I wished they had taken this approach. Forerunners are back, but you don't know why. Cortana long gone due to rampancy (maybe she self destructs to prevent it or found some kind if forerunner containment doohickey on the forerunner structure they crash on but leaves pre recorded messages to MC.
They could then have this 50 (or even 150) year period - where humanity rebuilds, the covenant gets more fleshed out, humanity encounters forerunners - that could be explored in fiction and game spin offs. And you don't have to drive a cool forerunner artifact that you only barely get to explore into the sun.
As it is the timing just feels off, an example being Thorne more torn up about a city versus the near extinction of humanity.
I would have loved this too. Hell, maybe even keep MC in cryo for 100+ years, if they were ballsy enough to do it.
I think that could have made for one awesome story, with MC waking up to a galaxy that's almost totally unknown again, where the Spartan program has long since shut down and he's almost a mythical figure, and Cortana is just
gone. Imagine waking up on a crashed FOD on some unknown world to complete silence.
Even if they did bring back the Covenant again, it wouldn't feel as much as a retread as it did in Halo 4, because they would have the opportunity to totally reinvent them and show how they've changed over the years. Maybe introduce some newly discovered alien races to the Covenant, or just as their own faction. Even the humans might be wildly different.
But instead, MC gets woken up barely after he goes into cryo, and we're on yet another Forerunner structure, fighting the same old Covenant, with the same old sandbox (plus a couple new weapons and vehicles). Two out of the three new enemies are, gameplay-wise, pretty similar to old enemies with a gimmick or two thrown in.
I mean, I get
why they took the story in that direction. I just feel like it really took away from the potential creative freedom they could have had with the other approach.
Also I really can't muster any amount of interest in the direction the current story is going. I couldn't care less about the Halo EU, and any potential directions for the storyline now just seem really boring, tbh. (if someone wants to tell me why its not, I'd love to be convinced otherwise)
Wasn't Nathan Fillion apparently the voice for the Halo 5 trailer? Hope that means Buck and the squad are returning.
