: "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.

I think the current state of the Halo universe was designed to overcome a key weakness of Bungie-era stories. Bungie's trilogy was pretty good, but each of the games followed a similar story arc. Stories outside of those games usually followed a simple formula: UNSC fights Covenant, Covenant digs up Forerunner artefacts and prepares to use them against the UNSC, UNSC destroys the artefacts before they can threaten the status quo.

The need to have the UNSC come out the winner in each story meant that the UNSC could never successfully recover a Forerunner artefact. If they did, it'd probably get crated up in a warehouse somewhere and never be brought up again. Most every author writing in Halo looked at 343 Guilty Spark and the Reclaimers' ability to fire the Halo, and assumed that all surviving Forerunner machinery would boot up and serve humans the first chance they get. After that, incorporating materials science and machine code millions of years in advance of our own into weapons and armor would be a walk in the park.

The Covenant likewise could not acquire Forerunner artefacts, because those would tilt the war too far in their balance (and let them win for once). Thus, the writers felt free to dangle hangars full of warships and slipspace-interdiction facilities between the UNSC and Covenant until Human space was ludicrously cluttered with relics.

The struggle over Forerunner relics was not the only story that could be told in the Human/Covenant War period, but they were low-hanging fruit. A story needs a structure, and a struggle for a MacGuffin is easy to build off of. This could have been fine, War-era stories could have been told for years to come, except there wasn't a whole lot of wiggle room for other stories. There was no communication or parlay between the two sides; Sangheili won't surrender and won't accept surrender. Battles are usually one-sided slaughters as a prelude to glassing a planet. The UNSC can't achieve anything more than token victories. There were no iconic planets that could be visited story after story.

A stable of really good authors could have crafted some fine stories within those limits. God bless him, Tobias Buckell set out to write something other than a Forerunner McGuffin plot. The Cole Protocol had all the ingredients to kickstart a revolution in Halo's storytelling: The Covenant were working at cross-purposes outside of the traditional species boundaries, the Insurrection had a major role in a conflict, trade and even co-existence between human and Jackal settlements occurred without upsetting the balance of the war. If only the Cole Protocol had been better-written, and its release didn't take place immediately before a change of hands in Halo's stewardship, the Halo franchise as a whole might be in a better place today.

Imagine if the rifts between Sangheili keeps, Covenant star systems, even entire regions of Covenant territory had been something that the writers explored. What if certain Sangheili discovered the truth about Humanity, and kept the secret for their own reasons? What stories could be told about the complex relations between the UNSC, separatist forces, Covenant outcasts and heretics, and the Covenant proper? What stories could be told about the difficulties the UNSC and Covenant faced in moving soldiers and fighting material across vast interstellar distances? What if the UNSC wasn't static during the war, and the state it was in at the beginning of the war made fighting the Covenant even more difficult than we saw in the Bungie trilogy?

Tangent: I think that last idea would have been unlikely to catch on. Most people want to read about weapons that radically reverse the entire course of a war, not incremental improvements over the course of two decades that turn the UNSC from needing a 7-to-1 tonnage advantage in space battles to only needing a 3-to-1 advantage. I mean, look at the stuff we see in movies and history channels and newspaper columns. The survival of the Rebellion always hinges on destroying the Empire's new superweapon. People want to believe that Nazi Germany would have won the war if the ME262 or the Panzershrek had been introduced years earlier, when every credible expert says that the Third Reich would have lost anyway. People want to believe that we could prevent every casualty in Iraq/Afghanistan, if only we'd ditched the M16 family and armed our troops with (Insert sacred cow gun here. Bonus points if it's made by Heckler & Koch).

So, back to 343i. They tried to expand the variations of UNSC vs Covenant stories by making them evenly matched. Unfortunately, the writers aren't even paying lip service to the motivation behind the conflict. The Covenant factions are too one-dimensional to call themselves anything other than The Covenant. They are too one-dimensional to craft a manifesto in response to the demise of the Covenant religion, and blithely try to act as if it's business as usual. They are too one-dimensional to do anything besides hunt for Forerunner relics; they don't barter on the black market, they don't worry about logistics and upkeep of their Covenant-era weapons, they don't worry about recruitment or forming coalitions.

Halo 4 was just a shooting gallery full of cardboard cutouts with no motivation. The Covenant fight you because that is what Covenant do. The Covenant set up camp outside of Requiem for two years, because banging on Forerunner artefacts until they respond to prayers is what Covenant do. They stuck around even when Requiem was at the brink of destruction, because fighting suicidal campaigns is what Covenant do.

343i tried to expand the stories they could tell, but the Covenant is just this chaotic evil entity with no goals aside from hindering the UNSC. Unless the factions of the former Covenant Empire are fleshed out, the stories they're trying to tell in the comic books and novels are going to be one-shot affairs that nobody will bother to remember.

: 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.

Yes.

: 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.

I've said much about the above, and I do not feel like rehashing it. But I have a different question.

Why are the Covenant still here?

Slipspace travel is not instantaneous. The travel time between Sanghelios and Earth has to take years for Covenant warships. Our own slice of the Milky Way can't be all that much more rich in Forerunner artefacts than the territory controlled by the former Covenant. It's not as if we've got an abundance of habitable planets to settle upon, because they've all been glassed.

Tangent: The Reach Datapad that determined that the Covenant cannot glass planets may be in error. It assumed that the Covenant were reducing the whole of the planet's surface to glass, when glassing a fraction of a planet's surface would be sufficient to render it permanently inhospitable. In addition, it probably underestimated the size of the Covenant fleets by orders of magnitude.

The only reason that would compel the factions of the former Covenant Empire to fight in UNSC space is to retrieve the rare Forerunner artefact that was overlooked or unexploited during the war, or to salvage weapons and machinery from old battlefields.

Of course, there would be factions that want Humanity exterminated for good, but their motivations had better be more complex than "OMG, Humans expand just like the Flood!" and their strategy had better be more intelligent than "Spray Human-killing biohazard element MacGuffin into a random crowd."

If you've made it this far, thank you for reading.