So I’ve seen both cutscenes and got all the gear.
Okay, I’ll be fair. They might be teasing a Battle Royale mode with them talking about collecting the armour from dead Spartans in the field. Got to rely on your team and all that out there beyond the safety of the walls. It does give you a bit more info and sense of who these Spartan Lone Wolves are.
Now I am not going to be fair. How is it a narrative event to have an intro cutscene where “yeah you’re a great shot” and end with “yeah you’re pretty good shot”; exactly a narrative event? I am not seeing any narrative hooks here beyond saying what’s already been stated about the Spartan Headhunters branch. This is clearly just meant to be a flavour piece in a much shorter season. Not only have they forgot about the limited story they had with the intro about finding Zeta Halo and Infinity but they even forgot about this nonsense with Irratus.
Also I continue to be confused and bewildered by the lore. They’ve been fighting the Created (which your Encyclopedia plays down as not a big deal) for a year and the Banished for six months. They’re not 7 years into the Horus Heresy where they’re scrounging their own armour and you have unhinged sub cults emerging in the Space Mar…I mean Spartans. You’re a professional soldier not a Space Wolf.
Plus the campaign did not set up any context to support what’s going on here. Why is the UNSC having to scrounge armour and it’s Spartans going full Shattered Legions? It’s an interstellar regime with hundreds of planets. The Created have been gone for 6 months, plenty of time to get things back in order. The Banished are just heavily armed raiders. What we have are a few Spartans in a base telling me it’s really dangerous out there when we have been given no reason to assume this. These things aren’t being posed as mysteries; they’re just being obtuse with knowledge the characters are operating under.
Not only that but they keep mentioning Irratus like he’s the main villain but he hasn’t done anything beyond make some Wolf noises. If he’s going to tell the Banished where the Spartans are he’s taking his sweet time doing it.
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Hundreds of planets? I think you’re overestimating the UNSC’s size, and it’s resources.
Halo Encyclopedia Page 44
“Nearly a thousand human outposts had once been scattered across the Orion Arm, ranging from resource factories to fully terraformed worlds with populations in the Billions.”
They also have a chart of 152 named worlds of which 60 were glassed or 39 percent. Apply that to your thousand worlds and we can guess about 610 human worlds remaining. So yeah, about 500.
They shouldn’t be scrounging for pairs of boots.
As an aside and to continue to grind that personal axe on all you Banished Sympathisers but it also mentions on page 45 “While the Covenant represented a pivotal moment in humanities past and the threat of the Banished now looms in its future.” Hmm, kind of ominous for a human loving faction of freedom fighters there.
This is like Rooster Teeth Red vs Blue season 1 where they have all these maps and weapons in the game and they design a story around what already exists since they can’t actually add anything new to the actual game. Except of course Red vs Blue was hilarious and entertaining without any need from me to take it seriously in order to play the game.
It’s like designers just made cool things and then made someone write about it. Then they shoe horn a story where, Spartans have to kill each other as a way to save the day? Because you know multiplayer needs a story instead of just giving us content and enemies the Spartans were actually designed to fight against.
Your basic tutorial gives enough story for MP, you’re training against other Spartans for something bigger, now we need the something bigger not the same old stuff. It’s like giving me a ham and cheese sandwich and next time saying here is a cheese and ham sandwich and I’ll tell you why this is so much better than ham and cheese. It’s the same thing and it is devoid of actual story telling.
They need to stop all cut scene development and writing and push towards something that has depth and works towards and actual big development change in the game. They are trying to achieve status quo with what they are currently doing, but MP will never be satisfying as a narrative because having the NPC character tell you good job when you literally did nothing but get your -Yoink!- handed to you for a week straight is not gratifying in the least.
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I would wager less than 5% of MP players have any idea there’s even supposed to be a story. I’m probably in the 80-90th percentile of knowing and generally caring about Halo lore, and even I have no idea what’s going on. Although to be fair, the story of Halo now appears not to be principally discussed in the games given the canyon of unexplained gaps between H5 and HI, and if you didn’t play the spin-off RPGs (which only a relatively small minority of the playerbase did), you can pretty much forget about anything making sense.
Infinite completely ignored the rest of the universe, so we have zero context for where these MP story things are going on, when, who characters are supposed to be, etc. And the extent of the content seems to be a few like 30 second cutscenes, right?
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It’s funny, because Titanfall 1 tried this and failed spectacularly because the multiplayer narrative devolved into “This is a standard multiplayer match, except regardless of performance, one side will always lose”
Titanfall 2 reworked it into being what I would loosely term as “sparring matches” between two different groups that may or may not have a reason to fight one another, and… That was the depth of the multiplayer story. Competitive multiplayer is not the place to tell a deep or interesting story, least of all one that’s trying to seriously add to a universe. I get that 343/Microsoft want a Halo multi-media empire to rise out of Halo and decimate everything around it, but short cutscenes that are barely related to the story isn’t going to work.
I miss the days when Halo MP wasn’t canon and no one cared. I have yet to see any justifiable reasons for keeping Halo’s Multiplayer canon. Least of all after these weaksauce “narrative” events