Halo Infinite Campaign: Where I thought it was going, and where it actually went

Games Halo Infinite
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I am naive. I didn’t see the signs, in the way 343’s decisions on campaign would go. I was hindered by my emotions, carried over from the Bungie days of Halo.

343 did well. I understand their choices. It was a business led story.

Without further ado, here’s what I expected to happen in the story. This is purely from a casual fan’s perspective. I do not read books. I just play the game, and only the important cinematic cutscenes, themes, and dialogue stick with me.

STORY EXPECATION

So, Cortana for whatever reason went Rogue in halo 5. I guess since Halsey is a bit bitchy, it makes sense she became like her in old age.
She has the Guardians, huge planet ending things at her disposal. She is the threat to face in Halo 6. Clearly.
Expectation = Fight with Cortana, Fight with Guardians in space, or on earth. I know we can’t fight with an A.I. and I guess we kinda fought her soldiers already in halo 5, but what if she manifested herself into another Creature? Maybe she sides with Atriox and manages to upscale the once dumb brutes to Elite level. Maybe a new enemy kills Cortana. Maybe the forerunners kill her.

But, what else is going on with the story right? the masterminds that were the prophets are now gone. The didact, gone. No intelligible species to fight besides more forerunners.
We are left with the Elites, who aren’t strong enough to take over the void of the prophets.
Then we have the dumb apes, the brutes.
Expectation = NOT to have a game, that too, halo 6, the second trilogy, the to-be “masterpiece”, “Infinite” be led by Brutes, who are literally monkeys.

So, the forerunners show up again, this time as a feminine creature, no worse or better than the Librarian in Halo 4. I don’t know… I’m not scared, I’m not puzzled, cool fangs I guess.
She talks about the Endless, and things worse than the flood.
Expectation: = I want to see the -Yoink!- surprise! Why push it out into the future? What? why… when do I get to play that? when Covid-29 kicks into gear? come on. Screw the wait. Just exhaust the story already. Have one of the rings blow up or something, show us the endless. Show us Esherim kill Halsey, I mean someone’s got to kill her. Maybe the forerunners can infect beings like the heretics/banished. I want to see multiple wars going on. Brutes fighting the Elites. The flood fighting both. The forerunners killing the flood. It’s been 20 years and we’ve still not seen a halo blow up.

The didact was the only proper villain, what a character. You’d think if Halo 4 was really the beginning, then we’d see someone superior and even higher rank than the Didact, and what did we get? The harbinger lady? come on. A beefy brute? Just stop. Even the warden eternals were better suited, and more scary.
So, what do I suggest you ask?
Expectation: Better Villains. Fight with Blue Team. Fight with Atriox and Echerim sure. But also, Fight with a flood boss. Fight/Confrontation with the Forerunner Architects. Fight with Halsey. I’m just sayin she’s gotta be stopped.

Regarding map design, locales, setting: we have an open world halo map, great. But, who asked for it? Halo was never that. We had a small taste of non-linear campaign in the first/second level in halo CE ring. That was big enough and open world enough. The great thing about halo 1 story was we got to go from Spaceship to Halo ring to Covenant ship, to a beach and cartographer, then to an ICE world map, and then to a Jungle, and a Library and then to a spaceship again in a Desert!? wow! that’s all I ever wanted 343.
Expectation = More and more biomes. As amazing as the mountain terrain of Halo Infinite is, I just feel lost. Like the only good reason for it is to have battle royale mode. You basically took the halo 1 cover art and made it into a level, that’s GOLD, but at what cost? we don’t get more than 2 levels? mountains and forerunner hallways? bad tradeoff for us fans there.

The rings. The -Yoink!- halo rings. That’s what the game is all about. They are created to kill the flood. How inefficient it is to wipe out all life and start over. Imagine doing that in programming. Oh I caused a bug, let me revert code to version 0.0 and begin anew. It’s not at all bad to introduce a new purpose to the rings. Maybe they aren’t only to kill the flood. They are weopons of mass destruction! maybe their were multiple purposes(sp?).
Expectation = Why not go grandiose… show the flood killing off humans in another galaxy, have cortana deploy a ring and blow that entire galaxy up. I want to see it. I want to see Cortana become power hungry. I want her to turn into wrinkly Halsey being mad mad. I want to see Chief kill Halsey. I’m just sayin! I want to see the objectivism of A.I. fail and see it turn into the very thing it’s suppose to be disconnected from, being human. I want to get philosophical here, like the matrix movies, and delve into who gets to have the mantle of responsibility. That was teased way too much for us not to go there.

Final Expectation = I want to see all 7 rings and the arc blow up. I want the halos gone. papapapammmmmmmmm.
End the game. End the series. Master Chief can die. papapapammmmmmmmm. Humanity can live. papapapammmmmmmmm. Maybe that’s how things should end. papapapammmmmmmmm pa papapa papapam. All technology is erased on Earth, the galaxy wiped clean. Just the sun, the earth, humanity, the arbiter remaining, and chief would be no more, as he has died saving it. “It’s over.” “The flood, the covenant” “the forerunners, the halos, it’s done”. The forerunners lose forever. papapapammmmmmmmm. Halsey has a granddaughter, her name is Cortana. We are shown Cortana’s best friend, John. They look up at the sky, there are round aurora borealis indicating the once presence of the halos.

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At this point we’re on the franchise train. Halo is not a series created to sell stories. Its a series created to sell Xbox. It’s a series now to bring people to Game Pass and Free to Play MTX. It can HAVE engaging or thoughtful storytelling. The but main aim never was and never has been just to tell a certain saga.

We were supposed to “Finish the Fight” in 2007 but it was a mistake for anyone to believe a popular mega successful corporate property could ever just end. So we get books and spin offs,prequels, sequels. As long as there’s still interest and a potential for profit the Halo machine must keep going.

Things can change but only enough so we can tell more stories and sell more Multiplayer and get more GamePass subscriptions.

This isn’t a cynical post. I like Halo and I’m invested in the characters and world. I quite enjoyed Halo Infinites story and found the open world sandbox a lot of fun to explore.

But Halo isn’t The Wire. It’s not even a series really designed with an end like the unfinished A Song of Ice and Fire.

It’s more like a long running Network Television series. In fact it has even greater potential since it’s less limited by the realities of aging casts and doesn’t need to pump out a 22 episode season every year.

There’s a reason why Halo 3 ended with a potential tease for future stories and kept the Master Chief alive. If you wanted an end Halo 3 was it. If you’re playing Halo now we’re in the expansion times where the creative have to figure out new ways to keep the story and lore chugging along.

They can make an excellent Halo sequel or whatever. But at it’s core Halo isn’t designed to tell a story with a beginning, middle or end. It’s an evolving beast

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1: Smart AIs “think” themselves to “death”. After seven years they become rampant. Serina from Halo Wars deleted herself at the end of her 7 year period.
Cortana got access to the domain and that was for some reason a cure to rampancy, though she got new ideas.

2: The Banished were quite popular in Halo Wars 2.
i343 has also story wise cornered themselves when it comes to enemy factions. The Covenant is gone and there are quite a few splinter factions.

3: It’s not Forerunner, it’s an entirely new species which supposedly bring something new to the table which is worse than the flood.
The push for the future is to sell story expansions.
Though Microsoft has registered Halo: Endless, so we’ll see where it goes.
But the idea is that the story continues with at least one cliffhanger.

4: Things haven’t gone as planned with the storyline for this era.
It started as a planned out trilogy but grew into a saga and has changed direction twice now.

Storywise they lost their bearing around Spartan Ops to the Escalation series.
Bendis, if I’m not mistaken, wrote Spartan Ops, then Halo 5. He has a reputation of not really taking previous work into account on what he’s writing.
The Didact was meant from the start to be an ongoing antagonist through and through, and Halo 5 to be the darkest storyline in all games. 72-hours later happened and things changed, direction, hard. The Didact was out, and for some reason an even bigger new threat was needed. Cue Dictator Cortana, for some reason.
Now they took yet another new project and jumped in after the conclusion of the previous story. Not knowing how to handle it in a good way? And just ditched it for the next new clever idea.
SpOps was ditched for Warzone, which was ditched in Infinite.
The Halo 4 storyline was basically ditched for a robot revolution storyline, which was basically ditched for, whatever this.
It’s sporadic and inconsistent.

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Well Brian Reed can be black listed for life on destroying the potential that Halo 4 had and writing the worst convoluted story that trashed Chief going through losing Cortana and bringing her back with a “lol she’s evil now” gag.

I’m mad that Laskey, Palmer, Halsey and everyone else gets written off in audio logs and fates left unknown. A lot of Infinite’s campaign was cut so we’ll going to be sold it back to us in installments.

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Brian Reed aside, the Campaign development team were also straight trash.
Who on earth decides to put some wave defense thing in the middle of the mission which lasts needlessly long? And the worst part is that the members of Osiris won’t shutit the entire time.

Also H5 on Legendary is just… well let’s just say if you want to torture someone, make them play H5 Legendary over and over.

The whole squad based revive mechanic doesn’t work. The AIs are stupid for one, but having the revive mechanic actually prolongs your suffering on Legendary. You go down, the AI tries to get you back up, they go down, another AI comes to try get you back up, they go down, and repeats until everyone is down and you have to load a checkpoint.

Why not just save us the damn trouble and let us load the moment we go down? Now I have to suffer these 3 idiot AIs goofing and prolonging my death just to load.

Also, ALSO, H5 somehow brought back H2 levels of Jackal Snipers. Like actually WHAT.
We had finally left behind the plague of Jackal Snipers for 3 games and you bring them back in H5 just to torture the players even harder with the revive mechanic. ACTUAL WHAT.

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343, in my opinion has thrown in the towel on the Halo plot and have instead put all of their chips into the monetization and multiplayer aspects of Infinite.

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343 kill Cortana, turn her evil, kill her again off screen for no reason since Atriox is still alive, and replace her by an other Cortana. Never a loved character has been so mistreated.

I really hoped they would explain than the evil Cortana was infected by the Domaine and wasn’t really our Cortana, but no, they concluded her arc story by making her good in her last seconds of life, like if that would erase all of what she done !

Never forget the real Cortana is dead in Halo 4, the rogue one is just a fragment of her infected by the domain.

And to answer to StillFBlazin, I found the Banished was a good thing, it’s a good changement after so many game with the covenant. I regret to the absence of the Didact, he was a good villain