People are really divided on the fact that the game is rated T. People are debating if 343 is toning down the game to sell more copies. However, there may be something else that has caused the rating. Maybe the ESRB has changed its standards, and decided that Halo has been lighter on the M rating and decided to finally give it the T rating. Do you think the ESRB has changed on what makes a game M and T, and they made the choice of giving Halo a T rating?
The description ESRB gave for 5 is almost identical to the one they gave for CE, so it is probably just a matter of changing times.
I would hope that is the case. There was a clear shift in rating at the start of last gen when basically anything with blood an violence was M where as games with near identical content only a year or two before would have been T. The Flood were the only justification I could see for any of the Halo games being M and ODST, Reach, and Halo 4 all had M ratings for no real reason other than their predecessors were rated M.
Even then I wouldn’t really consider the first 3 games really ‘deserving’ and M rating even with the Flood but I digress. I can see the value in what the ESRB does for parents, but they cast such a wide net last gen that it didn’t have much value.
There is not reason to get bent of shape because of the rating anyway, telling a ‘dark’ story does not require a lot of blood and gore. I don’t see any evidence that anything has really been toned down in from a normal game anyway so I really don’t understand why there would be any controversy.
It’s possible that the ESRB has toned down their view on violence, but I’d say this is just a matter of Halo 5 not including extreme acts of dismemberment. Halos 1-3 had gore, but very little else made them M titles. Halo 2 vista had nudity added to the rating after the fact because of an image with a dev mooning the camera. Halo 3: ODST and Reach had some scenes that could cause some sort of trauma. The scene were Cat is shot through her un-shielded helmet or the scene where Emile is impaled by an Elite General. As for ODST the scene where Romeo gets slammed with a grav hammer and I think a few expletives may have also caused this one to receive an M rating.
As for Halo 4 we all know the reason it got its M rating. It was because of Cortana being too hot. No, but seriously it was partly due to the composer scene on Ivanoff Research Station and maybe Spartan Ops, but I’d assume that would go in the “Online interactions not rated” clause.
So this practically confirms that Halo 5 won’t have any scenes of dismemberment or hyper-decomposition. Honestly the only ways to get an M rating these days are hyper violence and gore, Extreme language, nudity and the use of drugs.
A side note since the ESRB isn’t a government controlled organization like PEGI and the Australian Classification Board, so there isn’t a standard that can not be redacted or changed over the years.