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343i Acknowledges Halo 5 Storytelling Mistake, Will Double Down on Master Chief Focus

Cranster

Banned
Let's also remind ourselves about the halo 5 marketing which hardly related to the game at all.

We never chose a side, or had a choice in the matter, we never had a true fight between chief and locke in the slightest outside of a pre-recorded cutscene that lasted 30 seconds and had about 5 punches thrown.
That's no more true than Halo 2, Halo 3's and ODST's marketing campaigns.
 
You have the franchise director saying she's using her bodacious body to overpower her enemies.



tumblr_nxep1puiwv1ufs4gzo1_500.png

Funny thing is I don't even know why Kojima gave that dumb explanation for Quiet. Everyone who's played his games dating back to the MSX knows he's just a giant perv. I mean look at all his visual novel games like Snatcher and Policenauts, there's always lewd parts.

I prefer perverted devs to just own it. Don't insult your fans' intelligence.
 

Rarius

Member
That's no more true than Halo 2, Halo 3's and ODST's marketing campaigns.

??? Halo 3's was basically the culmination of the series and was 'finish the fight'.


None of those games had advertisements and an ENTIRE ARG dedicated to telling a story that was not even related to the game at all. Every single piece of Halo 5 media was based upon Osiris hunting down Chief to solve a mystery, and would be a versus game of each side trying to work towards a goal while the other tried to stop them. It was supposed to explore Chief without Cortana, and the relationship between an AI and its user.

There are exact fucking quotes by the developers talking about the game being based around story beats that never, ever even get touched upon in the game.
 

Izayoi

Banned
Celebrating a decade of ruining one of gaming's once-great franchises!

Original Trilogy on Steam and all sins are forgiven.
 

Cranster

Banned
??? Halo 3's was basically the culmination of the series and was 'finish the fight'.


None of those games had advertisements and an ENTIRE ARG dedicated to telling a story that was not even related to the game at all. Every single piece of Halo 5 media was based upon Osiris hunting down Chief to solve a mystery, and would be a versus game of each side trying to work towards a goal while the other tried to stop them. It was supposed to explore Chief without Cortana, and the relationship between an AI and its user.

There are exact fucking quotes by the developers talking about the game being based around story beats that never, ever even get touched upon in the game.

Halo 2's marketing implied the entire game takes place on earth aswell as Halo 3's marketting depicting a massive scale battle on the ruins of earth with Master Chief taking a final stand against the Covenant while being held as a trophy by a Brute Chieftain.

.
 

Takashi

Member
I can't understand the decision to utilize "resurrecting" Blue Team by skipping the part of that story that would have any emotional impact, let alone narrative coherency. Representing that in-game by jumping directly to showing everyday, mundane operations with them paired with Chief feels more like an unimaginitive writer than deliberate narrative craftsmanship. Even when the story moves to a point where Chief sounds like he's losing it, and Blue Team trusts him enough to make the same sort of well-meaning defection that Chief did in Halo 4, it doesn't feel like it matters when it absolutely should. If they showed how important that "normal," connected military life was for Blue Team, that decision to risk it all to help Chief would have that much more weight.

A team of writers have a situation where characters who obviously love each other (combined with the interesting slant of none of them communicating it in predictable ways) are meeting up after what might as well be a lifetime apart, and those writers decide, "HEY LETS SKIP THIS." I rarely go out of my way to question talent like this, but maaaaaan. That choice can fuck right off. Missed opportunity is putting it very nicely.

My thoughts exactly.

A series of small flashbacks detailing what they went through as children would have come a long way to showing the importance of their "family" to casual players who had never heard of them. It would have also helped explained why Chief is very stoic and taciturn, along with his drive to help/rescue Cortana throughout the series stemming from him losing friends all his life due to the circumstances he was forced in.
 

Jawmuncher

Member
I don't care about master chief. The only problem was playing up a confrontation between him and Locke that amounted to nothing. I thought the game was gonna be about hunting chief and that aspect aside from one quick fight never gets the building it deserved. Since it had to once again focus more on Cortana than anything else.
 

Kssio_Aug

Member
I thik Halo 5 was pretty damn awesome, and yes, if they focus on Chief that's a good step forward.

I really liked Fireteam Osiris and playing as Locke, but I do like Master Chief more and would appreciate that, specially cause Chief is Halo's signature.

Other than that, the single only issue I had with the campaign was Warden Eternal repetition.

Everything else was pretty much perfect gameplay wise (story could be better overall, the introduction for newcomers is pretty bad). Great levels and great shooting! One of my favorites Halo campaign actually... more varied enemies compared to Halo 4 and it doesn't go upside down with constant Flood fighting as it happened with Halo 1 ~ 3 (although Halo 3 managed to make the Flood less boring).
 

LunaticPuma

dresses business casual
??? Halo 3's was basically the culmination of the series and was 'finish the fight'.


None of those games had advertisements and an ENTIRE ARG dedicated to telling a story that was not even related to the game at all. Every single piece of Halo 5 media was based upon Osiris hunting down Chief to solve a mystery, and would be a versus game of each side trying to work towards a goal while the other tried to stop them. It was supposed to explore Chief without Cortana, and the relationship between an AI and its user.

There are exact fucking quotes by the developers talking about the game being based around story beats that never, ever even get touched upon in the game.

You must not have been around for the I Love Bees ARG. Halo's marketing doesn't usually do much to relate to the primary plot of the games.
 

Cranster

Banned
And myself while I understand the criticism for Halo 5's story I don't think it deserves the hate that it's getting. I enjoyed it for the most part and if anything I do hope that if Halo 6 does focus entirely on the chief I do hope they improve on the writing and characters to strengthen the game rather than outright ignore characters and events like they did with Halo 4's story and characters.
 
My biggest gripe with Halo 5's campagin is that after all that build up about Chief's motivations and has he gone rogue, his reasons are simply that a vision of Cortana told him to go to Meridian so he did. Mystery solved. The weirdest part is that the vision of Cortana turns out to actually be Cortana. Cortana should have been a Didact trap or it should have been a blatantly obvious Rampant Cortana with Warden Eternal replaced with the composed Didact which is how she got access to the Domain or something like that.

I really wanted Geoff Keighley to do a Final Hours for Halo 5 just to find out what the hell happened.
 
I feel as though 343i follows a very predictable pattern with their releases:

1. Make a fucked up game.
2. Apologize and said you learned your lesson.

Rinse repeat.
 

Kssio_Aug

Member
Some here would probably hate me for that, but to be honest, I think Halo story was hardly as good as some like to paint in the games franchise. Halo CE story was pratically non-existent, Halo 2 was much better but again nothing fantastic (they explain more about the flood and the Halo rings at least), and Halo 3 came with that same thing again about destroying Halo to eliminate the Flood.

I do think the story used to be enough to justify the gameplay, but the story seems to be really deep only from outside sources, at least until Halo 3. From ODST maybe things started to change a bit, but it was 343 who actually added an extra sauce to it (even though that extra sauce wasn't exactly appreciated).

Gameplay wise Halo CE was fantastic, but when the Flood shows up it kind of goes downhill... it's good at the first levels they appear cause it changes the gameplay a bit, but it soon gets tiring. Changing the smart Elite AI to the smartless Flood from half the game to the end wasn't good. Halo 2 suffers from the same issue. Halo 3 managed to make the Flood much better than before, but it still shines when fighting brutes and Scarabs.

That said, I think that 343 gets way more hate then they deserve (but they still deserve a bit), while they're constantly compared to a Bungie that maybe never existed since improved by players nostalgia. Gameplay wise Halo 4 is far from perfect and I actually understand the criticism in the multiplayer aspect, but Halo 5 is the best multiplayer Halo game, and besides the story related issues the campaing is very good overall.

Edit: By the way, I first posted it quoting Vegetable Lasagna that said he prefer gameplay over story, but apparently he posted in the wrong thread. Still I didn't want to erase everything I wrote.
 

E92 M3

Member
Some here would probably hate me for that, but to be honest, I think Halo story was hardly as good as some like to paint in the games franchise. Halo CE story was pratically non-existent, Halo 2 was much better but again nothing fantastic (they explain more about the flood and the Halo rings at least), and Halo 3 came with that same thing again about destroying Halo to eliminate the Flood.

I do think the story used to be enough to justify the gameplay, but the story seems to be really deep only from outside sources, at least until Halo 3. From ODST maybe things started to change a bit, but it was 343 who actually added an extra sauce to it (even though that extra sauce wasn't exactly appreciated).

Gameplay wise Halo CE was fantastic, but when the Flood shows up it kind of go downhill... it's good at the first levels they appear cause it changes the gameplay a bit, but it soon gets tiring. Changing the smart Elite AI to the smartless Flood from half the game to the end wasn't good. Halo 2 suffers from the same issue. Halo 3 managed to make the Flood much better than before, but it still shines when fighting brutes and Scarabs.

That said, I think that 343 gets way more hate then they deserve (but they still deserve a bit), while they're constantly compared to a Bungie that maybe never existed since improved by players nostalgia. Gameplay wise Halo 4 is far from perfect and I actually understand the criticism in the multiplayer aspect, but Halo 5 is the best multiplayer Halo game, and besides the story related issues the campaing is very good overall.

>best MP game
>suffers from heavy aim and other aiming problems
>OP autos

Halo 5 is alright, but can't be compared to Halo 2. Especially when we're discussing map design.
 

Shads

Member
I know I'm in the minority here, but I actually enjoyed the Halo 4 & 5 campaign. Nothing amazing for sure, but it was entertaining enough for me. But I do agree that their storytelling is quite horrible, there's just little explanation for things or it requires you to read a novel or find terminals, poor dialogue, mostly pointless cutscenes that add no value to the story, and then on top of that, a lot of their new characters are unlikeable with the exception of perhaps Lasky, Vale, and Tanaka (Buck isn't new). I was actually okay with the idea to play a new character in Halo 5, but too bad he's one of the worst and most dull main characters to grace the screen. That's really my main problem with Locke as the main protagonist in H5. They need to either kill him off or make him a minor character in the next outing, or give him a personality overhaul.

That's fine if they're going back to a Master Chief-centric game for Halo 6, but that wasn't my main problem to begin with; just don't give Chief shitty friends. And they need to learn how to tell stories and make better cutscenes from Naughty Dog.
 

Head.spawn

Junior Member
That's no more true than Halo 2, Halo 3's and ODST's marketing campaigns.

The Halo 5 marketing did not in any possible way seem vague.. it seemed to me like they intentionally sold the game as one story/scenario and then did something else completely different and boring (as far as Chief/Locke), and the whole Cortana angle took literally the entire game to start develop and then left you with blue balls.

honestly im disappointed if this is the only lesson they learned from halo 5's story feedback

This isn't the first or only thing they have said about Halo 5.
 

Gestault

Member
My biggest gripe with Halo 5's campagin is that after all that build up about Chief's motivations and has he gone rogue, his reasons are simply that a vision of Cortana told him to go to Meridian so he did. Mystery solved. The weirdest part is that the vision of Cortana turns out to actually be Cortana. Cortana should have been a Didact trap or it should have been a blatantly obvious Rampant Cortana with Warden Eternal replaced with the composed Didact which is how she got access to the Domain or something like that.

I really wanted Geoff Keighley to do a Final Hours for Halo 5 just to find out what the hell happened.

There was slightly more to it than that, similar to how the messages to John in Halo 3 were strange and raised the question "how?" The H5 stuff stemmed from the Forerunner "Domain" network being back in a more complete sense (now not just corrupted fragments co-opted by a gravemind that Cortana piggybacked). He knows either he's nuts and it's nothing, or if real, it represents a big change to the landscape even if everything around it is hunky-dory. He can't change his deployment (he's active duty, at this point) through official channels to follow up on it, and chooses to go rogue.

When he follows the bread trail, Cortana claims connecting to the Domain "cured" her rampancy, but she's acting very much not like Cortana. This isn't telegraphed to the player, but Chief can tell something isn't right almost immediately, and knows his connection to whatever this Cortana is means he (and Blue Team) may be the only ones who can get close enough to confront it. Chief and Blue Team can't exactly signal home what they're doing, because their only communication channels are inherently compromised, due to being connected information systems themselves. The player only knows this for *sure* after the confrontation with Locke, where it's clear Chief isn't isn't being influenced by his feelings for this "Cortana," but is actively assessing ways to neutralize a threat. The game slowly reveals something attempting to create a civil war between the humans and their own smart AIs (Cortana or not).
 

mcrommert

Banned
There was slightly more to it than that, similar to how the messages to John in Halo 3 were strange and raised the question "how?" The H5 stuff stemmed from the Forerunner "Domain" network being back in a more complete sense (now not just corrupted fragments co-opted by a gravemind that Cortana piggybacked). He knows either he's nuts and it's nothing, or if real, it represents a big change to the landscape even if everything around it is hunky-dory. He can't change his deployment (he's active duty, at this point) through official channels to follow up on it, and chooses to go rogue.

When he follows the bread trail, Cortana claims connecting to the Domain "cured" her rampancy, but she's acting very much not like Cortana. This isn't telegraphed to the player, but Chief can tell something isn't right almost immediately, and knows his connection to whatever this Cortana is means he (and Blue Team) may be the only ones who can get close enough to confront it. Chief and Blue Team can't exactly signal home what they're doing, because their only communication channels are inherently compromised, due to being connected information systems themselves. The player only knows this for *sure* after the confrontation with Locke, where it's clear Chief isn't isn't being influenced by his feelings for this "Cortana," but is actively assessing ways to neutralize a threat. The game slowly reveals something attempting to create a civil war between the humans and their own smart AIs (Cortana or not).

Small note...forerunners used the domain but didn't create it...hopefully that is the big reveal of the next game...the precursors are back
 
That's no more true than Halo 2, Halo 3's and ODST's marketing campaigns.

i dont care about the marketing campaigns. Make great games and the marketing accuracy wont fucking matter.

I feel as though 343i follows a very predictable pattern with their releases:

1. Make a fucked up game.
2. Apologize and said you learned your lesson.

Rinse repeat.

They do. Its what theyve learned from MS.

XP: YES
Vista: Booo
Win7: YES
Win8: Booo
Win10: YE....maybe?
 

jelly

Member
I don't really mind not playing as the Chief, you make good characters or at least not bothersome with a decent motive, I'll roll with it like Noble team. Maybe 343 are just being diplomatic here and not admitting faults for obvious reasons in public. I wanted more of Blue team and didn't care for Osiris. Surprises me that they said people liked them.
 
i dont care about the marketing campaigns. Make great games and the marketing accuracy wont fucking matter.



They do. Its what theyve learned from MS.

XP: YES
Vista: Booo
Win7: YES
Win8: Booo
Win10: YE....maybe?

Xbox: yes
Xbox 360: Hell ye---hang on i got RROD
Xbox One: why.jpeg
 

Euron

Member
Not being Chief focused wasn't the problem. The Chief levels were somehow the worst ones. The issue with the story was that it was completely different from the very interesting marketing for the game. And the plot eventually turned into Mass Effect 3.
 

LowSignal

Member
The thing that made me mad was that the story telling was so poor in that huge parts happened off screen. What happened to the didact? (
told in a comic
) what happened with the Elite that was looking to be a big bad during spartan ops? (
quickly killed off in a cut scene during the intro cinematic of halo 5
) How did blue team make it back? So many things were wrong with the story. I'm a huge halo fan and I know the story has always been so so but with 5 they made multiple mistakes. The multiplayer was great IMO
 

Takashi

Member
Huh? Wasn't that just ONI propaganda for the citizens back on Earth and such?

Was it? I'm fuzzy on the details.

I kinda forgot some of the HtT stuff after playing Halo 5. I was expecting ONI to be a possible threat pulling strings in the background that Locke had to uncover. But then Cortana turned evil and the whole ONI thing wasn't even touched, and I was left wondering what HtT had to do with anything.
 
Halo campaigns will never be as good as the one in Halo Combat Evolved. I've come to accept this. Bungie couldn't recreate it and 343 won't be able to either.

Best of luck chasing that unicorn.
 

jelly

Member
Because they oversexualized her in Halo 4, which is one of the worst character redesigns I have EVER seen in a game.

pKVZ1Ra.jpg


And then when all the complaints came in they had two choices: redesign her in a fashion similar to the previous Halo games, or throw some digital clothes on her.

I still laugh at the idea of Cortana wearing armor. Goes well with the awful armor artstyle that has completely covered the entire game at this point.

Disagree on her being sexualized and 343 should be applauded for normal body proportions, it's just a mostly subtle female avatar. Her change to armour suits an authoritarian leader and if
it's actually the real Cortana, apparently not
.

This apparently needs spelling out:

A naked human figure isn't itself sexualized (in the normal context of that term). Making her appear physically more human is not sexualized. She was not treated as a sexual object in the games. Her interactions weren't curtailed to highlight a gender/sexual role. The camerawork wasn't disrespectful or prurient. If it's not clear from my tone, I think the idea that Halo 4 sexualized Cortana in excess compared to previous games isn't a coherent opinion.

Agree with this.

I do dislike her look in Halo 5. The Halo 4 design was superb, armour or not. The face shouldn't have changed. It's not even similar and very charring. Hope they change it back or go with something similar.
 
Disagree on her being sexualized and 343 should be applauded for normal body proportions, it's just a mostly subtle female avatar. Her change to armour suits an authoritarian leader and if
it's actually the real Cortana, apparently not
.



Agree with this.

I do dislike her look in Halo 5. The Halo 4 design was superb, armour or not. The face shouldn't have changed. It's not even similar and very charring. Hope they change it back and go with something similar.

Halo 4 Cortana is best waifu. Halo 5 Cortana was cool too though.
 

Karl2177

Member
This post contains Breaking Bad spoilers, which is kinda weird for a Halo thread, but whatever.

Admittedly Didact and Jul M'dama were somewhat throwaway villains, but I fear for what they're going to do with Atriox. They've developed a villain that is menacing and fits in with the race's background. Are they going to go the Loki route where they can't kill him because he's the only good villain or will they go the Gus Fring route and have the character's death feel earned by the protagonist? Or will they toss him out like the other Halo villains?
 

Trup1aya

Member
This post contains Breaking Bad spoilers, which is kinda weird for a Halo thread, but whatever.

Admittedly Didact and Jul M'dama were somewhat throwaway villains, but I fear for what they're going to do with Atriox. They've developed a villain that is menacing and fits in with the race's background. Are they going to go the Loki route where they can't kill him because he's the only good villain or will they go the Gus Fring route and have the character's death feel earned by the protagonist? Or will they toss him out like the other Halo villains?

They'll just throw him in the mix, with no explaination, working under the assumption that everyone played HW2s.

Edit: then kill him in a comic
 

MarveI

Member
Halo CEA MP using Halo Reach: We made a mistake
Halo 4 MP: We made a mistake
Halo MCC: We made a mistake
Halo5 SP: We made a mistake

they do that a lot

This is actually quite sad. They are the studio that makes games and apologizes after each one.They've been at it almost as long as Bungie and they still can't get 1 right. I don't remember another studio with such carte blanche after so many mistakes. When does MS say...''ok this isn't working out we need to change things to get Halo back on track before it's completely unredeemable''.

I'm fairly certain we'll be seeing another thread like this a couple years down the road.
 

Shpeshal Nick

aka Collingwood
Some here would probably hate me for that, but to be honest, I think Halo story was hardly as good as some like to paint in the games franchise. Halo CE story was pratically non-existent, Halo 2 was much better but again nothing fantastic (they explain more about the flood and the Halo rings at least), and Halo 3 came with that same thing again about destroying Halo to eliminate the Flood.

I do think the story used to be enough to justify the gameplay, but the story seems to be really deep only from outside sources, at least until Halo 3. From ODST maybe things started to change a bit, but it was 343 who actually added an extra sauce to it (even though that extra sauce wasn't exactly appreciated).

Gameplay wise Halo CE was fantastic, but when the Flood shows up it kind of goes downhill... it's good at the first levels they appear cause it changes the gameplay a bit, but it soon gets tiring. Changing the smart Elite AI to the smartless Flood from half the game to the end wasn't good. Halo 2 suffers from the same issue. Halo 3 managed to make the Flood much better than before, but it still shines when fighting brutes and Scarabs.

That said, I think that 343 gets way more hate then they deserve (but they still deserve a bit), while they're constantly compared to a Bungie that maybe never existed since improved by players nostalgia. Gameplay wise Halo 4 is far from perfect and I actually understand the criticism in the multiplayer aspect, but Halo 5 is the best multiplayer Halo game, and besides the story related issues the campaing is very good overall.

Edit: By the way, I first posted it quoting Vegetable Lasagna that said he prefer gameplay over story, but apparently he posted in the wrong thread. Still I didn't want to erase everything I wrote.

The beauty of the "story" in Halo CE was its simplicity and a hint at something far larger. There was mystery to it.

Halo 2 was on the right track in exploring that mystery and giving us the perspective of the enemy, but I feel they simply blew the execution. Halo 2 doesn't hold up well at all and has a terrible campaign.

Halo 3 was then clearly supposed to be the bombastic all out War type scenario and it basically delivered. I liked the arc of the 3 games even if Halo 2 wasn't ultimately a good game.

Halo 4 and 5 are basically just a mess story wise. Halo 6 needs to strip it all back and recapture that essence of Halo CE. Keep the story simple and focused on what Chief is doing and merely hint at sonething larger and more mysterious.
 

Gator86

Member
This is actually quite sad. They are the studio that makes games and apologizes after each one.They've been at it almost as long as Bungie and they still can't get 1 right. I don't remember another studio with such carte blanche after so many mistakes. When does MS say...''ok this isn't working out we need to change things to get Halo back on track before it's completely unredeemable''.

I'm fairly certain we'll be seeing another thread like this a couple years down the road.

And... do what? It's not like they can pull 343 off the series and put someone else on. There's not really a solution. They have a weak 1st party bench and have to get Halos out to buffer their exclusives for marketing purposes.

I'm not disagreeing, mostly just saying that 343 is Halo now and this is probably what to expect moving forward.
 
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