> WARNING: This thread (wall of text) contains SPOILERS for Greg Bear’s Forerunner Saga and Karen Traviss’s Glasslands.
So we were treated to a wealth of new information about Halo 4 in the latest Bulletin and more information in it is given away than we’re initially led to think. I thought I’d break down and analyse this new information [in the hopes of promoting productive topics rather than hate threads].
First off, the achievements - specifically the campaign ones:
> Dawn - Complete Mission 1 on any difficulty.
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> Requiem - Complete Mission 2 on any difficulty.
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> Forerunner - Complete Mission 3 on any difficulty.
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> Infinity - Complete Mission 4 on any difficulty.
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> Reclaimer - Complete Mission 5 on any difficulty.
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> Shutdown - Complete Mission 6 on any difficulty.
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> Composer - Complete Mission 7 on any difficulty.
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> Midnight - Complete Mission 8 on any difficulty.
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> *
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> Contact the Domain - Find a Terminal in the Campaign.
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> Terminus - Find all of the Terminals in the Campaign.
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> Digging up the Past - In Mission 1, find and access Chief’s record.
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> Midnight Launch - In Mission 2, get significant air in the Warthog at midnight.
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> This is my Rifle, this is my Gun - In Mission 3, carry a UNSC weapon all the way through on Heroic or harder.
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> Bros to the Close - Make it through Mission 4 without one preventable Marine death on Heroic or harder.
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> Mortardom - In Mission 5, hijack a Wraith and use it to kill at least four enemy Wraiths on Heroic or harder.
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> Explore the Floor - In Mission 6, trick or force a Hunter to fall to his demise.
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> Give Him the Stick - In Mission 7 in solo Campaign, take out both Hunters using only the Sticky Detonator.
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> Chief, Smash! - In Mission 8, kill 3 Crawlers in one hit with the Gravity Hammer.
Some of the more interesting things about this come from the names of the achievements. The one that stands out to me the most is the seventh one, Composer. To anyone who knows about the expanded fiction, the Composer is a Forerunner entity capable of turning people into AIs by extracting their personality and memories (as it did with Chakas who became the ‘template’ for 343 Guilty Spark).
So what could this mean? Well I see this being a two-fold answer:
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A twist in the game could well be that the Promethean-Knights actually were Forerunners who were ‘composed’ into these AIs.
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The Composer could well be Cortana’s salvation from rampancy, turning her into a Forerunner AI. Or, since we know Halsey is in the game, Cortana actually dies and Halsey is composed - becoming the new ‘Cortana’ for John. This is kind of a long-shot, but I’d love to see that rather than have a cop-out for Cortana’s rampancy. This way there needn’t be any change in voice actor or appearance.
Anyways, that’s just my speculation. And that’s really the only mission completion achievement which is very telling about the story. The rest is pretty much just common sense:
> Dawn - the first level of the game which we’ve seen pictures of, John is awakened by Cortana, the ship is under attack by the Covenant and you have to escape.
> Infinity - likely the mission which has the cutscene of John and Cortana on the ship with Captain Del Rio, Lasky and Palmer we saw at SDCC. In this, we can see Cortana’s rampancy taking its toll on her as she screams “I WILL NOT ALLOW YOU TO LEAVE THIS PLANET!” at Del Rio. At this point, John is arguing with Del Rio about leaving. According to John, “if we let Him leave this world, humanity will be at risk”. Who this refers to, we do not know. Possible explanations could be the Didact or Faber, but there’s no substantial set-in-stone evidence to back that up.
I want to talk about some of the mission-specific achievements now because some of them are really interesting.
> - Contact the Domain is another reference to the Forerunner Saga. The Domain was, to put it into Layman’s terms, the Forerunner ‘internet’. It held a record of Forerunner history, ideologies and laws (etc). The Domain was integrated into EVERY Forerunner through their suit of armour, however it’s shut off towards the end of the Forerunner-Flood war by Mendicant Bias, who defected to the Flood, later overcame rampancy and sent John to Requiem at the end of Halo 3 (as evidenced by the last Terminal).
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> This achievement seems to imply that the Domain is related to the Terminals we will find in the game. Since these Terminals are obviously going to show us records of Forerunner history, like they did in Halo 3 and CEA, perhaps through discovering all these Terminals you actually unlock the Domain? I can’t imagine all this information would be very good for Cortana, the sheer amount of information she got from Installation 04 in Halo CE was enough to push her close to rampancy, what’s the rest of this Forerunner record going to do to her?
> - Digging up the Past is what a lot of people have been wanting, more exposition on the history and background of John. Throughout all the other games he is a stoic, sterile and pretty one-dimensional character. It’s good to see that finally he’s going to be getting some development in the game by reflecting on his past, presumably bringing his Spartan-II training from The Fall of Reach into the game.
> - Midnight at Launch is another interesting one. Specifically the last 2 words, “at midnight”. The last mission of the game is called Midnight, but this achievement specifies that it has to be done in the second level, Requiem. Could this possibly point to some kind of day/night cycle in the campaign? It seems odd to specify an exact time of day it has to be done in…
> - Bros to the Close sounds like it will be fairly tricky to do. The key word I noticed was ‘preventable’, meaning that over the course of that mission we are going to see some Marines getting their -Yoinks!- handed to them by Promethean-Knights and Covenant.
> - Mortardom implies large-scale battles given that it says you have to kill “AT LEAST” 4 enemy Wraiths. So there are more than 5 Wraiths in the mission, it’ll be cool to have large-scale vehicular battles like Halo 2’s Quarantine Zone or Halo 3’s The Ark/Covenant again.
> - Chief, Smash! confirms the presence of the Gravity Hammer in the game, which pretty much confirms that Brutes will have at least some presence in the campaign.
Thoughts?
