Messing up the Fiction

Community General Discussion
1

Is it just me or is anyone else sick of 343 messing up the fiction that is Halo… What do I mean by this well, in every new thing that comes out, more and more HALO 4 items are being moved into older stories.

For example

The Forward Unto Dawn series featured a Halo 4 Elite Zealot. Technically this Elite Zealot comes from the faction of Sangheili loyalists, known as the Storm Covenant; which is a group that is intensely hostile to humans and broke the truce formed at the end of the initial war with the Covenant (the end of Halo 3). This style of zealot is first seen in Halo 4.

Also the elite in the series should technically be using a sword older than the ones found in Halo CE. Last time I checked the swords in CE blew up after the user died.

The energy sword in Halo reach apparently is also the exact same energy sword as the halo 4 ones. There both type 1. How can they both be type 1 when they look completely different and technically are years apart. How can they be the exact same weapon? Have you seen Halo Wars energy swords?

In the opening cut scene of Halo 4 why do all the Spartan feature all of the exact same armor? Halo Reach tells us that all Spartans have different armor. Look at Noble Team. A better question is why do they all have the Halo 4 style Mark VI? Last I check the only Spartan to get Mark VI armor was the Chief and now Spartan 4’s.

The list goes on and on, Elites in Halo 2 Anniversary, Spartan Fire Team Armor in Halo 4 campaign (All Spartan 4’s look exactly the same), Novels and Games giving conflicting information both back by 343, etc.

Now I know this is splitting hairs in some cases but really. This company was built for the sole purpose of building Halo games and according to them (343) everyone who works for them is a fan of the franchise. SO why is it that the company built for the sole reason of make Halo games making more fictional mistakes than Bungie ever did? (if i’m wrong please call me out on this)

I’m just saying if your job is to sole make Halo. Everything 343 puts its label on should be 100% correct.

Does anyone else share these views or am I just crazy and never need to bring this up again.

…

Found what I was looking for,

This link talks all about the making of Forward Unto Dawn.

http://www.redbull.com/uk/en/games/stories/1331581824971/halo-4-forward-unto-dawn-making-movie-gaming-console

16 Paragraph: “Microsoft weren’t taking any chances though: O’Connor and a team of fact checkers were on set every day making sure everything was strictly canon. Not that shooting went on for too long: meeting the deadline of the game’s launch meant everything happened at light-speed. Fitting for the biggest space opera since Star Wars, really.”

IDK who did the fact checking for Forward Unto Dawn but if you want to hire me to do it. I’ll be more than happy to do it right. Who ever is doing it right now is not doing a good job.

If I’m wrong on something please let me know. I’m more than happy to say I have a mistake, if I do truly have one.

2

I can’t call you out on this because you’re right on pretty much everything. There are a lot of issues that were brought up in the first 30 seconds of the Halo campaign.

3

The only thing I will only comment on (as this is the only piece I won’t be speaking out of ignorance) is the spartan IIs armor in the opening cutscenes I saw a tweet somewhere from one of the debs stating that they are aware that that armor variant isn’t canonically correct. They had intentions of putting the mark IV or V (don’t remember which) but couldn’t due to time constraints.

4

> The Forward Unto Dawn series featured a Halo 4 Elite Zealot. Technically this Elite Zealot comes from the faction of Sangheili loyalists, known as the Storm Covenant; which is a group that is intensely hostile to humans and broke the truce formed at the end of the initial war with the Covenant (the end of Halo 3). This style of zealot is first seen in Halo 4.

In Reality, they used the same model design for Halo 4, because it was the of time and cost reasons.

For lore, the Storm covenant most likely used what ever they can get their hands one and/or still have laying around. IE old gear, and if the Storm Covenant was mainly a faction with in the Covenant fleet, like a company with in a battalion, and they had their own gear (Weapons, armor, ships, IE), then it’d make sense that a group of Covenant sporting that gear in FUD would also have the same gear when it splits off and forms the Storm Covenant.

What many tend to not realize, is that no mater the advanceness of the military, if they change the standard uniform, weapons, and gear, the change isn’t a quick and simple change, it takes weeks, months, years, and so on to happen, and in many cases, even after the new standard is in place, many will keep their old gear on hand. I know many fellow soldiers who’ve been over seas who still have their old Desert camo, even tho the standard is the current Army ACUs, and yet many still have BDUs. Active duty Army has M4s, M16 A4s, my Unit still has M16 A2s with the original hand guards, and when I first joined, supply still had the old style gear from before the golf war.

My point is, even tho in FUD the Covies was wearing armor that doesn’t show up until Halo 4, doesn’t mean there’s an issue with the lore. It just means, those Covies who formed/joined the Storm Covies most likely had some old gear that they had back before the Covenant broke up.

5

Time constraints for the opening of Halo 4 Spartan Armor, console limitations for all Spartan IVs having the same armor. Otherwise you are spot on. Bungie was way worse though.

6

The Halo 4 Zealot armor is a traditional armor set of Hesduros origin. Hesduros supplied the Covenant with many warriors and supplies, so it makes sense some would take their traditional armor with them. The force that attacked Circinius IV seems to be made up primarily of Hesduros Elites, like a lot of the Storm Covenant.
Otherwise, it was just easier for the CGI team for FuD to use the existing model, as it would take time and resources to make a completely new one for the 2 Elites we actually see in the movie.

Using that excuse, swords should have blown up in Reach too. It was a gameplay mechanic in CE so players can’t use them. Also, did they actually explode, or just fade out? I don’t remember exploding sword elites.

Chief’s Mk VI was styled after an early Mk IV set, so canonically, the opening cutscene is plausible. However, in reality, they just reused assets due to time constraints instead of building whole new models.

While there have been some errors, certainly, Bungie most definitely isn’t a saint in this either. They’ve made as many, likely more lore errors than 343i has. Just look at Halo 3. The story was butchered in that game. Truth became a religious zealot, Miranda became incompetent, Chief and the Arbiter’s relationship wasn’t fleshed out at all, High Charity getting to the Ark is a plot hole, the Gravemind became incompetent, the Flood and Brutes lost their threat factor, etc.
“To War” … ugh.

7

> The Forward Unto Dawn series featured a Halo 4 Elite Zealot. Technically this Elite Zealot comes from the faction of Sangheili loyalists, known as the Storm Covenant; which is a group that is intensely hostile to humans and broke the truce formed at the end of the initial war with the Covenant (the end of Halo 3). This style of zealot is first seen in Halo 4.

Just because it wasn’t seen until H4 doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist. Eg. You only see the Didact in H4, but he’s there.

> Also the elite in the series should technically be using a sword older than the ones found in Halo CE. Last time I checked the swords in CE blew up after the user died.

The fail-safe in Halo: CE was implemented into the game so that the human military couldn’t get their hands on it. The elite you see is a sort of ‘clean-up crew’ as he appears when the covenant suspected all of the important military left. He was basically there to find stragglers and probably didn’t need to initiate the fail-safe locks. Imagine how bad you would look if you lost your energy sword just because you dropped it while looking for ‘ants’, so-to-speak. Another point involving the same thing in Reach: Maybe the fail safe wasn’t even there yet…

> The energy sword in Halo reach apparently is also the exact same energy sword as the halo 4 ones. There both type 1. How can they both be type 1 when they look completely different and technically are years apart. How can they be the exact same weapon? Have you seen Halo Wars energy swords?

The covenant energy sword has always been type-1. There was never a successor. The change in design is similar to Master Chief’s armor being still Mark-VI in H4 even though it was drastically improved. An energy sword looked different for each elite that wielded one. They were never made the same. In theory, this means that an elite could make it’s energy sword look like anything it wants, including an older looking sword. (I know that all energy swords in each Halo look identical, this is for technical limitation reasons)

> In the opening cut scene of Halo 4 why do all the Spartan feature all of the exact same armor? Halo Reach tells us that all Spartans have different armor. Look at Noble Team. A better question is why do they all have the Halo 4 style Mark VI? Last I check the only Spartan to get Mark VI armor was the Chief and now Spartan 4’s.

The cinematic in question shows SPARTAN-II soldiers. All spartan-IIs got given the same armor configurations which is why they look the same. As for the spartans having different armor in Halo: Reach, any spartan-II who survived long enough had the option of armor customization, even though the only spartan-II in Noble Team was Jorge. (Another technical limitation with the spartans have mark-VI armor. They already had the player model so used that to save space for ‘more important’ things.

> The list goes on and on, Elites in Halo 2 Anniversary, Spartan Fire Team Armor in Halo 4 campaign (All Spartan 4’s look exactly the same), Novels and Games giving conflicting information both back by 343, etc.

As for these, I can’t really explain then, except for the spartan fireteams in H4. There are sort of two reasons for this. The first being technical limitations. There just wasn’t enough space for more different armor configurations. The second point being, from what I have learned, that the spartan-VI soldiers were so mass-produced that it would be a waste to give each and every spartan custom armor to just any recruit, since they would usually die within a few days of deployment. So the surviving spartan-VIs and the higher-ups got to get custom armor. Although this would technically be needed for you as a player, 343 didn’t do that because, lets face it, that would make a terrible mp experience with everyone the same.

As a side note: this is the same story with armor mods/specializations. These were only given to spartans of rank 50 as they were so expensive.

I do know most of these answers involved technical limitations, but they are genuinely really hard to work around to make a universe as detailed a Halo. I think that 343 did a great job on continuing the franchise with what they had to work with. It was a big pair of shoes to fill.

Sorry for the long read, but I hope this helps.