: It is a major accompaniment, and I wasn't trying to set it aside in general,
: I was just refuting the idea that the... let's call it the extra story
: content in Halo games... is strongly connected to the main story.
: Come to think of it, I think the terminals in Halo 4 are more connected to
: the main story than the stuff in previous Halo games because they involve
: some of the same characters (and you kind of need to see them to know WTF
: is going on [except they don't really explain some things that well]).

That's part of the problem. Terminals in Halo games are optional; they're a mini-game on their own, like an easter-egg hunt. If the material you put in them is required to understand what's happening to you as you play the campaign, there will be a lot of confused players. My first playthrough of Halo 4 was riddled with "wait, what?" moments.

The terminals in Halo 3 help you to understand the grander picture, they fill in a lot of gaps, but they also reestablish some of the mystery that made the first Halo so good. The Librarian's astonishment at finding earth and her confusion about the humans there was great. It wasn't explicit; that is, the amount of detail it provided was sufficient to encourage investigation and discussion, but not blatant enough to end speculation. The Halo 4 terminals leave out information, but not in the same way. They just feel incomplete, like you missed an episode or a writer left something important out unintentionally. A good optional terminal should reinforce what's happening and give extra information as a reward for finding it, but it shouldn't contain details needed to understand your purpose or the purpose of characters you meet.

I think that's part of my beef with the action comic format. In the same amount of time it would take to read an equivalent text-based terminal, you get like 1/3rd of the information. There are a lot of subtleties that the written word has, especially when you include tools like corrupted information (a lot of the words in the H3 terminals were incomplete or distorted, which served as a way to convey information while retaining some mystery). I love a cool drawing, don't get me wrong, but as a narrative device in a Halo game, either let me see it happen in full 3D via cutscene or gameplay, or give it to me via text. The terminals are established as records, and I have a hard time believing the Forerunners would have cell-shaded all their histories.