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> > > > > > > Saying that the Flood will “undoubtedly” be in Halo 6 is a bit of a step, considering that the only known outbreak is being quarantined by the Banished.
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> > > > > > Perhaps, but chances are we might return to the Ark, and I doubt the Banished are that resourceful in quarantining the greatest threat in the galaxy. That being said, with the Flood being as serious as it is, I highly doubt it would only be brought back for the expense of a DLC.
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> > > > > According to that DLC you’re referencing, the Banished has already successfully beaten back the surviving Flood on the Ark and neutralized the forming central intelligence it had. So now the surviving Flood on the Ark is actually weaker after Awakening The Nightmare than it was before.
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> > > > And whose to say another intelligence won’t just assemble… I mean come on- were talking about the Flood here. If the Forerunners, as advanced as they were, couldn’t defeat it, let alone hold it off, how well do you think the Banished are gonna do. Plus the last point I made in my last post still stands: why would 343 bring back such a crucial enemy for just the expense of a dlc and not potential in a far huger game (H6).
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> > > It’s always possible that another Gravemind/Flood outbreak is somewhere in the galaxy; however, it’s not something that’s been addressed in any game or any piece of literature that’s come out, so that would mean that a Gravemind in Halo 6 would be a newly-introduced source of Flood we’ve never heard about before, which would be a bit weak plot-wise.
> > > As for the reason why 343i would bring back the Flood for a short-term stint in Halo Wars 2; well, because of their popularity. Many fans love the Flood and have been asking for them to return, but Halo 4 and 5 haven’t focused on the Flood at all, so seemingly the Reclaimer saga has nothing to do with them (unlike the original trilogy, which featured them in all 3 games as a threat that grew increasingly more dangerous with each game). The HW2 DLC allowed 343i to bring them back in a method that both leaves them available for addressing in the future and leaving them out of the current plot ark, if that’s what they want. Personally, I don’t feel like the Flood should be involved in the Created ark, so I’m hoping that Halo 6 does not feature the Flood. Plus, HW2 does not do an adequate job explaining why the Flood even survived on the Ark, so it really seems like 343i just cobbled something together to quell the clamor of the Flood fans.
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> > Actually, Halo 4 did feature the Flood at an important angle: if the ancient humans had not encountered it, conflict would not have arisen between them and the Forerunners, thus the Prometheans would not have been officially militarized and Forerunners would not have been distracted in defeating and devolving the humans and would have realized the Flood threat sooner. In fact this conflict involving the Flood is what has set argument in the Halo universe that if humanity is worthy of taking up the Mantle of Responsibility, which so far in the saga both the Didact and Corrupted Cortana disagree with. Kinda bunny-trailed there, but back to the HW2 DLC, your probably right, 343 mostly brought the Flood back because of their popularity, but you should account for the fact that the firing of the second Alpha Halo from H3 was still a Halo fire, meaning while it destroyed the remaining Covenant, it was only speculated to damage the remaining Flood, and as history in the Halo universe tells us, it took around a 100,000 years for the Flood to fully die off from starvation, meaning its reasonable that some Flood survived High Charity.
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> Halo 4’s Terminals were a brief summary of the Silentium trilogy of novels that detailed the Forerunner-Flood War. They were there to put context to the Didact’s motivations. I would hardly call the Terminals featuring the Flood as focusing on the Flood, which is what I said (I said “focused”, not “featured”; there is a difference). I won’t get into the whole “Flood testing humanity for the Mantle” theory debate because it has nothing to do with this thread (I guess this whole conversation doesn’t, really).
> We can agree that the firing of Installation 04b would have had the Halo effect on the local area of the Ark. This for sure would have meant surviving human/Covenant forces on the Ark and (using other sources about the Halo effect on Flood as a reference) higher order Flood forms would have been instantly destroyed. They only Flood that should have been still viable would have been spores and maybe Infection forms, but without anything to infect, it doesn’t make sense that they were able to grow to a militant force capable of threatening the Banished. Especially when you take into account that 000 Tragic Solitude sealed off the sector with High Charity with a hard light shield, razed the surrounding sectors of all life, and then guarded the area with Sentinels (all of this very soon after the firing of the Halo, before any other life would have had a chance to encounter the Flood). It just does not follow with what we understand about how Halos work. I can live with High Charity remaining intact after all of that, but there was already nothing living in High Charity when it crashed onto the Ark, and after the Halo fired, there would have been no intelligent lifeforms around to help form a proto-Gravemind.
I do apologize for my wording, and your right, that is what the terminals are initially there for, but they do give some insight on the Flood, as does the cutscene between the Chief and the Librarian. And I still feel like the rep the Flood has in the universe gives it the bypass of being so persistent it could survive through all of that, and once again it took (lets be hypothetical) roughly 50,000 for the Flood to fully die off beyond the samples kept on certain installations. With its unfounded speed of global infection in mind, I would say the forces infected due to Voridus’ plundering of High Charity were enough to get a mass Flood force going. But as you said, this whole conversation really isn’t relevant to the topic, so lets just leave it on our own thoughts and be done with it. It will ultimately answered when H6 comes around.