I’d love to get all your thoughts on the Infinite campaign, I am a big fan of the lore and the books so I was super excited for diving into the story…
However, the lack of continuity between 4/5 - Infinite is jarring, from the start when we learned Atriox is "dead
" - leaving a sort of hole in the plot being filled with the nearest Brute we could find - i.e Escharum (do we really care about him?) This just lead me to be confused and skeptical about whether or not he was truly dead - waiting for the ‘twist’ so to speak
Next, we had Cortana’s plot… leaving Halo 5 she was the MAIN antagonist - which could have been an emotional story between Chief and her but instead, we get rid of her off-screen and are left to fill in the blanks throughout this story. I actually think the events that unfolded would have made for an EXCELLENT game - we witness Sydney, we witness Cortana destroy the brute homeworld and the Spartan IVs, the finale is - we deploy the ‘weapon’ , etc, etc
I’m just not sure how to feel about the story, what was really accomplished? Does anyone else feel like there were too many significant events off-screen throughout the story? Are we going to play the next installment and find out that the ‘Endless’ have been taken care of off-screen and there is a new evil species in town?
And where are all the legacy characters? Halsey, Palmer, Locke, Blue Team, etc
yep, I posted this on the other campaign thread, but it works better here
"It felt like they were trying to tell two stories at the same time here by filling in everything that happened while chief was out. The 343 games really should have just been the Cortana trilogy arc. Bungie did the big galaxy wide world building and wrapped it up pretty tightly, almost like it was mean to be the last game. Going forward should have been smaller more personal stakes.
While I am glad to be fighting Aliens over robots, having Cortana be largely resolved off screen without any input from MC was a huge bummer. After 5 games with her at our side in some way, what ever had to happen to her should have been at Chief’s hands."
Having the story on Earth against Cortana and likely her end at chief’s hands would have also made decent symmetry holding the events of the story between the fall of Reach and receiving Cortana and the fall of Cortana and saving whatever would be left of humanity.
It honestly feels like we spend the whole time in infinite learning about what happened in a game that doesn’t exist.
What do we actually achieve on the ring? Killing Atriox’s mentor/lacky? Fighting some random ominous lady?
This is why I quickly became disenchanted with the campaign. I didn’t mind all this ‘what happened earlier’ nonsense in the first bit, as its sort of the connective tissue between tittles, but the game never goes anywhere with it. It just keeps telling us more and more of what happened 6 months ago.
But 343 wanted to force in an open world and the story they told wouldn’t work with it.
So, for what it’s worth I think narratively the campaign of this game did what it needed to do in a spot in the franchise that was very difficult to tie up. In one game it had to:
Introduce the Banished, including Atriox, without assuming any prior knowledge from Halo Wars 2 for those who exclusively play the mainline games.
Deal with the Cortana storyline, in such a way that doesn’t invalidate the previous 2 games but does move past it so we can deal with threats that are easier to shoot than an AI hologram is
Set up future conflicts
Do all this in a sufficiently self contained way, so that it can be a starting point for new players.
As a result of these requirements, there was a metric tonne of exposition and off screen events that needed to be explained, as well as some catch up about the game’s history, cortana, the covenant and the banished etc. I don’t think this made for the strongest story as far as actual meaningful events happening in game.
However, I think the franchise kind of needed it nonetheless. The thing that really left me happy with this game’s campaign isn’t the events of it, but the state of the story and how it sets up the future stories in this universe. Halo Infinite’s campaign is essentially a big ol’ reset button which fixes much of where the story went wrong in 5, reintroduces the banished for those who didn’t play Halo Wars 2, and leaves us at a good point to now get to the real interesting stories about Atriox and the secrets of the ring, as well as the truth of the “reclamation” which Halo 4 set up so well, only for 5 to go on a tangent about Cortana taking over the galaxy. It’s all one big course correction.
The downside is, all I’m left with is a need to see these new stories that follow, and god knows how long that will take. It would have been nice if the game’s campaign was twice as long and we were able to actually get to those stories. Nonetheless, I’m now far more optimistic about the future of this story and this franchise and look forward to future content
I liked the campaign overall, but I agree with this. The “spiritual reboot” angle always indicated to me that 343 was going to be very selective with what elements from H5 they decided to directly address and resolve in Infinite, which is fine- except that they took it to a very extreme degree.
I have less problem with where the game picks up on the timeline (it’s fine, even cool IMO to set the player on the search for clues as to what’s happened during Chief’s latest nap), though, and more issue with how the campaign seems to see Chief engaged in a very tunnel-vision, one man crusade against Escharum and the Banished. It definitely works as a way to showcase John as “still having it” as Humanity’s MVP, and I like it on that level.
Only, it doesn’t seem to make sense why making a rendezvous with Lasky, Halsey and as many other important UNSC players left on the board wouldn’t be a top priority. I fully expect to see this story beat in an expansion down the line, but not even having a hint of a reunion at the end is odd to me.
As to why they chose to do it this way, though? I think it just comes down to wanting a very fresh feeling coming off of Halo 5, given that game’s infamous campaign and polarizing cliffhanger. Again, the term “spiritual reboot” was thrown around so much during this game’s promotion literally from day one that I was fully expecting this sort of thing, just not quite to the degree that it actually happened. Not even seeing any combination of Lasky/Halsey/Palmer/Locke in the opening cutscene was weird.
Yep 100% agree. This game was absolutely a direct response / potentially overcorrection to Halo 5. And while I think the franchise is overall better for it, I wish there was more. I have no doubt when we do get campaign DLC / the next full campaign it’ll feel like a much more eventful story with more characters etc. than this has so far.
343 wrote themselves into a corner with 4 and 5, they relied too much on books and novels when they should’ve told whatever story they were telling IN GAME.
The way they concluded the “Created” storyline and set up the Banished was a good compromise.
As vague as they left the details of the “Created” storyline, this is good for the simple fact that another game later down the line can flesh out those details once they’ve figured out HOW to conclude that storyline. Think “Halo: Reach”, we knew what was going to happen, but now we had the details.
This was a good lesson for 343. They’re supposedly bigger fans than most people, read all the novels, explored all the supplementary materials, etc. The fact that 4 and 5 were such major disappointments made 343 reconsider the way they tell the story. They now realize that you have to tell whatever story you want within the game you’re making. Build the books around the games, not the other way around.
I have never read a single Halo book, but I’ve played every game. I understood everything about Halo 1 - Reach. As soon as 343 took over, I was completely lost.
That’s the major difference. I can read the books to fill out details the games leave out later, but I can’t be expected to do homework before I get to have fun.
343 is now on the right track and they made this story as good as they could with the story they had. I’m actually excited to see where the story goes with the Banished, Endless and Atriox. That’s not something I could say for Cortana and her delusional rebellion.
I’d disagree with you hear. Infinite simply makes everything that happened in 4 meaningless. All Cortana’s talk about how she and Chief were meant to protect each other and they did and that Chief shouldn’t feel guilty about her death means nothing when apparently five seconds after she vanishes she decided to go rule the galaxy. Infinite doesn’t fix that.
Not to mention how suddenly everything changes in Infinite.
She threatens Atriox and destroys Doisac.
Next segment is her apparently beaten and reverts to a cuddly wuddly victim. Going from unlikable dictator to defenseless puppy eyes in seconds.
Oh yeah. He even said anyone who felt she was evil were just “young fans” who didn’t understand subtlety and nuance. Nothing as subtle as blowing up a planet I suppose lol
I thought they did a good job of setting this theme when Chief showed Escheram respect in death - at the end he was just a soldier, questioning choices, wondering if he’d done the right thing.
Cortana did the same thing. From where we join her story it is obvious she is resigned to her fate.
And from her interaction with The Weapon she had a “good look in the mirror”.
We don’t know the time span… but Cortana would have had plenty of time to reflect between being locked down, taken back to the Infinity for deletion, being captured by Atriox, and fbeing coerced into destroying the galaxy.
Hell, we saw what she could do in a few milliseconds.
Ah yes of course.
But the planet was homeplanet for bad space monkeys, so it’s okay to destroy it. Not evil. Anti-hero akin to Venom and Deadpool maybe.
For real though, this felt like another one where they disregarded a lot of the previous to build something new.
Ah, well I guess that makes betraying everything her friend stands for, hoodwinking her fellow AIs into a rebellion, using slave soldiers (the Knights), and genocide okay then if she had a good look into the mirror.
The thing about that is, that they didn’t have to do any of that. They didn’t need to out in the banished or set up new enemies. They could’ve made the story that happened before Chiefs nap:
Going back to reach
Witnessing Sydney HQ destruction
Witnessing the spartan training station destruction
Building the weapon
Going to Halo Zeta
And then end it with the start of the banished attacking, having the next Halo start like Halo 1 pretty much.
It wouldn’t have been easy to fill the pure story parts with combat gameplay but if they just said that they wanted to restart and fix the mistakes they made then I would’ve just been fine with left over covernant or pirates on Reach and then prometheans for the Cortana parts if needed just to get the new story going (whoch has huge potential.
A lot of people are happy with the game because it has potential and I agree but making a whole campaign be a teaser after 6 years just makes it feel empty