Did anyone else find the Campaign story totally disappointing? (Spoilers)

Community Halo Universe
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I’ve been a Halo fan since I randomly picked up the first game at my local rental place all those years ago. I’ve loved the storylines from all the games so far (except maybe 5, wasn’t thrilled, but it was ok). I was totally disappointed in this campaign’s storyline. It felt like, I dunno, a short story happening between major events. The campaign barely answers any questions we might have had about what our favorite characters were doing, and shoves a bunch of new ones at us.

Where did the Banished get the starships?
Weren’t they trapped on the Ark from Halo Wars 2?
How does the UNSC even know who the Banished are?
Why was everyone at Installation 07?
What happened to the Science chick that rode the ring out from the Ark in Halo Wars 2?
I get that the Banished want something from Installation 07, something to do with the new species, I think? But WTF? I totally don’t have enough information for that to even make sense.
They chose not only for Master Chief to get his butt kicked by Atriox in a ten second cutscene with Zero gameplay, but they killed Cortana OFF SCREEN? WTF?
The two villains felt hollow to me. Especially the new Alien. I don’t even remember it’s name or species…
Why was the main Banished guy dying? Did I just miss something?

Playing through the attack on the infinity by the Banished -All by itself- would have been more interesting to me. Learning how they got those ships and what they were after. How they managed to ambush the Infinity and other stuff like that.
They keep saying throughout the campaign how Atriox died, and they don’t even bother to tell us how, and OH, Wait! He’s not actually dead… wow… what a twist… I didn’t see THAT coming from a mile away…

I totally feel like I missed a game in the series. Never before did a Halo game have me asking what was going on from beginning to end. Even Master Chief’s motivation didn’t make sense to me. Aside from maybe making sure Cortana was dead, which is crappy motivation to begin with in this story.

As I said, I’m just totally disappointed…

Note: I haven’t read any recent books so I don’t have any info they might contain, but I don’t think I should need it to understand what in the world is going on in the flippin game.

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I’ll agree that there seems to be a chapter between Halo 5 and Halo infinite that we weren’t given in a game. Maybe one of the books released this past year touches on it, but life being what it is, I’ve fallen a bit behind on the books. I think there should have been a game covering the Banished leaving the Ark, what happened to the Spirit of Fire’s crew on the Ark, and the race to Zeta Halo. I think the Infinity’s destruction would have been more meaningful if it had been Cortana destroying it with her Created, or even if humanity had to throw it into an unwinnable battle to distract Cortana for long enough for Master Chief to get in and stop her (my speculation from years back was that to stop Cortana, they’d have to collapse the Domain, which would mean going to Maethrillian, which I think would be interesting).

However, there are answers to some of those questions.

The Banished’s flagship was destroyed, but they still had the rest of their ships, so they weren’t completely trapped on the Ark.

In the time jump before this game, the Banished found Zeta Halo, which already had an extensive human presence on it, bringing the two factions into conflict. Infinite is set around 6 months later, which is why humanity’s well aware of the Banished.

Humans are on Zeta Halo because they’re studying the Halos and attempting to disable their primary weapons. The Banished went to Zeta Halo because they found something on the Ark that convinced them that there was something buried on this Halo they needed.

Master Chief’s defeat was intended to humanize him. It’s something he’s struggling with throughout the game.

The game does show Cortana’s end after the fact. It’s just a flash-back, not in the moment. There’s also a bit of a question left open as to whether she’s actualy gone, or if the “echos” are more than they appear.

The Harbinger is potentially a member of the last species the Precursors used as avatars to interact with their creations, one that was not turned into Flood. This would suggest that the Forerunners sealed away the majority of them during the Forerunners’ rebellion, as opposed to killing them all. I’m curious to see how that pans out.

The Banished leader in the game was a mentor to Atriox. He was dying because he was old. He sought death in battle, a fight that would cement his legacy.

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Thank you for the answers, that helps. :slight_smile:

I like your ideas and think that would have been a better story.

I am confused about one thing, Installation 07 “is” the ring transported from the Ark in Halo Wars 2 right? Because the way they talk about it makes it seem like it had been around for some time before the six month jump. How could humans have established such a presence on the Ring if it’s only just appeared “during” Cortana’s attacks. That doesn’t make sense to me. The last thing I remember seeing from Halo Wars 2 was one of those Giant Space Robots (Can’t remember the name off hand) Cortana was using to control the galaxy.

I have no problem with Master Chief getting his butt kicked, I just don’t like how they did it.

I could totally buy the Banished wanting to get to the Precursor species if they gave a good reason as to why? The Banished are all about standing alone and never bowing to anyone, so why would they seek out a species so much older and most likely way more powerful than they are? It seems counter productive.

I didn’t catch that that Banished leader was dying of old age, I thought he was injured in some way (poisoned or something). lol

Anyways, thanks for the reply! :slight_smile:

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Ok, so I just read on Halo Alpha that Installation 07 is one of the 7 that’s been around since the Forerunners and Ander’s Halo from Halo Wars 2 is Installation 09, which is a replacement for Installation 04 which was destroyed in Halo 1 and after Installation 08 was destroyed in Halo 3. That’s not convoluted, lol. So we have absolutely no idea what’s going on with 09 after Halo Wars 2.

That “oddly” makes more sense in regards to Halo Infinite’s Campaign.

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It was disapointing for me, yeah. It felt like the first third of a full story. Hopefully the story will be fleshed out in the upcoming DLCs, but as it stands right now it just wasn’t very compelling for me. The story’s scale was very small and simplistic, albiet something that 343 stated multiple times before launch. The story was essentially just stopping the banished from repairing the ring, killing Esharum, then killing the Harbinger.

Esharum was a pretty hollow villan to be honest. He just showed up every so often as a hologram to yell exposition at you until you show up to fight him, and the Harbinger was just as hollow; a character embodiment of some ancient mystery, whose motivations are chopped up to wanting to bring back some race of beings that you know next to nothing about, for a reason that isn’t clear.

They decided to leave out the major characters that have been developed since Halo 4, in favour of new characters that we either know very little about, or don’t care about at all (and in some case both). No appearances from Lasky, the Arbiter, Halsey (besides in memories), Locke etc was honestly jarring. I get they wanted to focus on new cortana and the pilot, but the cast was just extremely thin for the amount of characters in the lore.

Cortana’s treatment was insulting given her importance to the franchise. I understand that the inept writing of Halo 5’s story left infinite in a precarious state going into infinite, but I feel like they could have done better with the threads that were in place. I didn’t like the whole '“created” plot thread at all, but to just chop everything up to Cortana realising she made a mistake and sacrificing herself to help the UNSC just felt like a cheap cop out. Cortana is seemingly killed off for no other reason than to abandon the badly written created plot, and we are essentially left with a clone of Cortana to fill the void. It just feels really cheap.

It was an okay first chapter in a longer story, if that’s what they are planning. I’ll judge it in its entirety when the DLCs come out, but right now it feels very incomplete, simplistic, and shallow for me.

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After playing through the Halo Infinite campaign, I never wanted to touch it again. My disappointment was so jarring it’s permanent. The story ruined it for me - why throw out the Arbiter, Lasky, Blue Team, etc.?! Why do we get these completely new characters who we know nothing about or don’t even care about? Escharum was an utterly disappointing villain right from the moment we were introduced to him years ago.

My longtime friend has been saying that Halo nowadays is too much like the Michael Bay Transformers movies - in every installment, new characters just show up out of nowhere and beloved or other new ones suddenly disappear (Halo 5 killed off Jul 'Mdama too early, but that is nothing compared to Infinite completely throwing Blue Team, Lasky, Palmer, and especially the Arbiter under the bus). Now, with Infinite, I have too many questions that will never get answered properly, and heaven forbid if they kill off Blue Team or the Arbiter. That would upset a good portion of the fanbase, me included. I already gave up on Halo books after Halo: Bad Blood (Halo: Shadows of Reach just doesn’t interest me, and the book cover alone already turned me away).

To end this post, something really tells me that I will not enjoy the forthcoming campaign DLCs. This game has left a bad taste in my mouth unlike any other partly thanks to its terrible multiplayer progression and monetization (it’s even worse when Halo 5 did multiplayer better in every aspect!), and now the disappointing campaign story. The gameplay was not bad by any means, but I really hated being so slow and especially hated not seeing any of my favorite characters in the game, which only led to me asking more questions about the game and the story and never getting any answers. The only new characters I liked were the Pilot and the Weapon, and even then, they will never top Blue Team for me (except Linda, I can’t stand her).

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I don’t think these other complaints showing up on this thread hold up to scrutiny. You can make anything sound bad if you summarize it poorly, ignoring the nuances. Ex:
“Halo CE is just fighting aliens over a big gun, then an infection breaks out.”
“Halo 2 is just fighting aliens over a big gun, then an infection breaks out.”
“Halo 3 is just fighting aliens over several big guns, and the infection spreads.”
“Halo Reach is just people we know are going to die fighting aliens to get an AI.”
etc.

As for the argument that Halo Infinite introduced too many new characters while ignoring the old ones… Both parts of that claim don’t hold up. There aren’t that many new characters. You’ve got the Chief, the weapon, and the pilot as the three recurring heroes, and one new recurring character leading the Banished. That’s a total of three new characters, because all of the other Banished leaders are set dressing, because they’re one-and-done targets. Through the audio logs we know Lasky is on the ring somewhere, and Blue Team was sent on another mission. And the Arbiter is the leader of his race, he has to govern. Besides, the Arbiter’s not in more games than he’s in, so his absence isn’t surprising, especially since none of the factions in this game are his.

If you look for the bad, that’s all you’ll see. Rather than dwelling on what people didn’t like, it’s much better to look for the merits, and get a more complete picture of the quality of the game. Halo Infinite does much more well than it did poorly.

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I was disappointed we didn’t get Battlestar Infinity and more of Cortana being a Goddess (before going back on it coz she’s a good AI, Logic Plague etc etc). Instead they have, apparently, fridged Cortana at the start of the game instead which is odd for a main character whose been around for 20 years.

But, it was still an outstanding campaign and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. It passes the main test I set which was do they manage to weave the events of Halo 5 to still drive the story. Which they very much do. The Banished want to destroy humanity because of Cortana, it’s why the UNSC is so weak, it’s central to what’s up with Chief having taken this loss and the Weapon. The tone is spot on.

The open world concept is amazing. There’s always room for improvement but having an open world with linear set pieces missions bolted in works surprisingly well. The music really adds to this as well.

The Banished work very well in the campaign as villains.

The gameplay is great.

For now, they haven’t done any hard retcons where I am like “that doesn’t make sense”. If they turn around and say the Arbiter found the Wardens central cortex and killed him or the Created/Prometheans got driven off Earth when it was established the UNSC only had a handful of ships and most of that was the Infinity. That’s where I think it will start running into issues. If you don’t blow the Domain up then you will have to address those points eventually. If it just reverts to Halo 4 UNSC I’d be left shaking my head.

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Ok, I can respect that others might like the story, but I didn’t.

Let me be clear though, I liked the gameplay, graphics, etc. That was all good. I thought the open world could have been far better, but they didn’t make a bad game, that’s not what I’m saying. I just didn’t like how they handled the story.

I didn’t care at all about this game’s villains. I wanted to deal with the major villains, not their second in command and some new creature that we’re barely given any information about. I reiterate what I said above, to me this whole storyline felt like a short story set in between major events. I want to play through the major events, not hear about them second hand. Who plays a game like this just to hear about all the cool stuff you don’t get to participate in?

It takes Years for these games to come out and god knows who gets to screw with the story between games.
So give me a story that feels complete. This isn’t a DLC. This isn’t some off-shoot of the franchise. This is a prime game in the series, and the story totally felt incomplete. It didn’t feel like it had a beginning, middle & end. It felt like it started in the middle and… just stayed there.

The capture and erasure of Cortana, the attack on the Infinity, fighting Atriox and loosing, that would have been way cooler than what we were given. I also thought the about-face that Cortana did at the end was weak. Actually, everything about how they handled Cortana in this story felt weak. Like they were just trying to find a quick way to get rid of her.

NOTE: I’ve never really been a big fan of the online Multiplayer stuff (Just a personal preference thing) so I can’t justify any opinion on that side of the game.

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