: Yep. For a while in the H3 era we got stuck on "oh there's this massive
: cache of technology! But we have to destroy it to deny the Covenant
: getting access. We won, but we're still on the run!" stories, and it
: got pretty played out. The status quo had to shift.

Yeah, the Halo universe isn't well-constructed for stories set during the Human-Covenant War. There's no communication between the UNSC and the Covenant, no negotiations that can take place. There's no real lasting victories for the UNSC to win, because this group of refugees is only escaping to be glassed another day. Readers want victories, and it's really hard to make them care about saving this one group of refugees.

That leaves fights over Forerunner artefacts, which is constrained by the status quo the Bungie games. The UNSC doesn't know much about the Forerunner, so artefacts can't be recovered by the UNSC. Readers want the good guys to be victorious, so the Covenant can't win the artefacts either.

That status quo can be a real pain, by the way. We know that the Covenant didn't know where to find the Halos until they followed Cortana to Alpha Halo, so that one artefact in Broken Circle was doomed the moment it displayed a hologram of a Halo. The UNSC doesn't know about the Flood, so the Spirit of Fire can't return to UNSC space until after the war.

: I can understand the people upset with Halo 5's story because they had hoped
: the ramifications of humanity taking over would become a prime focus for a
: game; instead we seem to have brought a rather sudden end to that
: hegemony.

No, I'm just upset that this Forerunner stuff is blocking my view of the continuing collapse of the Covenant Empire. =P

: As is though, the story going forward might be humans on the verge of defeat
: united against a fanatical group of AI, all while trying to uncover the
: mysteries of a long lost civilization whose technology could give us an
: edge in the war for our survival. :P

And here we have what I feel is the real problem with 343i's games. It's the high stakes. By the time 343i rolled around, we've already saved the universe three times. Four, if you count Halo Wars. Fatigue has got to set in eventually, and I think it has. We get jaded with save-the-world plotlines and long for smaller-scale stories that give you time to breathe and enjoy the characters.

Contrast Hunters in the Dark with Last Light. Hunters was about exploring the Ark, which was ruined by the "Gotta get there now and cancel the countdown" plot. In fact, the Monitor's plan to destroy all life in the galaxy could have been removed and the book would be greatly improved.

In Last Light, it doesn't really matter if the Ancilla falls into the hands of the Gao (Gaoian? Gaoite?) government. ONI will just keep working at the problem, sending in teams of Spartans or undercover agents until they recover the Ancilla. But Last Light didn't need some world-ending threat to make its plot matter. It was all in the characters and how they played off each other.

I'm not sure when, it could have been before Halo 4, but I think it was after, but one of the suits at Microsoft sat down for an interview and said that Halo couldn't keep running on save-the-galaxy plots. You have to conjure bigger and bigger threats to keep the new bad guys credible, and eventually the stories all start to sound the same. I think there was a promise to focus on smaller character-driven stories, but that might be wishful thinking on my part.

Oh well. I hope Troy Denning gets called back to write another novel, and not necessarily a sequel to Last Light.