What's up with the skulls? (I've been playing Arkham Origins...) When the skull is displayed: quick fire BatClaw to rip it from it's casing and that frees the hobbit from mind control. You get achievements for freeing X souls. Free 100 souls in spops and get the SoulHunter achievement.

On a more serious note: I take your point about failure of execution but I wonder if the Promethean ideas were innately unexecutable. Could anyone have sold those ideas through game play?

But 343 didn't even manage to sell the idea through cut scenes. They had to tell us what was going on via forum postings and interviews. You can enhance your stories via social media but you shouldn't be telling them via social media. That is a failure of writing and/or execution.