: Or something. Maybe.

Those aren't terminals though, you don't go to an external service or change to a different view like with Halo 3's terminals and ODST's logs. You stay in first-person and in control.

: Halo 3's terminals play around with the extent to which they exist in the
: game world. The last one seems like it might be addressed to the Chief,
: and Cortana is obviously aware of its presence, but the terminal also
: comments on the player's choice of difficulty level.
: That stuff was executed well. 343i needs to improve their terminal-handling skills.

I just read it again and it doesn't reference the difficulty level. Also the first time you find a terminal in Halo 4 Cortana says something about how she'll store the data in it and analyze it later.

munky-058:
: Also, not requiring Waypoint might have helped...

Yeah, maybe they could've put them on the second disk, maybe at least let us download them and watch them from a menu in Halo 4? Overall I think this game just should've waited, it should've been on the next console so it would be handled better and the devs would have more time.

Quirel:
: ... is actually related to the above.

: Don't use motion comics for terminals.
: Bungie did just fine with text and pure audio. Motion comics try to add a
: visual component, but they often look like you're watching a puppet show.

What's wrong with that? Puppet shows used to get a lot more respect. It's funny actually, the way puppet shows have gone is the opposite of how video games have gone.

: Besides which, keeping as much in-house as possible would probably ease
: development.

how? why does it matter who the the people making these (motion comics or cutscenes or terminal content) have as their immediate boss? why would putting more work on people in 343i, or hiring new people mostly or only for that, be better?