What they tried to do in Halo 4 directly contradicts this. Their focus on humanising Chief and making him more of a character isn't an inherently bad direction to go but their execution of it has been piss poor so far. Doesn't inspire confidence that they seem to think that isn't what they are doing.
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343i Acknowledges Halo 5 Storytelling Mistake, Will Double Down on Master Chief Focus
- Thread starter Cranster
- Start date
What they tried to do in Halo 4 directly contradicts this. Their focus on humanising Chief and making him more of a character isn't an inherently bad direction to go but their execution of it has been piss poor so far. Doesn't inspire confidence that they seem to think that isn't what they are doing.
Empyrean Heaven
Member
So basically they are re-learning from the same mistake they made 13 years ago with Halo 2
Or rather 15 years ago with MGS2.
Or rather 15 years ago with MGS2.
That will surely help and fix all the other issues that people had with Halo 5's mediocre campaign.
They already retconned that in a recent book:
343i is a master at this. Several important aspects of the games are hidden in books, comics, novels, movies, etc. etc. That's why I also think that them acknowledging the Storytelling mistake won't help them.
Here is also an other lovely quote from Bonnie Ross:
So, even less Story in the actual game and more Story in transmedia. That will surely help.
They already retconned that in a recent book:
The Cortana in Halo 5 is not actually the real Cortana, but one rampant fragment that got split during the fight against the Didact in Halo 4.
343i is a master at this. Several important aspects of the games are hidden in books, comics, novels, movies, etc. etc. That's why I also think that them acknowledging the Storytelling mistake won't help them.
Here is also an other lovely quote from Bonnie Ross:
So, even less Story in the actual game and more Story in transmedia. That will surely help.
Because they oversexualized her in Halo 4, which is one of the worst character redesigns I have EVER seen in a game.
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.
I'm actually totally fine with that retcon. It's what I expected based on 5 and I think it basically works.
That said, everything else in there absolutely batshit insane. Their obsession with transmedia is absolutely ridiculous and seriously harms their games. You can not fucking write a story for a game assuming that everyone playing it has read half a dozen books, completed the marketing ARG, etc. The story in H4 is damn near incomprehensible. Blue team appears out of nowhere in 5 and is never explained.
343 really needs better management.
Because they oversexualized her in Halo 4, which is one of the worst character redesigns I have EVER seen in a game.
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.
Samurai G0SU
Member
Lol, had a feeling they would do this! Especially when they showed off that story board of
the halo ring and Cortana going through brush to meet the AI that is on the infinity. so halo 6 - battle of the cortanas! They might as well call it Halo 6: Gemini
I'm pretty sure that was not a retcon as myself and many fans theorized that to be the case (the logic plague was another theory) considering the events of Halo 3 and Halo 4. More than likely it was just another incident of 343i neglecting to bring it up in-game.
Gnome Scat
Member
Good to hear, but I don't think that was the main issue with Halo 5's storytelling...
coughcoughcortanacoughcough
Can Crusher
Banned
More focus on one character doesn't save you from bad writing.
Because they oversexualized her in Halo 4, which is one of the worst character redesigns I have EVER seen in a game.
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.
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.
CalamityPixel
Member
I don't know why they bothered bringing in Blue Team. Chief finally fighting alongside his fellow Spartan IIs is a big fucking deal, yet the game acts like it is anything but. No time is spent introducing them or fleshing out their relationship with Chief. Instead we spend 90% of the game playing as Osiris trying to catch up to where the story is happening.
Like I will give 343i the benefit of the doubt here, after all that we have been through with them. lol
Uh yeah that was Halo 1-3...the had very little story in them...halo 1 was actually super confusing to me when i was 13 and hadn't read the books
Don't you kill the bad guy from 4 at the end of 4? Not correcting, I just literally can't remember because 343 is insane. I need to go wiki because my brain rejected everything from H4 which says lots of things about 343's approach to storytelling.
Jaguar Victory
Member
MC is not supposed to be the "Most interesting man in the world". He's a genetically altered space marine raised to put a hurt on enemies. So is the rest of Blue team. If that's not your thing folks don't play Halo. Blue team is the closest thing he has to family and Cortana, though an AI, had been his savior/friend who he's willing to risk his life to save/protect. What threw many Halo fans off was that Cortana was corrupted like that and Chief is hunted in his universe. Halo 5 is the part of the movie where the good guy is framed but we didn't get the great vindication where everyone realizes that he's the good guy suffering and sacrificing for everyone else. It's like Spiderman where he catches shit in the papers even though he's doing all the right things. Halo 6 should do better to further the arc along and give fans some more feel good.
This is all of course, my opinion.
Because I'm convinced 343i (and Bungie to a different degree) don't really give much of a damn about the Nylund novels that introduced these characters in the first place. I've been rereading Fall of Reach/The Flood/First Strike and its absolutely mindboggling how messed up and convoluted this series' story has gotten compared to its roots, and how they handle Blue Team is a disgrace to longtime fans of the books everywhere.
Kinda. At the beginning of the encounter Cortana says that the whirlpool thing below is actually a slipspace portal. It's up in the air if the grenade you use kills him or merely knocks him off the bridge and into the portal.
Also fun fact: in MCC, the final prompt tells you to press RT to fire machine gun, despite the fact that it's the grenade QTE.
Why did Cortana need to look more human to begin with?
Actually nevermind, I didn't realize 343 addressed this already:
uh huh
I'd be totally fine with it, if 343i handled the Expanded Universe more like Bungie, but they are absolutely not doing that.
Appareantly he actually fell into a portal and that didn't really kill him. But Chief reunites with Blue Team in the comics to kill him again.
Just like the whole Halsey and Jul M'dama story gets explained in the comics and leads to nowhere only for Jul getting killed off after the 1st mission of Halo 5.
Excuse me sir. Haven't you read the Halo: Escalation Comic? 343i did reunite them there. You were supposed to read it.
/s
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.
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.
...but it is a good game. It's not an amazing 10/10 experience, but it's a good game.
Excited to see what 343i does next, hopefully they've learned from their mistakes. I'm sure there's this weird line where, as a developer, you're wanting to make something that appeals to your hardcore fanbase while also trying something new. Gears of War 4 comes to mind, for me, when I think about games that did too little for a new campaign by basically making the same type of game that the first three Gears games were.
You try to appease fans, but then you get told it's the same thing that's been done before.
You try something new and it falls on its face, making fans say that you've ruined an otherwise great franchise.
I don't envy developers at all lol
Twilight Gap
Member
Master Chief was never really a character to me in Bungie's games and I personally didn't want him to be because he didn't need to be. Cortana was the voice in your head, and Johnson was the guy who always gave Chief shit. Now taht both of those characters are "gone", I wouldn't want Halo to be stuck telling Master Chief's story over and over again. I think it's interesting to see different characters within the same universe, but Halo 5 just did a very poor job of that, unlike ODST (and Reach to a lesser extent).
If they're going to have "more Chief" and turn him from an unstoppable juggernaut to a humanized and broken soldier, then he needs to have a story worth relating to. Why should we care about Chief beyond him being the face of the franchise, or rather, why do we need to? What's at stake for him?
That's pretty much the explanation for most of what 343 does, which is why I've stopped being nice about it. You're just left to wonder what they were thinking, like dedicating the entirety of Halo 4 to killing Cortana, and then bringing back "an evil fragment" of her immediately afterwards.
If they're going to have "more Chief" and turn him from an unstoppable juggernaut to a humanized and broken soldier, then he needs to have a story worth relating to. Why should we care about Chief beyond him being the face of the franchise, or rather, why do we need to? What's at stake for him?
That's pretty much the explanation for most of what 343 does, which is why I've stopped being nice about it. You're just left to wonder what they were thinking, like dedicating the entirety of Halo 4 to killing Cortana, and then bringing back "an evil fragment" of her immediately afterwards.
Rosvoja Torilla
Member
Let ME be Cortana! Make it a whole new game.
I disagree with your stale singleplayer statement. Actually the SP formula of Halo 1 and 3 is something you wont find in modern shooters which are mostly inspired by Call of Duty. Doom showed that its possible to double down on a formula long thought dead. Id made Doom work with a modern twist.
What 343 did was to shift direction away from Bungies Halo towards more "focused" campaigns. Even though Halo 5 opened up the spaces sometimes, 343 slept on the ai front making a lot of that space redundant.
343 should double down on what made Halo SP great in the first place: Huge open levels and AI that can use the space effectively, resulting in a game that forces the player to create new ways to takle a problem. Hiding behind a single rock should not work and spaces should be setup in a way that enables the AI to flank...and the AI should actually do it. Look at Doom for a game with a seemingly dumb AI that actually does a lot lost in recent Halo titles. And Halo has vehicles on top, which can create a whole new level of mayhem.
They should move back to "Halo - the simulation" and away from "Halo - the cinematic experience". The capabilities of modern concoles could enable such awesome gameplay experiences with huge amounts of friendly and enemy units all engaged on a big battlefield. Give me more simulation that can actually play out differently every time on a bigger scale than in the past. The tech is there for it.
Barrel Cannon
Member
-Having two stories in the campaign going alongside each other wasn't the problem.
-Having less chief sections wasn't the problem
IMO the issue was there was nothing major gained in having the two stories go alongside each other. We didn't have any cool revelations from having the two stories go alongside each other. Halo 2 for all the complaining it received on having two stories alongside each other at least gave us a fresh and distinct perspective on the Halo universe. Seeing things from the Covenant's side and Arbiter's side allowed us to view the Covenant in a way we hadn't before and allowed us to see the corruption the prophets had brought. Playing as Osiris just felt like playing as the same spartan with a slightly different HUD and seeing the story unfold from very slightly different eyes.
-Having less chief sections wasn't the problem
IMO the issue was there was nothing major gained in having the two stories go alongside each other. We didn't have any cool revelations from having the two stories go alongside each other. Halo 2 for all the complaining it received on having two stories alongside each other at least gave us a fresh and distinct perspective on the Halo universe. Seeing things from the Covenant's side and Arbiter's side allowed us to view the Covenant in a way we hadn't before and allowed us to see the corruption the prophets had brought. Playing as Osiris just felt like playing as the same spartan with a slightly different HUD and seeing the story unfold from very slightly different eyes.
this is confusing to me because every halo 1 cutscene is slathered in a thick layer of exposition.
like at one point Jen Taylor is damn near speed reading the script just to get it all out in time
Well written. 343 really seems to have no sense of what is important and what is not. It's fine to have a transmedia strategy, but you have to have a good sense of what should be included in each piece, what is essential, etc. The games absolutely must be self-contained and complete without the other content, otherwise it doesn't work. It's fine to have extra detail and expand on the story in books, but if you hide main story beats outside the games, you're just pissing off and confusing your fans.
MMO Cortana - everyone is a copy of cortana.
Well it certainly upsets people in real life. What if there are people in the Halo universe who are similarly upset.
I do agree, people need to quit saying Halo 1 and Halo 2 had no interesting story to them because they did. Halo 3 didn't, but the first two games had layers of story and world building.
rakkadakka
Member
They need to stop being masters spreading out hugely important story points in books that a very small percentage of people who play the game will read.
It's basically the same mistake that Bungie made with Grimoire cards.
As others have said..everything needs to be self contained in the game people are playing.
Gai Murakumo
Member
I do not think doubling down on the Chief will solve the problem. Overall I did not mind that you played Osiris through most of 5 it was just parts of the overall plot just did not connect properly and there were some missions in the campaign that were almost unnecessary. If they are going to double down at least maybe have a couple of Osiris missions but then focus on Blue Team more instead of just strictly focusing on just the Chief. Plus the whole Hunt the Truth stuff though awesome marketing was just an overt lie and had little to nothing to do with Halo 5's plot. I hope if they do marketing similar it is more truthful to what happens in the game.
Twilight Gap
Member
Well Halo 2 almost didn't happen. We have to remember that Bungie made many different IPs and wasn't planning to be a Halo machien, so Halo 2 was supposed to be a much different game. It's why Halo 3's story doesn't even start until a 3rd of the way in.
The problem with Halo 5 wasn't that you werent playing as Chief, it was the overall lackluster story and the fact that Locke is an uninteresting character. I mean they could have had you play as Buck and that might of fixed one issue, but the story itself was flawed as all hell.
Halo 5 makes me respect Halo 2 more in retrospect, as at least Arbiter was interesting.
Halo 5 makes me respect Halo 2 more in retrospect, as at least Arbiter was interesting.
VincentMatts
Member
Why pay attention and do your research when you can re-make the same mistakes again?
Next game will have bloom and armor lock.
This right here. Halo 5 could've been a game about Chief going to find Blue Team and them remembering what their early years together were like, training on Reach, while Locke (if they still wanted to include him) could be recruiting Osiris. Easy way to draw a comparison between the values each generation of Spartan prioritizes and get to know characters better.
mr teaspoon
Member
Who reads that and feels good about the future of the franchise? It seems like there is absolutely nobody at 343 with a clear vision, either in terms of the gameplay or the story. They're always chasing something.
RoyalLaFlame
Banned
Basically they want to destroy what made Halo what it is today.
And this is why I left my favourite franchise behind. Sorry Chief, it's not you, it's your parents.
Diablohead
Member
Was chief even a vessel in halo 5 when you only played as him about 4 times in total.
VincentMatts
Member
Yeah honestly, i dont think they get it at all. Dont get me wrong, i want more Chief but they dont seem to understand why that is.
This would have been amazing. How is it a fucking neogaf poster can come up with a better idea than 343.
So discouraging.
LastGamer84
Member
This. Halo 4's SP was an okay epilogue to the series, but after 5 I do not care about Halo anymore.
Outrun
Member
And like Harry Stamper from Armageddon, he keeps them.
343i said they would improve MP in 5. They did that.
Now they said they will deliver a stronger SP, I believe them.
He will make 800ft.
Cue Aerosmith Song.
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