I found this when I went to Google today. I feel like the article does bring up a few good points.
Yes… as much as I don’t want him to go, he’s getting pretty old as it is.
I wouldn’t mind the idea that they retire instead of straight up dying.
I personally couldn’t disagree more with the sentiment expressed in that article. This was exactly the perceived ‘issue’ that never needed fixing 343 squandered so much time and resources on in Spartan Ops, and the 80% of Halo 5’s campaign Master Chief was absent from. Only to then replace him with extreme bland uninteresting ‘generic hero guys’.
The majority of fans apparently hated it, and it resulted in Halo 6’s development being something of a car crash that’s has effectively doubled to twice that of its original scheduled development time. Halo 6 should have been released back in 2018 or 2019, and we should have all been anticipating Halo 7 around this time.
Despite all this the article is correct in one thing. Despite having little emotional or character development for whatever reason, Master Chief is a helmeted face that sells. For reasons most people people can’t agree on people just seem to like him, and he sells product. That’s not something 343 nedds to ‘fix’. That’s something they need to exploit to its maximum potential. Spartan Ops and Halo 5 should have focused on Chief. Not other characters shoehorned in that added nothing to the story and people had no prior connection to.
I’ve said before you cannot engineer popularity into a character no matter how hard you try. Characters either turn out to be popular, or their not. No amount of shilling or doubling down an a character’s status as a creator’s pet will change that, it will only harm your product in the long run.
As for this idea about Master Chief getting ‘too old’ to continue the fight, again I couldn’t disagree more. At the end of the day he’s a fictional genetically enhanced super-soldier ‘upgraded’ with Forerunner technology that is not impacted by time moving forward in the real world. Barely 6 years have passed since he was first introduced to us in the early 2000’s, and with this like cyro technology in the Halo Universe alongside everything else he could easily last 1000 years more.
Age and infirmity only becomes an issue for the Master Chief if 343 want it to become an issue, and as of now I don’t see any reason why it should. The Reclaimer saga should always have been about developing him as a character. Not phasing him out for a cheap and uninspired knock-off just because 343 fancied it at the time.
POST EDIT: Or, rather then focus on developing Chief as a character, 343 should have focused on actual world building. Between Halo 4 - 6 I would have loved to have seen more of the multi-sided ‘Great Schism’ conflict between all the numerous Covenant splinter factions, and potentially any other non-Covenant ‘alien’ races who may be trying to use the chaos of the Covenant’s collapse to expand their own territory. ONI’s hair-brained shenanigans and it’s proxy conflicts with various humans rebel groups is much less interesting. This is Sci-Fi, I want to see more of alien cultures, not human ones. Leave that to Call of Duty.
Have to say that I agree with timh1990 here. I don’t think Chief is even close to having outstayed his welcome as it were.
I know why I like chief and yes it’s different for everyone, but his popularity formed naturally and I think the majority of the fanbase still love chief. A lot of people seem to want more chief and arby, not less and I really hope 343i deliver that over the next few years.
As tim says, focus should be on world building now and maybe developing the big bad as much as possible. Personally I’d love more with my favourite rhyming parasite.
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> I found this when I went to Google today. I feel like the article does bring up a few good points.
Im fine with playing a different protagonist but I dont think Chief has to die or fade into irrelevancy.
Frankly I’d love it if we could do another Reach style game where you play a customisable spartan protagonist but I dunno if that’s gonna be a plan anytime soon.
His death’s gotta provide meaning if they decide to kill him off in Infinite. Besides that, no I don’t really wanna see him die but I know it’s gonna happen at some point.
I would love another game in the halo universe with a different main, but I don’t think Chief needs to be discarded. If he has to be at least let him retire.
A google article has as much weight as anything posted on this or any other forum.
What passes as journalist on the Internet… wow.
When it comes to MS, everyone seems to want them to do something contrary to what would bring them success.
While I’m definitely for stories progressing past certain characters before they hold back the narrative, I don’t think you could do it with the halo fanbase. The reaction to halo 5 says it all.
We’re stuck with chief, for good or ill. I just hope we dont have cortana come back and be just the way she was before as they kill covenant faction X to stop them from activating halo or the Y time. The Weapon’s a decent compromise as she has space to be her own character with her own traits.
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> > 2533274821734005;1:
> > I found this when I went to Google today. I feel like the article does bring up a few good points.
>
> Im fine with playing a different protagonist but I dont think Chief has to die or fade into irrelevancy.
>
> Frankly I’d love it if we could do another Reach style game where you play a customisable spartan protagonist but I dunno if that’s gonna be a plan anytime soon.
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Its not as easy as killing Master Chief himself. The many books and games where he’s this unstoppable mortal blessed by the forerunners shows that he is truly special.
There are a few things to note; If they kill off Master chief, making merchandise off him probably would end up changing for the worse since in time he’ll just be forgotten in time sad to say.
Another thing to note that Master Chief has survived near IMPOSSIBLE odds, the destruction of multiple rings along with basically defeating the covenant with Arbiter without even breaking much of a sweat really ups his reputation as being basically unkillable. It would honestly be EXTREMELY difficult to kill off Chief without it being anti-climactic as heck. We also cant forget the fact that Cortana tells us he has luck on his side, and everyone in the UNSC will most likely do quite literally EVERYTHING IN THEIR POWER to ensure Master Chief does not die out on the battlefield, or atleast thats how I believe they would go about it.
Killing off Master Chief I think would be near impossible, the only way they could get him out would be to have him go MIA.
As for the Voice actor, its his choice if he wishes to continue, heck he could continue with this gig until he dies who knows, but we haven’t reached that stage yet where we could make any assumptions I dont think, if anything they may find another voice actor for chief or manage to actually make a good set of heros or a snigle hero to continue the legacy of the Halo Franchise.
we dont need another death like SGT Avery Johnson where he survived so much only to get shot in the back by Guilty Spark.
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> Have to say that I agree with timh1990 here. I don’t think Chief is even close to having outstayed his welcome as it were.
>
> I know why I like chief and yes it’s different for everyone, but his popularity formed naturally and I think the majority of the fanbase still love chief. A lot of people seem to want more chief and arby, not less and I really hope 343i deliver that over the next few years.
>
> As tim says, focus should be on world building now and maybe developing the big bad as much as possible. Personally I’d love more with my favourite rhyming parasite.
Thanks. I pretty much agree with everything you’ve said.
Chief is a difficult character to manage, as like you said all of his popularity seems to have occurred somewhat randomly and naturally. Based on all the written rules of how to write a compelling character (which half the time don’t work), he shouldn’t be half again as popular as he is, but he is. 343 somehow ended up with a magic money tree that they seem ever since to have not been tending.
I personally would like to see Chief developed more as a character, and I think they we’re on the right track in Halo 4’s campaign concerning his relationship with Cortana once he knew she was going into rampancy. The mistake they made was in slashing the development time for the campaign in half to accommodate Spartan Ops. This single action forced them to condense two incredibly emotional stories revolving around Chief and Cortana and the Didact and Librarian, lessening the emotional impact of both stories.
The thing is I also respect the sentiment that there are plenty of people who like the Chief exactly as he is, and want him to remain as emotionless as a brick with no sense of humour. I’m somewhat sceptical as to whether these people form the majority of fans or are in the minority, but until I know one way or the other I’d be very hesitant about developing Chief further as a character if I was in 343’s position.
You also really need a single vision for how to develop his character, which can’t happen at the rate 343 seem to burn through lead storywriters. One of the reasons I personally think Sarah Palmer is such an irrational mess when it comes to any type of consistency in her personality is because so many different writers have tried to depicted her how they think a ‘strong’ female character should be written. (But that’s me going off on a tangent)
With all this in mind, I agree with you that a focus on world building is where 343 should have started all the way back in Halo 4, and now.
Referencing ‘Gravemind’, I personally you really would have liked the the Primordial if this creature had been the ‘big-bad’ the Reclaimer saga was steadily building towards. I never realised it when reading the Forerunner saga, but the Primordial and the Precursors in general were based on Cthulhu from the Lovecraft mythology. In addition, the Precursors themselves allegedly had the ability to warp reality to their will, and went through several cycles as a collective race of birth, evolution and death as different alien species.
That’s what we could have had as the ultimate villain of the Reclaimer Saga. A slumbering cosmic horror that could bend space and time to his or her will in ways we scarcely even imagine, potentially backed up by an entire advanced alien species of culture that would have been revealed simply to be the Precursor’s latest ‘skins’.
Instead after dumping mini-blue space fuhrer, it looks like we’re going to end up with a second very angry brute who is simply being a ******* for the sake of being a *******.
I just can believe how badly 343 have squandered the potential of this franchise.
Chief was never ever the problem with the Reclaimer Saga. It was this idea that he needed to be replaced by a ‘newer, cooler’ but ultimately duller and inferior generation.