I’m not sure if any of you have noticed this or not, but since 343i has taken over, the Halo community has had a lot more to talk about. I love Bungie to death, but at the end of their service to us, they got sloppy in the sense they weren’t giving us anything in terms of story, updates, or fan service in general. They didn’t interact with us on the forums at all. It was almost as if they were abandoning us because they knew that they wouldn’t have to deal with us for much longer. Also, they were extremely secretive with every element of their games when they were making them: no input to story or what we could expect coming up as far as environments and enemies. I remember spending months theorizing about Halo 3 from the trailer and arguing with people whether or not the device shown was on Earth, if it was the Arc, why would the Covenant be there, etc. That was the only thing we had to discuss.
We are now talking about "Where is Master Chief? Who is his enemy? Who is the ancient evil? What did the concept art really show us? Why is his armor so different(rather than minor ‘hand armor’ arguments). Rather than constantly flaming each other, we’re working as a community and discussing things intelligently. I realize a lot of this is because we have two new games upcoming that we’ve been wanting for years, but think about how much more 343i has to do with ‘us’ than Bungie did. I’ve seen so many people complaining about 343 and saying how upset they are with what they’re doing. Why? They took your favorite game and continued the story that Bungie refused to. Bungie left us on a cliffhanger with no intention on finishing it.
I didn’t make this thread to made Bungie look bad. I even had a theory at one point that Bungie purposely made Reach to piss us off, released it just a few weeks “before” Black Ops, and refused to listen to the community to make the franchise go under and tank right before 343i took over so that they wouldn’t have any competition on the new games they were developing. I just wanted to take the time and make this thread to thank 343. Thanks for the kick-A forums, thanks for two new games(with more to come), thanks for taking the community’s advice and fixing Reach, thanks for giving us plenty to talk about up the the release of your new games, thanks for giving us input and listening to us, thanks for making absolutely sure that our favorite games are going to link in with books about the game(rather than having slight conflicting canon of Fall of Reach and Halo: Reach), and most importantly thank you 343i for giving us more Halo. It all looks fantastic so far and I can’t wait.