: As for the rest, either you make as Grizzlei said MGS-level stupefying
: cutscenes, or you put in clues, streamline things, and assume your
: audience has a brain to make connections, because otherwise any game is
: going to start collapsing under the weight of trying to cater to lowest
: common denominators of players.

This seems a little extreme.

I agree with the OP that Halo 4 in particular could have done better clarifying the state of the universe - or rather, attempt to do so at all. It wouldn't have taken much: at the end of "Infinity", Chief could ask Del Rio what the deal is with the renewed hostility with the Covenant. Then Del Rio could roll his eyes and sigh that Chief would dare be out of the loop, and explain through gritted teeth that this is one of many newly-formed groups of ex-Covenant, not affiliated with the Arbiter. Two lines of dialogue, 30 extra seconds tops. Hardly needs a movie-length cutscene to at least address.

I do agree, however, that we don't need to play dumb, or assume the audience is completely clueless. Say there's a newly-minted 14 year-old Halo fan whose first game was Halo 4. It's not like there aren't thousands of official and unofficial videos getting people up to speed on the Halo story, just a google search away. The lore isn't especially complicated, and not terribly hard to catch up on.

And as long as we're being realistic, I imagine that most of the people who pick up Halo 5 will the sorts who play every new shooter, then trade it in for the next one. They may or may not even notice that Blue Team are new characters, and if they do they're not going to care. And that's if they make it through more than two campaign missions before moving on to multiplayer.