I’ve been keeping track of the “What remaining ‘Mystery’ is there in the Halo games” topic, and it seems to me that there’s a real desire from the responses there (and myself) for more mysteries in the Halo universe.
Some great examples for what I’m talking about are:
The general mystery surrounding Precursors. - What’s happening outside of our Galaxy? - Everything in Halo CE, 2, and 3 about the forerunners, before it was explained. - Finding ancient structures, with only hints about what their purpose is.My main question is, how do you all think 343 can introduce more elements like this?
I didn’t want to clutter up my original post with my opinions on this, so I’m writing this separately.
I believe that in general, 343 should be trying to create more questions than answers.
My best example for this writing style is Bethesda, as in every game they make, there’s so many small and large mysteries you come across, like say, what happened to the Dwarves, that you’re never told outright exactly what happened. Instead there’s plenty of hints and pieces of evidence you can work with to draw your own conclusion, and different people can come out with different conclusions which are all possibly true.
I know Halo isn’t Elder Scrolls, and I don’t want it to be, as they’re as different as you can get. I think Halo’s greatest strength in storytelling has always been its environments; the Ark was vast and dotted with forerunner structures to explore, but when you look closer and find the terminals, you find some evidence of a being tampering with the computer systems of the Ark and helping your goal. New Mombasa is cozy and familiar, with strange Hyroglyphs on the walls and a benevolent AI behind the scenes.
If 343 makes interesting environments like this, I think they’ll capture people’s interest.
One mystery could be finding remains of a civilization that got reseeded after the rings fired but killed each other off or found the flood but due to them being stuck with mid 20th century tech at most and could be a isolated incident since they never made it to space turning the planet into the equivalent of a sleeping giant
Another could be fragments of a a.i. on the ring that aren’t of any origin that’s known
Our galaxy is very large and surely there is still much to discover before thinking about traveling to other galaxies. But it would be great to add more civilizations from the Forreruner era that can add mysteries of their own to the lore.
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> One mystery could be finding remains of a civilization that got reseeded after the rings fired but killed each other off or found the flood but due to them being stuck with mid 20th century tech at most and could be a isolated incident since they never made it to space turning the planet into the equivalent of a sleeping giant
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> Another could be fragments of a a.i. on the ring that aren’t of any origin that’s known
I absolutely adore this idea! It’s a compelling use of the universe’s history, and something we’ve never seen in Halo. There’s a lot of ways they could do this too. We might get taken there in search of some forerunner artifacts left on that species’ home planet, just like they did for Humans. It would also be quite cool if instead, we found evidence of them on Zeta Halo, like astronaut gear we’d have in the real world and pre-slipspace space vehicles. The last thing you expect to find on a Halo ring is remnants of a low-tech civilization that we’ve never heard of.
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> > 2535447291443771;3:
> > One mystery could be finding remains of a civilization that got reseeded after the rings fired but killed each other off or found the flood but due to them being stuck with mid 20th century tech at most and could be a isolated incident since they never made it to space turning the planet into the equivalent of a sleeping giant
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> > Another could be fragments of a a.i. on the ring that aren’t of any origin that’s known
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> I absolutely adore this idea! It’s a compelling use of the universe’s history, and something we’ve never seen in Halo. There’s a lot of ways they could do this too. We might get taken there in search of some forerunner artifacts left on that species’ home planet, just like they did for Humans. It would also be quite cool if instead, we found evidence of them on Zeta Halo, like astronaut gear we’d have in the real world and pre-slipspace space vehicles. The last thing you expect to find on a Halo ring is remnants of a low-tech civilization that we’ve never heard of.
That’s a pretty good idea too, probably find were ancient secluded battles happened. Would add more spice to Halo’s mystery garden variety, another mystery could be ONI covering up evidence of one more space faring civilization for whatever reason, probably wouldn’t be explained or dug into to keep a shroud of mystery
Considering they plan to expand upon the game for the next decade, I would hope they implement more mystery and lore to the universe. Only if its well written, however. I don’t see any kind of game, comic, book, movie or TV universe getting very far without a slight bit of unexpected results or twist factor given to the audience. When you can see what’s coming next, without fail, things start to get real bland.