Ok so I was wondering, why does locke get so much hate. I did not enjoy the halo 5 campaign but I never felt locke was a bad character. Does he get hate because he took time from chief, because he isn’t how he was advertised, or because he is a spartan 4. In alot of ways he reminds me of how chief was in the original trilogy, doesn’t talk much and is there to do his duty and complete the mission at any cost. I realize chief was part of the Spartan 2 program and this background made us like him more (at least for those that know about how it all happened since it’s not explained in game. I think the vast majority of the forum community knows). The only real background we got for locke was nightfall. Was nightfall the cause of the hate. I would like to be enlightened. Also, what role should he play in Halo infinite if at all
I do agree that Locke gets too much hate. But the reasons you cited are valid reasons why people don’t like him. He took wayyy too much time away from our favorite green boi, and felt pretty much like a cardboard cut out. There’s a fine line between being the strong, silent type who gets the job done, and someone with no personality. Unfortunately, the writing of H5 leaned toward the latter.
I see Locke as embodying many of the professional soldier qualities we got from the Spartan-IIs, but his lack of personality shown in the game made those qualities look boring. Even Chief suffered from this problem. Buck, who was arguably the most charismatic character of the game, wasn’t much to write home about, and Lasky, who was a cool character in H4, was boring too.
It wasn’t so much an issue with the character, but with the writing for every character.
Honestly, I don’t dislike Locke, but I don’t like him either. I’m mostly indifferent to him.
Personality-wise, the problem is not so much that he is a bad character, but that he is a pointless character. There is not a single thing he did in the story that Chief would not have done as well. So what was the point in not playing Chief in the first place?
An additional factor is that Locke is (Ex-)ONI. A faction of the UNSC that (with the exception of Dare in ODST) has consistently been portrayed in a negative light. Then they put this new character associated with a faction that has a bad image in charge of hunting down the one person that has been the audience proxy for 15 years. You see where this might cause negative reactions?
Him being a Spartan-IV as you have said didn’t really help in this regard, as they were generally not well-received by the community.
While Nightfall didn’t make him mor likeable, I also didn’t think it made him dislikeable. It was just a bad story wherein Locke hardly did anything. Forgettable at most.
As for his role in Infinite (or any other future Halo games), I think if anything he should only appear in cutscenes. I wouldn’t necessarily kill him off (unlike Tanaka) but I also don’t see people reacting to him very well as an accompanying NPC. Playable character is completely out of the question.
Whether or not he is a good or bad character, he was completely mishandled twice by the writers already, and as the idiom goes “There is only one chance to make a first impression”. I think the best course of action would be to diminish his involvement in the story as much as possible. This would also save money on hiring the actor, now that he has gotten his taste of Marvel fame.
Locke, like the rest of Fireteam Osiris, is the empty shell of a character. Osiris had so much potential: A cold, calculated ONI agent who would do everything he can to hunt down the Master Chief (Locke); an ex-army solider who’d been raised in the dark, depths of a glassed, practically Insurrectionist world (Tanaka); an ONI member who’d spent her life studying aliens, understanding their cultures and fluently speaking their languages (Vale); and a familiar ODST soldier who had spent his years fighting the Covenant directly on the frontlines, who we all knew had an interesting romantic relationship with a much warmer member of ONI (Buck). There was so much 343i could have done with all this. The dynamic between Fireteam Osiris would have been amazing to build upon over Halo 5’s campaign, and yet, all we ever got were some generic lines of dialogue that never actually propelled the plot forward or added any form of character construction. If I had one word to describe Locke and Fireteam Osiris in Halo 5, it would be dead. That’s the problem with Locke. He just feels lifeless. He offers nothing.
Part of the issue probably stems from the fact he was originally supposed to be HUNTING the Master Chief and Blue Team down. That was the idea; an ‘Elite’ team of Spartan IV’s were supposed to be tasked with hunting down the Legendary Blue Team. That obviously didn’t do them any justice, least of all for Locke. Then there was the fact that the advertised idea of ‘Hunting the Truth’ was sort of a lie considering that fell a part almost immediately.
Between what he was meant to be, add the fact he was written very poorly, not to mention both Osiris and all of Blue Team were left as little more than exposition, and well, you get a very bad taste in your mouth for most of Halo 5.
Of course there’s also the fact that we got literally 3 Blue Team missions and like, what? 8 Osiris missions? There was no balance, no back and forth, no story to drive. It was all from the perspective of Fire Team Osiris. Blue Team’s part was rushed through because they only got 3 missions to tell their part which meant it was severely overexplained in their missions which ruined everything. Osiris was even worse because since we got so much of them it left the writers little to talk about so we ended up getting the neutral territory missions like Meridian Station and Swords of Sanghelios camp site (twice).
With Halo 2 (which did this the best), it was back and forth between Arbiter and Chief. Chief made some progress, then we saw what Arbiter was doing in the meantime, then back to Chief and so on and so forth. They sort of progressed at the same pace give or take because once one got so far, we were thrown back to the other until one was out of reach (Chief on the Dreadnought). In 5 this isn’t the case, it starts out with Osiris coming on scene, then we see what BT is up to, then it jumps right to BT being AWOL and then we’re just trying to follow them. When we get back to them, they’re progressed so far ahead that we need extra Osiris missions just to catch up and then BT is just out of commission.
So in short; Halo 5 was a whole mess of a story with too much exposition and bad pacing as well as no real concept of mystery so it stands to reason the characters all suffered from poor writing.
He is just so incredibly boring. The only memorable thing about him, is the voice of the voice actor.
Jameson Locke was alright with me. I didn’t mind him personally in Halo 5. But I don’t think 343 would have him take up as much time as he did in Halo 5 since Halo Infinite is suppose to focus more on John-117. If anything, him and whatever is left of Fireteam Osiris (likely a slightly new formation if they replace Edward Buck after he reformed Alpha-9 in Halo Bad Blood) could appear as allies in a mission or be mentioned in some way.
I don’t think he’s a bad character. I think the main reason people don’t like him is because he took up like 70% of the campaign and it didn’t help that his missions were kinda boring. People want the Chief.