I really enjoyed your article. I think you've nailed a lot of the problems with the modern Halo story. I've played 4 but I've yet to play 5--after your article, I'm not sure that I will.
My one critique is that I'm not sure you've captured the extent to which Halo's backstory and character development have always been missing from the games themselves. It's much worse now, but it's always been bad. It was really Eric Nylund that gave John 117 a set of believable motivations and a coherent history. Same for Dr. Halsey. Without this context, Master Chief is nothing more than a patriotic Clint Eastwood character in power armor.
It's partly because, based on an interview with someone responsible for all those extended universe things... Bungie didn't want or care about that stuff. Bungie didn't want Nylund to write those books, for instance. A lot of the EU stuff was apparently very Microsoft-pushed, not Bungie-pushed.
Halo is heroic military SF.
The expanded universe is a lot more.
The same is true of Star Wars.
Like others have said, it's a well-written article. I disagree with a lot of it though but I'm work and given the effort and care you've put into the article, I don't want to half-ass my own response.
I think what's clear though is that 343 and fans alike would benefit greatly if the next Halo game had a vast codex/library like with Mass Effect games. That could help keep the ever-growing backstory fresh in people's minds from game to game.
I know you didn't mention it in your article, but one person in this thread stated "How did Halsey lose her arm"? Well she lost her arm in the previous damn game. A codex would help out with keeping things that have already happened in previous game fresh in people's minds, and also enriching people's knowledge with codex entries from the expanded universe, stuff that's never been in games but that people can finally read about in codex/library.
A codex is the worst way to tell a story, though. You should tell your story in your story. Establish your characters quickly, keep your scenes nice and short, make everyone's motives extremely clear and always give those motives room to breathe.
But my background is in screenwriting, so I have specific feelings on how to handle this stuff.
A) Sure, there were still a lot of similarities in CE (forerunner mysteries, 343's foreboding dialogue, questions about the motivations of the covenant and the flood...), not to forget the Cortana letters which Bungie more or less completely retconned in Halo 3 (as I was reminded a couple of days ago in this thread). Halo 2 explained a lot of things too quickly and for example the gravemind in 2/3 was absolute butchery of what should have been a really cool character IMO, he should have been left in the terminals and not forced into cutscenes.
B) Yeah, I don't disagree, obviously this is just my opinion as a fan of the series and I can't claim to speak for anyone else.
C) I'd be interested in knowing how this ties into the complete rewrite of the Destiny story and all of the writers leaving soon afterwards... AFAIK all that is known about this stuff is that the Bungie heads weren't interested in the extended universe, but many of the writers were obviously actively engaged in fleshing it out and happily considered Nylund's work completely canon.
As I said I absolutely agree that the way they are telling their story is not working and your Ferrari analogy hits the mark for me, but I can't agree with your complaints about the actual story they are telling.
B) Yeah, and I hope I conveyed that this is what I think Halo should be, and this is why I come to Halo, and other people have completely different, equally valid reasons for coming to the series.
C) As I understand it, there are mechanical people at Bungie and story people, and Bungie has always prioritized the mechanical people.
Right, what I'm trying to do is say "the thing I came to Halo for is gone." I could do another piece explaining what I feel are faults with Halo 4 and 5 on a storytelling mechanics level, just like I could do another place explaining what I feel about the game's actual mechanics, but we're talking about ~9600 total words on Halo 5 at that point. So for this one, I went with this "Here's what I like about Halo, and 343i doesn't do that specific thing."
Nope I don't buy that for me personally. It is Bungie's fault in making what is in essence a simple Space Marine Pew Pew game hard to follow. It wasn't all that easy at the best of times to understand. What someone already said afterwards, the extended universe information is where the meat of the story is and people interested in understanding more need to go that route and were rewarded if they did.
Halo has always been about a singular place and time to jump into and have action. The story was never going to be that meaningful.
I do agree Halo 4 was in that same vein of what the heck is happening here, but Halo 5 was not that hard to understand for me at all. But I am biased because HUNT THE TRUTH campaign added so much other material as well that I followed, could reflect on and add it to my campaign experience.
We just have different view points.
The story in the earlier games meant more to me. Feel free to downplay it, but I personally found it valuable, so I wrote an article on what it meant to me and why I cared. I don't think that's a problem. "You're thinking too much about something that doesn't matter" isn't really a valuable contribution to the conversation, is it?
Part of me wants to write a serious response. The other part of me is about to go watch The Martian. I saved a response to you for last, but this post is already long as it is.
Ok you're hired.
Start at Chief waking up at 4 and give me a galactic spanning threat that can compete with the flood and OG covenant firing off the Halo rings.
Make me feel like a hero every step of the way.
Question #1: Why do I have to start after the fight has been finished? Seriously, I'd be more inclined to write about games for other characters at the beginning of the war. That was a long war with plenty of interesting engagements. My instinct would be to have a more personal war story.
Question #2: Why does the protagonist have to be Chief? There was nothing wrong with being Locke, but everything wrong with being a secondary character in Chief's story. Like, if Chief had been a major player in ODST or Reach, they would have sucked, but he wasn't, so, y'know, they were awesome.
Now, let's say I did start with your premise.
My story would have gone with the line "you ARE Forerunner" from the first game. I would have made Humanity the Forerunner, and I would have gone into a story detailing the origin story of The Flood and the Forerunner's downfall. Basically, I would have explored all the stuff that 343 did in the Greg Bear books, but I would have done that in a game where humans were the Forerunner and there were other big bads out there that had created The Flood. But that's trying to work as closely with what 343i did as possible, and I'd much rather do grand departures from that or do more intimate Covenant War stories.
The gameplay stuff on the other hand has me confused. Halo 5 is probably the least challenging Halo game up until Legendary. You can absolutely run and gun on Heroic except when you're in the middle of a giant firefight and they all have Suppressors. You're otherwise not penalized for it because the AI behavior is easy read and exploit, even in spite of whatever sponginess they may exhibit. It's definitely improved over Halo 4, where you could be out of an Elite's awareness bubble and shoot them until they died right where they stood. But there have been many instances where the AI has stopped shooting at me entirely while my team revived me (if they eve managed to get to me), including the Warden. The only way I beat the last fight on my first playthrough was because Warden didn't slash my whole team when he stood right on top of us.
I don't know what to tell you. My team of robot friends couldn't kill a single elite. I'd hit guys with entire clips without them going down. Individual kills were absolutely taking more shots than they did on Reach Heroic, and my health overall felt significantly less.
DocSuess, you wrote a technically solid article, but I disagree with damn near everything and mostly for one reason:
You have based your entire vision of Halo and what it's supposed to be on this notion of HEROISM. It's almost as if you fell for the ONI propaganda that surrounds Spartans, that they're super powerful and save their fellow soldiers in a pinch and that Halo theme with the pulsating drums in the background makes us feel like we're doing God's work.
But if there's anything that Halo represents, beyond the fact that EVERYTHING WAS THE FLOOD, it's that humans are and have always been their own worst enemies. You said that you couldn't stand that John-117 had been made a walking war crime or that Dr. Halsey made a mad scientist, but ... are you serious?
You're talking about a woman who scoped out 75 six-year old children (through vaccination of all things), kidnapped them, replaced them in their families with flash clones DOOMED TO DIE. Let me repeat that for you. Kidnapped kids, replaced them with doomed mirror children. Augmented beyond human capacity, causing 30 to die (STILL KIDS HERE) and 12 to be crippled and washed out.
You don't want to think of John-117 as a walking war crime? Boo hoo. That's too bad. He is. Every single Spartan II was a war crime. No amount of whitewashing will change that. You're wearing rose-tinted glasses. Bungie never truly addressed the moral issues surrounding the Spartan II project and 343i, though still not where they need to be narrative-wise, have shown a greater degree of respect to the fact than I ever really anticipated.
You don't think that Cortana's motivations make sense? Fine. But let's not forget that AIs have always had the bigger picture in mind and have never hesitated to take things into their own hands if given the power to. See Mendicant Bias for more. I'm not saying she's right, or that the execution around her return and her plan are flawless, but they work, in the grand scheme of things.
I've stated in this very thread and others that I think there was issues with the narrative and character development in Halo 5, so I don't need to do that again right now. But Bungie's Halo trilogy dismissed the Master Chief's humanity and the sticky, unethical moral ramifications of the Spartan II program almost completely. You don't like 343's Halo? There are many that don't.
But to act as if the ugly background of the central characters doesn't count just because it doesn't make you feel "MASTER CHIEF, HECK YEAH" is damn near disingenuous. What it says is that you don't love the actual story of Halo, you just love a certain feeling you associated with earlier games and are not happy that feeling has dispersed since the propaganda has ended.
The actual story of Halo is what you get in Halo, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo ODST, and Halo Reach.
The story you're presenting is extrapolated from a lot of expanded universe stuff. I like the universe. It's really cool. I've read almost every novel that was released. But that's not why I play the
games. 343i might be presenting a world consistent with Microsoft's lore, but it's tonally inconsistent with the games that I enjoyed playing. I didn't buy into "ONI propaganda," because that's expanded universe bullshit. I bought into the experience of
being the Master Chief (and Noble Six and The Rookie).
The best decision Disney made in regards to Star Wars was killing its expanded universe and getting back to basics: what made Star Wars appealing? Why do people go to watch the Star Wars MOVIES? And then they tried (dunno if they succeeded yet) to make a series of movies about that particular feeling. So, yeah, there are definitely elements that would be problematic, like kidnapping kids to make them super soldiers, but... what's "realistic" and what's interesting about Halo/Star Wars are different things.
