All of the really cool stuff happened while Chief was sleeping in space for 6 months and we learn about it through flashbacks at the very end. Why didn’t we get to play during Cortana’s war on humanity and the AI uprising? Everything that happened before Chief got rescued by the “pilot” is so much more interesting. Instead of hiding from Cortana and her Guardians all Battlestar Galactica-style, picking up UNSC survivors along the way and fighting a losing battle against Atriox on the Infinity, we get to play a grappleshot simulator set in one of the most lackluster environments in a Halo game.
11 Likes
Completely agree. The story in the campaign (what little there was) was such a letdown.
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To be fair, I have no interest at all in Cortana’s War and whatever. I’m glad they skipped it because imo Cortana should have stayed dead at the end of Halo 4. Halo 5’s entire narrative was a huge mistake.
Halo Infinite is perfect to connect from Halo 4 because it explores the loss of Cortana again and introduces a new partnership with The Weapon, something which should have been the main focus of Halo 5 in the first place. So, no. I don’t really care for the “missing content”.
Would be nice to know what happened to Osiris, Palmer and Lasky though, that’s the only part I’m kinda unhappy about with Infinite.
7 Likes
This could be a DLC Campaign whose story is a prequel to the main campaign. I don’t see this happening otherwise though.
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While I agree with this, i would have prefered they have a better narrative to replace it with.
Instead infintie feels very bland to me, and getting h5 ‘2’ via cliffnotes and having it still be a major player in the plot is honestly worse than just having the h5 followup.
4 Likes
To be fair if time travel is a thing, they might end up going back to that. Plus reading Divine Wind, they seem to establish that it’s really difficult to kill an AI. They strongly imply even a scrap of data is enough for it to continue and you have to totally purge it. Which runs very much counter to what we are shown in Halo Infinite where there’s a lot of Cortana scattered across the ring. Not to mention the Weapon herself.
The issue is you can only do evil Cortana takes over the Galaxy once. It doesn’t matter if we kill Atriox, we aren’t going to kill every Brute in the galaxy and that threat is never going away. Whereas this was a one off story, so you feel like you missed out on what was billed as a massive event in the lore.
It’s not like Cortana just took a Halo and waited in the middle of nowhere. That they could have easily retconned without much fuss. Having the majority of smart AI join her in a rebellion and conquer the Galaxy. That is not remotely the same thing. They’ve only gotten away with such a retcon because they’ve moved the narrative focus away from the wider galaxy entirely; like Halo Wars 2.
I’ve said this many times. 343 has (since they picked Halo up) continuously dropped the ball when it comes to telling a story. Especially of Halo. Most of the lore is already in novel or comic form. They could just pick from it, build to it, and make it more awesome. But no, their “better” directions are just an excuse to not actually know WTF their doing.
Especially with Halo infinite. I want to fight the banished invading the infinity, I wanted to fight atriox as chief and get my butt kicked. I wanted to have some contiguous story from H5 and fight against cortana. They couldv’e made two more Halo games with how much material they left out and tried to fill in with “audiologs” psht, how patheritc… This aint 2006 bioshock…
And they talk about Halo “evolving”, please, they only thing that needs to evolve, is 343s persepctive. . .
5 Likes
Exactly. I think 343i focuses way too much of their story-telling efforts on the external material like books and comics. This approach is alienating the fans of the games (who make up most of the series’ fanbase) and cause the games to be in a worse state in terms of narrative. Not only is this frustrating to existing fans but also to new ones. Bungie had the right idea when it came to branching out into different mediums. The games themselves are the primary source for information and story while everything else is secondary and is not dependent on the games and vice versa. You didn’t have to read 10 novels to understand who the Master Chief is and what is going on with the Flood invasion. Everything that you needed to know was part of the game and it focused on telling a story within the same game.
2 Likes
I think that if they were to give us a prequel of sorts that it should have been part of the game from the beginning. Having to pay extra money or wait for another release to get a fully fleshed out story is unacceptable. Spreading everything out through DLC is not only petty but disrespectful to the fans.
3 Likes
I didn’t care for Halo 5’s story either but I think having a better transition between that and Infinite would have been more preferable than ignoring it completely and pretending it never happened in the first place. Infinite was their chance to fix the narrative and turn everything around.
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Which book is that?
Halo Divine Wind is the one set just before Halo Infinite where they go back to the Ark and a group of Covenant try to activate the ring due to the machinations of a powerful Forerunner AI. The author seems to have had some insight into Infinite since we do get Escharum and certain Infinite guns showing up.
Incidentally, the book Bad Blood has a similar incident where a human AI gets it’s chip destroyed. But it’s able to carry on and hitch a ride on something as portable as a small computer.
The point being that both Halo Infinite tie in books suggest that either the AI is completely destroyed or even the smallest sliver is enough for that AI to continue to exist. The way Infinite depicts it, Cortana’s dust and echoes are just non sentient fragments that are “just here”. So there is an inconsistency there. Following the books, every one of those fragments is Cortana and there would be nothing preventing them latching on to any nearby technology.
Which could just be the author admittedly having their own take. Alternatively the Silent Auditorium explosion is equivalent to this and there’s just a bit of dramatic license with these Savathun style memory flashbacks we are seeing.
1 Like
Imagine if instead of the third lotr film, we just went straight back to bag end and hobbits sitting around eating and planning the next spring festival and they got raided by some local hooligans.
Thats what we got with Infinite.
What the BLAM were they thinking?!?!?
Where’s Halo 6 ffs?
1 Like
seriously this was the most lackluster campaign i have ever played and that includes call of duty ghosts
1 Like