Both Halo 4 and 5 included material from other media in the franchise, and their inclusion and implementation has been mixed. Some have criticized 343 for requiring players to have read and watched these other pieces of the fiction. With some of it I agree with, others I think 343 did a pretty good explaining stuff in Halo 4. Over a year ago, Grim stated that the games and other materials will be in separate ‘swimlanes’. For Infinite, they stated that it will be accessible for everyone, including new players. However, this is Installation 07, Zeta Halo. There’s a lot of history and ties into the deep lore of Halo, namely the Forerunner Saga. However, in either case, do you think 343 will have some EU material in the Campaign, not just in the background but actually in the forefront and part of the plot?
I think they’re smartly moving away from the combined approach. They’re discovering, like a lot of other longstanding Sci-Fi franchises with deep and expansive Universes, that including too much depth and allusion to broader or obscure topics of the fiction serves to do little but alienate casual participation. Sure, it lends credibility and validates a very small portion of the diehard fan base by assuring them that the novel they bought and read last year has something, however little, to do with the events of the latest flagship entry in the series.
Star Wars and Star Trek have both been fighting this exact same battle for decades, and I think it’s pretty clear that the “everything counts and everything matters” approach to expanded fiction doesn’t work very well. There become very quickly too many cooks in the kitchen, each with their own ideas for what the series should be and each thinking their particular vision for it is authoritative and definitive. Doing a story group hasn’t done much to solve the problem for Star Wars, it’s just changed the problem into less worthwhile and entertaining expanded material. Star Trek seems to take more of a “whatever you want to believe from the expanded lore as long as it doesn’t contradict what you’ve seen on screen” approach which is a bit more useful in that it allows people to feel like they at least aren’t wasting their time delving into expanded materials (that have officially been cast off as ‘Legends’ by the rights holders–*cough, Star Wars EU).
The different swim lanes analogy is great, and it actually used to be the way things in Halo operated. Enjoyment of the games and the novels weren’t mutually exclusive, but they didn’t depend on each other entirely, either. Nylund didn’t have the strength to write independently incredible Sci-Fi novels, so CE gave Fall of Reach some credibility that it otherwise would’ve lacked. Smartly, though, none of what was written was necessary to know to enjoy Halo 2 or 3, or ODST. Bungie obviously didn’t feel beholden to the books over what they considered to be their vision of the series, as they proved when they made Fall of Reach an incredibly confusing or downright unreconciliable read when paired with Halo: Reach.
I think Infinite can give players a good explanation of what Zeta Halo is and its general importance in-game. It’s not as significant of an artifact as the Ark was, and I haven’t heard people complain about how Halo 3 introduced and handled that. Overall, it’s just a lot cleaner if the games are designed to be accessible to a wider audience. And it’s better for the future of the series, too.
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> I think they’re smartly moving away from the combined approach. They’re discovering, like a lot of other longstanding Sci-Fi franchises with deep and expansive Universes, that including too much depth and allusion to broader or obscure topics of the fiction serves to do little but alienate casual participation. Sure, it lends credibility and validates a very small portion of the diehard fan base by assuring them that the novel they bought and read last year has something, however little, to do with the events of the latest flagship entry in the series.
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> Star Wars and Star Trek have both been fighting this exact same battle for decades, and I think it’s pretty clear that the “everything counts and everything matters” approach to expanded fiction doesn’t work very well. There become very quickly too many cooks in the kitchen, each with their own ideas for what the series should be and each thinking their particular vision for it is authoritative and definitive. Doing a story group hasn’t done much to solve the problem for Star Wars, it’s just changed the problem into less worthwhile and entertaining expanded material. Star Trek seems to take more of a “whatever you want to believe from the expanded lore as long as it doesn’t contradict what you’ve seen on screen” approach which is a bit more useful in that it allows people to feel like they at least aren’t wasting their time delving into expanded materials (that have officially been cast off as ‘Legends’ by the rights holders–*cough, Star Wars EU).
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> The different swim lanes analogy is great, and it actually used to be the way things in Halo operated. Enjoyment of the games and the novels weren’t mutually exclusive, but they didn’t depend on each other entirely, either. Nylund didn’t have the strength to write independently incredible Sci-Fi novels, so CE gave Fall of Reach some credibility that it otherwise would’ve lacked. Smartly, though, none of what was written was necessary to know to enjoy Halo 2 or 3, or ODST. Bungie obviously didn’t feel beholden to the books over what they considered to be their vision of the series, as they proved when they made Fall of Reach an incredibly confusing or downright unreconciliable read when paired with Halo: Reach.
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> I think Infinite can give players a good explanation of what Zeta Halo is and its general importance in-game. It’s not as significant of an artifact as the Ark was, and I haven’t heard people complain about how Halo 3 introduced and handled that. Overall, it’s just a lot cleaner if the games are designed to be accessible to a wider audience. And it’s better for the future of the series, too.
I see what you’re saying about it probably being smarter to keep games relatively clean and simple when it comes to an extended universe perspective, but I will say that Halo 4 was a really awesome experience lore-wise, AND they managed to keep it interesting for a general audience with the Chief/Cortana story. It’s almost like they brought the different swim lanes into the game itself, between the Didact/Forerunner story and the Cortana/Chief story. It’s worth noting that a lot of comments on youtube videos of Halo 4’s campaign make note of how good it was, story-wise, in retrospect. A big issue with Halo 4’s story had to do with the accessibility of the terminals–which did a lot to fill in relevant backstory. They were only accessibly through the waypoint app at the time, and the app was totally bad. If the terminals had been accessible on the disc/game itself I almost believe the lore knowledge-gap would have been a nonissue.
Halo 4’s story went a reasonable distance into incorporating extended lore, but it was still pretty well-received. I think a lot of the real frenzy of “What the heck is going on in this story???” happened in Halo 5, where even lore aficionados (or perhaps especially these folks) were basically going, “Wtf?” throughout the story.
I think there’s been a kind of unfortunate conflagration of the responses to Halo 4 and 5’s story, and because of that, 343i is now taking the point of view that excessive lore in game is bad for the story. I think that’s dumb. Responses to Halo 4’s story have only gotten better over time, and its initial lukewarm(ish) (<–I think most people even at the beginning thought it was pretty good) reception could have been improved with tech that allowed the terminals to be on-disc; and everybody still hates Halo 5 because it was bad, and because, in fact, it had nothing to do with the lore. It didn’t finish up Spartan Ops, it didn’t mention anything that happened in the conclusion of Spartan Ops in the comics, and Didact was nowhere to be found. It didn’t deal with Hunt the Truth–its own friggin’ marketing campaign–or any of the ONI shenanigons set up in the KT trilogy.
Lore in-game shouldn’t be a deal-breaker, and I don’t think it has to be. It does a lot for the people who bother to read the EU, and it does a lot to make people want to invest in the universe. Plus, pleasing lore/die-hard fans is good because the stuff that gets discussed on forums in quiet corners of the internet ends up feeding the larger social narrative about whether a game or good is not. The die-hards get the long-term say on what’s good (or not) in a franchise, and whether a series is worth sticking around for–if the die-hards even exist at all.
All this to say, I’m all for a crisp and clean Halo game with a pretty straightforward story. I loved the original trilogy like everybody else, and I think Halo Infinite can be absolute fire. I just think they started to do something really cool with Halo 4, that they could pull off, and that they’re now backing away from. Kinda sad! Still, tried-and-true is tried-and-true. If they managed to churn out another Bungie-esque Halo (Pre Halo: Reach… I hated that game) in Halo Infinite, I don’t think anyone can complain.
Tangential mini-essay aside,
OT: It would be cool to see them do stuff with mendicant bias (in the plot). It would be cool to see them address precursor shenanigons (in the plot). It would be unsurprising (and a little bit hectic, given the whole “Created” thing going on) if they introduced the Flood, or teased it for the future. It would be cool to see them bring the Didact back into the fold, given his current “composition” (heh heh).
Will they? Tough to say. I think it seems likely that a lot of these references and continuations of their significance to the plot will exist in the background, in terminals, etc. It seems like they really do want to go with a more straightforward, Halo Wars 2-esque tight little story that’s self-contained and intriguing/fun of its own accord. Not good or bad, necessarily, but different. I’d say “smaller,” but that has sort of a negative connotation and I don’t think it’s (necessarily) a bad thing if we get another CE kind of story out of Infinite.
It’s not what the past few games were pointing at, but HI is being explicitly sold to us as a palate cleanser.
The problem with this is a large majority of people have no idea what is going on. I’ve played halo for 15 years, but I have absolutely no idea what happened in campaign.
I totally respect your opinion and get where you’re coming from @VANGUARD 003. The biggest difference between our opinions is that I’m getting the impression we fall on opposite sides of the Halo 4 opinion coin.
Although I’ve gradually come to dislike it less and less, I initially had a very negative reaction to Halo 4’s story in both the more expanded Forerunner context and the personal context of Chief and Cortana’s drama. Even having been a lore buff at the time (more then than now, even, I think) I didn’t feel that the vision of the Didact and the Promethians fit what we’d learned up to that point in time in the Bungie materials. Gregg Bears’ books definitely felt like the same universe as Halo 4, but to me neither of them felt like they were describing the same Forerunners I’d always extrapolated from the terminals in Halo 3 and the other scattered information put forward by the original games. As far as the classic books, I only ever read Contact Harvest, The Fall of Reach, the Flood, and First Strike, but I can’t recall any of them giving me any strong sense of who the Forerunners were.
It’s on me to some extent that I extrapolated an image of the Forerunners that wasn’t matched (except by the Librarian, kind of) by Halo 4. In game it doesn’t contradict its portrayal of the Forerunners, it just defies my personal understanding of their general vibe and aesthetic based on the other games. The Chief and Cortana story really didn’t work for me in Halo 4 because it felt like they were both suddenly pretty different characters, or at least their relationship was suddenly very different, than it had been up to the end of Halo 3. I’ve ranted on Halo 4 for literally seven years here on the forums, though, so I’ll truncate this one here and suffice it to say that while these issues have lessened over time for me, they haven’t gone away entirely. I haven’t embraced them so much as I have begrudgingly accepted them.
You’re right that Halo 5 is a lore mess. It’s a mess in just about every other sense, too. Shudders I also think you’ve got a point saying that generally, popular opinion has warmed on H4 over the years.
Overall, even if it isn’t the way the series goes for the long haul, I think what Halo needs in Infinite is a game a total newcomer can play, understand, and love as much as someone who’s been popping Grunts since '01.