: I think that many of the systemic problems that plagued the prequel trilogy
: affect 343i's Halo. Once had a list comparing the two, but it's lost on my
: hard drive. I will avoid making the obvious comparison between the geas
: and midichlorions, because they share only superficial similarities.

: I'm sorry you think so.

: Seems kind of sterile to me. Like they aren't breathing life into what Bungie
: didn't have time to explore, merely importing it from elsewhere. Marvel
: comics, probably.

: They have every right to stray, but I can't find the connection to what came
: before. Looking back from where we are now, it's like... it's like I'm
: looking over the embers of bridges burning behind us, and getting a
: glimpse of how green it was on the other side.

: Under Bungie, Halo had a certain magic to it. They couldn't consistently
: capture it, there's a lot of spots where they just fell flat in Halo 3 and
: Reach. But under them, the grass was greener, the lights were brighter,
: the taste was sweeter. 343i has shown themselves to be incapable of
: duplicating that magic, and I don't think they're capable of coming up
: with something else that's just as enthralling.

: (Note: The above is what happens when you write forum posts while listening
: to Pink Floyd.)

"Sterile" is a good word to describe it. 343i's take on Halo feels more safe, sanitized and committee-driven than Bungie's ever did. And I'm not just talking about the games. 343's post-war universe has a very stable status quo which means they can keep churning out serial stories with their stock cast without threatening or meaningfully affecting the overall setup. With the Bungie-era games and novels you felt that things actually happened and moved the universe and characters forward, even though the games didn't always connect with the EU as well as they could've.

I mean, I like 343's basic idea that the expanded universe and games should be more connected but this feels like a waste when most of the plots and characters from the previous expanded universe have been all but tossed away. I was looking forward to reading more about the adventures of Dr. Halsey, Mendez and the newly-reinforced Blue Team where Nylund left them and then what we get is one half of a book which basically unravels everything that was exciting about Nylund's setup and manages to mangle many of the characters almost beyond repair. But that hardly matters since most of them haven't been heard of since. Or the whole deal with the Elite-Brute feud that was supposed to be going on that's basically forgotten about. And a ton of other plot threads left flaccidly dangling in the breeze, never to be revisited.

Moving beyond that the post-war era just lacks the believability and tension we were treated to earlier. Everything is cheap and nothing has an element of sacrifice to it anymore. 343i's post-war UNSC is so far removed from the idea of a broken and battered civilization recovering from a war with technologically superior xenocidal enemy it's not even funny. After Halo 3 the UNSC apparently gained infinite resources from... somewhere, meaning that none of their massive investments or losses matter at all anymore. A few Spartans died? Oh well, we have a thousand more, with top-tier armor for all of them, along with an insane selection of incredibly specific purpose-built variants. This infinite industrial capability would've come in real handy a few months back when they had to equip a few hundred SPARTAN-IIIs, but then that was when the basic laws of cause and effect still functioned.