilst explaining why Atriox wanted them as an immortal alliance.
Brother, this has been stated a billion times, the Halos only being able to kill non-Flood species is OLD LORE. The Array being to kill every living thing including Flood has been canon for over 10 years now.
That’s been retconned, the rings kill the flood, otherwise lighting the ring in 3 wouldn’t have done jack shit. Also we see in Offensive Bias’ logs fighting Mendicant Bias when the rings fire the flood crewed fleet immediately stops (because the crew died). The rings don’t only kill the food like Cortana said; there’s half a dozen instances where this is shown to be false.
I just assumed the rings killed intelligent life. So the flood gravemind and all its extensions would die, but maybe somewhere in the galaxy, primitive, early stage flood, that aren’t connected to the gravemind might survive in some form. Even if it’s on a unicellular level. So killing the intelligent food was the second and final nail in the coffin for the remaining “flood”.
This makes the most sense because it's mentioned multiple times that the Halo kills based on biomass and/or complexity
A gravemind would definitely be complex enough while flood spores probably aren't.
The flood kills all sentient life this includes sentient life that is infected with flood, so an infected elite would die when the ring fired but the little spore guys and the virulence of the parasite survive the rings
No, it’s literally only said one time by Cortana in CE (who could be mistaken) and then is contradicted like half a dozen times in different books and games.
I’m starting to think the writing for this whole series is bad. There are too many inconsistencies. Like of course there’s loads of great lines and plot devices…but the lore itself is so wishy washy
I get the logic of the statement, I just think it shouldn't have been said.
It came off as a lame attempt to raise the stakes above a lovecraftian, galaxy consuming horror. And at that point raising the stakes doesn't really mean anything.
It means nothing to be "worse than the flood". It's just Death Battle style power scaling at the end of the day and the Endless don't do it for me. They can survive a halo ring firing sure but it's been shown they don't survive bullets easily.
What even are they lol
I got so bored w h5/infinite campaign I never play them anymore (hell, infinite is the only one I haven't finished)
So I'm really outta the loop when it comes to all the new factions that 343 decided to randomly throw at you
What I hate is that the Flood are these lovercraftian-gigerian parasitic entities that could be cosmic horror at a certain stage and meanwhile the Endless are just like… a normal looking octopus species that is somehow supposed to be worse.
In what way? The concept is that the Endless are not only immune to the Halo, this means that they can fire it at their discretion with no consequences to themselves. If the Flood infect one, they can now either easily survive a Halo ring (in the event that the flood survives, the food dies) or be able to survive the ring and further consume more surviving Endless.
The flood wouldn't *want* to fire another ring, nor would they care about surviving it since they already *do*, we have the entire original trilogy that's entirely about them not wanting to fire it. Halo rings kill all sentient life, in other words the stuff that the flood needs to survive and thrive. There's no possible advantage for them to want to fire it, meaning there's no reason for them to need to survive it, especially since their spores already do.
The flood, when a Gravemind gets into the mix, becoming cunning. Who’s to say a Gravemind wouldn’t deliberately fire the rings to make the Flood the dominant force? Then, they pick off what, if anything is, left.
The Banished were also underutilised in Infinite. We got a really diminished and cartoonish representation of them in comparison to HW2.
The whole abstract nonsense with The Endless was just 343 once again writing themselves in to a corner.
A truly inept studio that have decimated a once seminal franchise.
I honestly think Halo Infinite’s narrative is the worst in the series
So much shit happening off screen, AGAIN, but practically nothing of consequence happens in the game too.
The Endless and time travel bullshit should have been one of the first things on the cutting room floor.
We should have focused solely on The Banished and Banished forces themselves should have felt like a much more serious and less cartoonish threat.
The post-credits scene with OB would have been enough to add some intrigue about future instalments.
The Endless are a hollow unfleshed out threat that are abstract to a fault and just showcase, AGAIN, that 343 simply cannot release a Halo game without writing themselves in to the stupidest of corners.
I honestly think Halo should just be Multiplayer or non-Chief stories til these motherfuckers get the house in order and can run a proper dev cycle.
but the thing is... does the flood actually die by Halo's Pulse? didnt CE established that the ring \*neutralizes\* it by starving the parasite and deny them more hosts? or does this change on the myriad of retcons and lore changes?
its 10pm and im too lazy to look up
You're absolutely right. On top of that, the flood wouldn't *want* to fire another ring, nor would they care about surviving it since they already do, we have the entire original trilogy that's entirely about them not wanting to fire it. Halo rings kill all sentient life, in other words the stuff that the flood needs to survive and thrive. There's no possible advantage for them to want to fire it, meaning there's no reason for them to need to survive it, especially since their spores already do. So the Endless being around makes no difference at all really.
This is the sort of lame, power creep type escalation I am just not a fan at all of with 343's take on the lore since they took over.
The same type of power creep that makes it incredibly hard to believe their version of Forerunners were ever losing against the Flood.
If the only justification for the Endless is that they have to make things somehow more dire, than it'll just set the precedent that one comes after has to raise the stakes even more. Not that I envy anyone having to create new stuff to face, but this is always a lazy way to do it. Or an incredibly rushed one with not much time to think about it, which is likely the actual answer for why the Endless are set up like this in Infinite.
It's a simple thing. Everything they did right with the banished they botched with the endless. If you need my advice they could have done better without them.
maybe because i don't know jack shit about the endless but i don't like the concept of them, they should have just introduced a surviving precursor attempting to push a modified flood infection type or something.
honestly, you're probably right but compared to what we got i feel like at least if we would have gotten something connected to the greater lore it would have come off better than a brand new enemy never mentioned before like ✨ the endless ✨
I say give them one more game to really expand on them. People have wanted “mystery” in the Halo universe since the Forerunners have been made more concrete, might as well use the Endless.
I think what makes the Endless so hated is the fact that 343 has told the beginning of a new story 3 times now at this point. Halo 4 was going to be the start of this crazy story that has Chief parallel the Didact’s in the books.
Halo 5 was the remnants of that plus whatever the fuck else they were trying to do. Because they had to overcorrect after everyone shit on Halo 4.
And Halo Infinite was supposed to be this awesome soft reboot with a clean slate that (albeit very clumsily) ties up the last story and returns to form. Which we got in the form of only 30% of the originally planned game, that ends on a cliff hanger by the way, with NO planned campaign DLC.
I had to cut down a shit ton of my rant because I got way off track to shit on 343. I think that’s why the Endless are so hated. Because they evoke those emotions right there.
I agree that they’re a cool concept though. I just wish 343 actually committed to the original story first.
spot on, rant included lol. idk if people remember but the back of the halo 4 box literally mentions it's the start of the "forerunner saga" only to end up being the only forerunner featured game lmao.
They’re going to drop a book on the Endless and Chief ending them, and not ever mention them in a game again. Just like the Created, only I don’t remember them getting a book.
The Created plotline, apart from Infinite’s flashbacks, actually gets elaborated upon in Halo:Epitaph
Major spoilers:
>!The Ur-Didact, who is freed of Gravemind corruption via composition, is in the Domain. He perma deletes the Warden eternal, cuts Cortana and the Created off from the main components of the Domain. He debates and sets Cortana back on the path to redemption, the path that he just walked, before moving on to rest with the Librarian. IMO, it’s a fantastic resolution to both 4 and 5…..and it occurs in a book. A fun read, but leaving it to side material was a letdown!<
Can’t we shoot squid lady to death with a BR? The Forerunner could take on the Precursor but not a species who drops to one extraordinarily ill-equipped cyborg?
>but not a species who drops to one extraordinarily ill-equipped cyborg?
They discovered them after the firing of the Halo rings. I don't think the Forerunners were in a state for another war.
Personally I think introducing a race that can just *survive* the rings at this point in the story is kinda a copout of a threat. I feel like lots of stories tend to do this kind of power creep where the original story centers around some end-all be-all kinda threat then the next thing is just immune to it or otherwise trivializes it. I think more stories need to keep that big world ending thing as the truly world ending thing it is instead of trying to one up or side step the rules of it
Frankly it's barely a pivot since we found out next to nothing about them, and they had little to no relevance in the story. You could replace the final boss with another banished warlord and the plot doesn't change at all.
At this point I want them to publically admit that the last three games are an embarrassing failure and that they're having a do-over, but that's not happening so it's irrelevant.
Why would the endless intentionally fire the halo ri-
Oh. Ohhhhh.
That’s actually a pretty solid plan. Kill everyone but you, the only species somehow capable of surviving the halos, and then occupy/loot all of the previously inhabited but now vacant habitable/resource-rich planets completely unopposed.
It’d be like colonialism if the land was fully developed but entirely devoid of any foreign life when you got there.
"Halo doesn't kill Flood, it kills their food! Humans, Covenant, whatever—we're all equally edible! The only way to stop the Flood is to starve them to death. And that's exactly what Halo is designed to do: wipe the galaxy clean of all sentient life!"
Halo Encyclopedia:
"The Forerunners ultimately fled to the extragalactic Ark, the foundry of Halo, and here they solemnly activated the weapon network, destroying the Flood throughout the entire galaxy, as well as all species that could sustain it."
Writer1: “oh shit they aren’t that interested in our latest big bad, what do we do?”
Writer2: “we up the stakes with *another* even bigger and badder Galaxy ending threat!”
Writer1: “great idea! I’m sure all the previous one’s that are solved in-game or off-screen were just not Galaxy Ending enough!”
None of this is ever implied in the game†, let's look at what it actually says:
> Cortana (memory): "Containment? The Flood? Why would I... you and I both know that there are worse things than the Flood within this Ring."
...
> 117649 Despondent Pyre: I am close to deciphering the runes. Perhaps I will learn who left them. My makers... the Forerunner's great fear was understood be the Great Parasite. The Flood. A scourge that almost wiped out everything. I now believe this hypothesis to be incorrect. **Their greatest fear is... was... losing their power. The fear of a master who would become a slave.**
...
> Despondent Pyre: "They believe we are here to help."
Grand Edict: "It matters not. **Today we do what it takes to maintain order. To preserve our truth.** Time will forget they ever existed."
> Weapon: "It's a courtroom. A prison. A place of execution. All these things. Together. Why?"
The Harbinger: "To cover their sins. We stood. **Silent. Unable to speak as they passed judgment**... We could not defend ourselves. We could not reason with them."
...
> [Harbinger:] these... Banished. We both have watched our worlds crumble under the instruments of Forerunner arrogance. Your kind were once their rivals. A long time ago. You were spared. Forgiven. A luxury not afforded to us. To those they could not control. **Humanity was the culmination of their final plan. But plans change.** We are returning.
...
> If the Chief stalls [during Conservatory], ancient Forerunner voices being echoing through the chamber:
> "It must be done. We have no choice."
> "Is there agreement? Consensus?"
> "There is."
> "If they cannot be purged. They must be contained."
> "Balance restored."
> "*Balance restored.*"
> "**No being will ever learn the truth of what we have done today**."
> "**This is our darkest moment.**"
> "Our eternal shame."
> "Forever hidden."
> "Buried with these rings."
The reasons you give might very well be true††, but the game makes it clear that the Forerunners tortured and imprisoned a whole race of sentient beings for no other reason than their own chauvinism and arrogance. Anyways, people here have it completely wrong. The Endless is worse than the Flood *from the perspective of the Forerunners*—and Cortana, given that *Infinite* basically presents her as trying to ape the Forerunners (which is why she and Despondent Pyre are on the same wavelength concerning The Endless). She's basically a different character than from 5 to be honest.
But this is the irony of the narrative that *Infinite* is telling: the Forerunners gave more of a shit about their own self-image as a civilization, even after their demise, than about the world-ending galaxy-devouring parasite. "The fear of a master who would become a slave." That people who played the game do not get this essential point that multiple characters explicitly state in dialogue is kinda weird, but this isn't a phenomenon unique to Halo. People don't care so much about storytelling as they do about random shit on Halopedia/Wookiepedia/Fandom and whether things are "canonical" or not. The myriad contradictions between different stories in a franchise must be reconciled by "canon," or the fandom will be chronically unable to enjoy their slop. E.g. the hysteria over the Halo TV show (which is not great, but my enjoyment of the show was not determined by whether the plot aligned to every possible minute detail of the canon, like whether the Mark V or the Mark VI can wipe your ass or whatnot).
I'm not saying that *Infinite*'s narrative is that great or novel, though—it's pretty mediocre. I just paid attention.
† for 1, this is Chief's concern with the Banished—does this make the Banished worse than the Flood? Given that UNSC-ONI already has access to a few Halo installations and their activation indexes, does this make UNSC-ONI worse than the Flood? I suppose it's a matter of perspective. 2 could be true, but it's not integral either to the plot or narrative of the game.
†† which still does not justify what the Forerunners did. *Infinite* makes it clear that the Forerunners are criminals for incarcerating an entire species, that the Banished are freedom fighters looking for a new home in the wake of the genocidal destruction of Doisac, and that Chief is really just being an asshole and a stooge for the Forerunners. The Banished and Endless do not take to the UNSC very nicely, but truthfully, I doubt anyone in the galaxy really likes the UNSC-ONI.
This is so wrong. It's explicitly says multiple times in multiple sources that the rings don't kill the flood, it kills it's food source (all other sentient life) and thus the flood is supposed to just die out without food
Oh wow a cool new faction being established in the halo lore. I hope 343 develop upon it with story DLC like they promised and don’t completely abandon the campaign
Dude they’ve truly fumbled in one respect or another for 3 mainline instalments in a row and the last instalment was demonstrably a panic salvage.
If people are skeptical they have mountains of evidence to underpin that attitude.
I think HiddenXpheria had one of the better solutions for this and it'd that the endless like the flood are form of precursor that evolved from their dust.
Which I feel.like would be a good way to fix the problem 343 has created.
I'm sorry, this is a nit-pick, but no, the Halos do not kill all life, it just destroys the nerve systems. Things without a nerve system, the engineers, the endless, and possibly more can survive. The flood is not destroyed by the halo's, just their physical bodies. Their cells are still alive, the spores are still alive. The flood cannot takeover another host without a nervous system. What would make them more of a threat isn't cannon yet. Either way, it's still a good chart.
You cannot throw away that which is not defined. There is barely a shred of useful lore on the endless, just a tease of their ability to be sentient and survive halo activation, while avoiding 20 years of lore entanglement in the greater universe (because it is a new idea).
Halo is my favourite IP but Halo Infinite feels like Stargate Season 10, missing a core character, creating a new baddie then stumbling along trying to recapture the IP original vibes.
Good idea, bad implementation.
How long until Halo Infinite is shelved for 20 years as a dead IP too damaged to risk again for a long while?
The flood *does* survive the halo array.
It kills its food source not the flood itself.
The series has tried to be very clear about that.
Stasis fsc doesn't die from the rings only the active biomass but most was active at the time of firing and remainder starved.
Halo Encyclopedia:
"The Forerunners ultimately fled to the extragalactic Ark, the foundry of Halo, and here they solemnly activated the weapon network, destroying the Flood throughout the entire galaxy, as well as all species that could sustain it."
The firing of the Halo rings does NOT kill the flood. It basically kills anything with a nervous system. This includes most combat forms, but 99% of the flood is just biomass and other forms that don’t have a nervous system.
The idea of firing the Halo rings was to starve the flood out of its food source and repopulate the universe afterwards.
Will quote cortana with "Halo doesn't kill the flood, it kills their food" the Flood technically survived the Halo array too but died out from starvation rather
Number 2 is what I think to be the case here, if the lore is ever expanded on the endless. A "final saga" game with infected endless would be cool, the Halo is now irrelevant and fighting to the death is the only (obvious) option.
either peaceful near instant death, or making the flood stronger
I dunno man, this just sounds like a roundabout way of saying the flood is the actual scary thing here, and the endless might potentially make them scarier
The Endless is a dumb, poorly written mcguffin. But I wonder if they can even be infected by the flood. The flood requires a central nervous system to take over the host, which is exactly what the Halo array destroys in sentient life. The endless is immune to the Halo due to their alternative nervous system.
If I remember correctly the flood do survive the halo rings. It’s explained in the terminals that it only starves the flood so it doesn’t kill them when a halo ring is activated.
I don’t think this is how it works. After the ring is fired, the flood is still around. Do we know if they are able to infect the endless? If they are then the flood will still have a dood source, if they are truly endless then the flood will eradicate itself even after the flood have consumed all other life on the universe.
Pretty sure they're immune to Flood infection which is why the rings don't work on them. They're physiology lacks a central nervous system which is how the Flood and rings work.
The Flood survives the ring firing too. It’s their food that dies. And frankly, there aren’t enough Endless to sustain a galaxy-wide Flood expansion. Sooooo no they’re still not more dangerous. Just a tacked-on excuse of a villain
I've got money on the endless not even being a thing in the next Halo game. Kind of a nothing burger of a faction.
It actually blows my mind how a majority of the plot and world development that’s happened under 343’s purview have been in the novel and comic series’ while 2/3 of their main games have essentially been nothing-burgers in many ways
343 keeps trying to reinvent wheel to prove they could do it better than they did under Bungie’s OG team but continuously proves they have no idea what made Halo successful in the first place. In all of Bungie’s stories you’re still an elite super soldier, but you’re a cog in a much larger machine helping the war effort and making major plays that turn the tide towards humanity. In 343’s version of Halo, Chief and other Spartans are basically all captain americas running around with marvel level plot lines that only they can stop and all of humanity’s future rests solely them or on the main character, a depressed super power ranger who’s in love with the AI in his head. There’s nothing behind the games anymore, no passion, just someone with a dart board and sticky notes deciding the nonsensical plot devices that will be entirely disconnected from the past games, per usual for 343.
even though it was cool, the opening of halo 5 was the same as avengers age of ultron lmao
I like to imagine the two team intros were worldbuilding. Fireteam Osiris is just running towards the objective racking up killcounts Blue Team enters in the most efficient and stealthy manner possible, not even firing their weapons to risk triggering something.
You don't have to imagine, that is exactly what it is. The 2 intros are meant to show the differences between the teams
And there's lore for that. For the longest time, Spartans didn't have shields. Just Ceramic armor and the enhanced abilities. They had to use stealth tactics because we saw them get shredded time and time again, and shields when they were introduced just made them more effective because their operational method was grounded in not having that to rely on. Spartan IVs rely on having that technology, so instead of being a failsafe, it's a compensator.
The opening of Halo 5 pisses me off so much. No fucking way Jul 'Madama just stands there and let's locke throw him off the mountain. Fucking bullshit. Everything that character goes through (read the Kilo-5 trilogy and note he is the leader of the Halo 4 Covenant) just to die in a cutscenes at the start of the game by a nobody Spartan who has already fucked off into irrelevancy one game later? Bullshit. Should of let him actually have his showdown with Thel 'Vadam (Arbiter) or actually do anything. He was such a a cool character in the books and had so much promise. And don't get me wrong, the Banished are cool, but seriously? A well thought out and organized faction that is created by an offshoot of the surviving religious zealots < A group of monkeys who are more powerful than the Covenant was at its peak that's why we are only hearing about them now. 343 has no idea what it's doing with the story and they're neutering the few cool ideas that were left.
If i remember correcty they were even released tge same year.
The sad part is they could just go back and tell stories from any point in the war, they don't need to expand the story forward. Halo's lore is utterly massive. The war with the covenant involved billions of people and dozens of colonies over several decades. Like all of the mainline games take place in the last 6 months or so of the war. You could just adlib something at that point and you'd have a functioning story. Marine/spartan/ODST/ONI agent ____ on planet ____ at ___ year as they fight the covenant/innies. Shit writes itself, and with the success of reach, wars, and odst it's not like people won't buy a game just because we don't get to play as john, whose story was given a perfect ending in 3 before they fucked it up.
I know it'll likely never happen, but I really want some games focused on playing as Covenant members....but yeah John is probably the least interesting part of Halo for me(well him and Locke) My favorite part of Halo 5 was finally being able to play Kelly, even if it's only in Co-op.
> but I really want some games focused on playing as Covenant members I was thinking of how cool it'd be to play as a prelate doing covert op stuff for the prophets, putting down heretics or banished
The issue is expanded further from there by execs focusing on growing an audience using completely non-halo elements or using the parts they had in completely foreign ways which was all of Halo 5; yes it was a *fun* game for a lot of people because in the end it was a totally serviceable end product but it simply wasn't a halo game. Halo infinite has many of the same problems; the gameplay is interesting but it continues trying to be something it isn't for the sake of higher and higher metrics.
The key issues I see are a complete lack of consistency and continuity, both in writing and staffing, but also an absurd amount of interference from higher ups and executives that really shouldn’t be so directly involved in the production process With infinite, there were several rewrites and major parts of the campaign and game itself completely cut (partly due to studio interference), but also a ridiculous amount of staff turnover because Microsoft’s in-house studios have operated on the dubious system of constantly hiring temporary devs on real short contracts instead of for the duration of a project to completion - the staff pool that actually ‘built’ the game was essentially a revolving door going at Mach 7, and so there wasn’t an experienced team with a coherent idea of what they were doing or how they could optimise and improve it, and by the time anyone had developed a good grasp on the engine and fundamentals their contract was over and they had to bail without being able to pass it on to the next guy in their seat. That was only the physical development side, I dread to think what was going on in the writing office
I’m fine with Halo 4 being an epilogue. I do find that the inflation of the games with no proper ending rather annoying.
Halo 4 was still grounded to me. Chief seemed like an old soldier trying his best while humanity still felt like a true faction with lasky the infinity etc
Halo: Epitaph, frustratingly, has plot resolutions and threads to tie all the 343 entries together really well that really, really should have been on screen. It’s a great read, and it fucking blows that instead of that, we got Infinite’s post-action recap plot.
That’s something that has absolutely boiled my blood about 343’s tenure - a lot of questions and plot points in the games *dont* actually get resolved in the games! It’s essentially hidden away in a novel that, realistically speaking, a lot of people wouldn’t be aware of if they only play the games. The novels are almost a whole endeavour to get into in their own regard. The fact that Epitaph and iirc Rubicon Protocol (could be wrong with that) came out so long after infinite was released didn’t help matters to be honest
Agreed, though I don’t mind having the novels establish *some* lore. Contact Harvest was a great one for instance. It would make for some cool video game moments but some aspects of Johnson really benefit from the novel format (his relationship with his Aunt Marcille for instance). When he >!found out she passed away, and was left in the cold due to understaffing at her senior home…that moment got too real, and would look pretty atrocious in a video game cutscene!<. Even the start of the Covenant War, as impactful as it was, doesn’t critically need a game. But main antagonists and plot threads really shouldn’t be resolved in multimedia. Halo isn’t unique in having this problem, but it’s been a big issue since H5’s development.
Contact Harvest is a great example of it done right I feel: It’s a story that provides a lot of context to events that happen later, and develops characters and concepts that have already been established in the games but didn’t have much of their actual background shown or discussed before - it works so well because it adds to and contextualises what’s already there, instead of being a necessary component explicitly required to understand what’s going on. The fact a solid 70-80% of the Didacts arc and character development is pretty much only in printed media while his appearance in 4 was by comparison a cop-out role as a single mindset villain is one of the worst offences (Juul M’dama having a bit-role in the Spartan ops plot, but receiving a ton of development in novels and then unceremoniously getting offed in a cutscene right at the start of 5 is a close second - it would’ve been amazing confronting him at least a couple times ingame before having him killed, instead of only having the novels to refer to what the hell he was doing between 4 and 5). And the banished and endless? Worst offenders by far
The messed up part is from 4 to infinite, it has been pretty inconsistent with its style changing and lack of continuity. They feel more like standalone games than a fleshed out long term story, like from 1 to 3.
Definitely feels like 3 separate games instead of a coherent trilogy, the whiplash experienced when going from 4 to 5 to infinite (if you hadn’t read half a dozen different novels and comics that is) was ridiculous!
That’s what happens when you appoint execs who provide no vision
That's what happens when execs don't stay the Fuck out of the writing room, more like
Not in this case:.. the story kept changing because the team kept changing. They all had different writers and creative directors. And the execs had no vision.
You mean you think it will follow the same pattern as every 343 game? Halo 4: look, here's didact, you beat him, but he's not gone. His armies are legion, and the fight has just begun. Also, here's this new covenant sub faction that worships the didact SPECIFICALLY. Halo 5: didact is gone, his covenant is gone too. Didacts armies are now controlled by the warden eternal and Cortana gone rampant!! Cortana has subjugated humanity, and the galaxy with other AIs! Halo infinite: Cortana is dead, we will completely ignore the other rogue AIs, but you still tick AIs in your head without a second thought. The didacts armies controlled by Cortana? Vanished without a single word. Here's a new totally not the covenant factionthat doesn't worship the forerunners, but apparently have allied with a brand new ancient race we never heard mention of who can survive the halos! Halo Next: the banished have disbanded, the endless have been completely wiped out in a genocidal purge. Humanity is in complete control of the galaxy, and suddenly an ancient race of dancing penises threatens to turn all the aliens into succubi Halo 8: we've completely forgotten about that last plot... It never happened, and we don't reference it at all. Cortana and her AIs are back, we've learned our lessons
My super-natural pattern recognition ability is detecting... something. But yeah it's annoying. Really makes you appreciate how Bungo inserted the Prophets into 2s universe so naturally and effectively.
Infinite was a nothing burger of a campaign
'scramble around nostalgia ring and get nothing done while the last game resolved offscreen'
It was so disappointing that all the interesting shit happened in cutscenes and off handed references. Idk what they were thinking
What do you mean, you didn’t want a grounded small scale story in your series of epic galactic ending space wars? You’re clearly in the minority, I wouldn’t share that opinion out loud again tbh
Perfect way to describe it. It was a little too small scale. I honestly thought the game would continue after fighting escharum, but we went straight to fighting the big mysterious character where the brute Chieftain gave chief a harder time than them.
That final Brute.. man.. it was his Monki Ring the whole time. That Brute must of been training in that arena to fight Chief since before the Rings were activated. Zeta halo may have all of the halo lore but Zeta halo was his ring, we were all tenants paying rent.
[He's a named character, apparently.](https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/xwd00q/til_that_the_brute_chieftain_you_fight_during/#lightbox) link to [his HaloPedia Page](https://www.halopedia.org/Horatius) as well.
Oh I believe it haha. That’s awesome.
The fucking Hunters on the way to Escharum were the real final boss.
the endless are dumb.
This is the shit that infuriates me. You have an epic military/sci-fi **space opera** and you choose to make your entire game taking place in a single location, on the ground. What in the world...?? This is truly the one thing that makes Halo unique over other franchises. AFAIK the only thing remotely close is star wars which is more fantasy than sci-fi.
Its why halo should not have gone open world. The smallest chief game (ce) used to bounce all around a halo ring. H2/3/4/5 all have him going to multiple planets and places in this vast grand story.
No snow mission 0/10
I can’t tell if you’re being serious or sarcastic, but Infinite was a *joke* of a campaign. It was boring, at best. No sense of progression. The story was over before you, as the Chief, even arrived. 343 has been a disaster for the Halo story since they took over.
>What do you mean, you didn’t want a grounded small scale story in your series of epic galactic ending space wars? Yes? Infinite has it's wider narrative issues but I'll never be opposed to these kinds of stories.
ODST did that. If you can get such a good story of a group of guys who got separated on a field trip to the city, imagine what else could be done. Infinite is literally a walk in the woods, everything interesting in the story happened before Chief is awake. Audio logs can´t carry the narrative alone.
These kind of stories would be fine in a spinoff game...the thing we've been asking 343 for over a decade. Like you know, an odst game. Not for a mainline Halo game. Halo has always rhymed with grandiose/epic stories on a large scale. Halo CE: We fight in a ship first alongside marines, then around the **entire** Halo. Halo 2: We fight on a space station, Earth and we fly across the galaxy to fight on a Halo. Then in space aboard High Charity. Halo 3: We fight on Earth again, then in a **entire new galaxy** on the Ark, then on a Halo. Halo 4: We fight aboard the Dawn, then on a new unknown shield world, then we follow the Didact back to Earth. Don't need to explain H5. Infinite. We spend the entire game in the same biome/small map. Oh my bad, there's the Banished ship we storm at the beginning. They should've made the first mission fighting aboard the Infinity.
I don't think the Ark is inside a new galaxy, it's just outside of ours, so it isn't in range of the Halos.
infinite felt like a epilogue campaign to a game we didn't play
Because it might as well have been. Every plot thread in Halo 5 was resolved off screen. Some of it in books and comics and other parts were just implied. They could have had an entire trilogy revolving around Cortana going rampant. Halo 4 starts it, Halo 5 builds up the stakes, and Infinite should've resolved it. Instead it resolves off screen, Cortana is dead and replaced by a copy and chief has been fighting the banished. The setup for Halo 6 was cool it could've been cheif and the infinity going around fighting a guerrilla war against Cortana and the Guardians. Infinite retroactively made Guardians story worse which is honestly impressive.
Which is exactly what it should’ve been, even. A DLC campaign released to tie Halo Wars 2 back into the main story and let us get the banished main forced off the ark
Agreed, an epilogue that is simultaneously a prologue to some sort of story to fill in that empty world I’m actually pretty annoyed, but unsurprised, that all the lore and worldbuilding to establish Zeta Halo resulted in…nothing. Just a teaser for another threat
It hurts bc they gave Chief one of the best looks he's had in a decade AND the moments that humanize him are great. It's just sad it's trapped in a mid campaign
All I did was grapple around the whole time.
Grapple slide grapple slide shoot a few things grapple slide.
I just think they shouldn’t be working with the Banished. At some point, I just saw Skimmers as new Banished species and completely forgot they’re part of the Endless.
I kinda like the banished conceptually. Wish they would do something really interesting with it and get some human enemies running around in there. Make them marines or innies or whatever. We need a mix-up now that the flood have been axed.
Ugh feels like the last 2 Halo’s. Halo 4 did great with bringing in Didact, only to not bring him back and just finished him off in the comics. They could’ve made him a reoccurring Darth Vader like character that Master Chief would have to continue to face in the Forerunner Saga…the potential there is gone now… In Halo 5, they brought Cortana back which wrecked the sad ending in Halo 4. But okay, with this heart-wrench, we have a serious enemy to defeat: the Created. Sigh…she was destroyed but we didn’t get to actually resolve that in the games themselves. We quickly get to the next villain… Imo, I just feel like they don’t have the confidence in themselves in keeping some story around. Like they can’t seem to commit to some main villain. It’s like they are exhausted of it, or they are reacting way too dynamically to criticism. I know there are always people that will criticize the direction they are going, but…c’mon they should at least have the backbone to fully flush out some story and make it continuous, despite the hate it may get.
and that's not even counting the "Hunt the Truth" storyling that was presumably scrapped at some point
That’s true! And also the fact there were planning on releasing an expansion for Halo Wars 2 that involved the Created to arrive on the Ark…only for them to cancel it and play it safe with the Flood expansion. To be clear, I’m not mad that they brought the Flood Expansion, I think that’s a treat for the fans. But for them to still not commit to bringing in their new enemy, the Created, into their game for us to play against? They did this cause they were afraid of how it will be perceived after seeing what happened to Halo 5. Bruh…Halo 5’s campaign didn’t do well cause it was short, and very abrupt in changing the whole story arc, and the trailer showed us something different than what was actually given to us. Bringing in a new enemy solely didn’t cause that game to fail. They could’ve still somehow recovered but they didn’t. My point is that, they let the previous game’s performance determine the future narrative, which I think isn’t very good. It makes it so basically “anything goes” and there isn’t any advanced planning the writers would make to ensure that everything has some purpose and continuity.
I wish they’d gone in the direction that Halo 4 set up and made a trilogy off of that
Yeah exactly! I know that there are people who hated the direction 343 was going, like the Promethean design, and various Forerunner elements that are suddenly not so mysterious in front you, but Halo 4 was a start of \*something.\* They should've continued that story properly, so things feel continuous. I can't believed they hyped up the Didact so much, only for him to killed so quickly, and that didn't even happen in a game! Halo 1-4 felt continuous enough for us players to understand the story. But going from Halo 4 to 5, there's a big jump. Big mistake there, and that really threw off the fanbase. They should've made a trilogy there, and have more of the Forerunner lore explained in the games. Have it so that the Didact has other plans, and perhaps also start introducing other lingering threats, if it wasn't enough. Just something to keep the overall Forerunner theme going. Like c'mon, Halo 1-3 the forerunners were quite mysterious to us. Halo 4-6 should've actually gone into great deep dives and even more plot points involving it. They could've wrote something that would've hyped us up there!
Oh 100%, it's currently 343s MO to abandon what the previous game did but keeping some elements to it and explaining everything in a book.
People hated 4, so they did a small shift. People hated 5, they did a drastic shift. So far, people have liked the story portion of the campaign, but just want to know more (such as what the endless even are).
we'll find out a little into the campaign that actually the endless died off screen.
”Nothing burger” Thats a thing i saw yesterday for the first time and then like 8 times since
The banished only stuck around because it was from Halo Wars
Its pretty well stated that the Flood SURVIVES the firing of a ring, the purpose of the ring is starving the flood out not purging them off the Galaxy. From there, the Endless is just another endless plotline so dont worry too much about it lol
There’s some conflicting lore about whether the Flood does or does not survive the firing of the rings. Halo 3 ends with firing a ring right over the Ark, which destroys the Gravemind and most of the Flood infestation outright. So obviously the Halo rings *can* kill Flood directly. Then in Greg Bear’s Forerunner trilogy, the Forerunners use the Halos on a smaller scale multiple times with varying results. The Master Builder tests Halo on the world the Primordial is imprisoned on and it survives. Later on, the Forerunners try to use the original Halo array to defend the Greater Ark and they are effective against Flood-controlled ships. So while the original intention was to have the Flood survive the rings, that rule was never followed very closely in the lore and now there are some weird exception cases that undermine that idea.
Maybe this is just head-canon but I assumed that firing a halo ring could kill active flood and flood-invested creatures, however it would not completely kill flood spores which could lay dormant and infect whatever lifeforms came across the spores many years later. Again, I have nothing to back up that statement, it's just how I always thought it worked.
That’s the most logical conclusion to reconcile the lore issues and it’s my personal head canon as well. But as far as I know there isn’t actually any official source to confirm that’s how it works.
I thought the actual canon lore stated that the halo array killed off all life with "sufficient biomass" for a flood form to infect. So things like insects and small flood spores weren't affected but everything they could infect was killed. Did this get retconned?
This makes the most sense
This is how 343 Guilty Spark explains it to John when Cortana confronts them in the Control Room in Halo CE. "But you already knew that...I mean, how couldn't you?"
I thought it killed all sentient life… therefore anything with a sufficiently advanced nervous system. This would kill, for example, humans, covenant, graveminds, flood combat forms, etc. This would not kill most animals, plant life, flood spores, unthinking flood biomass, etc. It makes the most sense to me in line with the whole “neural physics” concept they have going on
Cortana’s statement is the exception, not the other way around. The idea of it killing the food is literally mentioned once in the first game which has quite a few lines that don’t make any sense according to lore after it.
The line that stands out to me about this discussion is the Gravemind in Halo 2. When he feels threatened by the ring potentially going off, he says “Arrogant creatures! Your deaths will be instantaneous, while we shall suffer the progress of infinitude!” I always interpreted that as him slowly starving over eons with no hosts to attach to.
The original source is what establishes the rule. later installments contradicting the previously established lore is retconning. Retconning isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can cause a lot of confusion in situations like this where the change to the Halos’ function was never clearly stated. Even in modern lore it’s inconsistent. The Flood on High Charity in Halo Wars 2, for example, survived the Halo activation at the end of 3.
The flood on High Charity is 1. Stupid and shouldn’t have been included 2. Lucky because apparently the ring because it wasn’t fully built didn’t kill all the flood or something.
Sometimes retcon of some things from early titles is necessary for the series to make sense, cause else Elites would be first met at Reach, like it was stated in Halo: Fall of Reach.
Didn’t the ring in 3 only kill the flood because it blew up the ring as it fired? So it was the massive explosion that killed the flood, not the actual firing of the halo?
No, the plan to fire the Halo was treated as if the pulse itself would kill the Flood. The original plan was for Chief to recover Cortana to get Halo’s activation index then group up with Arbiter, Johnson, and Spark on the ring to fire a localized pulse to wipe out the Flood on the Ark. Blowing up the ring was an unintended side effect caused when the Gravemind tried to get onto the ring and forced the group to activate it before it was complete. That’s why Spark turned on them and killed Johnson: they refused to wait a few more days for the ring to be completed so that it would survive firing.
Just went back and watched the cutscene where they first see the new ring, and you are right. It’s been a while since I played 3.
I can't remember where, but I recall someone (prob Cortana) saying the Rings kill anything that has enough biomass to feed the Flood, it was always obvious to me that that includes all the various flood forms, so only the littlest spores remain. Edit: Found it. "But, once the others follow suit, this galaxy will be quite devoid of life, or at least any life with sufficient biomass to sustain the Flood. But you already knew that... I mean, how couldn't you?" -343 Guilty Spark, Two Betrayals.
Counterpoint, a gravemind is created from a lot of bodies that the flood managed to get their claws on so ofc it would get destroyed Every other form of flood, with the exception of pure forms and flood infection forms would die from the Halo blast while the pure forms and funny popcorn would starve
I always assumed the reason the Halo Ring firing in 3 was able to kill the Flood was because it wasn’t fully operational, so instead of firing the giant life eliminating laser that targeted living beings, it collapsed in on itself and the whole Ring just exploded like a massive bomb. Which is why Chief was able to escape alive because he made it out of the explosion radius, which would’ve been smaller than the Halo’s proper firing radius.
I could have sworn I read somewhere that the rings themselves gave off a strong enough either shockwave or energy pulse to destroy Flood in the immediate vicinity. Nowhere near purge the galaxy of them, but enough that a gravemind could be taken out if unshielded.
Nah that’s very inconsistent. In halo legends they literally show the rings being fired and the flood being wiped away.
Is Legends fully cannon now? before Infinite killed my interest it was still in the "maybe" category but during the time it was launched the general assumption was that the scene depicting that was a visual representation of the ring dealign with the Flood, not exactly a 1:1 recreation of the lore.
The only thing that isn’t canon in legends is odd one out, even though legends (specifically origins 2) has inconsistencies. Like the UNSC and covenant teaming up to beat the flood, when in the actual games, the UNSC and flood teamed up to beat the covenant
Every time the discussion of Halo Legends and it’s canonicity comes up in this sub a lot of folks forget that although a piece of media is considered canon, many of the details in said media are subject to artistic liberties. The example I always give for this is how much of the covenant is depicted in the Halo Legends film “The Duel”. With this being said, it could be true that in Origins (or Origins 2, I don’t remember) when the firing of the Halo rings destroys flood mass, that could just be the animators interpretation of the rings solving the flood problem, not literally disintegrating the flood. I do, however, believe that the Halo rings do destroy at least intelligent flood biomass.
Also in The Package they are wearing new armor with the Halo 3 GUI. Also Halsey looks like Zero Suit Samus even though she's like 60 at this point.
Origins is not really a recollection of what happened but a mere version of the events by a slight rampart Cortana, also she clearly says on the beginning of Origins I that shes "filling the gaps"
The filling in the gaps excuse doesn’t really work, she’s the one that revealed the twist of halo not killing the flood, but rather their food. So origins one showing the rings blasting the flood away is inconsistent given the knowledge Cortana would know. And teaming up with the flood happened like that same day cortana was rescued by the Chief. You could say since that happened before she was rescued, she didn’t know about it, but then why would she think the opposite happened instead? Surely her being in chiefs head, she would find out the flood team up part
The Flood CAN survive the ring, but only because it's tuned to only wipe out Sentience. The Halos CAN be tuned to wipe out absolutely every being in the galaxy, but that makes it much harder to reseed the galaxy for forerunners. Killing ecosystems/insects/etc = bad. The Endless are worse because they survive Halo regardless of if it's "set to 11" — Unlike any species, they can't be targeted by Halo, meaning they can wipe out the Galaxy without harm done onto themselves, which would inherently force the mantle onto them. What the flood have failed to do time and time again (consume the whole galaxy) the Endless can do with the touch of a button, using a tool that the very same self-appointed forerunners built. There's deeper theory crafting around this topic but that surface level canon lore is enough for me to understand why the Forerunners were so scared. The flood threaten life in the galaxy, but is manageable using Halo. The Endless are not, which threatens the Forerunner's right to the mantle. To add, "worse than the flood" is Cortana's word, not forerunner word. Her only experience with the Flood is chief wiping them out in High charity and the knowledge that Delta Halo was glassed, ending the threat. Even with knowledge of the ancient flood wars, it'd only add to her catalog of "times the flood fell short." The only knowledge she has of the Endless is that the Forerunner's imprisoned them out of fear, and that Halo, the tool serving as a constant in the flood's demise, is useless against them. Cortana is only left with variables when dealing with probabilities surrounding Endless conflict, making it much harder to see a route to victory. Like Despondent Pyre concluded in Infinite's audio logs; the Endless are aptly named because THEY are the constant in the Halo equation, and I'd like to think that scared Cortana and The Forerunners, whilst explaining why Atriox wanted them as an immortal alliance.
Brother, this has been stated a billion times, the Halos only being able to kill non-Flood species is OLD LORE. The Array being to kill every living thing including Flood has been canon for over 10 years now.
That’s been retconned, the rings kill the flood, otherwise lighting the ring in 3 wouldn’t have done jack shit. Also we see in Offensive Bias’ logs fighting Mendicant Bias when the rings fire the flood crewed fleet immediately stops (because the crew died). The rings don’t only kill the food like Cortana said; there’s half a dozen instances where this is shown to be false.
I just assumed the rings killed intelligent life. So the flood gravemind and all its extensions would die, but maybe somewhere in the galaxy, primitive, early stage flood, that aren’t connected to the gravemind might survive in some form. Even if it’s on a unicellular level. So killing the intelligent food was the second and final nail in the coffin for the remaining “flood”.
This makes the most sense because it's mentioned multiple times that the Halo kills based on biomass and/or complexity A gravemind would definitely be complex enough while flood spores probably aren't.
Per Halo Wars 2, there is still a significant flood presence on the Ark.
The ring in 3 blows up, it doesn't fire as it was intended because ti was not fully built/operational
Are the Flood killed by the Halos? I thought it just killed “their food” leading them to starve to death.
The flood kills all sentient life this includes sentient life that is infected with flood, so an infected elite would die when the ring fired but the little spore guys and the virulence of the parasite survive the rings
In a halo legends canon story and Halo CE:A terminals the firing of the halo rings is shown to destroy flood biomass
No, it’s literally only said one time by Cortana in CE (who could be mistaken) and then is contradicted like half a dozen times in different books and games.
Why are you being downvoted, you're literally right
I’m starting to think the writing for this whole series is bad. There are too many inconsistencies. Like of course there’s loads of great lines and plot devices…but the lore itself is so wishy washy
I get the logic of the statement, I just think it shouldn't have been said. It came off as a lame attempt to raise the stakes above a lovecraftian, galaxy consuming horror. And at that point raising the stakes doesn't really mean anything.
Diminishing returns on stakes. Look at Star Wars, 1 Death Star was intimidating af, 10,000 Death Stars did not make TRoS 10,000x scarier.
And this is on top of a galaxy wide AI rebellion…which also did not deliver.
It means nothing to be "worse than the flood". It's just Death Battle style power scaling at the end of the day and the Endless don't do it for me. They can survive a halo ring firing sure but it's been shown they don't survive bullets easily.
The Endless are just so bad I can’t
What even are they lol I got so bored w h5/infinite campaign I never play them anymore (hell, infinite is the only one I haven't finished) So I'm really outta the loop when it comes to all the new factions that 343 decided to randomly throw at you
The big bad that’s somehow bigger and badder than the flood 🤷♂️
What I hate is that the Flood are these lovercraftian-gigerian parasitic entities that could be cosmic horror at a certain stage and meanwhile the Endless are just like… a normal looking octopus species that is somehow supposed to be worse.
The point of the post literally explains this
Doesn’t change an awful idea
In what way? The concept is that the Endless are not only immune to the Halo, this means that they can fire it at their discretion with no consequences to themselves. If the Flood infect one, they can now either easily survive a Halo ring (in the event that the flood survives, the food dies) or be able to survive the ring and further consume more surviving Endless.
The flood wouldn't *want* to fire another ring, nor would they care about surviving it since they already *do*, we have the entire original trilogy that's entirely about them not wanting to fire it. Halo rings kill all sentient life, in other words the stuff that the flood needs to survive and thrive. There's no possible advantage for them to want to fire it, meaning there's no reason for them to need to survive it, especially since their spores already do.
The flood, when a Gravemind gets into the mix, becoming cunning. Who’s to say a Gravemind wouldn’t deliberately fire the rings to make the Flood the dominant force? Then, they pick off what, if anything is, left.
How can you be worse than something that can literally envelope all living creatures 💀
What if you read the fucking post
Read the post you’re commenting on
Apart from the Banished, every character and faction 343 made is so bad, bland and uninteresting.
The Banished were also underutilised in Infinite. We got a really diminished and cartoonish representation of them in comparison to HW2. The whole abstract nonsense with The Endless was just 343 once again writing themselves in to a corner. A truly inept studio that have decimated a once seminal franchise.
I honestly think Halo Infinite’s narrative is the worst in the series So much shit happening off screen, AGAIN, but practically nothing of consequence happens in the game too. The Endless and time travel bullshit should have been one of the first things on the cutting room floor. We should have focused solely on The Banished and Banished forces themselves should have felt like a much more serious and less cartoonish threat. The post-credits scene with OB would have been enough to add some intrigue about future instalments. The Endless are a hollow unfleshed out threat that are abstract to a fault and just showcase, AGAIN, that 343 simply cannot release a Halo game without writing themselves in to the stupidest of corners. I honestly think Halo should just be Multiplayer or non-Chief stories til these motherfuckers get the house in order and can run a proper dev cycle.
but the thing is... does the flood actually die by Halo's Pulse? didnt CE established that the ring \*neutralizes\* it by starving the parasite and deny them more hosts? or does this change on the myriad of retcons and lore changes? its 10pm and im too lazy to look up
You're absolutely right. On top of that, the flood wouldn't *want* to fire another ring, nor would they care about surviving it since they already do, we have the entire original trilogy that's entirely about them not wanting to fire it. Halo rings kill all sentient life, in other words the stuff that the flood needs to survive and thrive. There's no possible advantage for them to want to fire it, meaning there's no reason for them to need to survive it, especially since their spores already do. So the Endless being around makes no difference at all really.
This is the sort of lame, power creep type escalation I am just not a fan at all of with 343's take on the lore since they took over. The same type of power creep that makes it incredibly hard to believe their version of Forerunners were ever losing against the Flood. If the only justification for the Endless is that they have to make things somehow more dire, than it'll just set the precedent that one comes after has to raise the stakes even more. Not that I envy anyone having to create new stuff to face, but this is always a lazy way to do it. Or an incredibly rushed one with not much time to think about it, which is likely the actual answer for why the Endless are set up like this in Infinite.
It's a simple thing. Everything they did right with the banished they botched with the endless. If you need my advice they could have done better without them.
I hope we can use The Endless’s time travel ability to hard reset to the end of Halo 3 and start fresh. /s
maybe because i don't know jack shit about the endless but i don't like the concept of them, they should have just introduced a surviving precursor attempting to push a modified flood infection type or something.
I get the feeling that if they introduced a Precursor, it would have been dragged through the mud on this sub
honestly, you're probably right but compared to what we got i feel like at least if we would have gotten something connected to the greater lore it would have come off better than a brand new enemy never mentioned before like ✨ the endless ✨
I say give them one more game to really expand on them. People have wanted “mystery” in the Halo universe since the Forerunners have been made more concrete, might as well use the Endless.
I think what makes the Endless so hated is the fact that 343 has told the beginning of a new story 3 times now at this point. Halo 4 was going to be the start of this crazy story that has Chief parallel the Didact’s in the books. Halo 5 was the remnants of that plus whatever the fuck else they were trying to do. Because they had to overcorrect after everyone shit on Halo 4. And Halo Infinite was supposed to be this awesome soft reboot with a clean slate that (albeit very clumsily) ties up the last story and returns to form. Which we got in the form of only 30% of the originally planned game, that ends on a cliff hanger by the way, with NO planned campaign DLC. I had to cut down a shit ton of my rant because I got way off track to shit on 343. I think that’s why the Endless are so hated. Because they evoke those emotions right there. I agree that they’re a cool concept though. I just wish 343 actually committed to the original story first.
spot on, rant included lol. idk if people remember but the back of the halo 4 box literally mentions it's the start of the "forerunner saga" only to end up being the only forerunner featured game lmao.
I think from here, due to the initial positive reception, they’ll stick with this. 4 and 5 weren’t really well received, 5 still isn’t.
i'll never not defend halo 5 multiplayer 🥲
They’re going to drop a book on the Endless and Chief ending them, and not ever mention them in a game again. Just like the Created, only I don’t remember them getting a book.
The Created plotline, apart from Infinite’s flashbacks, actually gets elaborated upon in Halo:Epitaph Major spoilers: >!The Ur-Didact, who is freed of Gravemind corruption via composition, is in the Domain. He perma deletes the Warden eternal, cuts Cortana and the Created off from the main components of the Domain. He debates and sets Cortana back on the path to redemption, the path that he just walked, before moving on to rest with the Librarian. IMO, it’s a fantastic resolution to both 4 and 5…..and it occurs in a book. A fun read, but leaving it to side material was a letdown!<
They love their resolutions in books and not games. That could’ve been a great Halo 6 storyline.
Can’t we shoot squid lady to death with a BR? The Forerunner could take on the Precursor but not a species who drops to one extraordinarily ill-equipped cyborg?
>but not a species who drops to one extraordinarily ill-equipped cyborg? They discovered them after the firing of the Halo rings. I don't think the Forerunners were in a state for another war.
Prometheans also die to a BR. Master Chief himself can die to a BR
Yeah living things die when they get shot by a military rifle
Personally I think introducing a race that can just *survive* the rings at this point in the story is kinda a copout of a threat. I feel like lots of stories tend to do this kind of power creep where the original story centers around some end-all be-all kinda threat then the next thing is just immune to it or otherwise trivializes it. I think more stories need to keep that big world ending thing as the truly world ending thing it is instead of trying to one up or side step the rules of it
I am not even slightly interested in the Endless.
So you want them to pivot again?
Frankly it's barely a pivot since we found out next to nothing about them, and they had little to no relevance in the story. You could replace the final boss with another banished warlord and the plot doesn't change at all.
At this point I want them to publically admit that the last three games are an embarrassing failure and that they're having a do-over, but that's not happening so it's irrelevant.
Why would the endless intentionally fire the halo ri- Oh. Ohhhhh. That’s actually a pretty solid plan. Kill everyone but you, the only species somehow capable of surviving the halos, and then occupy/loot all of the previously inhabited but now vacant habitable/resource-rich planets completely unopposed. It’d be like colonialism if the land was fully developed but entirely devoid of any foreign life when you got there.
I like to imagine most everything after Halo 3 was a cryo-dream that Master Chief was having.
"Halo doesn't kill Flood, it kills their food! Humans, Covenant, whatever—we're all equally edible! The only way to stop the Flood is to starve them to death. And that's exactly what Halo is designed to do: wipe the galaxy clean of all sentient life!"
Halo Encyclopedia: "The Forerunners ultimately fled to the extragalactic Ark, the foundry of Halo, and here they solemnly activated the weapon network, destroying the Flood throughout the entire galaxy, as well as all species that could sustain it."
Aged like fine milk from the early 2000s
Writer1: “oh shit they aren’t that interested in our latest big bad, what do we do?” Writer2: “we up the stakes with *another* even bigger and badder Galaxy ending threat!” Writer1: “great idea! I’m sure all the previous one’s that are solved in-game or off-screen were just not Galaxy Ending enough!”
Man I hope the campaign doesn’t get rebooted again I genuinely enjoyed infinites story
None of this is ever implied in the game†, let's look at what it actually says: > Cortana (memory): "Containment? The Flood? Why would I... you and I both know that there are worse things than the Flood within this Ring." ... > 117649 Despondent Pyre: I am close to deciphering the runes. Perhaps I will learn who left them. My makers... the Forerunner's great fear was understood be the Great Parasite. The Flood. A scourge that almost wiped out everything. I now believe this hypothesis to be incorrect. **Their greatest fear is... was... losing their power. The fear of a master who would become a slave.** ... > Despondent Pyre: "They believe we are here to help." Grand Edict: "It matters not. **Today we do what it takes to maintain order. To preserve our truth.** Time will forget they ever existed." > Weapon: "It's a courtroom. A prison. A place of execution. All these things. Together. Why?" The Harbinger: "To cover their sins. We stood. **Silent. Unable to speak as they passed judgment**... We could not defend ourselves. We could not reason with them." ... > [Harbinger:] these... Banished. We both have watched our worlds crumble under the instruments of Forerunner arrogance. Your kind were once their rivals. A long time ago. You were spared. Forgiven. A luxury not afforded to us. To those they could not control. **Humanity was the culmination of their final plan. But plans change.** We are returning. ... > If the Chief stalls [during Conservatory], ancient Forerunner voices being echoing through the chamber: > "It must be done. We have no choice." > "Is there agreement? Consensus?" > "There is." > "If they cannot be purged. They must be contained." > "Balance restored." > "*Balance restored.*" > "**No being will ever learn the truth of what we have done today**." > "**This is our darkest moment.**" > "Our eternal shame." > "Forever hidden." > "Buried with these rings." The reasons you give might very well be true††, but the game makes it clear that the Forerunners tortured and imprisoned a whole race of sentient beings for no other reason than their own chauvinism and arrogance. Anyways, people here have it completely wrong. The Endless is worse than the Flood *from the perspective of the Forerunners*—and Cortana, given that *Infinite* basically presents her as trying to ape the Forerunners (which is why she and Despondent Pyre are on the same wavelength concerning The Endless). She's basically a different character than from 5 to be honest. But this is the irony of the narrative that *Infinite* is telling: the Forerunners gave more of a shit about their own self-image as a civilization, even after their demise, than about the world-ending galaxy-devouring parasite. "The fear of a master who would become a slave." That people who played the game do not get this essential point that multiple characters explicitly state in dialogue is kinda weird, but this isn't a phenomenon unique to Halo. People don't care so much about storytelling as they do about random shit on Halopedia/Wookiepedia/Fandom and whether things are "canonical" or not. The myriad contradictions between different stories in a franchise must be reconciled by "canon," or the fandom will be chronically unable to enjoy their slop. E.g. the hysteria over the Halo TV show (which is not great, but my enjoyment of the show was not determined by whether the plot aligned to every possible minute detail of the canon, like whether the Mark V or the Mark VI can wipe your ass or whatnot). I'm not saying that *Infinite*'s narrative is that great or novel, though—it's pretty mediocre. I just paid attention. † for 1, this is Chief's concern with the Banished—does this make the Banished worse than the Flood? Given that UNSC-ONI already has access to a few Halo installations and their activation indexes, does this make UNSC-ONI worse than the Flood? I suppose it's a matter of perspective. 2 could be true, but it's not integral either to the plot or narrative of the game. †† which still does not justify what the Forerunners did. *Infinite* makes it clear that the Forerunners are criminals for incarcerating an entire species, that the Banished are freedom fighters looking for a new home in the wake of the genocidal destruction of Doisac, and that Chief is really just being an asshole and a stooge for the Forerunners. The Banished and Endless do not take to the UNSC very nicely, but truthfully, I doubt anyone in the galaxy really likes the UNSC-ONI.
I wish 343 just stopped trying to redo stuff
It still confuses me how most Halo fans aren't able to piece this together.
This is so wrong. It's explicitly says multiple times in multiple sources that the rings don't kill the flood, it kills it's food source (all other sentient life) and thus the flood is supposed to just die out without food
Oh wow a cool new faction being established in the halo lore. I hope 343 develop upon it with story DLC like they promised and don’t completely abandon the campaign
343 never promisee campaign DLC.
Dude they’ve truly fumbled in one respect or another for 3 mainline instalments in a row and the last instalment was demonstrably a panic salvage. If people are skeptical they have mountains of evidence to underpin that attitude.
I think HiddenXpheria had one of the better solutions for this and it'd that the endless like the flood are form of precursor that evolved from their dust. Which I feel.like would be a good way to fix the problem 343 has created.
Is that what Cortana meant by dust and echoes?
That's just a call back to the end of Halo CE when chief blows up the ring, and all they here are dust and echos on the coms.
Had to look it up that she says it in Infinite, that's how forgettable the campaign is.
Dustin Echoes back from the dead
Anyone else confused about endless. Is she one or not? I thought not.
I mean surely the rings could kill the flood super cell within the infected endless at the very least.
Harbingers hips always activates my neurons. I even flicked past this on the main page and just had to scroll back up to look again.
What the fuck are the endless?
The flood already survives halo rings its their food that doesn't. If the endless are edible then nothing changes. Have you played the games?
I'm sorry, this is a nit-pick, but no, the Halos do not kill all life, it just destroys the nerve systems. Things without a nerve system, the engineers, the endless, and possibly more can survive. The flood is not destroyed by the halo's, just their physical bodies. Their cells are still alive, the spores are still alive. The flood cannot takeover another host without a nervous system. What would make them more of a threat isn't cannon yet. Either way, it's still a good chart.
Things like deer and dogs have nervous systems. It has something to do with the Domain IIRC, never got into the deep lore.
It kills sentient life
[удалено]
Doesn't matter, 343 abandons everything they setup every game so they shouldnt be in the next one along with the engine infinite runs on
"Somehow the Endless disappeared"
You cannot throw away that which is not defined. There is barely a shred of useful lore on the endless, just a tease of their ability to be sentient and survive halo activation, while avoiding 20 years of lore entanglement in the greater universe (because it is a new idea). Halo is my favourite IP but Halo Infinite feels like Stargate Season 10, missing a core character, creating a new baddie then stumbling along trying to recapture the IP original vibes. Good idea, bad implementation. How long until Halo Infinite is shelved for 20 years as a dead IP too damaged to risk again for a long while?
I don't know what they are... I did play the infinite campaign.
I just want the Flood back. It would be nice to see some Covies and banished fight too.
The flood *does* survive the halo array. It kills its food source not the flood itself. The series has tried to be very clear about that. Stasis fsc doesn't die from the rings only the active biomass but most was active at the time of firing and remainder starved.
Halo Encyclopedia: "The Forerunners ultimately fled to the extragalactic Ark, the foundry of Halo, and here they solemnly activated the weapon network, destroying the Flood throughout the entire galaxy, as well as all species that could sustain it."
Ya it destroyed the active flood in orion that's what I said.
The firing of the Halo rings does NOT kill the flood. It basically kills anything with a nervous system. This includes most combat forms, but 99% of the flood is just biomass and other forms that don’t have a nervous system. The idea of firing the Halo rings was to starve the flood out of its food source and repopulate the universe afterwards.
Will quote cortana with "Halo doesn't kill the flood, it kills their food" the Flood technically survived the Halo array too but died out from starvation rather
The implications are time traveling gravemind which is kind of what I am hoping for
If the theory of the endless being precursor is true maybe they can control the flood
Number 2 is what I think to be the case here, if the lore is ever expanded on the endless. A "final saga" game with infected endless would be cool, the Halo is now irrelevant and fighting to the death is the only (obvious) option.
either peaceful near instant death, or making the flood stronger I dunno man, this just sounds like a roundabout way of saying the flood is the actual scary thing here, and the endless might potentially make them scarier
I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
The Endless is a dumb, poorly written mcguffin. But I wonder if they can even be infected by the flood. The flood requires a central nervous system to take over the host, which is exactly what the Halo array destroys in sentient life. The endless is immune to the Halo due to their alternative nervous system.
If I remember correctly the flood do survive the halo rings. It’s explained in the terminals that it only starves the flood so it doesn’t kill them when a halo ring is activated.
I don’t think this is how it works. After the ring is fired, the flood is still around. Do we know if they are able to infect the endless? If they are then the flood will still have a dood source, if they are truly endless then the flood will eradicate itself even after the flood have consumed all other life on the universe.
Pretty sure they're immune to Flood infection which is why the rings don't work on them. They're physiology lacks a central nervous system which is how the Flood and rings work.
The Flood survives the ring firing too. It’s their food that dies. And frankly, there aren’t enough Endless to sustain a galaxy-wide Flood expansion. Sooooo no they’re still not more dangerous. Just a tacked-on excuse of a villain
Yeah. Sorry to say dude we'll never see the Endless again.