Alternative Halo 4 story

Community Halo Universe
1

Hello guys! I hope you like my ideas and before reading just remember:
Because I don’t know the entirety of Halo’s lore, the following will be based only on the stuff known in the Bungie games since I have only played them. Anyways, I personally would play a Halo game like this one. If you feel like I am saying something that’s fundamentally wrong about Halo please point that out without being too offensive thought. I am relatively new to the deeper lore of the game.

As Master Chief is being dragged around space with Cortana with the spaceship’s debre, a slipspace rupture opens swallowing them and transferring them to installation 07 where they crash-land on this very newly discovered Halo ring. During the fall, Cortana just barely succeeds on waking Chief from stasis (a cool reference to “wake me when you need me”). On this new Halo ring, there are the banished that are trying to take control of the ring. While fighting the unexpected banished forces, you are trying to find what caused the rupture that brought you here. It was a forerunner scientist that denied the extinction of his spiecies and set up an observatory from random spaceship wreckage he found and that was also the reason you came down there on the ring. He had destroyed the ring’s monitor since it was attacking him. Also he needed help with the banished because they were threatening him to make weapons for them. He promises to send you back to earth if you help him. The discovery of said scientist happens at the end of the first mission of the game whilst on the first one you are trying to find shelter and, sorry that I forgot to mention, your armor’s shield function is damaged from the fall and gets repaired by the scientist. By the way, you are being chased to the front of the door of the observatory whilst the defensive turets that the scientist made, save you. The backstory of the scientist mentioned above is being discovered through SHORT expository dialog through out the game and with references to past experiences of him like him saying, sorry for that -Yoink- line, “this looks like that time I did that to that damn sphere!”. The shield system is upgradable by the scraps of your enemies. You can ask for special tools but they are expendable (like a bubble shield) and you can also find them on the field. However, you have to go to the upgrade station that the scientist always caries around. The end goal of the game would be to find a tool that would make the possibility to send Chief to earth since the rupture needs to be far since earth is far.

2

This is an interesting idea. Only one “hard mistake” though: In Halo 3’s legendary ending the ship is already shown drifting towards Requeim, so Installation 07 is definitely not a “correct” starting point for your alternate story if you want to pick up Bungie’s trail. Other than that I think it’s fine. Could use some polish here and there but hey, this is a wild imagination anyway.

3

> 2535472130922237;2:
> This is an interesting idea. Only one “hard mistake” though: In Halo 3’s legendary ending the ship is already shown drifting towards Requeim, so Installation 07 is definitely not a “correct” starting point for your alternate story if you want to pick up Bungie’s trail. Other than that I think it’s fine. Could use some polish here and there but hey, this is a wild imagination anyway.

Thanks for checking my ideas man! It was just some stuff I pieced on an afternoon. Sorry for the broken English you read. I am not that good in long stuff.

4

> 2535452219002241;1:
> Hello guys! I hope you like my ideas and before reading just remember:
> Because I don’t know the entirety of Halo’s lore, the following will be based only on the stuff known in the Bungie games since I have only played them. Anyways, I personally would play a Halo game like this one. If you feel like I am saying something that’s fundamentally wrong about Halo please point that out without being too offensive thought. I am relatively new to the deeper lore of the game.
>
> As Master Chief is being dragged around space with Cortana with the spaceship’s debre, a slipspace rupture opens swallowing them and transferring them to installation 07 where they crash-land on this very newly discovered Halo ring. During the fall, Cortana just barely succeeds on waking Chief from stasis (a cool reference to “wake me when you need me”). On this new Halo ring, there are the banished that are trying to take control of the ring. While fighting the unexpected banished forces, you are trying to find what caused the rupture that brought you here. It was a forerunner scientist that denied the extinction of his spiecies and set up an observatory from random spaceship wreckage he found and that was also the reason you came down there on the ring. He had destroyed the ring’s monitor since it was attacking him. Also he needed help with the banished because they were threatening him to make weapons for them. He promises to send you back to earth if you help him. The discovery of said scientist happens at the end of the first mission of the game whilst on the first one you are trying to find shelter and, sorry that I forgot to mention, your armor’s shield function is damaged from the fall and gets repaired by the scientist. By the way, you are being chased to the front of the door of the observatory whilst the defensive turets that the scientist made, save you. The backstory of the scientist mentioned above is being discovered through SHORT expository dialog through out the game and with references to past experiences of him like him saying, sorry for that -Yoink- line, “this looks like that time I did that to that damn sphere!”. The shield system is upgradable by the scraps of your enemies. You can ask for special tools but they are expendable (like a bubble shield) and you can also find them on the field. However, you have to go to the upgrade station that the scientist always caries around. The end goal of the game would be to find a tool that would make the possibility to send Chief to earth since the rupture needs to be far since earth is far.

I actually love your idea although like Sierra said it does need polishing but it does sound real great

5

I like the idea of jumping straight into where halo infinite is starting. It almost seems like that’s what 343 is going to do since there hasn’t been any information about the guardians or cortana in the trailers for the game yet.

6

I’d keep halo 4 the same, nanobots justifying chief’s armor or that sort of explanations for art style changes were lame, the remnant covenant needed a bit more clarification and the forerunners less, del rio was over the top and the didact’s defeat was extremely forced and lazy, but they nailed the story otherwise and I’m sad to see they dropped that direction.

Everything after H4 needs the rewrite more.

7

> 2535449333929845;6:
> I’d keep halo 4 the same, nanobots justifying chief’s armor or that sort of explanations for art style changes were lame, the remnant covenant needed a bit more clarification and the forerunners less, del rio was over the top and the didact’s defeat was extremely forced and lazy, but they nailed the story otherwise and I’m sad to see they dropped that direction.
>
> Everything after H4 needs the rewrite more.

Yeah I’m with you on this. OP, great job, love the idea. Still I think H4 was going in a very interesting story direction and then suddenly it just got cut short in favor of this Locke guy and a half-baked hunt for the Chief.

If you’re a fan of Act Man, he actually does a great series of videos on H5. They’re mostly bashing the game, but there are some parts where he provides ideas that could have worked better and driven the plot forward in a more coherent way. Like having Chief return to Infinity after leaving Argent Moon, coming back for a psych eval, getting called crazy, then stealing a broadsword and leaving to go off on his own in search of Cortana. Then you can ignore this Locke character and have Blue Team be the ones to bring him in. Way more impact that way, and the sudden change to ally with the Chief that Locke did toward the end would make more sense if it was his own team doing it.

8

Setting aside the continuity snarl others have already pointed out, I don’t think there was any need to set Halo 4 on a ring. On paper Halo 4 had everything it needed to be a great game. Requiem as a shield world containing a cybernetic Forerunner army was a really interesting concept, and both the Didact and Librarian were a good antagonist and ‘walking talking exposition dump’ in theory. Even the Infinity was a good idea in concept, through I personally would have swapped out the Spartan IV’s for Sangheili SpecOps of the SOS while at the same time swapping out the Sangheili led Covenant Remnant faction for the Banished, led by Atriox.

The real problem with Halo 4 in my opinion was that at some point during its development 343 slashed the time and money meant for the campaign in favour of Spartan Ops, which was not nearly as popular as they had expected it to be. As a result what should have probably been a campaign told over 16-20 missions became a campaign told over 8 missions. I think if they’d have actually given the Didact, the Master Chief and Cortana time to properly develop the story between them and given the player a much longer time to free roam about Requiem the game would have been much better. (It’s very telling in my opinion that even though Halo 4 had the shortest campaign of any Halo game, the story was genuinely see as much better then the story told in Halo 5 Guardians despite the latter game having twice the run time to tell its story. What could have been if they’d have gone down that route the first time round?)

9

> 2535449333929845;6:
> I’d keep halo 4 the same, nanobots justifying chief’s armor or that sort of explanations for art style changes were lame, the remnant covenant needed a bit more clarification and the forerunners less, del rio was over the top and the didact’s defeat was extremely forced and lazy, but they nailed the story otherwise and I’m sad to see they dropped that direction.
>
> Everything after H4 needs the rewrite more.

I’ve never felt changes in art need to be explained, as I think it comes safely under the ‘Artistic Licence -Art’ trope. (I personally feel people get to hung up over changes in art between games anyway, as it’s a good way of a developer sampling what people like and what they don’t, but does not overall impact the story or game mechanics)

To give an example, I’ve been reading up on Cryogenics in the Halo Universe recently for…completely unrelated reasons. (And defiantly not about how to make someone disappear)

Anyway, early on in one of the novels it was stated that when crewman go into cyro-sleep they can’t be wearing anything as any inorganic matter left on the skin interferes with the freezing process and can be painful or dangerous. Now at the end of Halo Wars we see Professor Anders climbing into a gyro-tube fully clothed, which is a huge continuity snarl.

And no one cares, because its very obvious this is a case of artistic licence. As far as I am aware Bungie actually came out and commented that the reason Anders does not strip of here is because that scene would have bumped the entire game to to an R rating, which would have prevented a large portion of their desired demographic customer base from purchasing the game.

That makes perfect sense to me, and I don’t need a quick exposition dump inside the game or out of it explaining this to me that during a war Anders found the time to build a special type of pod that would allow to to wear clothing due to her personal preferences. Not every question raised always needs and answer, and I actually wish the statement about nano-technology never came up because that kind of technology has so many practical uses that it raises the question why do we never see this technology in use before or after.

10

> 2535435902217648;7:
> > 2535449333929845;6:
> > I’d keep halo 4 the same, nanobots justifying chief’s armor or that sort of explanations for art style changes were lame, the remnant covenant needed a bit more clarification and the forerunners less, del rio was over the top and the didact’s defeat was extremely forced and lazy, but they nailed the story otherwise and I’m sad to see they dropped that direction.
> >
> > Everything after H4 needs the rewrite more.
>
> Yeah I’m with you on this. OP, great job, love the idea. Still I think H4 was going in a very interesting story direction and then suddenly it just got cut short in favor of this Locke guy and a half-baked hunt for the Chief.
>
> If you’re a fan of Act Man, he actually does a great series of videos on H5. They’re mostly bashing the game, but there are some parts where he provides ideas that could have worked better and driven the plot forward in a more coherent way. Like having Chief return to Infinity after leaving Argent Moon, coming back for a psych eval, getting called crazy, then stealing a broadsword and leaving to go off on his own in search of Cortana. Then you can ignore this Locke character and have Blue Team be the ones to bring him in. Way more impact that way, and the sudden change to ally with the Chief that Locke did toward the end would make more sense if it was his own team doing it.

Indeed I am a fan of Act Man my guy!

11

> 2533274853837831;9:
> > 2535449333929845;6:
> > I’d keep halo 4 the same, nanobots justifying chief’s armor or that sort of explanations for art style changes were lame, the remnant covenant needed a bit more clarification and the forerunners less, del rio was over the top and the didact’s defeat was extremely forced and lazy, but they nailed the story otherwise and I’m sad to see they dropped that direction.
> >
> > Everything after H4 needs the rewrite more.
>
> I’ve never felt changes in art need to be explained, as I think it comes safely under the ‘Artistic Licence -Art’ trope. (I personally feel people get to hung up over changes in art between games anyway, as it’s a good way of a developer sampling what people like and what they don’t, but does not overall impact the story or game mechanics)
>
> To give an example, I’ve been reading up on Cryogenics in the Halo Universe recently for…completely unrelated reasons. (And defiantly not about how to make someone disappear)
>
> Anyway, early on in one of the novels it was stated that when crewman go into cyro-sleep they can’t be wearing anything as any inorganic matter left on the skin interferes with the freezing process and can be painful or dangerous. Now at the end of Halo Wars we see Professor Anders climbing into a gyro-tube fully clothed, which is a huge continuity snarl.
>
> And no one cares, because its very obvious this is a case of artistic licence. As far as I am aware Bungie actually came out and commented that the reason Anders does not strip of here is because that scene would have bumped the entire game to to an R rating, which would have prevented a large portion of their desired demographic customer base from purchasing the game.
>
> That makes perfect sense to me, and I don’t need a quick exposition dump inside the game or out of it explaining this to me that during a war Anders found the time to build a special type of pod that would allow to to wear clothing due to her personal preferences. Not every question raised always needs and answer, and I actually wish the statement about nano-technology never came up because that kind of technology has so many practical uses that it raises the question why do we never see this technology in use before or after.

They wouldn’t have to explain anything if they kept it consistent. Aside from the grunt / elite anatomy, marines, warthog and some weapons and spartan armors that just can’t stay, H4 looks great. My gripe is the lack of transition. Show the prologue with the designs we knew, have the H3 dawn, chief and the weapons on it as we knew, then you can start evolving it. The idea of “it’s different because it’s just a different style” can be used to do literally anything, like turning a truck into a balloon.

12

> 2535451518895699;11:
> > 2533274853837831;9:
> > > 2535449333929845;6:
> > > I’d keep halo 4 the same, nanobots justifying chief’s armor or that sort of explanations for art style changes were lame, the remnant covenant needed a bit more clarification and the forerunners less, del rio was over the top and the didact’s defeat was extremely forced and lazy, but they nailed the story otherwise and I’m sad to see they dropped that direction.
> > >
> > > Everything after H4 needs the rewrite more.
> >
> > I’ve never felt changes in art need to be explained, as I think it comes safely under the ‘Artistic Licence -Art’ trope. (I personally feel people get to hung up over changes in art between games anyway, as it’s a good way of a developer sampling what people like and what they don’t, but does not overall impact the story or game mechanics)
> >
> > To give an example, I’ve been reading up on Cryogenics in the Halo Universe recently for…completely unrelated reasons. (And defiantly not about how to make someone disappear)
> >
> > Anyway, early on in one of the novels it was stated that when crewman go into cyro-sleep they can’t be wearing anything as any inorganic matter left on the skin interferes with the freezing process and can be painful or dangerous. Now at the end of Halo Wars we see Professor Anders climbing into a gyro-tube fully clothed, which is a huge continuity snarl.
> >
> > And no one cares, because its very obvious this is a case of artistic licence. As far as I am aware Bungie actually came out and commented that the reason Anders does not strip of here is because that scene would have bumped the entire game to to an R rating, which would have prevented a large portion of their desired demographic customer base from purchasing the game.
> >
> > That makes perfect sense to me, and I don’t need a quick exposition dump inside the game or out of it explaining this to me that during a war Anders found the time to build a special type of pod that would allow to to wear clothing due to her personal preferences. Not every question raised always needs and answer, and I actually wish the statement about nano-technology never came up because that kind of technology has so many practical uses that it raises the question why do we never see this technology in use before or after.
>
> They wouldn’t have to explain anything if they kept it consistent. Aside from the grunt / elite anatomy, marines, warthog and some weapons and spartan armors that just can’t stay, H4 looks great. My gripe is the lack of transition. Show the prologue with the designs we knew, have the H3 dawn, chief and the weapons on it as we knew, then you can start evolving it. The idea of “it’s different because it’s just a different style” can be used to do literally anything, like turning a truck into a balloon.

I get your point but at the same if Bungie or 343 never try anything new the visual art stagnates.

Since you played Halo Combat the first time, has there ever been any changes to the art of appearance of characters, species, armour or tech that you thought were for the better, or do you think it’s just been declining all round. Because if the answer is ‘Yes’, then that change in artistic direction was a risk Bungie and 343 made that paid off. Not all of them do. (Sorry just re-read your original response and you said there were parts of H4 visually you did like, so the above would apply in my opinion)

Trust me I’m filled with concerns over just how 343 could screw up Halo 6’s infinite story, lore and gameplay and with the exception of the last one if they screwup they lore or story, that’s permanent. If they kill of Chief, the Arbiter or wipe out the Brutes as a race, that will impact everything that comes after it. The art won’t won’t impact for ever more as long as 343 don’t dig themselves a hole trying to explain it, because if enough people complain about it they will most certainly change it in Halo 7, so I don’t really care.

13

Pretty awesome ideas!

14

> 2535472130922237;2:
> This is an interesting idea. Only one “hard mistake” though: In Halo 3’s legendary ending the ship is already shown drifting towards Requeim, so Installation 07 is definitely not a “correct” starting point for your alternate story if you want to pick up Bungie’s trail. Other than that I think it’s fine. Could use some polish here and there but hey, this is a wild imagination anyway.

Damn, I did not know that Bungie was already introducing Requiem ! That s sick !

15

> 2533274933000695;14:
> > 2535472130922237;2:
> > This is an interesting idea. Only one “hard mistake” though: In Halo 3’s legendary ending the ship is already shown drifting towards Requeim, so Installation 07 is definitely not a “correct” starting point for your alternate story if you want to pick up Bungie’s trail. Other than that I think it’s fine. Could use some polish here and there but hey, this is a wild imagination anyway.
>
> Damn, I did not know that Bungie was already introducing Requiem ! That s sick !

Well for the record, the name “Requiem” was coined by 343, not Bungie, but the Dawn drifting towards a shield world was Bungie’s creation nonetheless :wink: