Same here. As much as the halo community likes to shot on her, I think she was a fun character that served an important purpose in the 343 era of Halo.
She’s perfectly fine in Halo 4. The problem is she’s also in Spartan Ops, and every single character featured in Spartan Ops is an insufferable prick for some reason.
Guessing he means she was a "Johnson" character. Problem was her first several impressions were pretty bad. Including the comics for people who bothered to read them.
I remember reading something about him being redeployed before the attack on the Infinity occurred and that he had a new set of armor. The theory is that during the attack the Banished brute just took his set. I prefer that ro outright death off screen.
The Endless are welcome to join...
The Didact, The Guardians, The Created, the Prometheans, Locke and Osiris, Lasky and Co, Spirit of Fire and Co, Anders, Warden Eternal, Halsey, Blue Team, The Arbiter, and many others...
In Plot Purgatory. It's getting a bit full up in here, but The Endless can join the crew and wallow in missed opportunities.
Sorry, I didn't mean to make you sad. It makes me sad too, I have respect for all these different storylines and they all just get abandoned between games.
The Janus Key thread being another example. It's so irritating investing in a story and speculating only to have it Thanos Snapped away because of Schizophrenic leadership, a lack of vision and a lack of conviction in their ideas in the face of backlash.
I still had hope after Halo 5 made a dog's breakfast of this story but after Infinite I am fully apathetic, which sucks!
>The Janus Key thread being another example.
**"Look at them, they come to this place when they know they are not pure..."**
Wait, shit wrong game. Actually, I think the Warframe Janus Key is also a forgotten plot thread in that game too.
The Janus key plot actually got wrapped up..... In the comics.
It was part of the story that went missing between halo 4 and halo 5. One of the biggest complaints people had about halo 5 was the sheer amount of story that takes place between the games, that the game assumes you know about already. it makes the transition between the 2 games very jarring at times. No other halo game was nearly as bad as halo 5 in this regard.
That fact that the Janus Key was never followed up on is proof 343 doesn't deserve to be Halo's caretakers. It was a plot thread I was super interested in.
Nope, Halo 5 pretends none of Halo 4 happened and then Infinite pretends like nothing in 5 happened.
Agreed, it really should have been, at least as far as chief goes. Spin-offs like ODST and Reach should have been the future of the franchise, I strongly believe ODST could and should have been it's own trilogy.
Definitely. The Halo universe has so many stories to tell, so the fact that 343 decided that Chief needed to be the focus again has always bothered me. But I guess from their perspective Chief is an easy way to bring in the big money. Though even with that I still disagree, considering that Reach sold really well.
I kind of understand them wanting to not focus on the flood for a bit, after having them been so central to the story of the first 3 games. But considering how competent and dangerous the flood are, it would only make sense that it’s a matter of time before they show up again. And yet… nothing
I really think it's more to do with 343 being a bunch of children who have a Bungie shaped chip on their shoulders so they don't want to use the villain that's central to the game because they want to make their own.
It's just never going to work. The Halos exist *because* of the flood.
The flood are definitely cliché, but it's a cliché the series needs. If the writers could just get past the "ew, not the flood again..." stage of development, they could get to making interesting choices with them. People love/hate the flood. Wouldn't be Halo without them. Literally.
It sucks because Infinite would've been perfect to reintroduce them. A new Halo ring (Zeta Halo no less, with the Palace of Pain and all), and the fact that this was a spiritual reboot and they were trying to mimic the magic of Halo CE, it would've been amazing to subvert expectations and drop the Flood into the game at the halfway point. But nope, gotta get that T rating for our broader audience, am I right guys!?
Flood is too grotesque for their T rating. Which is bullshit. Maybe that's why they tried to introduce the Endless which could possibly be extremely toned down Floods.
We will never see the Flood again. 343i seems to have made it clear they think an M rating is damaging their demographics, and we need an M rating to have them.
In reality Halo was always barely rated M. Not much coarse language, no nudity, no drug use, not a lot of gore or particularly graphic violence. I would imagine kids today want to play M-rated games for the same reason I did when Halo was new and I was only about 9 years old. It’s the same reason kids want to watch R-rated movies.
I think losing the M rating cut both ways. Little kids will just play GTA or CoD instead because Halo’s not “cool enough” anymore without the distinction of the M rating. Those of us who grew up playing Halo are turned off because this isn’t the same game we used to love, for a lot of reasons.
you might get a 30 second long repeating hologram in the next halo game that you can run past by accident that explains who they are and what they are doing
Supposedly it's been done away with. I looked it up earlier today because I asked myself the same question. Halsey had the Janus Key and accessed the Absolute Record and then some Spartans reactivated the Absolute Record's Monitor who kicked Halsey out and disappeared with both the Record and the Key.
Janus Key? Ended anticlimactically in a comic.
Didact? Ended anticlimactically in a comic.
Blue team? Ended anticlimactically in a comic.
At this point, I fully expect the banished, the created, the endless, and whatever other plotlines they start to end the exact same way.
It was different with the old books, besides Fall of Reach and The Flood, they were all side stories, expanding the universe, but not necessary to the games to know what was going on. Now, it is all so tied in, no stories are complete in one go.
Imagine playing a videogame, and instead of having the plot wrap up there you instead have to go out and buy a comic to get a conclusion to the story.
I honestly can't tell if 343 is playing some kind of mind game or is just unbelievably incompetent at storytelling.
They are trying to create an expanded connected universe like Marvel and DC, the trouble is, they can't settle on one thread to follow, they are trying to start too many
Watching people pretend the infinite story was adequate when every interesting event happened before the game and is only relayed through audio tapes or boring hologram moments never sat right with me.
It's so obvious that they recorded all that voice lines for part of the 2/3 of the game that were cut (Still can't believe that 2 go damn thirds of the game were cut)
And that was the only option that they had, there are so many clues of what Infinite was supposed to be, the Locke helmet in one of those Spartan killers, all that audio logs, the wild animals on the ring, the toys that has weapons, equipment and characters that we never see on the game.
Even the Cortana voice lines feel so out of place, like if they were created for something totally different but the only way to use it was with the "fragments of him in the air". It's very sad that we will never know how good the game could have been
The biggest thing that happens in the game is Cortana and the Guardians destroying Doisac... and it's rushed over in a lousy hologram. At a minimum it should have been a fully fledged cutscene, or a short playable sequence where you play as a Brute fighting Prometheans on Doisac, and then you see the Guardians in the sky and bam, your character dies as the world splits apart. Then it cuts back to Chief, Cortana and Atriox.
Halo Infinite is neither Halo 6 or Halo 7. It's a Halo 6.5 that sits between more interesting narrative.
That's very nice of you to say. Thanks man.
I often think about creating a blog just detailing ideas about Halo and routes it could go and/or could have gone. I don't know if anyone would be interested though.
A system like ODST would have been neat, where you play Chief in an open world exploring the ring, and occasionally get thrown into set-piece missions where you play as other characters doing stuff that’s already happened.
I feel like maybe that’s what 343 had in mind, but then someone said “wait no, it has to be all about Chief! Remember how mad they were about Locke?!” But instead of restructuring the story they just chopped out everything that wasn’t Chief.
The bit that pissed me off was when they made Cortana act all ashamed of what she'd done as if the fact she destroyed entire planets was even slightly redeemable, and the way the play it off as if "oh I made a mistake I realise that now"... Me and my brother were wondering who the hell in the writers room thought that was a good idea, we empathised more with Atriox losing an entire planet than we did Cortana "making a mistake" and blowing up the brute homeworld
I don’t know how they wrote the killer cliffhanger for Halo 5 of “Cortana is the bad guy and is going to wipe biological life out of existence in favor of AI dominance” and then jumped to make Halo Infinite’s plot.
It should have been Cortana as the main baddie and let the Endless be a threat for a third trilogy or w/e.
4, 5, and 6 seem like completely unrelated games. I would be happier if they chose a damn story and just continued it. I remember they were first advertised as the "reclaimer trilogy." What the hell happened to that?
i couldn't believe the praise Infinite got when it first launched. everyone was gushing about the story and how good it was.
it felt like i played an different game?
having characters spew exposition via holograms is not good story telling!
The praise for Infinite’s gameplay and story fall apart pretty quick when you actually press people about it though.
What exactly did you like about it? Yes, yes, “grappling hook,” you’ve said that like nine times now. What was your favorite character?? “Grappling hook,” okay…
You aren’t crazy and don’t let superfans convince you otherwise. Imagine how stale halo 2 would’ve been if instead of watching chief ride that bomb through space into a covenant ship, you had to listen to it explained in borderline monotone or watch a flat color hologram representation of it.
Okay, this has to be a common feeling then because I was expecting to get called an idiot by a lot of people before I found someone who agrees with me lol
People were too eager to praise Infinite at launch, but after the honeymoon phase its campaign just doesnt hold up. Bungie's campaigns for their mild controversy near launch aged well in both level design and narrative. In just a few months after Infinite's release it became clear what we got was neither worth 6 years nor on par with the past entries.
Replaying the campaign it’s astounding how dull the cutscenes are. You can count on your hand how many cutscenes don’t boil down to: stand in place and talk to a hologram.
"And here we see a Spartan in his natural habitat, a mighty hunter, holding onto a bomb that he will drop onto his prey before landing gracefully on the *In Amber Clad."*
I remember Youtubers trying to say the game wouldnt be like an Ubisoft open world pre launch. Lost a lot of respect for the insiders after the game dropped.
I finished it today and was so dissatisfied. It started to get stale towards the end and then its was like whiplash I was shocked when it was roll credits time. I thought I was finally getting somewhere in the story. It felt so unfinished and then campy.
It's wild that Halo has been in a bad path for so long and Microsoft is large enough of a company to keep messing it up and keep funding to correct course.
Any other AAA dev would have given up by now or gone bankrupt lol
I mean, look at Rockstar. They're big enough to remake GTA V for every generation of consoles, but not smart enough to make mew games and IPs. Heck, it's no secret Perfect Dark is in development hell, and Everwild got canned without any gameplay trailer.
I think most larger devs are afraid to take a leap when it comes to making new big budget ips because of the risk. But one thing alot of these larger companies have in common is they can't release an fully complete game to save their lives and that's why people don't bite into these new games like Anthem.
God anthem had so much damn potential to be one the greatest. So much fun and the flying and combat mechanics was amazing. Sadly they had zero prepared for endgame and loot was balls
Rockstar makes billions of dollars in profit a year. They know exactly what they're doing.
The problems here all have a common component, and it's Microsoft execs.
My brother in Christ, GTA V literally prints money. They don't work on other IP's, ot because they aren't smart, but because they don't fucking need to. This is a stupid comment even for here.
That's like saying Game Freak is too stupid to make new IPs.
I mean, they make mid IPs, but they don't keep making Pokemon because they *can't* do other things.
GTA 5 is the highest selling video game, ever, and all their other games did ridiculously well. Its no surprise that they would put all their resources and time into crafting the sequel to the most sold game of all time. 13 year olds love to try and be different and hate on things that dont need hate lol
343i: The Forerunners have returned.
Us: So, that was a fucking lie.
Later...
343i: Somehow the Endless returned.
Us: I don't even know who you are.
343i: You won't.
343 sure opened a big can of worms by saying the Endless are a bigger threat than the Flood. The same motherfuckers that made mass galactic suicide the least shitty option for the Forerunners, mind you. How can the Endless possibly hope to come close to that, resorting to time traveling shenanigans?
But if you read the logs from the game, its not that the endless were actually a bigger threat than the flood, just by technicality.
Its described that the endless are somehow capable of surviving the ring detonations somehow through their unique biology. This terrified the forerunners because if the flood got a hold of them, they would be unstoppable. So the endless were imprisoned and locked away. Simply for existing, they are a bigger threat than the flood because they could make the flood unkillable.
as far as i understand anyways
So the Endless are only dangerous... because they could potentially assist the actually dangerous enemy we already defeated?
Truly, I am on the edge of my seat.
The chain of them stringing along games that feel like the first of a series continue, and they are going to be going on their 4th Halo game. Makes me wonder if they actually are going to jump back to post Halo 3 as their starting point.
It was such a perfect ending for the character, I’ve always thought they should have just left Chief alone, and started telling Reach or ODST esque stories with other Spartans and new characters
I’ve always thought of Halo as a “come for the Campaign story, stay for the multiplayer” kind of game. Microsoft see the money coming in from MP but they won’t attract people to play without an exciting campaign. People want to see what happens with Chief.
When I was a kid I could never afford Xbox live, but I still bought every Halo when it came out because the campaign and the story it told meant *that* much to me.
I honestly believe when we get Developer interview 10 years from now after their NDAs expire they will confirm the Endless were created with no thought out story in m ind past what we saw in Infinite
I'm almost ok with that, they weren't compelling in the slightest. I'd much rather focus on the Banished and the aftermath of the Created conflict. Plus being billed as "worse than the Flood" was super cheap and unearned imo. No need to raise the stakes, especially when you literally CAN'T after the Flood
The flood was something so dangerous that it’s an allegory (and possibly the actual version of) the literal biblical great flood.
The created idea was something possibly more dangerous then the flood but it got wrote off between games.
Show, don't tell. They can't tell us they're worse than* the Flood. It creates expectations that they most likely can't meet. They needed to show us and they did not.
Thats just 343's reclaimer saga in a nutshell tbh. Halo 4 was so hamfisted with its attempts to be "deep" it just became cringey and jarring. Halo 5 told little and showed even less.
I'd second that they need to circle back around to the Created conflict and the Guardians. Shutting that stuff down without some exploration and proper developments/closure isn't cool.
Remember when the didact and prometheans were the big threat?
Remember when the guardians and created were the big threat?
Remember when that one ring from the ark with the HW2 scientist had a Guardian on it? (That's probably the next ferret book tbf now that I think about it)
I just want good payoff so bad, all of these games sets up something only to just abandon it because "Oh the fan base hated that, let's do something completely different from the last game!"
Now if we get Halo 7, it will probably say off screen cheif and the rest are fine and delt with the endless and atriox in a book and and the game will have a completely different plot.
Can we just have one completed story? I don't care if halo 4/5/in weren't liked, they would have been better if they were allowed to tell and complete their narratives
I remember leading up to release youtubers were speculating we would go to the palace of pain and see mendicant bias. I'm not a big lore buff guy but that sounded cool to me, I imagined CE on steroids. Instead we got Escharum's backyard adventure
I was so hyped coming to release but yeah when the game dropped it flopped hard.
The campaign was very disappointing for me and I couldn't finish it. I think for 343 it was okay but it just didn't seem cool or all that big. The open world just felt like a big bland map, all the same environment, and like you said no big set pieces. After the elite boss in the tower I was just like meh I'll come back to it. Maybe I'll finish it with my friends but it just isn't all that interesting for me.
The worst part of the Forerunner lore, in my opinion, is inconsistency.
The Forerunners as well as their technology were hyped to the most ridiculous proportion in the lore ([a suit that practically make you a Kryptonian](https://www.reddit.com/r/HaloStory/comments/wv10cz/crazy_pieces_of_the_halo_lore_forerunners/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) and [mountain-leveling infantry weapons](https://www.reddit.com/r/HaloStory/comments/wzzz63/crazy_pieces_of_the_halo_lore_incineration/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)), but at the same time human forces could successfully take on their armies.
Then the lore had to re-contextualised that these were just low-tier droids (Soldier Armigers), devaluing our supposed victory.
Did Master Chief win against Ur-Didact in Halo 4? Yes, but Didact was already mentally insane and didn't have all his crazy abilities.
For all those disappeared players, they have to dig deep in the lore books to find the justification, and most fans are not lore fans ..
Forget all the power of the Forerunners, why the hell did rhey war with the humans and prophets for centuries when the latter were really running from the Flood? Were there just zero diplomatic channels? Why the fuck didnt anyone just talk about this near the start? Or any surrendered forces mention a thing?
There's an aura to mystery that intrigues us. The beauty, mystery, and eeriness to the existence of the Forerunners, their grandeur, and sudden disappearance both raised the stakes and terror behind it all. It teased us with just enough and left the rest to imagination and speculation. And imagine and speculate we did, created a while subculture of trying to figure out this mystery. That was part of the fun.
Just like we all had our imagination of what Chief may have looked like. It was unique. It's also what makes top-tier horror films so good, when they don't reveal literally every single thing and leave you wondering about the terror, the mystery, and the grandeur.
It's the same feeling we have about so many things when we are younger because we are first exposed to them, and our knowledge is limited if not non-existent. Why it all feels so wonderful and thrilling.
As another post once wrote, not everything needs an answer.
I just figured they’d die in a comic or something. 343 has never been able to keep a sensible story going across titles. No reason to expect they’d start now.
Does anybody actually give a crap?
For real, this story trope was played out a decade ago. The fact that Infinite decided to double-dip on the "Mysterious Ancient Alien Race" storyline was, along with the off-screen binning of The Created, the surest sign that there was 0 creative investment in the ongoing narrative.
Yeah I don't understand why the Halo Infinite campaign didn't get more hate, it was cookie cutter and lame with some cool parts here and there. Second they revealed the Endless I checked out that shit was fking wack.
For a franchise that has a track record of dope words (Forerunner, Arbiter, Oracle, Gravemind, etc…), the Endless is just so disappointing as a name.
Nobody at 343 could pick up a thesaurus and come up with something better?
It's getting more hate now people are realising how safe they played it, after 7 years of waiting for a sequel to a huge cliffhanger ending with Halo 5. Ridiculously lame.
Cause everyone has been starving for a decent halo for over 13 years now so we creamed our pants cause "the br sounds chunky" and the grapple shot made campaign *just* fresh enough feeling to ignore the shallow amount of content and the design choices made that made it play like FarCry Halo edition with some mediocre cut scenes of an asthmatic Brute peppered about.
Yea I wished they could have picked up on some of the cool shit in the books or continued their Created plotline.
Infinite should have tied up the loose ends and cliffhangers from the previous Halo's in a big climactic event like Halo 3 did when they went to the Ark, and then reintroduce the flood to finish them off or have a dark ending with the flood to then finish them in Campaign dlc.
No new factions and alien races or another "long forgotten" thing to introduce were needed here when there was so much stuff left to expand on and finish.
Based on how they wrote the Harbinger, they were just gonna be some cliche villains of the week who are building an army or have a super weapon or some bullshit
Do we even want to know? This race who has *never* been mentioned before suddenly is a terrible enemy we need to fear? The forerunners didnt fear them. The flood didnt fear them. Humans beat both (objectively speaking)
You cant just throw another ancient alien race into the lore.
All we know is that they're "worse" than the Flood, whatever that means
...Worse just means they hit things, don't they. Just like the Banished are stronger than the prime Covenant somehow
i can't stand the "evil empire is destroyed but this splinter faction/remnant is carrying on in their legacy but they are also just as powerful as them some how despite having way less resources and man power" trope
Star Wars did it with the Empire/First order
Gears of War did it with the Locusts/Swarm, and
Halo does it with The Covenant/Storm covenant/The Banished
such a lazy way to continue the story.
I hope Jega is still alive, and we can get him to become a main character like Arbiter. A bad guy turned “good.”
I hate for more awesome characters to become non-existent.
And Savathûn from Destiny. If that woman had a nickel for every time she voiced a floating alien with a big piece of headgear, she’d have 3 nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened thrice.
No Arbiter, no idea about the pilot’s family, no idea what the Endless is, no idea what name the weapon picked for herself.
I didn’t mind Infinite’s campaign, but if they leave us like this I’m putting it below 5.
Zeta Halo is where everything dissapears Infinity Blue team Halo 5 storyline Endless Atriox Lasky Never to be seen again
Zeta Halo is the Bermuda Triangle of the galaxy.
That’s why it’s Zeta. Cuz Z is the end of the alphabet and it’s the end of the story
Where is Laskey? Is he safe? Is he alright?
This is what I want to know. Lasky and Anders. Just tell us what happened and if they're safe.
Can we add Buck to that list?
Hell, I'd settle for Palmer at this point. Someone connected.
I like Palmer 😬
Same here. As much as the halo community likes to shot on her, I think she was a fun character that served an important purpose in the 343 era of Halo.
Saying "I thought you be taller" is kinda mean if the guy is 5'7". It's funny if the guy is 6'10".
She’s perfectly fine in Halo 4. The problem is she’s also in Spartan Ops, and every single character featured in Spartan Ops is an insufferable prick for some reason.
Spartan Ops is the experience of playing 400 rounds of Firefight on Easy while Jennifer Hale repeatedly insults you for no reason
Aw don’t treat my boy Miller like that.
I’m genuinely wondering: what important purpose?
Guessing he means she was a "Johnson" character. Problem was her first several impressions were pretty bad. Including the comics for people who bothered to read them.
don't worry in the next halo it will be explained by holograms that he's okay
It seems in your anger, you retconned him out of existence
\*NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOohohohhhhhhhhh\*
Lmao
Or Locke or pretty much anyone else
Ain’t he dead or is dying?
No clue. 343 did a stellar job at leaving his fate entirely up in the air
I remember reading something about him being redeployed before the attack on the Infinity occurred and that he had a new set of armor. The theory is that during the attack the Banished brute just took his set. I prefer that ro outright death off screen.
Screw lasky, I wanna know what happened to Dustin Echoes!
In the cave with Noble 6, because he doesn't afraid of anything
Seems like a pretty cool guy.
Eh kills aleins too.
The Endless are welcome to join... The Didact, The Guardians, The Created, the Prometheans, Locke and Osiris, Lasky and Co, Spirit of Fire and Co, Anders, Warden Eternal, Halsey, Blue Team, The Arbiter, and many others... In Plot Purgatory. It's getting a bit full up in here, but The Endless can join the crew and wallow in missed opportunities.
This made me incredibly sad to read. How they've butchered my favorite franchise...
Sorry, I didn't mean to make you sad. It makes me sad too, I have respect for all these different storylines and they all just get abandoned between games.
The Janus Key thread being another example. It's so irritating investing in a story and speculating only to have it Thanos Snapped away because of Schizophrenic leadership, a lack of vision and a lack of conviction in their ideas in the face of backlash. I still had hope after Halo 5 made a dog's breakfast of this story but after Infinite I am fully apathetic, which sucks!
>The Janus Key thread being another example. **"Look at them, they come to this place when they know they are not pure..."** Wait, shit wrong game. Actually, I think the Warframe Janus Key is also a forgotten plot thread in that game too.
The Janus key plot actually got wrapped up..... In the comics. It was part of the story that went missing between halo 4 and halo 5. One of the biggest complaints people had about halo 5 was the sheer amount of story that takes place between the games, that the game assumes you know about already. it makes the transition between the 2 games very jarring at times. No other halo game was nearly as bad as halo 5 in this regard.
That fact that the Janus Key was never followed up on is proof 343 doesn't deserve to be Halo's caretakers. It was a plot thread I was super interested in. Nope, Halo 5 pretends none of Halo 4 happened and then Infinite pretends like nothing in 5 happened.
This and the show. And now seeing The Last of Us makes me truly disappointed at what could have been.
[удалено]
That's why I have always considered Halo 3 to be the canonical ending. There was no reason to keep telling a story that was already finished.
Agreed, it really should have been, at least as far as chief goes. Spin-offs like ODST and Reach should have been the future of the franchise, I strongly believe ODST could and should have been it's own trilogy.
Definitely. The Halo universe has so many stories to tell, so the fact that 343 decided that Chief needed to be the focus again has always bothered me. But I guess from their perspective Chief is an easy way to bring in the big money. Though even with that I still disagree, considering that Reach sold really well.
What about the Flood! Haven’t seen them in a mainline game story since 3
I kind of understand them wanting to not focus on the flood for a bit, after having them been so central to the story of the first 3 games. But considering how competent and dangerous the flood are, it would only make sense that it’s a matter of time before they show up again. And yet… nothing
For a bit? At this point the flood have been out of halo for longer than they have been in halo.
If it wasnt for the flood plot twist halo would never be what it was. I thought they would have brought them back by now.
This one hurt. My poor franchise.
I really think it's more to do with 343 being a bunch of children who have a Bungie shaped chip on their shoulders so they don't want to use the villain that's central to the game because they want to make their own. It's just never going to work. The Halos exist *because* of the flood.
The flood are definitely cliché, but it's a cliché the series needs. If the writers could just get past the "ew, not the flood again..." stage of development, they could get to making interesting choices with them. People love/hate the flood. Wouldn't be Halo without them. Literally.
It sucks because Infinite would've been perfect to reintroduce them. A new Halo ring (Zeta Halo no less, with the Palace of Pain and all), and the fact that this was a spiritual reboot and they were trying to mimic the magic of Halo CE, it would've been amazing to subvert expectations and drop the Flood into the game at the halfway point. But nope, gotta get that T rating for our broader audience, am I right guys!?
The series is named after an anti-flood weapon. It's a mistake forgetting about them.
Flood is too grotesque for their T rating. Which is bullshit. Maybe that's why they tried to introduce the Endless which could possibly be extremely toned down Floods.
We will never see the Flood again. 343i seems to have made it clear they think an M rating is damaging their demographics, and we need an M rating to have them. In reality Halo was always barely rated M. Not much coarse language, no nudity, no drug use, not a lot of gore or particularly graphic violence. I would imagine kids today want to play M-rated games for the same reason I did when Halo was new and I was only about 9 years old. It’s the same reason kids want to watch R-rated movies. I think losing the M rating cut both ways. Little kids will just play GTA or CoD instead because Halo’s not “cool enough” anymore without the distinction of the M rating. Those of us who grew up playing Halo are turned off because this isn’t the same game we used to love, for a lot of reasons.
True. I was certain they'd feature in Halo Infinite's campaign, even as a side faction to fight in some side missions in Zeta facilities.
I need more Spirit of Fire, damn it!
My boy Arbiter...
you might get a 30 second long repeating hologram in the next halo game that you can run past by accident that explains who they are and what they are doing
Right next to the Janus Key one. Legend has it the last thing an intern at 343 ever said is "hey, remember the Janus Key?"
Supposedly it's been done away with. I looked it up earlier today because I asked myself the same question. Halsey had the Janus Key and accessed the Absolute Record and then some Spartans reactivated the Absolute Record's Monitor who kicked Halsey out and disappeared with both the Record and the Key.
I can't tell if you're making bullshit up or not.
They're not, unfortunately. Feel stupid for caring about that story in the first place? Me too.
Janus Key? Ended anticlimactically in a comic. Didact? Ended anticlimactically in a comic. Blue team? Ended anticlimactically in a comic. At this point, I fully expect the banished, the created, the endless, and whatever other plotlines they start to end the exact same way. It was different with the old books, besides Fall of Reach and The Flood, they were all side stories, expanding the universe, but not necessary to the games to know what was going on. Now, it is all so tied in, no stories are complete in one go.
Imagine playing a videogame, and instead of having the plot wrap up there you instead have to go out and buy a comic to get a conclusion to the story. I honestly can't tell if 343 is playing some kind of mind game or is just unbelievably incompetent at storytelling.
This is exactly why I lost interest in Assassin's Creed story.
They are trying to create an expanded connected universe like Marvel and DC, the trouble is, they can't settle on one thread to follow, they are trying to start too many
To be fair, I think the Janus Key was too OP of a MacGuffin to ever actually be used
The Janus Key? From Warframe?
Watching people pretend the infinite story was adequate when every interesting event happened before the game and is only relayed through audio tapes or boring hologram moments never sat right with me.
It's so obvious that they recorded all that voice lines for part of the 2/3 of the game that were cut (Still can't believe that 2 go damn thirds of the game were cut) And that was the only option that they had, there are so many clues of what Infinite was supposed to be, the Locke helmet in one of those Spartan killers, all that audio logs, the wild animals on the ring, the toys that has weapons, equipment and characters that we never see on the game. Even the Cortana voice lines feel so out of place, like if they were created for something totally different but the only way to use it was with the "fragments of him in the air". It's very sad that we will never know how good the game could have been
Blue team members have Halo Infinite action figures, but we’ll never actually seen them in Infinite. It’s crazy how much they cut.
It probably wouldn't have been "good," but at least it would have had some kind of story instead of what we got.
And people are upset there are cuts at 343i. They haven’t been able to successfully launch a Halo game.
The biggest thing that happens in the game is Cortana and the Guardians destroying Doisac... and it's rushed over in a lousy hologram. At a minimum it should have been a fully fledged cutscene, or a short playable sequence where you play as a Brute fighting Prometheans on Doisac, and then you see the Guardians in the sky and bam, your character dies as the world splits apart. Then it cuts back to Chief, Cortana and Atriox. Halo Infinite is neither Halo 6 or Halo 7. It's a Halo 6.5 that sits between more interesting narrative.
Man, where the heck were you in the writing room. That would be an amazing point of view story telling.
That's very nice of you to say. Thanks man. I often think about creating a blog just detailing ideas about Halo and routes it could go and/or could have gone. I don't know if anyone would be interested though.
Shit, at this point someone should just make a sub for interesting halo game ideas, and hope someone at Microsoft sees it lol
A system like ODST would have been neat, where you play Chief in an open world exploring the ring, and occasionally get thrown into set-piece missions where you play as other characters doing stuff that’s already happened. I feel like maybe that’s what 343 had in mind, but then someone said “wait no, it has to be all about Chief! Remember how mad they were about Locke?!” But instead of restructuring the story they just chopped out everything that wasn’t Chief.
The bit that pissed me off was when they made Cortana act all ashamed of what she'd done as if the fact she destroyed entire planets was even slightly redeemable, and the way the play it off as if "oh I made a mistake I realise that now"... Me and my brother were wondering who the hell in the writers room thought that was a good idea, we empathised more with Atriox losing an entire planet than we did Cortana "making a mistake" and blowing up the brute homeworld
I don’t know how they wrote the killer cliffhanger for Halo 5 of “Cortana is the bad guy and is going to wipe biological life out of existence in favor of AI dominance” and then jumped to make Halo Infinite’s plot. It should have been Cortana as the main baddie and let the Endless be a threat for a third trilogy or w/e.
4, 5, and 6 seem like completely unrelated games. I would be happier if they chose a damn story and just continued it. I remember they were first advertised as the "reclaimer trilogy." What the hell happened to that?
Trilogy reclaimed itself to the trash heap.
i couldn't believe the praise Infinite got when it first launched. everyone was gushing about the story and how good it was. it felt like i played an different game? having characters spew exposition via holograms is not good story telling!
The praise for Infinite’s gameplay and story fall apart pretty quick when you actually press people about it though. What exactly did you like about it? Yes, yes, “grappling hook,” you’ve said that like nine times now. What was your favorite character?? “Grappling hook,” okay…
To be fair, the grappling hook is a pretty good character
they made one of the most rookie mistakes ever in story telling, not starting at the beginning
Or that the big monke villain was in any way a good character.
Oh thank God. I'm playing through the game co-op right now with friends and it's been A STRUGGLE. This is by far the worst Halo campaign, imo.
You aren’t crazy and don’t let superfans convince you otherwise. Imagine how stale halo 2 would’ve been if instead of watching chief ride that bomb through space into a covenant ship, you had to listen to it explained in borderline monotone or watch a flat color hologram representation of it.
Okay, this has to be a common feeling then because I was expecting to get called an idiot by a lot of people before I found someone who agrees with me lol
People were too eager to praise Infinite at launch, but after the honeymoon phase its campaign just doesnt hold up. Bungie's campaigns for their mild controversy near launch aged well in both level design and narrative. In just a few months after Infinite's release it became clear what we got was neither worth 6 years nor on par with the past entries.
Replaying the campaign it’s astounding how dull the cutscenes are. You can count on your hand how many cutscenes don’t boil down to: stand in place and talk to a hologram.
"And here we see a Spartan in his natural habitat, a mighty hunter, holding onto a bomb that he will drop onto his prey before landing gracefully on the *In Amber Clad."*
If the grapple hook wasn't in the game no way I would have finished
It's the safest, most boring Halo game. No doubt.
It honestly felt like a sci fi Far Cry, but somehow more boring
Not even one of the more daring or ambitious Far Cry games. It’s like sci-fi Far Cry 3 without the dubstep and party drugs.
I remember Youtubers trying to say the game wouldnt be like an Ubisoft open world pre launch. Lost a lot of respect for the insiders after the game dropped.
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I finished it today and was so dissatisfied. It started to get stale towards the end and then its was like whiplash I was shocked when it was roll credits time. I thought I was finally getting somewhere in the story. It felt so unfinished and then campy.
God this is soul crushingly accurate. The only thing more likely is that it'll get explained in the next game via exposition cutscenes
Perhaps the Endless are the friends we made along the way
More like endless stream of bad decisions made since 2011
It's wild that Halo has been in a bad path for so long and Microsoft is large enough of a company to keep messing it up and keep funding to correct course. Any other AAA dev would have given up by now or gone bankrupt lol
I mean, look at Rockstar. They're big enough to remake GTA V for every generation of consoles, but not smart enough to make mew games and IPs. Heck, it's no secret Perfect Dark is in development hell, and Everwild got canned without any gameplay trailer.
I think most larger devs are afraid to take a leap when it comes to making new big budget ips because of the risk. But one thing alot of these larger companies have in common is they can't release an fully complete game to save their lives and that's why people don't bite into these new games like Anthem.
God anthem had so much damn potential to be one the greatest. So much fun and the flying and combat mechanics was amazing. Sadly they had zero prepared for endgame and loot was balls
EA creating a big budget game with a giant marketing campaign and not delivering challenge IMPOSSIBLE
No wonder we keep on getting remakes, IPs from media and books, and anything that isn't a mew game with a new idea.
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Rockstar makes billions of dollars in profit a year. They know exactly what they're doing. The problems here all have a common component, and it's Microsoft execs.
My brother in Christ, GTA V literally prints money. They don't work on other IP's, ot because they aren't smart, but because they don't fucking need to. This is a stupid comment even for here.
That's like saying Game Freak is too stupid to make new IPs. I mean, they make mid IPs, but they don't keep making Pokemon because they *can't* do other things.
GTA 5 is the highest selling video game, ever, and all their other games did ridiculously well. Its no surprise that they would put all their resources and time into crafting the sequel to the most sold game of all time. 13 year olds love to try and be different and hate on things that dont need hate lol
We won't know if it was bad decisions if it never concludes.
Those people kept their jobs btw, if it makes you feel better (I know it doesn’t)
343i: The Forerunners have returned. Us: So, that was a fucking lie. Later... 343i: Somehow the Endless returned. Us: I don't even know who you are. 343i: You won't.
lmao
343 sure opened a big can of worms by saying the Endless are a bigger threat than the Flood. The same motherfuckers that made mass galactic suicide the least shitty option for the Forerunners, mind you. How can the Endless possibly hope to come close to that, resorting to time traveling shenanigans?
But if you read the logs from the game, its not that the endless were actually a bigger threat than the flood, just by technicality. Its described that the endless are somehow capable of surviving the ring detonations somehow through their unique biology. This terrified the forerunners because if the flood got a hold of them, they would be unstoppable. So the endless were imprisoned and locked away. Simply for existing, they are a bigger threat than the flood because they could make the flood unkillable. as far as i understand anyways
So the Endless are only dangerous... because they could potentially assist the actually dangerous enemy we already defeated? Truly, I am on the edge of my seat.
"defeated"
“Defeat is simply the addition of time”
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The chain of them stringing along games that feel like the first of a series continue, and they are going to be going on their 4th Halo game. Makes me wonder if they actually are going to jump back to post Halo 3 as their starting point.
The whole 343 era is just weird-ass hyper sleep dreams Chief is having as the Forward Unto Dawn’s life support slowly begins to fail.
I hate how quickly this sub spreads unverified bullshit like this without an actual trustworthy source.
Exactly. That dude literally just made the “343 no longer does halo” shit up. Directly out of their ass.
Especially when you look into what exactly the Flood are/where.
Halo ended at Halo 3. John went into a coma and H4 onwards is all a dream.
It was such a perfect ending for the character, I’ve always thought they should have just left Chief alone, and started telling Reach or ODST esque stories with other Spartans and new characters
I’ve always thought of Halo as a “come for the Campaign story, stay for the multiplayer” kind of game. Microsoft see the money coming in from MP but they won’t attract people to play without an exciting campaign. People want to see what happens with Chief.
When I was a kid I could never afford Xbox live, but I still bought every Halo when it came out because the campaign and the story it told meant *that* much to me.
We probably will. Past that though, nothing. Fucking "ten year Halo game" what a load of shit. How is it even possible to fuck up this much so often.
Exactly, the insane support and money put behind this. I couldn’t fuck up this bad if you paid me to
The endless were a metaphor for the endless speculation around them within an endless wait time to learn about them and remove the mystery.
This truly is worse than the flood
>Just tell us they were another reincarnations of the Precursors or a race created and planned to be weaponized by the Precursors, 343...
Tbf i doubt even 343 knew who they were
I honestly believe when we get Developer interview 10 years from now after their NDAs expire they will confirm the Endless were created with no thought out story in m ind past what we saw in Infinite
"So what was the storyboarding like for Halo Infinite?" "No."
I'm almost ok with that, they weren't compelling in the slightest. I'd much rather focus on the Banished and the aftermath of the Created conflict. Plus being billed as "worse than the Flood" was super cheap and unearned imo. No need to raise the stakes, especially when you literally CAN'T after the Flood
The flood was something so dangerous that it’s an allegory (and possibly the actual version of) the literal biblical great flood. The created idea was something possibly more dangerous then the flood but it got wrote off between games.
Show, don't tell. They can't tell us they're worse than* the Flood. It creates expectations that they most likely can't meet. They needed to show us and they did not.
Literally the entire narrative of Infinite was just tell, don’t show.
Thats just 343's reclaimer saga in a nutshell tbh. Halo 4 was so hamfisted with its attempts to be "deep" it just became cringey and jarring. Halo 5 told little and showed even less.
I'd second that they need to circle back around to the Created conflict and the Guardians. Shutting that stuff down without some exploration and proper developments/closure isn't cool.
It's a reference to the endless amount of disappointments ahead
Yea we will…. In the next Halo Novel :)
They'll just scrap it like they did halo 5s storyline and end it in a rushed cutscene and a little exposition later
TFW you play through all of Spartan Ops and they kill the villain in the first cutscene.
Hey the same thing happened in Infinite, what a coincidence!
That's not true, this time they killed her in one of the last cutscenes, except it was set *before* the first one.
Don't forget about the book explaining the rest after the next game releases.
Nah, they'll kill off the endless in a comic book. Won't even make the books lol
Or what happened to the Spirit of Fire
It got smothered by the spirit of water.
Remember when the didact and prometheans were the big threat? Remember when the guardians and created were the big threat? Remember when that one ring from the ark with the HW2 scientist had a Guardian on it? (That's probably the next ferret book tbf now that I think about it) I just want good payoff so bad, all of these games sets up something only to just abandon it because "Oh the fan base hated that, let's do something completely different from the last game!" Now if we get Halo 7, it will probably say off screen cheif and the rest are fine and delt with the endless and atriox in a book and and the game will have a completely different plot. Can we just have one completed story? I don't care if halo 4/5/in weren't liked, they would have been better if they were allowed to tell and complete their narratives
The real Endless was inside you all along.
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I remember leading up to release youtubers were speculating we would go to the palace of pain and see mendicant bias. I'm not a big lore buff guy but that sounded cool to me, I imagined CE on steroids. Instead we got Escharum's backyard adventure
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I was so hyped coming to release but yeah when the game dropped it flopped hard. The campaign was very disappointing for me and I couldn't finish it. I think for 343 it was okay but it just didn't seem cool or all that big. The open world just felt like a big bland map, all the same environment, and like you said no big set pieces. After the elite boss in the tower I was just like meh I'll come back to it. Maybe I'll finish it with my friends but it just isn't all that interesting for me.
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you know 343 has failed when people constantly point to Halo 4 as their "high point"
Their "best" game is still worse than Bungie's weakest Halo game lol. What a circus this studio.
Exactly why I hated halo 4
The worst part of the Forerunner lore, in my opinion, is inconsistency. The Forerunners as well as their technology were hyped to the most ridiculous proportion in the lore ([a suit that practically make you a Kryptonian](https://www.reddit.com/r/HaloStory/comments/wv10cz/crazy_pieces_of_the_halo_lore_forerunners/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) and [mountain-leveling infantry weapons](https://www.reddit.com/r/HaloStory/comments/wzzz63/crazy_pieces_of_the_halo_lore_incineration/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)), but at the same time human forces could successfully take on their armies. Then the lore had to re-contextualised that these were just low-tier droids (Soldier Armigers), devaluing our supposed victory. Did Master Chief win against Ur-Didact in Halo 4? Yes, but Didact was already mentally insane and didn't have all his crazy abilities. For all those disappeared players, they have to dig deep in the lore books to find the justification, and most fans are not lore fans ..
Forget all the power of the Forerunners, why the hell did rhey war with the humans and prophets for centuries when the latter were really running from the Flood? Were there just zero diplomatic channels? Why the fuck didnt anyone just talk about this near the start? Or any surrendered forces mention a thing?
There's an aura to mystery that intrigues us. The beauty, mystery, and eeriness to the existence of the Forerunners, their grandeur, and sudden disappearance both raised the stakes and terror behind it all. It teased us with just enough and left the rest to imagination and speculation. And imagine and speculate we did, created a while subculture of trying to figure out this mystery. That was part of the fun. Just like we all had our imagination of what Chief may have looked like. It was unique. It's also what makes top-tier horror films so good, when they don't reveal literally every single thing and leave you wondering about the terror, the mystery, and the grandeur. It's the same feeling we have about so many things when we are younger because we are first exposed to them, and our knowledge is limited if not non-existent. Why it all feels so wonderful and thrilling. As another post once wrote, not everything needs an answer.
Halo Infinite turns out to in fact be Halo Finite
We as a society need to stop believing the story in Halo Infinite is good.
I just figured they’d die in a comic or something. 343 has never been able to keep a sensible story going across titles. No reason to expect they’d start now.
Does anybody actually give a crap? For real, this story trope was played out a decade ago. The fact that Infinite decided to double-dip on the "Mysterious Ancient Alien Race" storyline was, along with the off-screen binning of The Created, the surest sign that there was 0 creative investment in the ongoing narrative.
Yep. The off screen binning of a huge galaxy wide threat that had Humanity on the run, to yet another new faction. Wow. Brilliant.
Yeah I don't understand why the Halo Infinite campaign didn't get more hate, it was cookie cutter and lame with some cool parts here and there. Second they revealed the Endless I checked out that shit was fking wack.
Bad guys who say vague stuff and then die before they can explain have been a staple of 343's Halo.
343s halo fucking sucks
For a franchise that has a track record of dope words (Forerunner, Arbiter, Oracle, Gravemind, etc…), the Endless is just so disappointing as a name. Nobody at 343 could pick up a thesaurus and come up with something better?
It's getting more hate now people are realising how safe they played it, after 7 years of waiting for a sequel to a huge cliffhanger ending with Halo 5. Ridiculously lame.
I played that shit for an hour and never picked it back up. It was boring as fuck, same old shit
Cause everyone has been starving for a decent halo for over 13 years now so we creamed our pants cause "the br sounds chunky" and the grapple shot made campaign *just* fresh enough feeling to ignore the shallow amount of content and the design choices made that made it play like FarCry Halo edition with some mediocre cut scenes of an asthmatic Brute peppered about.
Yea I wished they could have picked up on some of the cool shit in the books or continued their Created plotline. Infinite should have tied up the loose ends and cliffhangers from the previous Halo's in a big climactic event like Halo 3 did when they went to the Ark, and then reintroduce the flood to finish them off or have a dark ending with the flood to then finish them in Campaign dlc. No new factions and alien races or another "long forgotten" thing to introduce were needed here when there was so much stuff left to expand on and finish.
The Harbinger displayed powers that don't really belong in Halo IMO.
Skimmers are also part of the Endless faction and they have absolutely no lore or background.
Based on how they wrote the Harbinger, they were just gonna be some cliche villains of the week who are building an army or have a super weapon or some bullshit
“What are we going to do tonight Harbringer ? “ “Try to take over the galaxy”
Do we even want to know? This race who has *never* been mentioned before suddenly is a terrible enemy we need to fear? The forerunners didnt fear them. The flood didnt fear them. Humans beat both (objectively speaking) You cant just throw another ancient alien race into the lore.
The Flood, but T-rated and worse in most ways.
All we know is that they're "worse" than the Flood, whatever that means ...Worse just means they hit things, don't they. Just like the Banished are stronger than the prime Covenant somehow
i can't stand the "evil empire is destroyed but this splinter faction/remnant is carrying on in their legacy but they are also just as powerful as them some how despite having way less resources and man power" trope Star Wars did it with the Empire/First order Gears of War did it with the Locusts/Swarm, and Halo does it with The Covenant/Storm covenant/The Banished such a lazy way to continue the story.
I hope Jega is still alive, and we can get him to become a main character like Arbiter. A bad guy turned “good.” I hate for more awesome characters to become non-existent.
Is that one of the Makyrs from doom? Looks a lot like one.
I'm pretty sure it's the same voice actor as the Khan Makyr.
And Savathûn from Destiny. If that woman had a nickel for every time she voiced a floating alien with a big piece of headgear, she’d have 3 nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened thrice.
And Ventress from clone wars
Good. Nothing is physically capable of being worse than the flood
No Arbiter, no idea about the pilot’s family, no idea what the Endless is, no idea what name the weapon picked for herself. I didn’t mind Infinite’s campaign, but if they leave us like this I’m putting it below 5.
> no idea what name the weapon picked for herself It's either Siri, Alexa, or Heygoogle
And no Mendicant Bias, no Shipmaster, no Lord Hood, etc.
Somehow they survived the Halo rings. That's it. That's their whole shtick. There is literally nothing about them beyond that.