I remember when the Art of Halo 4 was released and we finally got an answer to the question of why the Forward Unto Dawn was redesigned. Sparth dismissed the version in Halo 3 as an "aggregation of boxes" that didn't look like a single object. He continued and said that the reasoning behind the new design was "Even if it was different, we wanted it to be identified as the Forward Unto Dawn while still making it a different vessel."

Look to the H4 FUD. Now look back to the version we saw in Halo 3. They don't have a similar layout, they don't share an outline, they don't have common design elements. I can either believe that a talented design artist could not subtly alter the FUD's design to give it a more cohesive shape, or I can believe that the stable of artists that 343i hired would much rather be doing their own thing, and are only paying lip service to continuity and respecting what came before.

Yeah, the redesigned Jackals and Grunts and Warthogs make it much easier to believe the latter, but they wouldn't have done it on their own. Frankie's insistence that Karen Traviss had a sympathetic view of Halsey and 343i going along with the "14-day Buy-And-Play" bullshapski drove it home.

You guys would rather be working on a reboot of Halo, building upon the general story with your own visual direction, your own take on the characters, your own concept of what the ultimate Forerunner soldier would be. That's not bad. I may intensely dislike what you guys write and loathe what you guys do with the Forerunner (Except for 98% of Greg Bear's books. By bringing him to the table, you scored a touchdown after hitting a home run with the bases loaded while bowling a perfect game and the baseball soared out of the stadium and scored a hole in one on a nearby green) but Halo is your thing now. You guys own the franchise, you guys get to tell the stories you want to tell.

Except y'all aren't being honest with the fans. And the story is suffering from the bends and twists you have to write to justify a continuity between the old and the new. Sometimes, this stretches beyond the plausible into the realm of the ridiculous.

Gravemind has explained why the Jackal/Grunt subspecies explanation is lacking (I learned a new word!) but that's only one problem. You guys insist that the Terminals in Halo 3 are canon, but... where was Mendicant Bias in Halo 4? The Chief was reading those terminals in-story, Cortana knew about those terminals and they presumably knew that MB was going to take them to meet his makers. The only acknowledgment that received in your media was Origins. After that, nada.

And then there's the explanation that the Chief's MJOLNIR is the same suit he wore in Halo 3, only the armor plating and the skinsuit underneath and the visor and everything else was modified by Cortana via on-board nanomachines. Nanomachines which never touched the scuffs and scratches he'd earned by the end of Halo 3.

Allow me to sum up my reaction thusly:

When you guys were first talking about taking the helm of Halo, you said there would be a focus on an integrated story. Things would truly be connected. The unspoken subtext of that promise was "Unlike Bungie." The games 343i produces wouldn't ignore the books and comics, unlike Bungie. Characterization and canonical appearance wouldn't be changed at a whim, unlike what Bungie did with Truth and the Brutes.

Except you guys are making the same mistakes Bungie did, only on a larger scale. You're treating the Bungie-era canon with the same vehement ambivalence that Bungie reserved for the books and games they didn't produce. And when you aren't twisting and stretching to make the story threads connect, you offer halfhearted excuses that a seven-year-old child wouldn't buy. Stuff like "The Chief's suit looks radically different because of better graphics available to us."

If I ask one thing of you guys, as writers, it's just for enough honesty to come out and say "we'd rather do our own thing, so please treat our media as a reboot of Halo."