Those difficulty mechanics have been in place since atleast Halo 2 though, so that's not really a fair complaint to make against Halo 5.
Like seriously, let's not forget...
I was playing yesterday and they could two-hit you on Heroic, not one-hit. They were pretty annoying, which is why they were less annoying in future Halo games.
Bungie was afraid to embrace the lore? That's because it wasn't their lore. Why does no one understand that? They didn't want Nylund to write Fall of Reach, they didn't even want Ensemble working on Halo Wars. They made Halo CE, it was successful and then Microsoft brutally pursued them to make Halo 2 which they barely got out of the door. Halo 3 was the culmination of that trilogy, the finishing of the fight, and many would argue was one of their better campaigns. And then, they gave us a self contained story with ODST and their own version of Reach that tied into the start of CE. They weren't there to satisfy lore whores who loved the extended fiction, they got so tired of Halo, they went onto make Destiny.
The positive that 343 has is that everything is now in house. They have a franchise team. They are created solely to make Halo. Those who get tired can quit and move on and others can come. Now you'd think this is a positive but it's actually hampered the primary medium for Halo, the games. Read these books to know just who the hell the people on your fireteam are, read this comic to find out what happened at the end of the last game, listen to this podcast so you know where certain characters are etc.
But this has had a negative effect on the games. That's two games now where the campaign story particularly has been largely panned by the gamers and the reviewers at large. If you cannot tell if effectively in game, rethink your current plan of utilizing miniseries and books and shows and podcasts to get the ENTIRE story out. The focus is the games. What good is it to Microsoft if they get a million podcast listens for Hunt the Truth but 600k physical (non bundle) retail sales at launch? Sometimes the best intentions don't make for a fun game.
As an outsider, it seems as if they don't understand that the single most important thing you do is make those Big Main Event Works completely standalone. Like, you do the Star Wars movies, and nobody has to read the books or the comics or whatever. They get the movies. There are some huge Star Wars comics going on right now, but you can absolutely watch the films without them.
The Major Works have to stand alone. Expanded universe stuff has to exist outside it. And, more importantly, as demonstrated by Star Wars, the expanded universe stuff has to twist and change to fit what happens in the movies. The movies never, ever, ever, ever rely on any expanded universe stuff. You have seven movies (Trilogy 1, Trilogy 2, and iirc, that Clone Wars movie) that relate to each other and only each other, and everything else builds on that, not vice versa.
The Major Works are your foundation, and everything comes from that, not the other way around, but 343i seems to try to build its main games on the 'foundation' of the expanded universe that 90% of all Halo customers don't actually care about. It can't penetrate the cultural consciousness if it's complex! That's why Disney killed Star Wars EU.
Also, the vast majority of the money that Star Wars made wasn't in the novels and whatnot, it was in the toys. Seriously, like... 95% of Star Wars merchandising is toys. Halo can't do toys nearly as well because it's military sci-fi, not sci-fantasy, so it has this entire military aesthetic and you can't go all cartoon and make a ton of cool, diverse toys based off of it.
Star Wars' popularity is also in the way they heavily encourage a lot of stuff like Robot Chicken Star Wars Special. Nobody before or since with a media franchise has allowed the same kind of fan work level that Lucasarts did, which helped ingrain Star Wars into the cultural consciousness.
Good read. I agree with a fair amount of it. For me, it comes down to one core thought: In Bungie's Halo games, I felt like I had an impact on the outcome, whereas in 343i's Halo games, I feel like the story is happening even if I wasn't playing.
Because Halo 4 was a time after Halo: Reach. While Reach sold a lot, people wanted a real Spartan, not some gimped Spartan. Quite a few of the hardcore fans that I know were pretty soured by the Reach gameplay experience and wanted to go back to the simplicity of MC and the way he played. It also helps push sales when you can throw your franchise's mascot on the cover.
Definitely.
Well, yeah, that's totally right. I get that. If I was making a new Halo, I'd go with a Spartan II. I'd probably start by rereading the Cole Protocol, of all things, because Gray Team was pretty cool, and I'd probably with that concept as a template and work from there. Locke should have been the series' Boba Fett, not "a stoic, boring army dude whose only task is to stop the guy everyone likes from doing what he wants." Dude needed a personality and didn't have one.
Anyways, if I were doing a Halo game, I'd be all "yes, yes, let's do more Flood stuff," and everyone would hate me for it. If I were trying to make a profitable Halo game, I'd work on a series that relates to the operations of a team that works like Gray Team and borrows its level design from mini-sandboxes like The Silent Cartographer and 'event levels' like The Ark. Or, with total control and a giant budget, I'd go with a game where a small group of Spartans has their own space ship and flies around the galaxy on individual missions that could be selected in order, like some weird Mass Effect Meets Halo Hybrid.
