Let me start off by saying that I am fully aware that canon and gameplay don’t make a whole lot of sense when you start mixing the two together. However after watching some of the Twitch streams of the pre beta gameplay I couldn’t help but wonder why I had the strange feeling I’d seen the thruster and stabilizer abilities before. So I decided to do some digging.
I quickly booted up H4 and played the level Shutdown all the way through to the final cutscene. In it Chief jumps off the tower and nosedives towards an oncoming Lich. As he prepares to land he flips 180 degrees and you see what appears to be flames/jets come out of the back of his suit. I replayed the cutscene several times to make sure I wasn’t crazy and it wasn’t a jetpack, but no he isn’t wearing one.
His suit has thrusters built into it. Here’s a link to a YouTube video to watch for yourself.
Curious as ever I went to Halopedia to see what this was all about. From my research thrusters have actually been a component of several of the Mjolnir suits as far back as the Mark 4 suit. Under the “Armor Components” section if you scroll down towards the bottom of the list thrusters is right there.
Here are links for the Mark 4 suit, and for the Mark 6 suit. I’ll also provide a link to the armor components of the Gen 2 Mjolnir armor to compare the thruster systems here.
I do want to back up a moment and say it wasn’t a component of every suit. The Mark 5 page didn’t have thrusters listed as a part of it’s components. Why that is I don’t know, but I thought it was interesting.
Once again, I’m not implying that canon and gameplay are related. All I wanted to do her is show what I found while researching the topic, and with the talk of thrusters and stabilizers in H5 I thought this was a fitting place to put it. Now that I know this information about the suits I do have a better appreciation for that cutscene in Shutdown because it makes a lot more sense to me at least how Chief was able to slow himself to land on the Lich without a jetpack.
Take what you will from this information. Hopefully some of you find it at the very least interesting to read about.