Halo Infinite is said to be a good starting points for new fans to the series. Obviously there’s way too much lore to really bring players up to speed on so many of the events that have taken place throughout the series and the EU, but what if 343 added a Codex like on seen in Mass Effect, Doom Eternal, etc.? It could contain info on so much of the characters, places, events, and more within the Halo universe without being an all-in-one, all-encompassing library of info for every tiny piece of the universe
Here’s how I could see it working:
At the very start of the game, you basically have maybe just a handful of entries. For instance, you’ll start with a brief but descriptive entry on who Master Chief is, as well as any other major characters we see in the opening cutscene, and an entry on the Covenant and Cortana and anything else that would be important right off the bat. So basically the game will begin with like six or seven entries and that’s about it. The first time you encounter the Covenant, you’ll get entry on it if the game didn’t begin with one, as well as an entry on each Covenant species as you experience them in the game. So if the first fight in the game is a small group of Grunts, then you just have a Grunt entry with info on them. When you encounter the Jackal, you’ll get a Jackal entry. And basically this happens each time you encounter a new member of the Covenant. This will also be true for other factions and enemies you see in the game, including the Prometheans, the Created, the Banished if they make an appearance, etc., as well as the wildlife you come across as you play. You’ll also get entries for new things you find in the game as well, such as new entries every time you pick up a new gun, use or encounter a new vehicle, etc. Eventually, you’ll have a pretty large Codex full of info on everything from humanity to the Covenant, to the Forerunners, to racial history for different species, to wildlife, to technology for the different factions, and everything in between, but still won’t contain every bit of lore such as in-depth descriptions of every character and event from every single Halo book. It’ll be a trove of information that not only informs new players of the existing factions and events but gives them knowledge on various other parts of the universe but without basically giving you so much information that you will never need to read a Halo book in your life because it’s all there
Also, the return of terminals could be how you get certain new additions. For example, accessing a Forerunner terminal will work like it used to where you either read the entry or watch a cutscene and it will also add a new Codex entry that expands on the contents of the terminal (if the information within the terminal calls for a Codex entry), and it would work the same when you access a Human/Covenant/Banished terminal/console/datapad/etc. So if you find a Forerunner terminal on the ring that mentions the Human-Forerunner War, you’ll get a Codex entry for it that gives some additional information on it but doesn’t contain a fully in-depth timeline of the entire war
343 said they wanted to put a focus on exploration. We still have no idea what this means, but a Codex could be one incentive to exploring because you’ll learn all sorts of stuff by exploring and discovering new things. I know you could just go one of the Halo wikis and read stuff but the wikis are a lot more in-depth than the Codex idea, and by the time you have all the entries in the Codex you still wouldn’t have enough text to equal a Halo novel so it’s not like you’ll be spending more time reading than playing the game, especially since it’d be totally optional to read any of it, and new players would probably be more likely to read Codex entries within the game than start looking up random Halo topics on the wiki
I just thought this would be a cool new addition to the series and an easy way for new players to learn about the universe without reading the books or reading tons of wiki articles, and it’d have entries on new lore that Halo Infinite itself adds to the universe so that would give longtime players a reason to use the Codex even if they already know a lot of Halo’s lore. If this game does end up being open world or have more open-ended missions then there could be all sorts of opportunities to find Codex entries from the amount of content we’d probably be getting with this game