Don’t get me wrong I am extremely happy to finally seeing Blue Team appear in a game after all these years however I must say I am disappointed in how they were implemented.
The fact of the matter is Blue Team doesn’t do anything in Halo 5. They are just sorta…there. Besides the fact that they along with Chief only appear in 20% of the game every line of dialogue with them can be summarized as
Some member of Blue Team: “Chief are you sure about this?” Chief: “Maybe”
And thats it, every time. Its so disappointing because their inclusion almost feels like fan service and nothing else. To be frank I’d rather have Halo 5 not feature them and have a alone(maybe poncho clad) Chief wondering the galaxy looking for answers and battling his emotions at the loss of Cortana and discovering his humanity like so many concept art pieces show. All Blue Team does in Halo 5 is prevent that.(If you’re not gonna have any of that and put in Blue Team then at least do something with them) “She said that to me once…about being a machine” Yeah remember that? What happened to that?
Gameplay wise nothing is done with them either, they are literally just co-op partners. You have these four Spartan-II supersoldiers with 30+ years of experience battling human and various alien forces as a tight unit with specialized roles so you’d think that would be capitalized on. Maybe have a mission where a target needs to be taken out so each member of Blue Team go off and have unique sections of the level. Linda could take the high, mountainous path to set up a shot with her sniper, Kelly would use her speed to distract security forces, Fred would stay back and assess the battlefield while relaying information and Chief would go in and take the target down. If doing this co-op each player would have a different objective and different sections to mess around in. This gives each character unique experiences and would actually give incentive to play as different ones. In the game we got when you’re picking a character in co-op what difference does it really make who you pick? Besides a slightly different HUD and starting weapons what is there? A .5% faster running speed or increased motion tracker range? Come on. Instead we got nothing remotely close to that because it feels like 343i were afraid to have either team split up for a second. None of them or Osiris for that matter were utilized well at all. If you took them out of the game and had only Locke and Chief what major differences would there really be? None and thats the problem. The entire 4 player squad mechanic feels shallow and rather unfinished.
Yeah, I think Blue Team got shafted. I was hoping that even with what little we’d get there would be quality. I can see an inkling. Kelly displayed how emotional she could be by being the first to board the Prowler in the second mission, but very little expressive body language, no cynical jokes, not even flipping the bird as she actually did to some Sentinels on Onyx and likely did on other occasions. Fred could have expressed more humor after his role in Last Light (telling Veta Lopis that next time he gets to be on top after she slid down a hill on top of his armor when it locked up was really funny) and maybe even pulling rank on Chief. Linda was fine since she was always pretty quiet, but I don’t feel like giving 343 credit for that since it could have been accidental.
I think the last thing Fred would do is pull rank on John, even in a joking manner. I agree with everything else, though. Blue Team isn’t an out-of-nowhere amalgamation of characters with little background. They are the very reason humanity was able to scrape by against the overwhelming power of the Covenant.
The ONE thing I wanted to see more than anything was their old smile hand signal. Two fingers pressed to their visor where their mouths would be.
> 2533274793336676;4:
> I think the last thing Fred would do is pull rank on John, even in a joking manner. I agree with everything else, though. Blue Team isn’t an out-of-nowhere amalgamation of characters with little background. They are the very reason humanity was able to scrape by against the overwhelming power of the Covenant.
>
> The ONE thing I wanted to see more than anything was their old smile hand signal. Two fingers pressed to their visor where their mouths would be.
That would require admission that Blue Team have noticeable and strong personalities, something Frankie recently said on TIME that they do not. With logic like that it isn’t surprising we go so little.
> 2533274812652989;5:
> > 2533274793336676;4:
> > I think the last thing Fred would do is pull rank on John, even in a joking manner. I agree with everything else, though. Blue Team isn’t an out-of-nowhere amalgamation of characters with little background. They are the very reason humanity was able to scrape by against the overwhelming power of the Covenant.
> >
> > The ONE thing I wanted to see more than anything was their old smile hand signal. Two fingers pressed to their visor where their mouths would be.
>
>
> That would require admission that Blue Team have noticeable and strong personalities, something Frankie recently said on TIME that they do not. With logic like that it isn’t surprising we go so little.
That’s… baffling. If they didn’t have any strong or notable traits, why are they in the SPARTAN-II program? That’s what I’d like to know. Grey Team’s whole premise is that their personalities are TOO strong, which is why they were put together as a deep cover, black ops team.
HALO 5 feels contradictive because it wants you to rely on all these outside lore sources to get any minor understanding of who is who and what’s going on, but then fails to acknowledge those lore sources.
> 2533274793336676;6:
> > 2533274812652989;5:
> > > 2533274793336676;4:
> > > I think the last thing Fred would do is pull rank on John, even in a joking manner. I agree with everything else, though. Blue Team isn’t an out-of-nowhere amalgamation of characters with little background. They are the very reason humanity was able to scrape by against the overwhelming power of the Covenant.
> > >
> > > The ONE thing I wanted to see more than anything was their old smile hand signal. Two fingers pressed to their visor where their mouths would be.
> >
> >
> > That would require admission that Blue Team have noticeable and strong personalities, something Frankie recently said on TIME that they do not. With logic like that it isn’t surprising we go so little.
>
>
> That’s… baffling. If they didn’t have any strong or notable traits, why are they in the SPARTAN-II program? That’s what I’d like to know. Grey Team’s whole premise is that their personalities are TOO strong, which is why they were put together as a deep cover, black ops team.
>
> HALO 5 feels contradictive because it wants you to rely on all these outside lore sources to get any minor understanding of who is who and what’s going on, but then fails to acknowledge those lore sources.
Exactly. I have no idea what was going on for the 3 years of Halo 5’s development.
> 2533274925892496;3:
> They were indeed shafted. A true groundbreaking freaking tragedy… and I had so much hope after the trailer.
>
> 343 really dropped the ball.
To be brutally honest, with some of the stuff Frankie and Josh Holmes have come out with, you can tell they really don’t care about Halo. It’s just a pay slip to them.
Yes. I think they should have gone deeper with these characters and not just putting them because we wanted to see them. We want them to develop there, not just be there. And that three missions are absolutely not what I expected.
> 2533274856454931;9:
> To be brutally honest, with some of the stuff Frankie and Josh Holmes have come out with, you can tell they really don’t care about Halo. It’s just a pay slip to them.
That’s harsh. Can you elaborate?
Blue team wasn’t that bad. They just didn’t have time which was one of the biggest dissapointments in the game.
I get the impression their focus was on making Osiris as cool as possible while Chief’s team members were kinda an afterthought. Simply put, I just don’t think they cared a whole lot about blue team. Spartan Locke is obviously being forced in as the new Halo poster-boy so why would you make Chief’s team super likable? Well, if they weren’t going to be in future games and perhaps even killed off then it makes enough sense to me why they did what they did.
0_0
Either way, they should have done a much better job.
They definitely wanted to introduce Spartan Locke’s team. Majority of the focus was spent on them. The levels with Blue Team were a little meatier than Team Osiris missions. I just wish we would have gotten more dialogue between Chief and his team mates during that time. They are supposed to fill the role that Cortana did in past games. At least that’s how I feel. I know that the Spartan-IIs were more focused on getting the mission done and are more serious but that shouldn’t mean that they are quiet in a game though. You can get away with that in a book maybe but not a game. I think that 343 stretched themselves a little too much with 8 different characters in the game. It’s hard to please everybody. I feel that just when the story was picking up speed it ended. I just hope we get blown away at E3 and get teased with another Halo 5: <insert title> game. Sort of like Halo 3: ODST did for Halo 3.
> 2533274824409174;12:
> > 2533274856454931;9:
> > To be brutally honest, with some of the stuff Frankie and Josh Holmes have come out with, you can tell they really don’t care about Halo. It’s just a pay slip to them.
>
>
> That’s harsh. Can you elaborate?
>
> Blue team wasn’t that bad. They just didn’t have time which was one of the biggest dissapointments in the game.
>
> Let’s hope it’s other way around in halo 6.
Who? 343i? They had three years. If you work on a game for three years and what you get out of it is a game that feels unfinished and messy then something is seriously wrong. I really want to know what went down during this game’s development.
Idk. If you just sit there. And explore the maps and wait long enough that your team starts talking to each other. Then the true light of Blue team comes out. You can’t rely on just the cutscenes.
Like Linda and Kelly egging chief on what it was like to have Cortana in his head.
This was very well said. When I saw blue team in the trailers for the game I was thinking they would, at the VERY least, explain how they got back together…but no. I’m sure there’s canon out there that explains it, and I’ve read the earlier books, but none since Ghosts of Onyx. That might explain my confusion a bit since the last I knew, the rest of blue team was stuck in a dyson sphere in some weird slipspace bubble. Anyway, history aside I still wish they would have done a little more with the 4 player co-op, it felt forced, like they just added the extra 3 members to each team so they could have a 4 player co-op.
I’d love to talk about them… But there’s so little to go by.
I’m really disappointed they didn’t run with “Family” more as a theme in this game. I believe Locke’s team would have been used more, him less, if they concentrated on the team/family aspect, supporting each other, the team is your weapon stuff…
Blue Team would definitely have done what they did in-game but they would have talked more with 117. I think a missed oppourtunity is having Kelly, Fred and Linda talk behind closed comms when the Chief isn’t talking, with a few questions thrown at said Chief once in a while, just so we can feel the family mind work,
We could see Fred being concerned, Linda not caring and Kelly being protective in a more organic way if we didn’t get so much “There’s no time to talk, now let’s be mutes and shoot things for a couple hours!”
This talk could have been a co-op thing only. Only by playing co-op can we get a deeper story. Cause of course in solo, the Chief wouldn’t head the banter.
… I mean, the Chief called BS on Cortana pulling that “I’ll tell you later” crap, Blue Team is family enough to do the same to each other!
And of course, that’s not including how Blue Team isn’t sharing as much time as the Arbiter did with the Chief in the first place. I feel it’s OK to move away from the #'d releases but not from Chief-centric stories.
It’s OK to have an expansion or side campaign where the Chief isn’t the star, Reach and ODST are great examples! But to not have a Halo moving the Chief’s story not star him… That’s wrong.
> 2603643534597848;18:
> I’d love to talk about them… But there’s so little to go by.
>
> I’m really disappointed they didn’t run with “Family” more as a theme in this game. I believe Locke’s team would have been used more, him less, if they concentrated on the team/family aspect, supporting each other, the team is your weapon stuff…
>
> Blue Team would definitely have done what they did in-game but they would have talked more with 117. I think a missed oppourtunity is having Kelly, Fred and Linda talk behind closed comms when the Chief isn’t talking, with a few questions thrown at said Chief once in a while, just so we can feel the family mind work,
> We could see Fred being concerned, Linda not caring and Kelly being protective in a more organic way if we didn’t get so much “There’s no time to talk, now let’s be mutes and shoot things for a couple hours!”
> This talk could have been a co-op thing only. Only by playing co-op can we get a deeper story. Cause of course in solo, the Chief wouldn’t head the banter.
>
> … I mean, the Chief called BS on Cortana pulling that “I’ll tell you later” crap, Blue Team is family enough to do the same to each other!
> And of course, that’s not including how Blue Team isn’t sharing as much time as the Arbiter did with the Chief in the first place. I feel it’s OK to move away from the #'d releases but not from Chief-centric stories.
>
> It’s OK to have an expansion or side campaign where the Chief isn’t the star, Reach and ODST are great examples! But to not have a Halo moving the Chief’s story not star him… That’s wrong.
>
> THAT’S WRONG!
But all that was in there. But everyone rushes through. Trying to beat the game as fast as possible or going from one engagement to the next.
The team will talk to each other when your exploring, looking for the skulls and audio logs. (Using guides ruins this for your not actually exploring and doesn’t do the time sync long enough to queue all the diologe for you know where to go)
When you get the, we got to keep moving prompt, you pretty much at through all the diologe in that area.
But when the next major event happens again. Like scripted diologe or action. There is a while new queue of Diologe.
The same thing happens in Battlefield Bad company 1 and 2. Some to the most amazing conversations are completely and utterly missed by those who don’t take their time.