Except setting up the status quo for Halo 5, which is... sorta what you'd expect from a bridging story.
What status quo? None of the primary actors in Spartan Ops are primary actors in Halo 5.
Jul didn't die until the end of the first mission.
That... doesn't change my point in any way. The dude was irrelevant.
Halsey's story isn't done yet
So? Halsey had a very specific story set up between Halo 4 and Halo 5's release. It had zero impact on Halo 5. At all.
True, but was it ever advertised as being groundwork for H5?
It was released as content filler between games, as part of a heavy media burst leading up to Halo 5's release. It was never meant as a direct tie in, true. It's literally just filler.
YMMV, I'm a fan and I liked it.
Glad you did. Wish I did.
Also never advertised as groundlaying. It did suck tho.
I dunno man, going back to the Ark post Halo 3 had me hyped as all hell. The disappointment from this book was tangible.
Again, not all the extended 'verse stuff is groundwork.
World building, flesh outs, filler. It keeps the ball rolling.
Agreed, but it definitely laid a lot of groundwork for 4 and later 5. Unfortunately.
Honestly? I feel I could expose the major items from each book and clearly detail how they went nowhere and ultimately meant nothing. This is the series that start the Halsey bashing. The series that set up Jul. That reduced the Onyx story to... a forgotten macguffin. That showed so much interesting non-UNSC stuff then... forgot about it all.
Sorry, the K5 wounds still haven't healed.
Arguably sets up Cortan's return; if the Didact survived falling into Slipspace, makes sense she could, too. It was stupid, but it did lay groundwork.
So we need a dozen super Composers to re-kill Cortana?
The less said about Halsey, the Librarian and jAnus key, the better.
YMMV. Loved season 2, admittedly not to the extent of season 1. Definitely had nothing to do with H5 specifically, though.
After season one, instead of throwing money at the writing team, they threw money at the casting director and ballooned it with more celebrities than a C-List Hollywood after party
#HuntTheActualPointoftheStory
Benjamin Giraud's fate is a pretty good analogy for the story itself.
It did, indeed, suck. But it also established the backstory of one of the main characters, so it definitely laid groundwork.
I actually clapped when Cortana in Halo 5 named dropped the stupid new Covenant species that they shoehorned into Nightfall.
Except, we did. It definitely didn't measure up to the story promised in the ads, but it did follow the general structure promised. Chief DOES go rogue and Osiris IS dispatched to bring him in. That things go solidly sideways halfway through doesn't change that the events depicted do play out, even in an unsatisfactory manner.
Nah, I'm not going to bend on this point. The tone, the ideas presented. Implied. There was no great hunt. No great rivalry. No great meeting. No real meaningful conflict. There was a justified push back from players post released about feeling lied to. They were justified. The Chief going "rogue"? You actually remember how that played out in the game? Disappointing is a severe understatement here.
The ad campaign was as disappointing as the mo-capped showdown cutscene in the game itself.