What bothers me is that they spent so much time trying to show off how “good” coatings and armors are. And the one place where people are almost unanimously happy showing off their Spartans, they don’t do it. Maybe people will buy more from the shop if there are more places to view them!
MP Just feels like the Agryna & Eklund cardboard character show, while your MP Spartan and forgotten Spartan Dinh disappear. Even though that is meant to be “our Spartan story”. Oh and they’ll retcon Fireteam Crimson, our first custom Spartan story to be Eklund. (There is wiggle room for her to leave Crimson before Spartan Ops but the lore comes off as Eklund was the one in Spartan Ops, not us)
Then co-op, where people might pretend to do PVE and form their own stories with their custom spartans, nah it can only be Chief. Co-op isn’t canon anyway, but we have to keep it Chief. Because 4 Master Chiefs makes a whole lot more sense than happening upon 3 Spartan IV’s on the Banished ship…
343, whoever is making these decisions on what the story about our Spartans is meant to be, please, tell them for me: Stop railroading and rewriting what “our Spartans” do. I never thought I would say this, but let people have their fan fictions about their spartans. Instead of offering only one way that our Spartans can be “canon” only to rewrite them later (Eklund…) Give us the tools to make up our own crap. I’m not saying “oh let’s have fan fiction contests” or saying “Yeah my Spartan was on Zeta Halo with Chief the whole time!” What I’m saying is let the game facilitate our personalities.
While playing co-op with my GF she naturally leaned toward being a sniper, and I leaned toward fast-moving mid-range attacks to draw fire to let her pick off targets. We work together well. It would be nice if our custom spartans reflected that and we made our own stories around that. It doesn’t matter where or what context this happened, it is just cooler to think that the two of us took down a banished base together, not that a pair of Master Chiefs saved Zeta Halo one base at a time. For us maybe it was on Zeta Halo, maybe it was on some random planet, maybe we don’t think twice and just move on with the game. It doesn’t matter and no one who has control of writing should take that away from the fans. Instead 343’s writing is actively blocking off this kind of fun. They’re saying “No you’re Spartan wasn’t on Fireteam Crimson, Eklund was, actually your Spartan is brand new and just learning at the Academy!” Okay, so you’re telling me that it isn’t possible in the years between Spartan Ops and Halo Infinite that my spartan was restationed off Fireteam Crimson and is a senior member at the Academy? That somehow you don’t like that I’m making my own story that you have no control of and doesn’t tread on what you’re setting up? 343 might not say it, but that’s how this feels.
Sure, functionally it isn’t necessary, but at this point its like 343 is saying “Your Spartan is doing ‘this’ unless we decide to rewrite it later.” Dang it let my Blue and White SII sniper GF and my Black and Red SIII shoot aliens in a non-roundbased mode in the events before Halo Infinite. You all can fill in what’s happening now. We’ll worry about the unneccessary backstory. If you’re that worried about what the fans do with their non-canon backstories and need to hand-hold us, at least both of us have our own copies of the encyclopedia.
Holy crap I went on a rant defending how fan-fiction ties into co-op cosmetics at 3AM. I need a life.