everyone keeps asuming that all the covenatn were wiped out or that they were only fighting the humans, w/ tech like that they could be fighting 6 other wars w/ 6 other species for all we know and maybe ther at war w/ wutever we saw in the E3 trailer!
From what I could understand by your writing, you’re saying that maybe the Covenant are still there are fighting against this new ancient evil?
Well first of all, Frankie said “No purple”, meaning that there won’t be Covenant. Second, the Covenant is dead, seperated. The species that were in the Covenant are alive, but they’re too busy trying to recreate their own societies to go out fighting (asides from some Brutes and Elites still going at it).
It’s simple:
At the end of Halo 3, the Covenant city was destroyed by the flood, and the high prophets, and most lesser prophets, were all dead.
The Elites went on a campaign to defeat the remaining covenant Loyalists, eventually pushing the Brutes back to Doisac (their home planet), and the other species’ simply scattered.
The Covenant as a religious faction no longer exists, and the humans, or particularly Oni, are establishing their place as the ruling race of the universe by puppeteering a civil war between the Elites, to keep them from progressing back into a powerful force.
By the events of Halo 4, chances are, the Humans go back to war with the Elites, defeat them into a peace treaty, and treat them as some kind of second class citizen. The Brutes are still warring each other, the Prophets are in hiding, Jackals roam the galaxy doing whatever pirates do, Grunts are probably living peacefully on their colonized planets, and as for the Hunters, Engineers, and Drones, who knows?
The alien species’ may very well appear in future games and fiction, but not as a unified Covenant.