Does Halo Still Have “It”?
Halo, now 20 years old, has had its newest entry released – Halo Infinite. It’s the third game from 343 Studios, the sixth in the main series titles and has the burden of proving the name Halo is still one of the most important series in the video game landscape.
After a disappointing Halo 5: Guardians, and the disastrous launch of Halo: The Master Chief Collection, it was common to see the online discussion shift to whether Halo was still relevant in a modern gaming landscape.
The first showing of Halo Infinite was badly received. So badly that Microsoft announced a year-long delay to allow more work to be done. After the past two game failures, it felt like one more blow would be a knockout for the storied franchise. Leading many people to ask, does Halo still have “it”?
The big problem with trying to answer that question is that “it” can mean something completely different to so many people. From campaign to co-op to multiplayer, the act of playing Halo can also be very different for so many people. Additionally, the surrounding gaming landscape is also very different now from when Halo first launched 20 years ago. Not to mention that Halo’s core fanbase of gamers seems to have aged into their late 20s early 30s, leading to Halo being jokingly referred to as a “dad game”.
For me, the question was deceptively simple. Was Halo Infinite a good game?
From LAN cable matches on Halo: Combat Evolved to Xbox Live matches on Halo 2 and Halo 3, I have certainly played more than my fair share of Halo multiplayer over the years. And while I enjoyed it immensely, my true love of Halo is with the story campaigns. From playing them over and over again by myself to powering through them with a friend on co-op, the campaign is where I truly put my time and attention in Halo.
For me, the big question hanging over Infinite was, what the heck they were going to do about the story?
The Lead Up
Halo 4, the first game by 343 Studios (post Bungie Studios), had a tall order to try and pull off a sequel with its story. I felt it stumbled a bit too much, relying too heavily on the expanded universe of media, such as the novels, to make sense of the main bad guy. But years later, as I did another play through the series and played Halo 4 again, I developed a much better appreciation for its story. Sure, those flaws were still there, but I appreciated what it was trying to do in developing the deep friendship between the Master Chief and Cortana, and challenging Chief into growing into more of a person, not just a machine. This very personal story between the two of them was very effective, and makes for a great bittersweet ending with the death of Cortana.
Halo 5: The Guardians could have an essay devoted to its marketing alone. About how good it was and how excited it made people. With an amazing audio drama podcast, Hunt the Truth, and the other ancillary works such as the novels, it seemed Halo was finally going to be directly addressing what was always in the background of the games. That the human faction, the UNSC, was a military dictatorship and it was finally about to blow up. All of this to say that when I played it I was shocked at how much the game ignored all of that completely. To call it a disappointment would be an understatement, I honestly felt rather hoodwinked. 343 Studios, in response to negative feedback of Halo 4, simply ditched all the lingering threads and setups from that ending and pretended it didn’t happen.
Halo 5 was a terrible story with a lame ending. It was about how Cortana was back from the dead and was now evil for some reason and the human AI were in open rebellion against humanity (like we hadn’t seen AI uprising time and time again). As truly terrible a story as it was, the key thing was that it ended with Cortana and her AI minions and giant alien warships called Guardians now threatening to control everything.
It was a terrible story with a lame ending. Reaction to the story was overwhelmingly negative and for people like myself who had invested in following the ongoing story, it felt like it had almost been a waste of time. Halo 5: Guardians remains the only Halo game I have never replayed, and never want to.
The time jump.
The theories about what a sixth Halo story was going to do were everywhere and all over the place. I was really curious as to how they were going to write themselves out of the unpopular corner they had written themselves into. So I was fairly surprised as to the solution 343 came up with, and the guts it took to do. They simply skipped it.
Right from the opening moments of the game, Halo Infinite jumps right into it. The Banished (originally introduced in a strategy game spinoff Halo Wars 2) blast onto the scene in the opening moments and their leader, Atriox, defeats the Master Chief, leaving him for dead, floating through space.
When Chief is (inevitably) eventually rescued, months have passed and the humans have lost. The Banished control the new Halo and Cortana is dead. Yeah, that’s right, Cortana was killed again, off-screen. It turns out Chief was to deploy a new AI, simply called The Weapon, in a last ditch attempt to destroy the new evil Cortana. And to do so, they recreated a version of The Weapon that would be able to slip past Cortana’s defences and defeat her. And as soon as I saw that this new AI looked like Cortana and was voiced by the same actor, I instantly felt like I knew where this story was going.
As the game goes on, it feels like the writers took a lesson from Halo 4, and most of this story focussed on the relationship between Master Chief and his AI companion, The Weapon.
Jeri Taylor continues to prove to be an excellent voice actor, who can easily switch between three characters (who are all related in some way), and brings a great young and inexperienced energy to The Weapon, in comparison to the older Cortana.
Master Chief has often been rather unfairly described as a completely blank, empty and voiceless character. Which I have never found to be particularly true. Even with minimal dialogue, Chief has often shown his character through action and by what little he chooses to say. None more so than here in Infinite, where he is slightly more talkative, but never really chatty. Steve Downes once again voices Chief and brings this sadder edge to the character, who is struggling with the loss of Cortana. In these moments, the game feels more like a sequel to Halo 4 than 5.
It is the growing connection between Chief and The Weapon that provides the heart for this story and feels like a strong enough foundation to build on in the future. As they battle through Halo, trying to find out why Cortana was here and who activated The Weapon to kill her, I kept waiting for a reveal where either The Weapon was secretly Cortana in disguise or would merge with all these fragments of Cortana’s code they were finding and become her, reborn. So you could get the best of both having Cortana without dealing with that whole becoming evil thing.
Pleasantly, I was very wrong on that account. Cortana is truly dead, and in her final moments realized her mistakes and activated The Weapon herself. I have to commend 343 for not going down the easy route and finding a way for her to come back as if nothing had ever happened.
By having that time jump at the beginning of the game with the Chief out of action, it avoids a lot of the potential problems that were going to happen with a direct sequel to Halo 5. You don’t have to star a very unpopular character of Evil Cortana, nor have a whole scene where she dies again. And by being stranded on a distant Halo ring, you don’t have to deal with what is going on in the wider galaxy with the whole AI uprising.
I think it is rather gutsy to solve your cliffhanger ending by simply jumping a bit ahead in time and largely avoiding it altogether.
The Expanded Universe
343 Studios have fully embraced the concept of Halo being a multimedia franchise, with a great deal of overlap between the books, comics and video games. This does allow the further development of characters and ideas, but it can be a double-edged sword. Often the modern games have felt like they require you to have read several books to understand what is going on.
Who is The Didact, the villain of Halo 4? Read the trilogy of novels by Greg Bear. Who is Blue Team, and why are they so close to the Master Chief? Read the first ever Halo novel, Halo: Fall of Reach. It seems that, finally, 343 have pulled back on knowing that level of cross over to be able to understand the plot of Infinite. Everyone you meet or who is important to the story is explained, no longer feeling like you need to have done your homework to be able to play.
A common refrain I have seen elsewhere online is that, this time around, Master Chief feels closer to his characterisation from the novels. The novels, by their nature, often provide a far more personal look at the character of the Chief. With this game’s narrower focus on him, it lets him shine through in a way that was often only read in text. This is a tricky balancing act to pull off, and I believe that the writers for Infinite have handled it brilliantly.
My only concern is that several glaring questions from the story will be handed off to the novels for completion there, leaving the game’s story as feeling like it’s missing something.
The Missing Story
While 343 has pulled back from some of their habits from Halo 4, they, unfortunately, continue to have some of the same problems. Mainly, 343 seems to have a habit of ditching story threads if they haven’t been received well. On the surface, this appears to be an understandable choice, but in an ongoing storyline, it leaves many large questions hanging over the whole plot.
What happened to the cast of characters that had been set up over the last two games? They appear in audio recordings scattered around the map. So, they reached the Halo ring with Chief, but where are they now? They are simply missing, and are never mentioned again. The AI uprising? Kinda mentioned. The Guardians, Cortana’s army of giant alien spaceships the last game was named after? Don’t appear.
Introducing the Banished as the main foe does mean a return to the classic style of weapons and gameplay from the early entries, but it also means that a lot of what had been set up in Halo 4 and 5 is completely ignored. The leader of the Banished, Atriox, is given a great intro, only to never be seen again. Which is really weird. Instead, you get his sidekick, who loves to give monologues via hologram. All these lingering threads are briefly mentioned, so they don’t feel like they were forgotten, rather that 343 didn’t have any answers so kicked the can down the road until the next game. After 6 years between Halo 5 and Infinite, to be left with little to no progress on many of these key storylines is rather deflating.
In the moment, none of this makes the story feel bad. But once the credits are rolling, I couldn’t help but think, “wait a moment, so we aren’t going to answer any of these things?” There is always the possibility these have been purposely left as open threads for future DLC and expansions, but it is hard to shake the feeling that these were cut simply to be able to get a shippable product out the door. We may never know the answer to that until someone who was working on it decides to speak about it publicly.
Towards the Future
When 343 took over Halo, they made a big deal about Halo 4 as the first in what they were calling the reclaimer trilogy. Which, over time, morphed into calling it a Reclaimer Saga (most likely because they didn’t want to limit themselves to merely three products). A big deal in the games was about the new main enemies, the Prometheans, and the returning race of long dead Forerunners. And this continued into Halo 5, with them being led by Evil Cortana.
Infinite largely changes that focus. Evil Cortana is already gone, the Prometheans are not seen or even mentioned. And the Forerunners are once again treated as a long dead race with buried secrets, not a potentially returning enemy. And by being set on Halo ring for the first time since 2007 Halo 3, the game feels like it wants to move away from all these elements that were never really received all that well.
This brings me to one of the new foes introduced, the Harbinger. A largely shallow character, who exists solely to set up a new enemy faction called the Exile and who dies at the end of the game. None of this is particularly bad or good, rather it’s a clear example of the changing direction of the franchise.
It is very easy to go and on about Halo. It has been around for over 20 years and has gone through so many games, books, comics and shows that there is so much you can talk about. So, attempting to talk about Halo Infinite on its own is almost impossible. It wasn’t created or released in a vacuum, and to truly discuss it you must understand where it was coming from.
I truly feel that Halo was in danger of writing itself into a corner, and, with it, irrelevance. The was a lot riding on the success of Halo: Infinite.
Halo: Infinite had a clear goal in moving past the mistakes of Halo 5 and setting itself up for the future. And I believe that even with its missteps of avoiding too many hard questions, it fully succeeds in its goal.
Yes, Halo is a very good game and does still have “it”.