Agreed. I had just told a Bungie employee at PAX something that I had realized around the time that I was there: the two characteristics that put Bungie's Halo where it was in relation to all other fictional universes that I had experienced were "plausibility" and "mystique".

Except for slipspace, almost all of Bungie's sci-fi seems like it's an extrapolation of a Popular Mechanics or Popular Science article, making it feel believable by connecting it to what we know of today. MJOLNIR's design being a key example of this.

Bungie's Forerunners, whom we were directly related to ("Child of my enemy, why have you come? I offer no forgiveness: A father's sins pass to his son. || "You ARE Forerunner. Inheritor of all my creators left behind." || etc, etc.) weren't mysterious only because they were such a crazily advanced civilization technologically... they were also wonderful and mysterious because they seemed to be a vision of what we would be like were we "ascended" in a sense. Were all our present faults either gone or sufficiently compensated for. They seemed almost "angelic" in a sense. Maybe kinda like Tolkien's elves from the films. I imagine they would have been a sight to behold, "ascended" humans.

Whereas 343's Forerunners just seem like a very technologically advanced civilization, no real mystique to them, just high intent. Plus the fact that their faces are so strangely designed: they look almost exactly like humans, but with slits for noses and sorta fishy-like things on their heads. Like some kind of mutated Voldemort.

re: Human-central story

Part of me wishes it were possible to go back in time and make it so that Bungie were somehow able to release their creative vision for the Halo universe via CG, like 343 is doing now, though at an even HIGHER fidelity. Some kind of CG parallel to the Blomkamp shorts, creatively. Because the Alien references are obvious, but it would be awesome to see some kind of Halo visual feast on the technical level of Prometheus or AVATAR, with all the tech available to us now.

With my horribly feeble arms, I hope to aim my bow such that Venerance hits as close to the mark of what I've described as possible. It's a big part of the appeal of the project.