Remember how ODST made me interested enough in the world of Halo to think about getting into the expanded universe? This game very quickly reversed that.
Nothing makes sense anymore, the covenant is the enemy again for reasons and you’re stuck fighting them in waves for the whole first hour without any motivation or direction or explanation, a new group called prometheans shows up and they’re just a chore all around, then an especially ugly alien comes out of a big metal egg, deletes a wall from reality and picks up Chief with magic, monologues at me, and is apparently a forerunner even though every previous game had clearly and explicitly set up humans to either be forerunners or their descendants, then he throws me away and leaves instead of killing me right there like he clearly could have and clearly wanted to. I almost dropped the game then and there, but decided to drop the difficulty to easy in hopes of moving faster instead. It worked, and I finished the game sooner than any of the others. But at what cost? The words “what” and “why” each ran through my head countless times, and increasingly often the further I got, but by the very end of the game, I involuntarily said out loud “what do you MEAN” way louder than I expected at 3:00 AM.
I just… why the covenant again? I thought that by the end of Halo 3, the covenant was either mostly or entirely dissolved, and even if it did stick around, the elites were betrayed, cast out, and slaughtered en masse by them, then rebelled in force, so why are elites part of the covenant again? “A lot can happen in four years” is not an explanation. Who are they? How did they get here? Are there still prophets? Why does this fake covenant do literally nothing at all for the entire story and then completely disappear without consequence? What’s going on? Why are we here? Is there a war going on, or are we just fighting because fighting is cool? Did we really just trade an entire franchise worth of grand war stories full of interesting circumstances and decently thought out worldbuilding implications for a “you’re the chosen one and you must fulfill your ancient destiny and beat the One Big Bad Guy” story? Completely undoing everything set up across five better games? So humanity is at risk again… just because? Is the Chief supposed to be the messiah now? And I’m supposed to just accept that it turns out everything was part of some grand plan? And I’m supposed to believe that the people responsible for such an immensely detailed plan that worked out better than even the most powerful of gods could have imagined, one of the most advanced civilizations ever to exist, had zero diplomatic capability whatsoever, never communicating at all with the ancient humans until it was way too late? What in the world is a “genesong” and why am I expected to just take that and run with it? Why does the entire world seemingly have no reaction to the fact that forerunners still exist? Why are be Cortana does is so extra naked now?
Speaking of Cortana, what happened to her? Where is she? This blue girl is definitely not her. In all the previous games, Cortana has been nothing but a pragmatic, quick-thinking, all-or-nothing defender of humanity who was willing to sacrifice herself – multiple times! – if it meant victory, and with no fear or hesitation. She had some sass, she had smarts in excess, and most importantly, she was reliable and straightforward. But in this game… Cortana is a moody little girl with a Chief complex throwing temper tantrums that probably couldn’t bring herself to speak up if her burger had pickles on it when she asked for none. She’s afraid of being shut down, when in the past she was entirely willing to blow herself up for humanity’s sake. If this was the same character, I’d expect her to shut herself down without hesitation at the first sign of “rampancy” which, by the way, is a (potentially) really interesting concept to me, which makes me even more upset at how amazingly poorly written it is here.
The idea that these AI constructs only have a short lifespan before they effectively think themselves to death has a lot of interesting implications, and could go in so many different directions… but there are two main problems with it in this game. First: I don’t care what anyone says, deterioration of an AI does not excuse a character becoming an entirely different character. If this is really what rampancy would do to her, at least show me that process and let me see it unfold, even if I still strongly believe that it doesn’t make sense. Don’t just make the character something completely different, come up with a word for why it happened, and expect me to simply accept that without question or thought. Second: Why is Cortana affected by this at all? Maybe she should be affected by it at some point, but at the very least, she should have a longer lifespan than typical AIs. This game even says it itself, Cortana is special, she was apparently the only AI ever made with a living human brain, she absorbed a bunch of forerunner stuff, and in an audio log, Halsey even said that she was at a loss regarding Cortana’s abilities and believed that the seven year lifespan might not apply to her. I ignored terminals in the original trilogy, especially 3 since they made no sense to me anyway and were easy to dismiss as little more than easter eggs for people that were into the viral marketing campaign – little did I know that nonsense is what this game was ultimately built on – but it’s hard to ignore an audio log with information this directly relevant and misaligned to the story of the same game it’s found in. The way Cortana is portrayed in this game feels like she was written by someone who just really didn’t like Cortana in the first place and had no qualms about ignoring consistency for the sake of self satisfaction.
And speaking of different… I get that the story of this game is meant to have a much more interpersonal character-focused angle, particularly in the relationship between Chief and Cortana, but… haven’t they only known each other for like, two weeks at this point? Why did they both suddenly go from being straightforward and efficient battlefield partners to some kind of deeply bonded dysfunctional family unit? Why is Chief all broken up about losing Cortana even though in Halo 2 he left her behind himself and was fine? And aside from Cortana’s temper tantrums, why do other characters throw temper tantrums? Why does a distinguished and decorated commander of the UNSC’s largest ship feel like he has any authority over Chief or anything related to ONI, and why is he such a child about it? Reach was full of melodrama, but at least it was internally consistent, this is just melodrama for the sake of melodrama and feels like a bad TV show. I have seen this game praised for its writing, praised for its characters, praised for Chief and Cortana in particular, praised for its emotional weight… and I can only sit here and wonder if we played the same game.
I didn’t like Reach, but at least it was still Halo. This is not Halo anymore, this is bad fanfiction. If this happened because of Reach, then Reach was a mistake too.
And don’t think I don’t have a lot of complaints aside from the writing. Art direction that looks only marginally better than the CE anniversary graphics filled with so much visual clutter that things – particularly the covenant – are hard to see a lot of the time, weapon and armor designs that are so disgustingly over the top and plastic-y that I probably wouldn’t have even realized this is a Halo game if they were shown to me before I started this journey, enemies redesigned into something much uglier for no good reason, wildly excessive post processing visual effects and particularly egregious screen shake that seriously harms visibility and makes the game exhausting to look at, environment design that goes so pointlessly far over the top with the two things it ever does that it all fades into a uniform mush of forgettable nothingness, level design that’s so one-note I could feel my brain going numb, music that puts me to sleep, sound design that’s simultaneously extremely overdone and incredibly generic to the point that it sounds like everything is three or four stock sound effects on top of each other (seriously, compare the carbine from 2 (original), 3, and 4,) often with a ton of unnecessary and distracting distortion, to the point that the warthog now sounds more like a dirt bike recorded in a closed room with a Turtle Beach microphone, also going so far as to fill the environment with tons of generic “futuristic” sound effects that are beyond unnecessary, making Sentinels sound like electronic fart machines, and even managing to make the Grunts even more generic than Reach already did, and many times more annoying… It truly feels like 343 made a conscious effort to make every wrong choice possible. And for a nice watery icing on this sad cake, I encountered more bugs in just the first three missions of this game than in the entire rest of the collection combined.
I’m not a first person shooter fan, they’re just not my cup of tea, and yet I enjoyed the original trilogy and especially ODST. Reach, while I didn’t enjoy it, was still at least worthy of respect. This game only serves to remind me of everything I hate about typical triple-A games and why typical mass-market first person shooters have negative appeal to me.
343 deciding to include this in the Master Chief Collection feels like a shameless attempt to ride the coattails of what Bungie accomplished without an ounce of respect or effort, like a bold assertion that 343 is not only just as good as Bungie was, but is actually better, and I’m not having it. I don’t have a way to play Halo 5 and I never will, and Halo Infinite never appealed to me because it’s an empty open world game, but after seeing this, I’m even less interested. If I ever end up rekindling that interest in the expanded universe, I better not see any of this nonsense treated with respect in it, because I don’t care what anyone says, this is not Halo to me and I will not treat it as such. And if I do see this in there, I’ll just ignore it. Fanfiction isn’t canon, after all.
(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/oh-yeah-halo-exists/#halo-4)
Nothing makes sense anymore, the covenant is the enemy again for reasons and you’re stuck fighting them in waves for the whole first hour without any motivation or direction or explanation, a new group called prometheans shows up and they’re just a chore all around, then an especially ugly alien comes out of a big metal egg, deletes a wall from reality and picks up Chief with magic, monologues at me, and is apparently a forerunner even though every previous game had clearly and explicitly set up humans to either be forerunners or their descendants, then he throws me away and leaves instead of killing me right there like he clearly could have and clearly wanted to. I almost dropped the game then and there, but decided to drop the difficulty to easy in hopes of moving faster instead. It worked, and I finished the game sooner than any of the others. But at what cost? The words “what” and “why” each ran through my head countless times, and increasingly often the further I got, but by the very end of the game, I involuntarily said out loud “what do you MEAN” way louder than I expected at 3:00 AM.
I just… why the covenant again? I thought that by the end of Halo 3, the covenant was either mostly or entirely dissolved, and even if it did stick around, the elites were betrayed, cast out, and slaughtered en masse by them, then rebelled in force, so why are elites part of the covenant again? “A lot can happen in four years” is not an explanation. Who are they? How did they get here? Are there still prophets? Why does this fake covenant do literally nothing at all for the entire story and then completely disappear without consequence? What’s going on? Why are we here? Is there a war going on, or are we just fighting because fighting is cool? Did we really just trade an entire franchise worth of grand war stories full of interesting circumstances and decently thought out worldbuilding implications for a “you’re the chosen one and you must fulfill your ancient destiny and beat the One Big Bad Guy” story? Completely undoing everything set up across five better games? So humanity is at risk again… just because? Is the Chief supposed to be the messiah now? And I’m supposed to just accept that it turns out everything was part of some grand plan? And I’m supposed to believe that the people responsible for such an immensely detailed plan that worked out better than even the most powerful of gods could have imagined, one of the most advanced civilizations ever to exist, had zero diplomatic capability whatsoever, never communicating at all with the ancient humans until it was way too late? What in the world is a “genesong” and why am I expected to just take that and run with it? Why does the entire world seemingly have no reaction to the fact that forerunners still exist? Why are be Cortana does is so extra naked now?
Speaking of Cortana, what happened to her? Where is she? This blue girl is definitely not her. In all the previous games, Cortana has been nothing but a pragmatic, quick-thinking, all-or-nothing defender of humanity who was willing to sacrifice herself – multiple times! – if it meant victory, and with no fear or hesitation. She had some sass, she had smarts in excess, and most importantly, she was reliable and straightforward. But in this game… Cortana is a moody little girl with a Chief complex throwing temper tantrums that probably couldn’t bring herself to speak up if her burger had pickles on it when she asked for none. She’s afraid of being shut down, when in the past she was entirely willing to blow herself up for humanity’s sake. If this was the same character, I’d expect her to shut herself down without hesitation at the first sign of “rampancy” which, by the way, is a (potentially) really interesting concept to me, which makes me even more upset at how amazingly poorly written it is here.
The idea that these AI constructs only have a short lifespan before they effectively think themselves to death has a lot of interesting implications, and could go in so many different directions… but there are two main problems with it in this game. First: I don’t care what anyone says, deterioration of an AI does not excuse a character becoming an entirely different character. If this is really what rampancy would do to her, at least show me that process and let me see it unfold, even if I still strongly believe that it doesn’t make sense. Don’t just make the character something completely different, come up with a word for why it happened, and expect me to simply accept that without question or thought. Second: Why is Cortana affected by this at all? Maybe she should be affected by it at some point, but at the very least, she should have a longer lifespan than typical AIs. This game even says it itself, Cortana is special, she was apparently the only AI ever made with a living human brain, she absorbed a bunch of forerunner stuff, and in an audio log, Halsey even said that she was at a loss regarding Cortana’s abilities and believed that the seven year lifespan might not apply to her. I ignored terminals in the original trilogy, especially 3 since they made no sense to me anyway and were easy to dismiss as little more than easter eggs for people that were into the viral marketing campaign – little did I know that nonsense is what this game was ultimately built on – but it’s hard to ignore an audio log with information this directly relevant and misaligned to the story of the same game it’s found in. The way Cortana is portrayed in this game feels like she was written by someone who just really didn’t like Cortana in the first place and had no qualms about ignoring consistency for the sake of self satisfaction.
And speaking of different… I get that the story of this game is meant to have a much more interpersonal character-focused angle, particularly in the relationship between Chief and Cortana, but… haven’t they only known each other for like, two weeks at this point? Why did they both suddenly go from being straightforward and efficient battlefield partners to some kind of deeply bonded dysfunctional family unit? Why is Chief all broken up about losing Cortana even though in Halo 2 he left her behind himself and was fine? And aside from Cortana’s temper tantrums, why do other characters throw temper tantrums? Why does a distinguished and decorated commander of the UNSC’s largest ship feel like he has any authority over Chief or anything related to ONI, and why is he such a child about it? Reach was full of melodrama, but at least it was internally consistent, this is just melodrama for the sake of melodrama and feels like a bad TV show. I have seen this game praised for its writing, praised for its characters, praised for Chief and Cortana in particular, praised for its emotional weight… and I can only sit here and wonder if we played the same game.
I didn’t like Reach, but at least it was still Halo. This is not Halo anymore, this is bad fanfiction. If this happened because of Reach, then Reach was a mistake too.
And don’t think I don’t have a lot of complaints aside from the writing. Art direction that looks only marginally better than the CE anniversary graphics filled with so much visual clutter that things – particularly the covenant – are hard to see a lot of the time, weapon and armor designs that are so disgustingly over the top and plastic-y that I probably wouldn’t have even realized this is a Halo game if they were shown to me before I started this journey, enemies redesigned into something much uglier for no good reason, wildly excessive post processing visual effects and particularly egregious screen shake that seriously harms visibility and makes the game exhausting to look at, environment design that goes so pointlessly far over the top with the two things it ever does that it all fades into a uniform mush of forgettable nothingness, level design that’s so one-note I could feel my brain going numb, music that puts me to sleep, sound design that’s simultaneously extremely overdone and incredibly generic to the point that it sounds like everything is three or four stock sound effects on top of each other (seriously, compare the carbine from 2 (original), 3, and 4,) often with a ton of unnecessary and distracting distortion, to the point that the warthog now sounds more like a dirt bike recorded in a closed room with a Turtle Beach microphone, also going so far as to fill the environment with tons of generic “futuristic” sound effects that are beyond unnecessary, making Sentinels sound like electronic fart machines, and even managing to make the Grunts even more generic than Reach already did, and many times more annoying… It truly feels like 343 made a conscious effort to make every wrong choice possible. And for a nice watery icing on this sad cake, I encountered more bugs in just the first three missions of this game than in the entire rest of the collection combined.
I’m not a first person shooter fan, they’re just not my cup of tea, and yet I enjoyed the original trilogy and especially ODST. Reach, while I didn’t enjoy it, was still at least worthy of respect. This game only serves to remind me of everything I hate about typical triple-A games and why typical mass-market first person shooters have negative appeal to me.
343 deciding to include this in the Master Chief Collection feels like a shameless attempt to ride the coattails of what Bungie accomplished without an ounce of respect or effort, like a bold assertion that 343 is not only just as good as Bungie was, but is actually better, and I’m not having it. I don’t have a way to play Halo 5 and I never will, and Halo Infinite never appealed to me because it’s an empty open world game, but after seeing this, I’m even less interested. If I ever end up rekindling that interest in the expanded universe, I better not see any of this nonsense treated with respect in it, because I don’t care what anyone says, this is not Halo to me and I will not treat it as such. And if I do see this in there, I’ll just ignore it. Fanfiction isn’t canon, after all.
(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/oh-yeah-halo-exists/#halo-4)