: I have a few sketches and a short story called "The Lekgolo Man"
: from around the time I did that Shield and Sword thing that went to some
: pretty abstract places. If I go back and revise the crap out of it I may
: post it here, along with some other odds and ends I've never finished.

: I got sick of Spartans/ODST/Marine squad stories in the EU a long time ago.
: The Marvel comics and a short story or two in Evolutions just hovered
: around that shtick and killed my interest. I enjoyed the characters of
: ODST and Reach of course, but the Legendary ending of Halo 3 gave me
: daydreams full of strange, elusive science fiction...

I'd been hoping the follow-up to Ghosts of Onyx could've gone in a more esoteric direction given the vastness and potential of the setting the characters were left in. Maybe a Rendezvous With Rama (or Eon) type story but bigger and with Spartans. But almost anything would've been preferable to what we got.

I don't believe that the basic kind of military sci-fi Halo stories should no longer be told, just that there's room for so much more. The books and comics and such would be an optimal channel to explore some of the more alien corners of the setting, something you can't necessarily do in a game (or you could, but something more experimental wouldn't necessarily jibe well with general audiences and may distract from the fun). The two categories don't need to be mutually exclusive either; you could conceivably use the Spartans et al. as the POV characters in more big idea-oriented stories as well (for example, the hypothetical GoO follow-up that never happened). Right now, all the expanded universe media is used to tell the exact same kinds of stories as the games do.

But even the archetypal military science fiction/space opera that the Haloverse has traditionally been is preferable to the sketchy comic book-ish direction the series' writing and art have taken under 343's tutelage. Can you have fun? Absolutely. But the humor shouldn't come from the unintentional comedy of something that takes itself way too seriously but is too incompetently put together to be viewed with anything other than amusement. Case in point, 343i decides the Grunts are no laughing matter and turns them into these supposedly dark and gritty versions of themselves - all the while providing unintentional comedy by presenting their main antagonist as a walking disco ball with vampire fangs.

I'm going off on a tangent here, but the same thing happened to the Mass Effect series. Without going into too much detail, the third game tries to convince me it has something profound to say about transhumanism and the nature of life and conflict while the memory of fighting a silly tryhard cyborg ninja is still fresh in my mind.