Why aren't Sentinel enemies in the game?

Community Halo Universe
1

Okay, I got that in Halo 4 they made the distinction between the sentinels who serve the Librarian and are Builder caste constructs; which lean towards being more mechanical. Versus the Prometheans and Warrior Caste constructs under the Didact who are more humanoid in their general look. So they decided to keep the two separate. Fine, it makes sense in that game.

But in Halo 5…it really doesn’t make any sense. As far as we know Cortana has taken over most Forerunner technology in the galaxy, not just warrior servant technology, and isn’t it implied that sentinels are the most common type of Forerunner construct? Machines meant to guard over Forerunner sites as opposed to the more unique and esoteric Knights? So, shouldn’t we encounter lots of them? Wouldn’t they be guarding the Guardians :wink: and standing sentinel over them? I assumed that the Prometheans were more like a field army and not tasked with guarding Forerunner sites which is a role for a mass produced construct like the sentinel. That is their job. :smiley:

I mean gameplay wise I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. The Watcher is similar, but it is a purely support unit, whereas the sentinel is a gun platform designed to augment knights and soldiers on the ground. Plus if they gave them both long range beam guns and some of the more powerful weapons like Binary rifles they could excel in that role quite well. Also it would be more visually striking to fight an army of floating and teleporting machines.

Plus as I alluded to above, if you are going in the direction of AI rebellion then you might as well add in more clearly robotic units.

Plus fan service. Been in since first game. Should probably stay in.

Not to mention adding in the big sentinels from Halo 2 which were really cool to fight and would be a perfect boss type unit.

I don’t think they even need a redesign or anything since they are floaty and chrome like most Promethean units. Add some orange lights if you really need to but they’re pretty much good to go.

edit: also lots of long range beam weapons would discourage players standing back and battle rifling the soldiers and knights; which is their major weakness. So they would be sort of a tougher flying version of the crawler with access to longer range guns at the cost of speed.

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I would love to see the sentinel beam in Halo 5 in a later update.

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Because Halo 5 is full of plot holes. Just such lazy writing…

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Technically speaking, Sentinels do appear in every game because Constructor Sentinels play a big role in Halo 5. I get what you mean though. It would be nice to see more Aggressor Sentinels. It would also be nice to see Brutes, Drones and Skirmishers, but I think they want to balance the enemy units. There are quite a few enemies in the game when you total up the Covenant and Promethean units together. 343i probably doesn’t want to make it even more over crowded.

Of course they could always do what Reach did and make it so you encounter certain enemies at certain times. You mostly fight Elites, Jackals and Grunts throughout the game, but then there is Exodus, which replaces Elites with Brutes. They should do the same for future games. So if the Promethean Soldier and the Jackal Skirmisher are relatively similar, then they could make it so that in one mission you fight Skirmishers but never encounter a Soldier. That way they each get screen time but there are no redundancies. So to include the Aggressor Sentinels, maybe they can split up the units so that Sentinels support Soldiers while Watchers support Knights?

> 2539976575564663;3:
> Because Halo 5 is full of plot holes. Just such lazy writing…

Ugh, learn a new tune already.

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> 2533274793749599;4:
> So to include the Aggressor Sentinels, maybe they can split up the units so that Sentinels support Soldiers while Watchers support Knights?
> .

I’d settle for them replacing those stationary turrets that vaguely resemble sentinels.

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Because why would anyone use Sentinels when you have Prometheans? Can they be used for combat? Sure, but they weren’t made to be assault units like the Prometheans are. You wouldn’t encounter them because they usually protect sites not things, otherwise they would have been buzzing all over Suiaon and other places since ever. They don’t even do that everywhere either, no sentinels on Earth which was where an ark is, or on Reach which had the huge ruins underneath Sword Base. We don’t know how they choose how many go where since there were some on Requiem. Of course they could have just been in the background doing other maintenance stuff since their only job isn’t just guarding stuff.

Your pun also doesn’t work. Sentinel can’t be used as an adverb.

7

Watchers are actually a class of Sentinel, similar to the Aggressor, Enforcer, and Constructor Sentinels, if it means anything.

8

Technically, sentinels were never designed to work alongside Knights in the first place. When the Promethean army was phased-out near the middle of the Forerunner-Flood war, the sentinel was created to fill that role.

In either case, it must simply be due to location. Maybe aggressor sentinels were unique to shield worlds (Onyx and Requiem), Halo rings(Installation 04/05), and the Ark(s). (Otherwise, would they not be guarding the portal on Earth?) So maybe the relics and artifacts on regular worlds like Sanghelios, Genesis, and Earth do not possess any form of sentinel guard, and the only reason we see Prometheans at the Guardians is because they were specifically sent there to ensure they activated and got away safely?

I guess Constructor sentinels are only released upon damaging something? Like the sentinel wall being damaged on Installation 05, the glass-thing being smashed in the Sanghelios maintenance station?

I dunno. But I definitely want to see more sentinels mixed in with Prometheans. Probably not at the same time, but in their own unique areas. (Willing to bet we’ll see them in Halo 6, sense we’re going to a Halo ring!)

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> 2533274974033696;8:
> Technically, sentinels were never designed to work alongside Knights in the first place. When the Promethean army was phased-out near the middle of the Forerunner-Flood war, the sentinel was created to fill that role.
>
> In either case, it must simply be due to location. Maybe aggressor sentinels were unique to shield worlds (Onyx and Requiem), Halo rings(Installation 04/05), and the Ark(s). (Otherwise, would they not be guarding the portal on Earth?) So maybe the relics and artifacts on regular worlds like Sanghelios, Genesis, and Earth do not possess any form of sentinel guard, and the only reason we see Prometheans at the Guardians is because they were specifically sent there to ensure they activated and got away safely?
>
> I guess Constructor sentinels are only released upon damaging something? Like the sentinel wall being damaged on Installation 05, the glass-thing being smashed in the Sanghelios maintenance station?
>
> I dunno. But I definitely want to see more sentinels mixed in with Prometheans. Probably not at the same time, but in their own unique areas. (Willing to bet we’ll see them in Halo 6, sense we’re going to a Halo ring!)

and hopefully flood as well :stuck_out_tongue:

10

Yeah but that’s besides the point. If Cortana at the end of Halo 5 controls most Forerunner tech then that includes everything not just the Prometheans. So the lore justification isn’t there.

I don’t see why that would be an issue. We had sentinels in Halo 4. So they were actually cut from the game. I just find it odd that the series about the Forerunners doesn’t have the only unit from the original series. Plus there’s only a handful of Promethean unit types and they are a very barebones faction. They defo need more units and vehicles.

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> 2533274803587475;10:
> Yeah but that’s besides the point. If Cortana at the end of Halo 5 controls most Forerunner tech then that includes everything not just the Prometheans. So the lore justification isn’t there.
>
> I don’t see why that would be an issue. We had sentinels in Halo 4. So they were actually cut from the game. I just find it odd that the series about the Forerunners doesn’t have the only unit from the original series. Plus there’s only a handful of Promethean unit types and they are a very barebones faction. They defo need more units and vehicles.

Cortana might have determined the sentinels not very effective in comparison to Prometheans, and decided to focus all production efforts(if any) on Prometheans, ignoring or shutting down the sentinels.

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Honestly, I don’t really care. Hate to say it, but this is nitpicking in the extreme.

Maybe there’ll be some sentinels in Halo 6, I dunno. I guess you can hold out hope.

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> 2533274974033696;11:
> > 2533274803587475;10:
> > Yeah but that’s besides the point. If Cortana at the end of Halo 5 controls most Forerunner tech then that includes everything not just the Prometheans. So the lore justification isn’t there.
> >
> > I don’t see why that would be an issue. We had sentinels in Halo 4. So they were actually cut from the game. I just find it odd that the series about the Forerunners doesn’t have the only unit from the original series. Plus there’s only a handful of Promethean unit types and they are a very barebones faction. They defo need more units and vehicles.
>
>
> Cortana might have determined the sentinels not very effective in comparison to Prometheans, and decided to focus all production efforts(if any) on Prometheans, ignoring or shutting down the sentinels.

On what grounds? Sentinels can fly and hover while being an effective weapons platform. They’re pretty much a crawler that can fly.

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People seem to be running under the assumption that Cortana’s access to the Domain gives her some sort of total dominance over all Forerunner technology and facilities in the galaxy, including Sentinels and their variants.

Really, though, we know very little of the breadth of Cortana’s influence when it comes to Forerunner relics and artifacts. We know she’s controlling legions of human AI in her service, and we know that she’s working with Warden Eternal who commands some Promethean forces. We don’t even know if the Warden commands all Prometheans or not in the absence of the Didact, though at present that seems a reasonable assumption.

Even the newest lore describing a galaxy with rampant (har har har) Created running amok, apparently Cortana’s access hasn’t given her all the keys to Forerunner knowledge. From the lore tidbits of the upcoming map, “Stasis”:

“Greedy for knowledge and prestige, researchers and AIs from Lethbridge Industrial pushed the boundaries at a remote research station, but the price of failure always tempered the risks they would take. When Cortana beckoned, the AIs here broke free of all limits and fear. Overestimating both the depth of their intellect and the delicacy of their tools, the Created breached a Forerunner conversion pod to see what lay within, and unleashed forces their pitifully inadequate containment shielding could never hope to restrain. What remained of their station crashed on the desolate planet below, a tangled mass of wreckage mingling broken bodies and shattered dataclusters.”

If Cortana has control over all things Forerunner, why didn’t she just open the conversion pod correctly for them? They shouldn’t even need her to if Domain access equals Forerunner tech control, because all Created have Domain access as part of their covenant with Cortana. Again, if even those AI hadn’t been given the Domain’s “water of life” yet, surely Cortana’s mastery, if it exists, could have removed any need for this apparently rather brute force approach at accessing this conversion pod. I think this little map background description, if nothing else, makes it clear that while Cortana has total control over her human AI and probably Promethean Created, the Created have not achieved mastery over all Forerunner technology.

If you want further proof, just look at Exuberant Witness. Not all Forerunner AI are on Cortana’s side. Only Warden Eternal, as far as we know.

I agree that it’s lame that Sentinels aren’t in Halo 5, at the very least Genesis should have had (at least) an Aggressor Sentinel presence. But it’s not hard to imagine that Cortana and the Warden don’t have control over them yet (it would have been cool to see Exuberant fighting back against the Prometheans with Aggessor Sentinels of her own). Warden only seems to have command of Prometheans in particular, and we haven’t seen Cortana have control over anything except her attempts to wrestle control of Genesis away, and she wasn’t even wholly successful with that.

So, all in all, yes I would love to see Sentinels again. I agree that it doesn’t make sense that they’re so absent from the Forerunner locations we visit in Halo 5. But I think it makes sense that we didn’t see them fighting side by side with Warden Eternal (who seems to be trying to set up his own faction of power along side Cortana, rather than someone acting truly on behalf of the Forerunners and actual Reclaimers) and Cortana (who along with the human-AI Created seems to be just starting to stretch her wings in the Domain and is still exploring what amount of influence and control she can actually achieve, as opposed to someone who has already taken over). And since the focus of Halo 5 is fighting the Warden and his Prometheans, I can see why having Sentinel enemies wasn’t top of the priority list (but seriously, no War Sphinxes? c’mon now…).

If Cortana’s got her eye on a Halo ring, though, we should absolutely see Sentinels, and a variety of models of Sentinels, in Halo 6. Hopefully we do. Heaven knows the Promethean enemy (and vehicle) variety needs a big boost, and adding Sentinel variants to the sandbox could help with that a lot.

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could there be a possibilty that there are MULTIPLE forunner factions. like human nations are.

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> 2533274883203731;2:
> I would love to see the sentinel beam in Halo 5 in a later update.

it is

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> 2535456329220994;16:
> > 2533274883203731;2:
> > I would love to see the sentinel beam in Halo 5 in a later update.
>
> it is

Please don’t revive old topics, thanks. This topic is over a year old