Halo coming to the PC after nearly 12 years with the Master Chief Collection - Sensationalist Headlines

To be fair to 343, the additions they made to the franchise before Halo 5 in terms of style and lore weren't that egregious. Some of the designs were iffy, of course, but honestly, the more I look into Halo 4, the more I come away sort of appreciating it. It does seem like the team behind it at the time knew the spirit of what made Halo good and tried to make their own spin on it. It's messy in some areas, and extremely interesting in others. Like I would've loved to have seen how the plot played out after Halo 4 was said and done from the premise it presented. Halo 5 though is a complete garbage fire, and given most of the writing team behind Halo 4 weren't involved with Halo 5 at all, it really shows. Especially with the previously mentioned premise being dropped all together in favor or just generic shooty bang bang "exciting" action. What makes it more baffling is that while they're trying to just make it balls to the wall action, they also plop in characters and knowledge from the extended universe and expect your average Halo player to know exactly who and what they are. Not everyone reads the books, in fact, I'd say the majority of people who play Halo don't read anything on the lore. And then yeah, couple that all with some of the baffling art design choices in the game. Halo Infinite makes me hopeful, but I just hope none of the Halo 5 writing team is involved in any way.

They're treating infinite as a soft reboot, they're not ignoring 5 complete, but it isn't going to be a direct followup. They also have a new art director. They also said it will new player friendly.

The way the phrased Infinite was in context to Halo 1: "Remember when you were fighting the last part of a long war that had been going on long before you start playing?"

Speaking of which, I'd like to see more games set before Halo 1.

It could be neat to see a game set during the anti-UNSC insurrection, with the ending being first contact with and getting btfo'd by the covenant

I really really wasn't a fan of the direction Halo 4 went in at all. Bare in mind the fact that I only remember playing through the game twice, but It wasn't just the change in art direction that threw me, I remember feeling as though the tone changed dramatically. Halo always had it's emotional beats or poignant moments, but these moments often occurred during gameplay- where you would usually still be fighting enemies and a shift to a more sombre tone was conveyed through music and your surroundings. When these moments did occur in cutscenes, the protagonists always reacted with brief pauses before raising their weapons and soldiering on. Yet in Halo 4 there were these really melodramatic moments where people would bicker and argue, or scenes where Masterchief couldn't have looked more like he was sulking without someone coming along and painting a frowny face on his helmet, or whatever those fucking weird forerunner dream sequence exposition dumps were supposed to be. It reminds me a lot of the recent tonal shift in the Fallout franchise. It's jarring when a series changes hands and you can clearly see that the new developers have a drastically different vision for it than it's original creators- it leaves this nagging feeling that somewhere along the way someone really missed the point. At least with the Fallout series Bethesda managed to maintain a very strong art direction- whereas Halo 4 looked and felt completely different from the previous entries.

It feels like with Fallout there are a small handful of people who really like the series and the rest of the company are just humouring them in making new games, while everyone at the company love The Elder Scrolls. With Halo it feels like most of the people working on it really like it but the people in charge were just waiting to write their own fan fiction that was 'better' than the original story, but is actually much, much worse.

They took away the iconic style of the UNSC. They retconned chief's armour from a bulky sci-fi suit of full-plate style power armour to an undersuit with 'realistic' bits of armour stuck ontop. Spartan IVs are just better than all the others but have absolutely no sense of seriousness despite supposedly being professional soldiers (Including things like High-fiving each other). No one's really bothered they found the Master Chief again and act as if he hasn't been missing for years. The Forward Unto Dawn got the iconic design retconned for gameplay reasons, but then that design doesn't make sense with the level. After 3+ games of fighting the Covenant, finally resolving the whole thing after years, they decided it would be a good idea to go back to fighting the covenent-but-not-quite. The story with the Forerunners was something that didn't make too much sense if you haven't read the books. Forerunners are now shiny and glowy with skull-faced robots. I could keep going, there were so, so many problems with Halo 4 that showed they had absolutely no idea how to properly treat the series.

IMO giving Chief some character is one of the better things 343 have done. He's not a Doomguy/Freeman who is purely silent, he quips and comments enough that he deserved some expansion character-wise(outside of books which had already done plenty of it and created a weird disconnect IMO), S-IIs had already been presented as more than quippy killing machines in Reach and if Halo 5 had actually explored that like was teased in the ad campaigns it could have been interesting. They also didn't lean too much into the mopey child soldier stuff, he accepts his circumstances and purpose and knowing a little more about how he thinks could provide a pretty interesting character, especially in gaming were we get a lot of meat heads (up until recently that is) The 343 gene seed/forerunner-human/moving the universe forward stuff is just bad though.

343 Forerunner stuff sucks but it's worth mentioning that some fairly significant elements of the new forerunner backstory was actually made by Bungie, too. Most specifically, the Precursors, the people who made everyone.

Some interesting shit is going to happen post-Infinite. Bonnie said that after Infinite is out the door they'd explore some games set in the Halo universe set in other genres. We might finally see that Halo MMO.

The thing that bothered me most in 4/5 was the inclusion of combat with prometheans who are not very fun to fight at all. The covenant in 1-3 were the most fun singleplayer fps enemies to fight ever.

If you're coming back to the series I highly suggest reading the Eric S. Nylund novels, and Contact Harvest by Joseph Staten. They're fantastic novels on their own but as a refresher for the Halo Feel they can't be beaten. I've been rereading them on my breaks at work and it's ace.

Still waiting for my first contact game staring Sgt Johnson.

I hope it's somehow possible to see the owner stats when all of the games come out on steam. I really want to see how much less Halo 4 is bought in comparison to the big 5.

NB: I still have not played past like halfway through Halo 2 or the first level of Halo 3, and have not read the spoilers within this discussion (thanks for doing those, btw). I'm not going to comment on the qualities of the later games, merely the broader statements being bandied about in this argument. I don't think it's necessary, or even super important, for a game series to have an ultra-consistent art style and perfectly consistent lore. Story is just trimming - it's good to have, it's important it not be distractingly bad, but a great game with a mediocre plot is still a great game (witness Resident Evil 4 - great game, kind of a bad story). What's important with a game is the mechanical identity. A Halo game needs to play like a Halo game. It needs to be a shooter. It needs the split shield/armor system. It needs vehicles. It has characteristic enemy design - very distinct "enemy classes" with fine-grained subtypes, wielding a limited set of weapons (mostly ones you can use yourself). You can stray a bit further in non-core Halo games (I don't think ODST had the shield/armor system?), and you can brand other games with the story and style (Halo Wars), but you can't present those as an actual Halo game. Other series have had far more aesthetic evolution. The Legend of Zelda, even only looking at the 3D ones, has no consistent art style, the tone ranges from "high-school anime" to "dark nightmare fantasy" to "post-apocalyptic", there's literally no overarching setting consistency, and yet because it keeps the core gameplay elements, nobody has trouble accepting Link's Adventure, Wind Waker, and Breath of the Wild in the same series. Doom has been rebooted twice, going from the archetypal 2.5D FPS to a vaguely survival horror game to a death metal shooter-brawler, and the most anyone complained was that Doom 3 was kind of bad. Even game series vaunted for their stories don't have to line up all the lore - no mainline Final Fantasy game is a sequel or prequel to any other*, Bioshock Infinite has only vague allusions to Bioshock 1, Mass Effect 2+3 retconned the shit out of the first game, etc. etc. Having not directly played the games but seen how people talk about the current Halo lore, I kind of get the feeling continuity is starting to drag the series down a bit. The people writing the wikis keep using weird fictional names for enemies instead of "Grunt" or "Elite" - I know wiki editors are going to be 10000% more invested than most players, but that still reflects poorly on the gameplay:story ratio. People keep looking for in-universe explanations for every gameplay change - for example, we don't need some convoluted backstory for why Halo 2 had no Assault Rifle, that's clearly because they split it into the weaker but dual-wieldable SMG and the long range-focused Battle Rifle, and then they brought it back because players bitched so damn much. A soft reboot might be good for the series. Take all the inconsistencies and just throw them out, brush away anything sticking around that doesn't fit what the games have iteratively become, wipe away any lingering urge to bring back a third-line character or ancillary story point as a critical plot element. Like I'm sure I'll have better, more specific opinions after playing the series again. Or at least 1-4+ODST+Reach, since I'm not buying a console for Halo 5. From the pictures shown here, it doesn't look like I'd be missing much. But I think I can safely say some of you all are taking the lore way too seriously. * Okay so obviously any explanation of anything Final Fantasy has to have a footnote explaining shit in WAY too much detail, because those games are fucking crazy. I don't count double-numbered games (X-2, XIII-2) as mainline, nor shit like Crisis Core or After Years. If you only look at I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV and XV, none of them are connected to each other. X-2 has a single dialog line implying that it and X are thousand-year prequels to VII, the Dissidia crossover declares them all multiverses which V hinted at, XII is in a timeline with the Final Fantasy Tactics games, and IX might be related to Crystal Chronicles.

I can dig your perspective, but I would argue that once you finish 2 and 3 and then move on to 4, it's pretty jarring. The other thing is, Doom, Final Fantasy, and Zelda games get set in different times, places, and universes, and I think that better excuses changes in art style than what Halo 4 tried to establish. Halo 4 is a direct sequel, so it's still set in the same galaxy only four years after 3. A better comparison might be to three

I'd like to see some spinoffs showing the covenant side, like arbiter's story in h2

An RTS from the Covenant's perspective, including space combat would be a great way to show the Arbiter's story leading up to Halo 2.

I've always wanted to see what the Arbiter was doing between the Forerunner gas mine and Delta Halo in Halo 2, maybe like supressing a small grunt uprising in High Charity.

What bothers me most about the direction they went with Halo 4 is that the Forerunners aren't Halo's story. They're the backstory, the setup, the window dressing that provides the MacGuffin for the actual story, which is Humans vs Covenant. The Human vs Covenant story is a great, self-contained narrative arc that you can explain in thirty seconds, and doesn't need to dive headfirst into ancient prophecies and precursor aliens like a second-rate Mass Effect. It's not like Halo's story was totally fleshed out and done. Halo 1 starts near the end of the Human-Covenant War, and Reach showed how much scope there is for titles earlier in the series. How about something involving the Insurrectionists? What about first contact? How else can you work the Flood into the story? What about the Covenant perspective? What about the other Spartan-IIs? What's ONI up to this whole time? What about all the other narrative richness in the franchise that still fits with the story we know? Bringing the Forerunners back and sidelining the Covenant makes for a story that, as far as I'm concerned, isn't Halo. I mean, I know why they did it- hard to bill your work as the Next Big Trilogy if all you're doing is exploring the margins of a story that's already been told. But man, does it feel like a fan-fiction spinoff.

Pretty sure the guy in charge of Halo 5's story, Brian Reed (previously of Marvel Comics) got fired after what he did by shitting all over Halo 4's ending by presenting Cortana to the player in a fucking midlevel comm

The stuff regarding the precursors are fine, it's really neat in a kinda cyclical way, that the Forerunner raised us up, and the Precursors raised the Forerunner up. oh wait, no, we can't have that, Humans are now several hundreds of thousands of years older and were equals to the Forerunners until a war broke out and they de-evolved us. So any of the Reclaimer shit gets really weird because they fought for us to be their successors but also thought that we couldn't be powerful anymore so the fucking DE EVOLVED US BECAUSE WE WERE THREATENING EVERYTHING. And we invented the flood by putting precursor ashes on poodles. Yes that happened, and no you can't tell me that I'm blowing it out of proportions because that's what fucking happened in their retcon.

I'd love this tbh. I kept waiting for a mission where we caught up with the Arbiter in halo 4, and was sad when it never came. Another thing I really liked about Halo 3 and Halo Reach that I was sad to see go was how each Co-op player had their own unique character instead of just being a copy of the protagonist. As far as I'm concerned the story of Halo 3 always had that four man squad running through it instead of just Mister Chief.

God that's just the worst. The old explanation for the flood was way better and WAY more unsettling. They came from another galaxy both makes them more alien than the covenant AND means we have no idea how fucked the universe is overall. Did they flee another galaxy? Did they conquer it and move on to the next? We'll never know and that's how it should be.

I just remembered that for no reason the Humans and Prophets were like, integrated in each other's societies hundreds of thousands of years ago. Why did I forget this? Because someone okay'd just this explosion of lore when the series changed hands, and like 99% of it is filler that is completely irrelevant, and never gets mentioned again.

somewhere in the distance, Joe Staten is screaming at the top of his lungs.

A games art style consistency is a big part of what helps to realize the world and setting of a game. Gameplay is not the only thing that matters, it is a game that is trying to tell a story and craft a universe through gameplay after all. None of those examples you gave are aesthetic evolution, they're differing takes on art styles for seperate, individual entities in a series that isn't based around one specific continuous story/setting. Bioshock Infinite was different aesthetically to the previous games because the brand was not meant to factor in a specific setting and its look, but rather the concept of the game and what that plot might entail. Mass Effect 2/3 retconned previous things but they kept the visual look and feel of all the major things - The look of Asari, Turian, Alliance, Reaper etc stuff all stayed the game despite those retcons and additions. It isn't a problem at all in that sort of situation as it is not affecting an already established setting and neither is it removing iconic things just for the sake of it. What has happened with the Halo games would be like if Star Wars suddenly decided that the Empire had Star Destroyers that were a more typical bright, flashy, futuristic, shiny modern-sci-fi look (e.g. something like ship designs from Marvel Movies), and that it had them all along. It would not fit in at all and would make the setting as a whole less coherant.

I'm not saying Halo necessarily needed an aesthetic evolution, nor that it had to be the one they did with Halo 5 (which does seem to kinda suck). I'm just saying we don't need an in-universe justification to reverse it, or move into a different direction. If Infinite wants to just undo all of it, literally all it has to do is not follow it. Pretend 5 didn't happen, or maybe the general story did but not all the fiddly details like how unusable the guns are. Or hell, dump whatever story 5 was working towards, and start a new main plotline with a new protagonist and new main conflict. I'm also not saying that each Halo game needs a wildly different visual style, like some other long-lasting series with more disconnected titles - it would be kind of weird to jump into, say, the anime style some of the early concept art used. Just that, if other games can handle swinging from sprites to cel-shaded to traditional 3D, Halo can handle some minor inconsistencies in the armor design of certain enemies.

Just looked this up out of curiosity, and yeah, guy was either sacked or left. Here's hoping the narrative director on Infinite knows how to write a Halo game. Also interestingly enough, the narrative director for Halo 4, Chris Schlerf, is now working for Bungie on Destiny 2. Either way, I think Halo 4's interesting points are seemingly never going to be brought up again it looks like. Halo 5 dropped them pretty much completely (like it dropped the ball on everything else in the campaign), and the theme of Infinite is "hope" iirc, so unless it revolves around a hopeful take on Master Chief coming to terms with what has transpired since 4 and 5, I think I'd just expect another break away at this point. Not that I have a problem with it, but I just liked some of the more interesting takes from Halo 4 and would've loved for them to have been expanded upon.