The video I’m linking below does a very good job at explaining what the core problem is with 343’s storytelling. In short, they are hyper focused on the story of Spartans and having the entire story hinge on the Master Chief.
Think about it, in the original trilogy, ODST, and Reach you were never acting entirely alone. You were almost always part of an operation bigger than yourself. 343 has seemingly dropped the military part of this military sci-fi shooter and it’s why they can’t make a gripping story like Bungie’s titles.
In my opinion 343 should have never attempted to continue the story. The war is over, the story feels finished. I just can’t seem to make myself care about 343’s stories because of that. 343 should have taken the same approach Bungie did and flesh out smaller stories in their games either with whole campaigns or even one off missions.
There was this Live Action Trailer for Halo 4, which had a great speech, talking about “For the first time in generations, we build a ship not meant for battle, but for peace”. And I think this is actually a great conclusion/continuation of the Halo Universe.
I also don’t mind taking a deeper focus on character motivations.
To me, it seems more like the actual issue is that they were never able to fully finish their ideas. There has always been trouble, which lead to changes during development and rushed releases. So the results we got were more like Zombies and don’t display the intention someone might had at the beginning.
To give it a positive spin: Perhaps they were too ambitious.
A simpler concept might have survived such troubled developments in better shape.
Ya i can agree with much of what op said. But id also claim they just execute poorly in the story. Like the idea can be great if they werent just so miserably implemented.
Its so much lore but without making it feel like its a cohesive whole. And they drop threads and have just failed to ever introduce a character well aside from perhaps lasky.
-So glad to hear someone else saying this. CE - Reach thrived on being military science fiction. Reach in particular, Bungie’s last game, showed clearly that they wanted to double down on the military science fiction side, but 343 has turned much more towards almost fantasy stuff.
And there’s the real truth. If they wanted a successful new franchise, they should have read up on the lore and carefully crafted an interesting new story in the late war (2540s.) Or tried a new genre like RPG or open world, but without waking chief up. If they were just now, 15 years after Halo 3, waking Chief up and continuing the story, then maybe they could have something interesting. Everything they’ve done has felt like a poorly planned cash grab from the beginning.
A key element is that the games shift towards a Scifi grounded story and rejects the religious mystery and even mysticism. Bungie took the story elements introduced from Marathon and gave it heavy symbolism in which to this day even Destiny relies on. There is a lot to dissect within the Halo games where you can understand the motives from the Covenant, Flood and how multi dimensional the series was.
4, basically rehashed CE without the flare. Boring gameplay and a story that’s a snore fest. Guardians tries to copy the controversy of 2 without any soul. Infinite, copies this finish the fight except it finishes nothing. They half -Yoink!- it entirely and are afraid to come up with their own storyline. There’s nothing innovative or new. I recommend you dive into Marathon. While off topic, Halo borrows a lot of it and there you begin to see Bungie’s magic with story telling.
I think 343 has really good idea of story direction… but terrible at story telling.
In Halo 4, the idea of Chief waking up in a world where he is unfamiliar with and the only companion who understands him the most, dies, questioning his life as a soldier was great. It set up that Spartans are now seen as expendable muscle (Hence the Spartan IVs) instead of the war heroes they were.
Then Halo 5, questioning his position led him to go rogue and lead into a bigger problem. That was great. But the whole #HuntTheTruth with Locke and Chief was just pointless and directed the story bad in game.
I am fine with Halo Infinite being a year later. The story telling about Chief trying to trust his new companion that was foreshadowed in Halo 4 was a really good direction. Just the whole story with Escharum flaming him in voicechat was just underwhelming.
I enjoy the stories and how ther revolve around John. The one story I really didn’t care about was Halo 5 which made him team up with mystery Spartand because they eanted to be like CoD, then the other team of people hunting him down…
With Staten back at the helm, future stories will probably be in a good place. He joined Infinite too late to have a big influence on its story, though. So we will have to wait for campaign dlc to really feel the effect he has on it.
I did like Infinite though. And my gripes with Halo 4 have more to do with campaign gameplay and level design than the story of it. I do wish they kept the forerunner can of worms close to the chest though. It was always better when the Forerunner were firmly in the past and impossible to truly understand.
I really liked Halo 4’s story. Master Chief and Cortana waking up years later with the Covenant War that had been really what their lives have been about gone, forced to confront what living means to them and especially with Cortana coming to the end of her cycle, that was all good - especially when we see the UNSC as it is now with its Spartan IVs. The only thing I didn’t like about it was giving the Forerunners a face/antagonistic role with the arrival of the Didact. I preferred Forerunners to remain faceless and shrouded in mystery and if fans wanted more, I would’ve kept that to the more expanded universe with the novels such as the Forerunner trilogy. I’d rather it have been another left-behind Forerunner creation like a corrupted shard of Menedict Bias or something.
That said though, I think they could’ve won me over to the Didact…if they didn’t immediately drop him after that. Yeah, there’s the comics, whatever, with him still “existing” so who knows, but his major part/contribution is pretty much over as soon as it began.
Halo 5…having Master Chief question his duty and maybe even some insubordination isn’t bad per se, it was just the execution with a conflict between him and Locke that was settled after a slowly-choreographed two-minute that was really poor. Bringing back Cortana as an evil AI Overlord after all that Halo 4 did was also a terribly poor decision, in my opinion. I’d rather it had been another kind of Forerunner AI or something else that could’ve been posing as Cortana, leading Chief to stray from his duty, only to realize the truth when it infected/coerced the modern AI into the Created with the Domain.
Unfortunately they did do that and then immediately killed off Cortana in Infinite.
Now Infinite’s story…is fine right now. I thought the ending they gave Cortana was both respectable and adequately wrapped up, I liked the closer look into the Banished with the focus on Escharum and his ilk to add a more personal stake against them, and I actually thought the Banished usurping both Cortana and the UNSC when they were so focused on each other to be a good display of table-flipping on their part.
My only problems with it so far is, other than its rather bare bonedness otherwise, is that once again we have the Created being dropped so unceremoniously when I would’ve been interested to see more of a conflict with them, especially as a multiplayer story, with one of Season 2’s story background literally saying “Banished replacing the threat of the Created” and now we have The Endless who…I dunno. Don’t know much about them yet. I may be a little interested but definitely not as interested considering how it just seems 343 is just dropping one threat for another at the drop of a hat. What I’m far more intrigued by is the UNSC part of this story, seeing Chief link up and reorganize with Locke, Laskey, Blue Team, actual living Spartan IVs, etc and see how they survive on this ring against the Banished and the coming of the Endless. A story like what we heard in the UNSC Datapads with the group of Spartan IVs trying to gather up and become a fighting force - only to fail - is what I would’ve liked to see in Infinite’s campaign.
There was a vidoc or vidoc-like thing before halo 2, where Bungie (it might have even been staten), made it clear that Chief was a Super Soldier, not a Super Hero. 343 however, seems to go the opposite.
Chief’s armor is always called the MK6 now, despite having gone through 4 different iterations. There’s no reason why the designation would stick around beyond fan association. Funnily enough, 3/4 of these iterations are based on MKIV varients, so its not like they’re actually visually inspired by the MK6
Master Chief is used more like a super hero name, or mantle, than what it properly is, a rank, a title.
The stories are all extremely focused on chief and cortana (even 5. You may not have gotten to play as chief much as 5, but Locke’s story is all about chasing him and has nothing to do with Locke or his team). Which has made the universe feel small, awkward, and lack all those cool things we enjoyed in the original games. Chief was important to those games because of what he did, not because of who he or his girlfriend was.
I think this is ultimately the biggest problem, despite my prior statements. 343 doesn’t commit to a story. They just brush it under a rug. Each 343 game has effectively soft rebooted the universe. This has generally killed my interest in what happens next because odds are they’re just discard it, tell us its over, and spend the story trying to sell me on the new thing.
We went from ancient alien warlord with an old grudge, “Conflict eternal” and a whole bunch of build up…tossed in the bit.
An AI rebellion lead by our former friend. Honestly I didn’t like this premise and felt like it broke halo and turned it into a generic sci-fi series, after Halo was like the one major franchise where AI’s and humans got along…but it was something.
Now we have the Banished who’re poorly defined. They’re galaxy conquering “mercenaries” who we’re supposed to feel bad for but also hate? Also gave cortana trouble somehow.
And now we have the Endless, ‘scarrier than the flood’, and materialize as some floating monkeys and a monologueing lady who’s less interesting than the didact (who we also kill, so oh well). I can’t wait till the next game shoves them under the rug.
Yeah, I think that’s true. All of 343s games had cool-looking trailers that hyped up an intriguing campaign, only to deliver terrible, bland, empty and meaningless stories (not to mention ridiculous and annoying plot holes). And I think it’s because (A) they don;t know how to make a cool, quiet character that is still human and feels natural, without compromising their cool-and-collected nature; and (B) they only ever try to write stories for those types of characters. All the more vocal, expressive side characters have minimal attention to them. Even in the old games, other characters like Johnson, Keys (Miranda and Captain Jacob), etc. were much more important and relevant than, say, Lasky, Palmer, The Pilot, and the other Spartans in Infinite
To be fair one of those “mystery spartans” was in combat evolved technically.
One of the other team was a playble character in a bungie game.
Reach was a team of spartans game.
I feel like this take away from halo 5 that a team of spartans was a bad ifea is common but ive rarely seen any good reasons as to why it would be.
Coop is a staple feature no1 has ever said “coop ruins halo cause theres only one master chief.”
You can still be a bad &$$ with other spartans around.
Coop in ce and 2 not to mention all of Reach proves that.
The team dynamic if it were well executed allows for tye best of both worlds.
Chief can be our eyes and ears while the squad build up the character and stoey without sacrificing what makes chief so iconic to begin with.
Althiugh personally the whole john is the chosen one destined hero direction 343i chose to take in 4 was not my cup of tea. Cortanas breakdown was great. The man or machine plot was great but the chosen space jesus raised up by the gods to defeat the didact thing felt super out of place and leaned on the explanation of things instead of the space opera mysticism we had prior.
343i either explain too much or make terrible mysteries.
The endless blah blah, who cares about that youll either destroy any mystique they have in the next i stallment or drop the thread to maybe conclude in a book or bad comic.
The created arc and the didact cpuld have been amazing.
But nah lets go onto the abnished but lets not give any real idea of what they are in infinite.
The whole great for newcomers and old fan alike jargon used when hyping the game fell so flat it makes the halo infinite body type bootys look phat AF.
I can’t really justify it either. The success of Halo: Reach, Halo 3: ODST and even the slightly warmer-than-lukewarm reactions to the Halo Wars games should’ve been clear signs to 343 that expanded universe was the way to go for mainline game entries.
I mean, I get it. A decade ago, Microsoft slammed their money down on the table and said “we want more Halo games” despite whatever Bungie intended before leaving the project, and 343 Industries was the answer to the massive “what now?” in the sky.
Putting myself in their oddly specific shoes, I would have my brand new (some returning) talent trying to play different angles on existing work than going “alright, let’s start from scratch.” That work just so happened to be the 7-foot-tall green man who makes badass one-liners while shooting alien bad guys.
(I’ll discredit my point right there a little though, because Halo 4 absolutely was a departure from what we knew, to the point that “starting from scratch” becomes relative when describing everything besides the franchise’s titular character.)
Coming back to the point though, should they have branched out after their initial experimentation, trying to remedy their flawed game formula while pushing for new content that avoids the classic trap of ‘safe’ trend following? Yes, absolutely.
They could’ve made games about anything or anyone in the Halo universe besides the fully developed main character while also achieving the same goal of staying close to their roots.
They could’ve made Halo Infinite’s campaign focused on one of the many Spartan IVs aboard the Infinity, and I would even dare to suggest that it could’ve been about a fireteam. Hell, they could’ve made some of the campaign about the Spartan IVs we find dead on the ring, a clever homage to Halo 3: ODST’s environmental storytelling.
There were so many ways to go about telling Infinite’s story, just like the other games before it.
I think its largely down to the poor execution of it, the AI companions were not terribly enjoyable, it effected encounter design, and that the story just wasn’t designed for it. The head writer at the time compared it to the Avengers, but halo 5 was like the Avengers if it was about Tony chasing the villain and then 7 other characters who were ‘new’ to the average viewer who were just kind of there.
Ya thats my impression also, i mention execution in the paragraph below the one quoted.
Its the 343i motif.
Good concepts terribly executed.
Or at least thats my take for the most part.
This knowledge is predicated on out-of-game material that the person playing the video game may not have read/interacted with. This is the primary issue with 343’s interconnected universe, because I would wager that… Roughly 80% of all players playing a Halo campaign have never read a Halo book. Of the remaining 20%, I would say 10% or even 15% have only ever read or interacted with a single piece of extended universe content.
So just bringing in these characters with zero explanation at all is confusing and uncomfortable for the people who haven’t read the extended universe novels. You should not be required to read several books worth of information just to play a video game, least of all when all of Bungie’s Halo games had zero reliance on non-game information.