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> Well in fairness Halo 5 did substantially change the setting because Cortana actually gets to use the Forerunner McGuffin. It does dramatically change the galaxy, setting and main source of conflict. Its up there with the Great Schism in terms of dramatic events in the series that changes everything.
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> For me its two core issues:
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> Humanity hasn’t done anything to earn the distinction of being a chosen race. Its a question of entitlement and it feels undeserved. Every single success has been the result of the Chief and one man is not representative of an entire species. The Forerunners had their technology, the Prophets created a galaxy spanning multi species civilization, brutes and elites are physically superior to humans and AI are exponentially more intelligent than humans. The excuse Halo 4 used is that Ancient Humanity was the most impressive civilization encountered by the Forerunners. But this is the equivalent of using the Roman Empire to prove that Italians are superior to everyone else. May have held true few thousand years back but it doesn’t reflect reality.
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> Whilst I think 343 fully mean this as a biblical chosen people, its kind of hard for this not to come across as a bit fascist. These god like beings seeded humanity to be shepherds to all the bestial and savage races?
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> Now to be sure, with the sole exception of Halsey during Spartan Ops, no human character or organization is actively seeking galactic supremacy through the acquisition of Forerunner technology. However to go back to my original post I can only put this down to stupidity on the part of the human race since this is clearly all very easy to use per the events of Halo 5. They seem remarkably disinterested in the whole thing. Halsey really is the only one who seems to think that humanity needs to get a handle on and understand this stuff; “our destiny as a species”. Which makes her the only sane voice and struggling to deal with the fact that her government is led by short sighted fools who have quite literally -Yoink!- humanity to enslavement by their AI Overlords; “I told you this was happening!”. If they had listened to Halsey and taken the mantle before Cortana did then they would not be in their current predicament of relying on the kindness of monsters.
I’m personally a little suspicious over how “far-reaching” Cortana’s created uprising will really be to both the story and the galaxy and large, as it appears 343 have set themselves up with a pre-made “reset button” trope.
If you look at the end of Halo 5 Guardians, whilst the ‘Created’ have essentially neutralized the UNSC, very little damage has been done to the UNSC’s existing infrastructure.
As far as we can see no human capital ships have been destroyed, no colonies glassed (some sustained minor damage from Guardians excavating themselves) and no humans economic infrastructure has been destroyed. This means that 343 can essentially have the player press at button at any point in Halo 6 to deactivate Cortana and all the rogue AI, and like magic the UNSC is reset to its pre-‘Created Uprising’ strength.
I’m personally not a fan of this ‘reset’ trope, as it encourage a ‘status-quo is god’ mentality where nothing significant never even changes.
Lets just pretend that at the end of Halo 6 the UNSC and SOS are able to effectively neutralize the ‘Created’ faction by flicking a switch that deactivates the Guardians and firewalls off all the rogue human AI with minimal to no damage to the UNSC’s civilian population or economic infrastructure.
Even if this conflict was resolved relatively bloodlessly, the ramifications for how humans would view smart AI would be just as long lasting as if Earth had been nuked by them. As a collective culture the majority of humans would never trust artificial intelligence again, as their would likely be something akin to a technological pogrom as the UNSC raced to destroy all SMART AI’s, or anything that may develop into a SMART AI just in case AI’s ever tried a machine uprising again. All aspects of human interstellar civilization would change as human engineering would probably rely on more basic human mathematic inputs to prevent themselves developing technology that could one day turn against them, and ironically humans may come to view artificial intelligence with the same heretical religious dogma that the Covenant did.
This is how I’m sure humans would react to an attempted AI uprising even if it was thwarted peacefully, but the very fact that 343 have set themselves up with this ‘reset button’ tells me they’ve already decided to return the UNSC back to its Halo 4 status quo at the end of Halo 6, with humans continuing to use SMART AI’s in every aspect of their daily life.
The fact these same SMART AI’s attempted to enslave humanity less than 5 minute ago will likely be hand waved as, ‘that was a Tuesdays problem, this is a Wednesday and were back to fighting aliens, and tomorrow its Thursdays and that means its Godzilla.’
I think if this is how Halo 6 ends it will be really sad as after 3 games we’ll be back to square one, but I’d confidently put money on the fact that this is the way Halo 6 will end.
I think as Anton has already said, 343’s critical flaw is that they can’t decide in what direction they want to take Halo as a franchise and when they do decide on a path they want to take the story down, they don’t put in the effort to make that story credible.
To use Halo 4 as an example, as some point during this games development someone at 343 got it into their head that they wanted to have the UNSC to become the galaxies rising superpower.
I’ve got no specific problem with this trope, but they didn’t invest the time and effort to make this a credible idea, and thus it came across as half-hearted.
Halo 4 opened with Chief waking from a cryo-sleep 4 years after the most destructive and costly war in all of human history.
If 343 wanted to make this story narrative credible, they could have had Chief waking up 50 years, 500 years, or 5000 years after the human-covenant war which would have given the UNSC and humanity adequate time to rebuild and flourish across the galaxy, either as a solely human empire or part of some kind of multi-species federation or revived Covenant Alliance, with new extragalactic threats to its existence.
This is a plot-thread that could have easily worked from a narrative point of view, but it would have required 343 to pour vast resources into redesigning this technologically advanced human culture which after perhaps 5000 years would bare no resemblance to the UNSC of 2552. (They’d also need to design new alien races, cultures and technology from scratch as well)
Instead, due to 343’s desire for keeping human technologically post-modern, (no phasers), were suppose to believe that the UNSC is bordering/surpassing the tier 2 Covenant with this civilizations ability to manipulate directed energy and gravity whilst still using ballistic armour and slug-throwers. (Doesn’t exactly scream state of the art in a setting where a supposedly intellectually inferior enemy is still able to outfit the backbone of its ground troops with their own personnel energy shielding, whilst the bulk of the UNSC ground troops have to make do with ballistic armour and helmets, despite the fact that due to ‘Word Of God’ humans are meant to be the more intelligent ones)
I really can’t stand ‘implied’ subtexts.
