It’s built into the lore and would be very easy to do.
Imagine a last stand at the ark, with all warring factions forced into a corner by a reemerged and surging flood. There is only one option: to light the rings.
The array fires, seeds are re-sewn, and the galaxy begins anew.
100k years later and we, the players, are brought into a new Halo timeline that can be very different, but also familiar in a lot of ways. And no one in universe is wise to what had happened, except for any surviving monitors and/or gravemind.
And here we are with a fresh canvas on which to play out new stories, or new variations of old ones.
Unlikely. But I’m just thinking out loud.
I wouldn’t bet on it. The Precursors are eternal beings, and the Flood are avatars they created for a specific purpose, part of which was punishing the Forerunners’ hubris. If the Flood was trying to consume everything, it would have destroyed the Forerunners long before the Halo Array was ever designed, or wiped out the Covenant and Humanity instead of pretending to be primitive, lacking the billions of years of knowledge the Flood actually has available to it.
The Flood is driving advancement by presenting itself as a threat to the other races, making them advance to survive, and all that work would be wiped out if the Flood actually wiped them out, or forced them to light the Halo Array.
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Whoa. Is that in a book, or is it your own theory?
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It’s a conclusion based on the multitude of evidence that the Flood isn’t trying to win.
Even when we see the Flood in a “feral” state, they still have a Gravemind somewhere, and the “feral” Flood are making decisions regarding who to infect or not infect far exceeding the level of intellect the other races believe they have. (Much of this is revealed in Greg Bear’s Foreunner Trilogy)
Every Gravemind is a body used by the same being that the ancient civilizations called the Primordial, and it always has access to all of the accumulated knowledge from its entire history. A gravemind even used this knowledge to tempt Cortana when it had her in custody in the events of "Human Weakness between Halo 2&3.
The Flood could easily have defeated the Forerunners and everything else long before the Halos were ever designed, but chose not to. That’s telling, especially since it became obvious enough that even the Forerunners noticed it. And the Flood having all of that knowledge and capability, it’s painfully obvious that if the Flood were trying to wipe out the Covenant and Humanity, the Flood already would have.
And if you look though the story, see how the various factions change after encounters with the Flood. They change course, either launching themselves forward in terms of technology and cooperation with other races, or if they were violating the Mantle (such as was the case with the Covenant) they’re crushed, giving the component races a chance to crawl out of the shackles the oppressive cult put on them. For an example of this, look at the Unggoy. They’re serving alongside Brutes and Elites in various organisations, and even holding positions of authority, instead of being universally relegated to disposable cannon-fodder. The Banished even give the higher-ranking Unggoy shielded armor.
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No because the UNSC is grounded in a specific and relatable point in time. Even if humanity somehow ended up with similar technology it wouldn’t be as immediately approachable. Plus the Galaxy is vague and I’ll defined enough that you can just move the pieces around to get the outcome you want without having to reinvent the wheel.
They’ve also kind of already done a soft reboot. You can’t keep knocking things down every game.