To be real, I liked what they did with Master Chiefs character, how he interacts with Cortana 2.0/Weapon and the Pilot. I thought the pilot was going to be ANNOYING with his twitchy MCU like character. But he impressed me.
But there are too many things off screened leaving alot of open holes in the story. So wide that how we got from A to B to C from Halo 5 to Infinite does not make sense. At all. Just hand wavey statements and pseudo flashbacks.
Lastly, we didn’t learn much. What we find out on the ring, doesn’t get explained, just that it’s bad news if it gets out. None of the audio files give insight, just being vague on what the Banished want. I get you bait for sequels/DLCs but you still need to answer questions like the “Forerunners sins”. Especially when most of it is pulling for Halo lore that wasn’t established in other games ( the sins of the Forerunners and the flood origins)
So while I do believe, that this game was more intriguing in story than Halo 4 and 5 and easier to follow…it’s cause there’s not much. I’d rate this way under Halo Reach, 1, 2 and 3 putting it above Halo 4 and 5.
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I thought they did a decent job with the story (minus the ending felt a little rushed IMO).
They did state that Infinite’s campaign will handled similar to chapters being released. Things I see being fixed in the next “chapter” will be a different biome or multiple different biomes, introduce a new enemy on top of the banished, or reintroduce old enemies, further explanation to the banished and unravel more mysteries of Zeta Halo.
My ranks in order:
CE
2
3
Infinite
4
5
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Agreed!
If campaign content consistently is added over the next year (sort of like Spartan Ops was meant to be,) then I could see this being the beginning of a great new chapter for Halo, and 343 climbing the ladder towards something great. I could also see another similarly bland campaign dropping in a year and things just stalling out…
Personally I’d order things:
Halo: Reach
Halo 3 (& ODST)
Halo 2
Halo CE
Halo Infinite
Halo 4
Halo 5
I actually like a lot of the off screen elements because it did make me feel like I was taken out of the action along with Chief for those 6 months and it also brought back that sense of mystery that I got in CE.
I think the way they went about holding off on an explanation is entertaining to me personally because here we have Chief asking Weapon “hey what are they up to?” to get the response “I dunno but it’ll be bad” and Chief is just like “Whatever I’m gona kill them all and ruin their plans anyways”. That aspect just appeals to my sense of humor. I can understand why people don’t like that though
I can agree that the things like the forerunner sins and the endless can feel a bit unsatisfying, but I think there is a good potential for them to pay off in whatever comes next. Hopefully that happens in less than 6 years, but we’ll see
My ranking for campaigns because why not.
2
Reach
ODST
CE
Infinite
3
4
5
For me it’s Gameplay:
3
2
Infinite
CE
4
5
For story:
2
3
CE
Infinite
4
5
Man I dunno what you liked about the pilot, that dude is a liability and a cry baby, he gets a pass for picking up Chief from space and yeah the character is believable but it’s not what I want in a Halo game, I want all of my marines rolling in shouting Hoorah! Foehammer was a way more enjoyable character to have in the face of similar circumstances against alien hordes on a Halo ring.
CE
Reach
2
3
4 = Infinite (pretty much what 4 does well, infinite does poorly and vice versa)
5
Hard to rank ODST as its a different sort of story. Def better than 4/infinite but not sure better than 3.
I dunno, being better than 5 isn’t really something to celebrate. Its grosly disapointing and didn’t really make me feel a need to get reinvested in the story. Infinite provides a story that is neither interesting, thouthful, or nore action-movie esque. It just kind of is.
In terms of immersion its the least immersive game. Its open world feels more video gamey due to the FoB’s being able to spawn anything out of the air, and HVT’s just being guys on camping trips.
Foehammer was a marine pilot, the Pilot was a civilian. I don’t think they would react the same in similar circumstances.
You also have to understand what 343 is doing vs Bungie was doing with Chief.
Bungie was all about letting the player play as Chief and embody him.
343 was all about making Chief more human.
All the characters are just foils to that end.
Granted, I’m not into 343’s whole “humanize Chief” thing, but I won’t just brush it off as BOOO IT SUCKS. It’s really quite alright how they did it in Infinite.
Yeah but that’s not the point. The whole idea of writing that character to begin with just sucked. I liked him more when he was in good spirits, shoulda just made him a fun character cos I didn’t care about saving him. He will also pick me up and fast travel me anywhere, but he can only drop vehicles to the FOBs, he doesn’t even make sense.
Like I mentioned, all these characters are just foils in an effort to humanize Chief.
He whine > Chief reassures him > he gains the resolve to fight.
We can only hope we see less whining in the expansions and more crazy daredevil stunts.
Those interactions were cringe material, much like a lot of the Weapon’s lines. The writing was really predictable and I didn’t feel like I knew the guy long enough to care, it just felt awkward…
The game lacks the charm of a character like Sarge. When the gameplay involves magic safe hubs, and the grunts are cracking jokes at propaganda towers, having a whiney pilot is weird contrast. He doesn’t add anything good to the story or the gameplay in my opinion.
It is impossible to accurately rate Infinite because its obvious it’ll be getting DLC and/or updates over time. That being said we can rate what it is currently against all the previous Halo titles.
My List goes something like this:
Reach
CE
Infinite
ODST
2
3
4
5
I think Infinite’s main issues from a Campaign standpoint is that it has no Co-op and that its overall open world (the main selling point compared to all the other Halo games) is lacking. As it stands now I would still put it above some of the lesser Halo’s because you can just explore and screw around and just go about the story when and how you want to, but its lack of content hurts it just like it hurts Infinite’s MP.
I personally don’t put an insane emphasis on story, because story is so subjective, while everybody absolutely adores MC and Cortana and blah blah blah I would definitely say that my favorite story was with the Reach/ODST cast and I loved them because of just how different they are from the main storyline.
I would rank Infinite below all other campaigns except for 5. It’s preference I guess, but I don’t find copy/paste FOBs/HVTs/Marine Squads with no story or narrative value to be fun or a good use of time–if you’ve done one, you have quite literally done them all because they’re all identical except for the HVTs which are… identical except one slightly different enemy. Doing every single side mission, and doing one single mission, results in the exact same story experience.
The actual on-rails story missions had more reused assets than anything other than CE as I can recall, with the same Forerunner and Banished room types and hallways reused not only over and over not only within missions but across missions. Don’t get me started on the Power Seed busywork. No memorable setpieces I can recall, and the closest it got to feeling like a Halo game with was that one Scorpion mission and I think that’s because of the music.
In terms of the actual narrative, the story was a total mess in my opinion. We’re suffering badly from Star Wars syndrome where every game is rebooting the story. There is no continuity from the previous game, and the Created who were an existential threat at the end of the last game (and were shown using guardians to casually blow up worlds in this game) are killed offscreen with no explanation. We are told repeatedly that the Covenant reskin are "The Worst Thing Ever ™ despite 90% of players never having heard of them (outside those who played spinoff RTS games, and even then, I don’t get the impression the Banished were ever intended to be The Worst Thing Ever). Oh, but perhaps I should save that Worst Thing Ever for The Endless, who are never remotely explained, or The Harbinger Who Uses Proper Nouns For Every Little Thing To Tell Me They Are Important who was also never explained or elaborated on before promptly dying.
Oh, and Zeta Halo is very mysterious, which we are repeatedly told but that never ultimately amounts to anything. We kill the bad Brute and the game finishes narratively in the same spot as it starts, essentially, with Chief and a few marines on Zeta halo and no understanding of what this means for the larger story. It just never actually appears to have real stakes beyond running around a forest and fighting the Covenant reskin.
Haha, so clearly, I have strong opinions. It’s not all bad. Chief was well-written and I like his interaction with the Pilot and the Weapon. But pretty much nothing happened in the story, it was all Told And Not Shown (and pretty ham-fistedly at times), and it was very disorienting for even me, who’s probably in a very high percentile of Halo story engagement.