: I asked the same questions, but perhaps my 'standard' line is a little more
: lax. I still expect that the things we know are 'new' to canon will have
: an explanation - even the things that seems unfeasible or ridiculous. For
: me, it says "oh they're going somewhere with this" before it
: says "what are the writers thinking?!". I just hope it doesn't
: get to the latter for me :)

I've seen a lot of 343i's writing (Nightfall, Escalation, Spartan Ops and the Kilo 5 Trilogy's treatment of Halsey) excused with a simple "They're just setting the groundwork for awesome stories later." And it doesn't work. If you're setting up a story, the setup and foreshadowing has to be interesting and fun to read. For a good illustration of how to do this, look up Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series. Even if it's a cliche storm with tons of foreshadowing and Chekov's guns, the execution is anything but formulaic.

Looking at Nightfall, we've been given no reason to believe that the writers are doing anything but recycling cliches from monster movies. There's been no attempt to make any of the characters likeable, the Hunter worms are risible (Look, when I said this, I was joking.) and the technobabble is... just...

Look, when a movie about fucking moon Nazis has harder science than a Halo series, something is wrong.