Where Halo's story telling went wrong (spoilers)

Games Halo 5: Guardians
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(xpost from Vtolz at /r/HaloStory)

First let me say this isn’t meant to be a rant, but food for thought. It is my opinion that after Reach (inb4 Bungie fanboy), the story telling for Halo went awry. I would like to know if you agree with me or if you do not, explain why. So without further adieu, let’s begin.

Let’s begin with the original trilogy. Halo CE-Halo 3 may have had flaws in their campaigns, be it design (the Library), or within the plot itself (Halo 2 cliffhanger). Gasp! The originals had flaws!? Yes, they did. But no story is perfect. There are always things being changed or altered–Cortana was supposed to be evil, after all.

But the thing with the original trilogy was that each game was self-contained. In CE, it’s very simple; you’re fleeing, you crash, you rescue, you discover ancient alien threat, you discover ancient alien weapon, you blow up ancient alien weapon. Nothing to special here, and definitely not the most complex plot to grace video games. CE has a lot going for it in the sense that it: launched the Xbox; was, at the time, completely novel and fresh to the gaming scene (even as it took elements from Alien, Starship Troopers, and Ringworld). The fact was that you were exploring it, in a 3D space. It was you on that Ringworld, or killing aliens with super big guns. I don’t need to mention that Bungie intended for Chief to be faceless in order to immerse the player more, but there you go. And it worked.

Fast forward to Halo 2. Chief’s back, we’ve got new enemies, we’ve got new places to explore, and-- holy -Yoink-, we’re fighting on Earth? Holy -Yoink-, there’s another Halo? Holy -Yoink- a playable covenant character? Besides for these new, interesting set pieces and characters, there’s a few other plot threads going on; Chief stopping the Covenant, the Arbiter reversing his beliefs, both of them discovering the Gravemind, both realizing their is a common enemy. Halo 2 introduced all of these things and did it adequately enough for us to care in Halo 3. This is why the cliffhanger ending is okay. In Halo 2, you:

  • prevent the covenant attack on Earth - Kill one of the covenant’s most prominent leaders

  • Discover an ancient horror much stronger than anything you’ve fought before

  • Join forces
    But, you also:

  • Leave behind your best friend on a flood contaminated ship - Discover another grave threat to the galaxy (the Ark)

  • Return to Earth because the covenant are back (as implied by the last cutscene).
    In Halo 2, you’ve had many victories, but you also have loose ends that need tying. This sets up Halo 3’s major plot points.

In Halo 3, you finish the fight. You eliminate the Covenant. You stop the flood. You destroy the rampant Forerunner who threatened to kill you once. You got your best friend back.

And there you should have stayed, left alone to float in space, left in the memories of all your fans. You were out there, somewhere, when we looked up at the stars. You were our hero, and you went out gently into that good night.

Fast forward to Halo 4. This is where things begin to suffer–and perhaps not in the way you think. First, let’s discuss Requiem.

Requiem should have had the same amount of mystery and wonder as the first Halo ring did. And why didn’t it? Level design. This is Halo 4’s biggest flaw in my opinion. You are reintroducing a shield world–an entire world built by the same beings who created the Halo rings–into the main series (the first being in Halo Wars, but I digress). There should have been forests, oceans, valleys, swamps, mountains, deserts, grottos, and so on so forth to explore–perhaps not literally, but hey, you explored half of those places in the original trilogy anyways. But instead the player is railroaded along linear paths, not left to explore every nook and cranny, but to sprint from point A to point B. This is also why in my opinion why Halo 4’s story feels a little rushed. There simply wasn’t enough space for such an epic tale to take place in. You are killing the Chief’s only companion, after all. You can’t cramp everything Cortana’s done into 10 missions. What’s worse, Chief is on requiem for 8 missions? But why do none of these missions feel memorable? Why do these new Forerunner buildings, these skyboxes, these deserts and forests not feel like anything worth remembering? Because the story focused too much on Chief and Cortana. I understand. After 3 Halos and an Ark, it’s kind of Forerunner Shmorerunner. But What a shield world? New types of Forerunners? All of this was glossed over in the game.

And why was it glossed over in the game? Because Halo has unfortunately fallen into the black hole that is the EU. Halo has fallen victim to the death of many good series; a series that gets too big to handle. A series that gets so dense, so massive, that it very much collapses on itself like a black hole (unless my physics are totally off, but you get the point).

It’s like this; the original trilogy had the EU revolve around them. The new Reclaimer Saga revolves around the EU. I didn’t even know there was another Covenant until Halo 4, and Cortana sure didn’t help when she said “a lot can change in 7 years”. That’s the best you can give me? Really? I didn’t even know there was an entirely new Spartan program, to which Chief and Cortana barely had a beef with. How would Chief know this if he were in cryo-sleep for 7 years? Why is Cortana not outraged, beyond a soft-spoken “they’re going to replace you” murmured here or there?

And who the hell was the Didact? Here’s an example of the EU done right. The Didact has his own backstory that spans 3 novels. That’s terrific, because it’s additional. It is not, however, invasive to the game. This is because he is a character, and more importantly, he’s the villain. From the gameplay standpoint, it’s shoot him 'till he’s dead–which was, very lackluster in my opinion (what was with the whole “mini-cortana” thing?) But nonetheless, all you needed to know was he was a threat. Beyond that, he didn’t matter. He moved the plot along.

Now, I know Halo 4 is heavily character driven. But when you introduce an entirely new world (literally), you can’t just throw it into the sun in the spin-off (also literally). If the Eye of Sauron was just a damn tower it wouldn’t be so menacing. If Hogwarts was just a damn castle it wouldn’t be so magical. If the Halo ring was just a ring and not a super-weapon, it wouldn’t be as interesting, but it would still be fun to wander on. Requiem is about as interesting as a bread bowl. Which is really, really a shame. They had a whole world, an entire hollow-sphere to fill to the brim with mystery, and it’s exactly that–a hollow-sphere.

Lastly, Halo 5. So much has been said already that I’ll just offer my opinion instead of rehash. Cortana being alive completely nullifies Halo 4. What’s the point? The Didact’s gone, Requiem’s gone, and Cortana is back? What the hell did you even accomplish in Halo 4, then? Got the Infinity back? Got Chief home? Those don’t matter either, because Chief is still same ol’ Chief, and the Infinity is hardly in this game. It would have made a difference if:

  • The Infinity was attacked and in danger like shown in the ad campaignAnd:

  • Chief actually went AWOL–like, full on renegade AWOL, not just a “Nah, I don’t feel like it” AWOL, because of Cortana’s absence.But no, she’s back, and she’s got the Domain.

The what?

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Where the hell was that all throughout the rest of the games? What mention of the Domain was there, at all? I don’t even remember if it was properly addressed in Halo 5, or if we’re just supposed to know what it is. Hell, did they even explain Guardians?

And the irony is that what Halo 5 does well is make a campaign that was kind of fun to play and explore, but there’s no point to exploring it. There would have been if you didn’t know where Chief was. But you do. Because they relegated him to Genesis for the majority of his missions. There’s no wonder. There’s no mystery. There’s no stakes here. And there certainly isn’t proper character development. It’s a shame; the adds promised a better story than what we got. It would have been okay, if only we got the same deep and conflicted, complex characters in the game that we got in the minute long adds.

So now we have this scrambled mess of a story, where there are no consequences and you don’t really save the day. There’s no truth to hunt; it’s solved in 3 missions. There’s no #teamLocke or #teamChief; there’s just “Who’s Locke” and “Where’s Chief”? The climax, the “epic cliffhanger” is literally Cortana harping on like she’s in a bad melodrama instead of space epic, a “rats, I’ll get you for this!” scenario, and rescuing Chief, who doesn’t look broken, but tired. And that’s the saddest part. This isn’t an MGS4 “Old Snake” tired. This isn’t a Dumbledore tired, or a Han Solo tired, or what have you. This is a senile tired. This is our hero failing, not because he’s broken, not because he’s conflicted, but because he can’t compete. Because he got trapped and the yung’uns had to bust him out.

Chief, much like Halo, is aging. It’s lost the magic the original trilogy once had. The EU, though rich and I’m sure wonderful, has too much influence over the game, to the point where Chief doesn’t look like he’s struggling, he’s just clueless (Compare his interactions with the Gravemind to the Didact, for example.) Halo was about the Master Chief kicking -Yoink- and saving the Galaxy. Now, he can’t even bust himself out of a damn cage, because the EU has created things so much stronger than him, that he looks almost…kind of pathetic. The EU has taken the mystery out of Halo. It’s taken the “How will Chief get out of this one?” and the “What does this do?” out of Halo, because we know exactly how Chief will–or more often than not, won’t–get out of a mess, or exactly what that thing does. None of which has been explained in game.

When the keystone of your franchise is your games, they need to remain the prominent story telling force in the universe.

Thank you for your time. I hope I’ve made some solid arguments and would love to hear from you.

TL;DR: Halo story-telling needs to happen more in the games.

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Yeah, I absolutely agree with you. I really hope 343 employs some new and better story writers.

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> 2533274824002906;1:
> And who the hell was the Didact? Here’s an example of the EU done right. The Didact has his own backstory that spans 3 novels. That’s terrific, because it’s additional. It is not, however, invasive to the game. This is because he is a character, and more importantly, he’s the villain. From the gameplay standpoint, it’s shoot him 'till he’s dead–which was, very lackluster in my opinion (what was with the whole “mini-cortana” thing?) But nonetheless, all you needed to know was he was a threat. Beyond that, he didn’t matter. He moved the plot along.

I guess, but having never read any of those novels, the didact came off more like this than anything. The terminals helped to provide some context, but other than that, all you really have to work with is “this guy is a -Yoink-”. Incidentally, I’m not sure whoever wrote this post initially played Halo 2 on release; it wasn’t so much “holy -Yoink-, we’re fighting on Earth?” as it was “holy -Yoink-, despite the entire advertising campaign we had two levels and we’re already done fighting on Earth?”

Out of the many problems with Halo 5, I think one of the broadest complaints I can make is that it had pretensions of being more than it and indeed any of the games are. Halo’s never been much more than “shoot at the aliens/parasites until they die” with everything else being so much background noise in accomplishing that goal, but it never claimed to be, either. Halo 5 tries to tell a story about loss and trust and ethics and the corruption of power and so many other things, and it just fumbled on every single one of them by instead ripping off an ancient sci-fi cliche without telling it as well as the original(s) did.