Hello. My name is AJ, like many of you at this point most of us have heard the rather troubling news from Mar 12, 2021, at around 12:00 PM U.S & Canada Central Time from HiddenXperia’s YouTube channel. For me, considering I am subscribed to plenty of Halo Content creators, he was probably the first, if not ONE of the first Halo YouTube content creators to release the devastating information that playable Elites will NOT be in Halo Infinite. Of course, this is assuming you did NOT watch the Q&A held by 343i. Their reason behind doing this… And I quote, was “You know, this a Master Chief story, and a Spartan story. Especially in Multiplayer.” Furthermore, they mentioned the competitive aspect and “fairness” but I’ll get to that in a bit.
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Before I continue I want to clarify something really quick. In no way is this meant to be disrespectful to any readers or come off that way. My intentions are pure and good and I’m taking the time to write this “novel” because I care about playable Elites and because I care about Halo. I will be venting and sharing my frustration quite a bit in this discussion within reason and in NO way is it meant to be disrespectful to 343i or anybody else but simply put my honest feelings, thoughts, and concerns. The honest criticism that you, 343i, definitely deserve to hear. With that being said, allow me to continue.
I. Goodbye Halo and goodbye 343i. I have had enough…
As the title of this section implies, yes. I am leaving the Halo franchise until Elites return and I will NOT be buying Halo Infinite under any other circumstance. I have waited many years and gave you people many chances to add them back, and despite all the things you said about player expression and creating a game that was meant to be a spiritual reboot, I honestly thought there was ZERO chance that Playable Elites would NOT happen. I truly thought Elites were 100% going to happen. Due to this decision and the absurd reasoning behind it, I can no longer bear the pain of waiting for something that will never happen but I will mention later in this article how playable Elites could still happen, and perhaps there might remain some sliver of hope. After all, they did say “Never say never” and it is a live-service game. To be honest, though, I think they are just feeding us BS when they say that. Kind of like giving us false hope in a sense. They don’t care much about Elites and I’ll explain more on that later.
II. Their “reason(s)” for not adding playable Elites and why it makes no sense.
First off, let us discuss the lore or canonical-based multiplayer philosophy. I really will never, and never have understood why this philosophy or idea even exists in the first place. Multiplayer is NOT a story or campaign. It has nothing to do with the story in ANY possible way. There is also a lot of people in the Halo community that seem to try and find an explanation about why Elites are not in the game and often people in the Halo community will use the same excuse or try to come up with some unrealistic and absurd theory. Since when does there have to be an in-game story reason why something exists in multiplayer? I don’t know how else to put this, so I’m just going to flat out say it. This is a video game. 343i are Devs of this franchise and this game now. As Devs, they can do whatever they want regardless of lore.
They are not going to do something completely random like putting a Skyrim character in Halo or something unreasonable. But take for instance Esports Black Steel from Gears of War 4 or the Spectre Swarm… Those are not lore-based but they look cool and it was a great idea. People in Gears 4 loved it. Also, stuff like Armored Kantus or other Locust characters which are no longer apart of the story were still put into the game. Want to know why? Because people loved the Locust more. It’s that simple. Do you see what I’m trying to say? It’s a game and even though I always tell people, “Halo is more than just a game.” especially to me, in terms of what they can and cannot do, lore has no power over multiplayer. Halo 3 and Reach were primarily centered around the Master Chief and Noble Six. Did that mean we couldn’t or did not have playable Elites? Of course not. We still had them. This right here is the perfect example and regardless of modern times or change, this sudden shift to lore-based multiplayer is perhaps the most delusional and silly thing I have ever seen a developer do for their game in the multiplayer sense.
Even if you had a Halo game with only forerunners and no covenant at all, does that mean Playable Elites cannot be in the game? Even if it is the main Halo game? No. Because people like to play as an Elite. It shouldn’t matter what the story is about. Playable Elites should be there simply because people want it to be there. It’s as simple as that. They didn’t refuse Elites because of resources, Covid, or time constraints. This time they did it quite literally for no reason and this is why I think 343i actively tries to avoid Elites simply because they are biased towards them. I don’t think 343i is stupid. I think they know exactly what they’re doing and they are trying to get away with it. We cannot let that happen. I’m well aware of the resources and time that would be required to implement playable Elites but we are way past that point and that is no longer a valid argument given how long we have been asking for them. There is NO excuse. I’ve done the math. They had the time, they had the money.
The last part for their reasons, I will only speak very briefly of because this argument has already been settled multiple times and there has been an easy solution to balance Sangheili in core modes and how that would work in ranked. Long story short, here is my proposal. Halo Reach Elites were drastically different simply because Bungie wanted to make them more lore or story accurate. The Covenant is more advanced, Elites are faster, can jump higher, have stronger shields, and even regen HP without a health pack and their shield regen DELAY is much faster than humans. Because of this and multiple other reasons, combined with Evade, Elites were pretty disgusting to go against, to say the least. This quite frankly was a design choice by Bungie and there is not much else to say in terms of Reach. The issues are so major but yet at the same time they did try to balance it in some ways. For instance, humans may have been weaker but were much smaller and harder to shoot. Elites were quite massive. However, it was still causing many complications. So in terms of Reach, I can understand why people complain about it being unfair.