Recently, Jospeh Staten gave an interview about Halo Infinite’s campaign. I’d post a link, but I am not allowed to yet. However, it’s the line that serves as the topic title that really bothers me. For some additional context, here is the portion where he talks about the problems fans had with the previous games (4 and 5) stories:
The team also made the decision — before Staten joined — not to make a direct narrative sequel to “Halo 5: Guardians.” That game ended with the former co-star of the series, the artificial intelligence Cortana, betraying the human race and forming her own army of sentient beings to assume the universe’s so-called “Mantle of Responsibility.” If that sounds confusing and unsatisfying, many players agreed with that thinking.
“There’s a connective tissue between the two games,” Staten said. “And it definitely enriches the experience if you play the previous Halo games and if you played ‘Halo 5,’ but if you’re brand new to the franchise, we wanted to make sure that we really sloped the floor for you, that we open the door, turn on the lights and say, ‘Hey, just jump in and enjoy.’ It feels a lot like the original Halo game: You don’t know a lot when you start, so you find yourself on a strange new world with a new AI companion and you’re figuring this all out together.”
Staten advised the team to double down on the game’s more intimate, emotional moments while scaling back some of the grander scale of the last two Halo games, whose scripts included events that happened hundreds of thousands of years ago, across galaxies far, far away. The Halo franchise lore reaches back to the beginning of time itself, with much of it detailed in various novels and extended, sometimes confusing, cutscenes from the last two games.
Staten acknowledged that even though the Halo series has sold tens of millions of copies over the years, there are still millions of players who aren’t familiar with the story.
“That core [of people who know our expanded universe] are foundational players in our community who have been with us for a long, long time,” Staten said. “But even members of that community had feedback where they said, ‘You know, it’s just too complicated. We just want a simple Master Chief story.’”
I know I’ve personally beaten this dead horse many times over, but 343 Industries has made similar statements like this over the years. Usually, it’s been put alongside how it was a mistake for them to add too much lore into the game narrative and that ended up confusing a lot of players. There is truth to that, while I love Halo 4’s campaign it can be a bit overwhelming at times (though stopping to really think and process the information you are told can help). But that last paragraph offered something new because it seemed to be talking about fans like me. Yes, I know it isn’t literally about me and I am not taking it that personally.
The thing is, as a member of the community who knows of the expanded universe, my problem between 4 and 5 wasn’t that I was confused because the information provided went over my head. I was confused because the studio abruptly shifted the gears of the story without any real clear reason why. We had just fought an awoken Forerunner commander and yet now the problem is Cortana coming back from the dead and becoming a dictator? That’s not a lore issue or a background information issue, that’s storytelling.
In hindsight, it all makes sense now. That’s why Halo: Escalation happened, it was a comic series that took most of what 4 and Spartan Ops set up and just…brushed into the garbage bin. So, yeah, the story would be confusing with a sequel that barely connects back to what the previous game did. Yet 34 has, to my knowledge, ever addressed how much of a problem this kind of thing can cause. I know plenty of big names in the community have addressed this in the past, so it’s not like I’m some fringe voice bringing this to their attention for the first time.
I mean, how do we go from Frank O’Connor saying the Didact would be essential to post-Halo 4 fiction to Brian Reed saying the Didact became extraneous to Halo 5’s story? Why would you introduce the Janus Key in Spartan Ops and set it up as this important object to them LITERALLY poof it out of Halsey’s hands in Escalation? There’s more, but you get the idea.
Here’s the thing. From what I’ve seen of Infinite’s campaign, it looks really good. People who I trust who have been able to play it that have shared my concerns sing its praises. I’m excited. At this point, I’d just kill to have someone at 343 acknowledge that perhaps rapidly shifting gears on their narratives didn’t really help the Reclaimer saga.