I’ll try to keep this as short as I can, but I’m a bit of a windbag and I can type fast, LOL.
I’m a campaign only player and a lore fan. I finished the campaign yesterday as many of us did.
Last week, on this very forum, when I heard about the mission split between Osiris and Blue Team, I was very incensed. I was so upset I decided to go ahead and spoil the game for myself by searching elsewhere on the web to verify if the mission split was for real, and in doing so I saw the plot of the game on the NeoGAF spoiler thread.
And at first, I HATED it. It sounded like fanfic to me. I couldn’t believe this was the storyline they went with.
However, I like to think I’m a reasonable adult, open to change and willing to listen to new ideas. So, I chewed on it for a few days and realized I was being unfair for a few reasons:
-First, it was unfair to judge the plot of the campaign without having seen it myself yet; you could take almost any story and summarize it down to one paragraph and make it sound silly, including the plots of most of the prior campaigns. You need to see all the machinations of WHY the characters are behaving as they are.
-Second, the plot many of us expected - Precursors or extra-galactic Super-Flood returning to test humanity and the Sangheili for the Mantle, would have sounded too much like retelling the story of Halo 2/3, and they wanted to go in a different direction, I respect that. If they’d gone that route, they’dve gotten flak for not being innovative enough.
-Third, this WAS the original plot for Combat Evolved back in the day, and in going down this route it’s actually a blast from the very distant Halo past, which is really cool when you think about it.
So, since I already preordered and preloaded the darn thing, I gave it a chance. And I’m SO GLAD I did!! I think this
campaign is awesome.
-The controls and the frame rate are smooth as butter. The weapons, on lower difficulties at least (more input later about higher ones), feel beautifully balanced - everything is actually useful now. The Spartan abilities and squad commands are effortless to pull off and feel like the most natural thing in the world, not cumbersome to use at all.
-The graphics are gorgeous. This LOOKS like a 2015 game, to me. The color palette that looked all washed out to me in Halo 4, is brilliant and vibrant this time around. Very world-immersing.
-The soundtrack is MAGNIFICENT. Perfect blend of old and new. This sounded like a Halo game from the moment you boot it up. They delivered on their promise to honor the entire musical Halo past - I even recognized the Reach theme during one of the Sanghelios missions.
-They also delivered on the open world mission design, to me. I had a BLAST moving my team all around battlefields looking for ways to flank enemies, get under them, get over them, get behind them… ya know, like a REAL warzone would be like.
Now, what about that mission split? Well - as a Chief fan who was ENRAGED when I first heard about it - it really wasn’t so bad. Most of Osiris’ missions were fairly short while Blue Team’s were fairly long. Blue Team’s missions were the ones in which the most important plot points developed. And even in the Osiris missions, the focus of the story was always about Blue Team. It didn’t FEEL like you were playing as Osiris 80% of the time, at all. And this is from someone who WANTED to hate it.
Oh, and about Osiris - I wasn’t a big fan going in, but as I got to know them by their banter, they’re really not so bad. We knew Buck would be awesome, but the others are pretty cool, too. If this is the first step in a long process of 343 eventually handing off the torch, we could do worse.
And as far as that story, I’ve grown to love it. The main plot isn’t so much, “Evil Cortana is taking over the galaxy because she can”, it’s really more, “Morally pragmatic Cortana is assuming the Mantle and THINKS she’s doing the right thing.” A powerful, morally ambiguous character taking over the galaxy with good intentions from their point of view, but who’s also killing thousands in the process and must be stopped - sounds more like a proper Halo story than I initially gave it credit for.
One asterisk, tho. 343, I sure hope you know what you’re doing as far as how to end this story arc. It would seem like the only options for Halo 6 are that either the Chief will have to kill Cortana, he will rescue her and make her “good” again, or she will repent of her actions and “kill herself”. Any one of these feels like it undermines the importance of her sacrifice in Halo 4. I’m hoping there’s another option I haven’t thought of. (I still would not be surprised to find out it’s not really “our” Cortana… which would allow the “real” Cortana’s death to remain meaningful. I dunno.)
Overall though, I just wanted to thank 343 for the fantastic ride yesterday. There are definitely a few things, both story and gameplay related, that I could critique, but I’ll leave those for other threads as I want this one to be a positive reflection of the good time I had. As many did, my wife and I took the day off and marathoned the campaign all day and had a blast. The proof of how good this game is, lays in the fact that even after playing it for 7 hours yesterday, I CANNOT WAIT TO GET HOME AND PLAY IT SOME MORE. That’s a sign of your winner there. Thank you 343!!!