Let me explain. Recall how some of us on these forums (myself included) had a collective 'WTF?' when we heard there was yet another Halo TV series being developed (Nightfall) along with S.S.'s series. This was before MCC was mentioned, or even leaked/rumored as I recall. We were like "what, why are they announcing yet another multimedia project when there is next to nothing on the FIRST? GIVE US TEH HALOZ ALREADY!"

Then came E3 and gave the context to the dust and echos we had heard vibrating in the Halo news. Nightfall goes together with bridging MCC with next year's Halo. Why it was separate from the main TV series was made clear.

And then there was last year's Halo at E3. Where they announced 'Halo for XBO'. 60fps, dedi servers, and continuing the MC's story. In the context we had, these dust and echos, and with some of the name reversals later, we presumed this was (just) Halo 5 (the teaser didn't help this confusion).

Then came this year's E3 and we got the MCC, which has all of the older parts of the MC legacy on the XBO, in 60fps and with dedi servers. Context added, confusion solved.

But that's not all. Think about Halo4. Today, I think this was made to be a XBO game from the start, but the studio was required to put out a new Halo game. We got H4 and we had to live with objects (namely weapons) being garbage collected far more quickly than in previous games, and there was no official saved films for campaign (even though Lord Zedd showed it was technically possible). I'm sure others can point out some other technical shortcomings of in the game, but these stand out the most to me for the purposes of this post.

Then came E3. I don't think it's been confirmed or denied yet, but I'd be willing to bet MCC-H4 will have saved films for campaign and SPOPs finally. And with the XBO's 5GB of RAM allowance for games, I'm sure they will be able to address the limited object memory pool that was used on the 360.

(You can also control the XBO with your Surface, right? In which case, H4's touch-friendly interface makes sense, now that we know it will be on the XBO).

Now, as a Halo fan, I'm far from disappointed with what we can expect in the coming months/years (though, I really do hope they give some weight to a PC version of the MCC...or HaloWars :3. At least sometime soon, I realize MS wants to push XBO first and foremost).

However, having to sit on the listening end of all these blips in Halo developments, in what seems like a deep space outpost, has been damn confusing and frustrating lol. Not to say it has been fun for 343 (I'm sure staying mum on the deal with campaign saved films has been painful for them, etc).

I guess it's just part of the growing pains the community has to go through in our transition to 343 from Bungie. The latter of which who seemed very focused on their iterative games, rather than say juggling the overall franchise (besides having control over it, so others didn't mess it up). So there didn't ever seem to be much confusion (good or bad) on what was going on.

So now the radio is finally void of most of these dust and echos...now we just have to get all the MCC communique to stop transmitting at the same time so we can digest on what-is-what in this massive $60 deal :p.

P.S. 343: You have at least 25GiB of disc space for Halo5...please bring back non-alienese-talking grunts. I miss the battle cries and taunts they would mutter before I mowed them down with my AR/Warthog. Native-tongue vocalizing grunts *is* Halo. So it is a must for Halo5 if it is to be true to Halo :p.

(Yeah, I probably could have used a better analogy than 'dust and echos'...but I was trying to use something in Halo to talk about Halo. Anyway, thanks for reading if you made it this far).