First came interviews during Halo 4's development that quoted 343i staffers as saying that Halo had the potential to be as big as Star Wars. Then came a post here or on NeoGAF where someone who had a business meeting with 343i employees on new Halo media said that they honestly believed that Halo was already as big as Star Wars, and it wasn't PR speak. Then, a few days after the MCC was released, they said in the weekly update that they have everything planned out to twenty years.

It must have slipped past everyone at the time, but it struck me as short-sighted and hopelessly ambitious. Why bother looking that far out when the content you've delivered in the past month borders on being unplayable, unwatchable, and unmemorable? And when you move onto new projects after five years, the writers who replace you will treat your backstory with the same respect you paid to Bungie's vision.

Mario, Zelda, Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, DC, they've all lasted much longer than thirty years. Zelda has a loose canon (Unintentional!) and Mario has no contiguous story. Their developers can focus on delivering excellent games without worrying about continuity snarl, and are free to branch out in ways unavailable to Halo. Face it, Tartarus will never go-kart with the Arbiter.

Star Wars, I think, was where Halo is today. Specifically, I'm thinking of the New Jedi Order. Sure, there was a central team coordinating everything, just like 343i, but the result was too many cooks in the kitchen hammering out a story that was ultimately uninteresting and didn't feel like Star Wars. The Yuuzan Vong/Promethean Knights are boring and belong in a different franchise altogether. The stable of authors writing the novels can't agree whether the Yuuzan Vong are devoid of the Force or merely on a different wavelength, nor can they agree if Halsey did extreme things for extreme actions, or if she was a cartoonishly evil protege of Josef Mengele.

Can Halo survive thirty years? Well, Marvel and DC have been going for fifty years or more, so it's possible. But compared to the sheer amount of comics that have been inked about superman and X-men, there's only a handful of good comics. The rest are lost in self-imitation and flanderization. They've had all character development wiped away again and again and again and again because their writers are fans and unwilling to let their childhood idols grow up. But hey, if there's anything that One More Day proved, it's that no amount of bad writing can kill a sufficiently long-lived franchise.

The real question here is, "Is 343i writing Halo so it will last 20 years?"

Are they?

No. If they were really planning on 20 years, they wouldn't have thrown the Great Schism under the buss. That was the opportunity to create metric craploads of backstory and character development. THat was the opportunity to show empires crumble, to see warlords and visionaries rise, and to establish the UNSC as using guile and diplomacy as sword and shield while it struggles to rebuild from the ashes.

"A lot can happen in four years."

Hear that? That's ten years worth of games and books and comics and tabletop RPGs crumpled up and thrown away, to be brought up briefly in the comics only to have all its potential wasted again. All this, so 343i could skip directly to Requiem and obliviously waste the potential of every story that could be told there. The Master Chief's journey, Mendicant Bias's redemption, the surviving Forerunner, all of that was negated in the span of a single game because they told a story too self-contained to follow up on. Not to say that they didn't try to resurrect that plotline in the comics, but "The Next 72 Hours" didn't change anything and wasted every opportunity that it was given. See a pattern yet?

There's no surviving Forerunner, just a senile clone of Thanatos that claims to be one. Mendicant Bias wasn't riding along with Cortana or even sending the Master Chief to meet his makers. In fact, it seems like Mendicant Bias didn't know what he was doing at the end of Halo 3. The only thing 343i did remotely well was Cortana's rampancy. And it's cold comfort, seeing that story lying in the ashes of a dozen equally promising storylines.

Now, between Halo 4, Escalation, and Nightfall, it seems like 343i is running through different plotlines as fast as they can, without taking the time to develop them properly. Everything they visit, from surviving Forerunner to hidden Sangheili colonies to lost shards of a Halo ring, has such awesome potential. But it's always used for humdrum, forgettable stories that could be told anywhere.

So, yeah. Halo is going to be around for twenty years. How long can you keep a brain-dead person alive on life support?

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