I can't be the only one who has noticed that 343i is very good at talking up their stories, but the execution always falls short. Always. Now, we could bitch and moan that, say, the Didact went down like a chump and got shelved before he could prove his mettle as the Chief's nemesis... or we could push for change. We could push for the current crop of writers to step aside in favor of whoever has been writing the advertisements for the current generation of Halo games.

Take Halo 5. The core problem with the story isn't that it was bogged down in details from the EU or that the villain was Necrotana. The problem is that whoever wrote Hunt the Truth wasn't writing for the game. The problem is that someone is writing this stuff that Frankie and Bonnie and all those other guys say on-camera when talking to Gamasutra or whoever, and that stuff is game of the year material, but that's not what's actually in the game.

As of Halo Wars 2, this is still the case, although it's considerably downplayed from Halo 5. From what I hear, Atriox isn't the threat that they promised he'd be. If you promise the cross between Grand Admiral Thrawn and Mao Zedong, you'd better deliver Mao ZeThrawn. What we got was just another big angry Brute.

: I'm sure that some of them are nice guys and all but they just can't write a
: good campaign. And if they can't do that then there is no use for them.
: Locke was their chance of introducing a new character who wasn't a blank
: shell. They failed. Blue team should have been awesome - they weren't

Cortana should not have come back. She did.
Halo 5 shouldn't have been poorly-written HaloXAge of Ultron fanfiction. It was.
The Great Schism shouldn't have been compressed into part of one game and less than half a novel. It was.

: 343 needs to concentrate on gameplay above story and they need to understand
: the story telling limitations of a first person shooter and the
: limitations of the Halo AI.

Running around the plains of Africa with a squad of Marines in tow is awesome.
Marines are expendable. They barely have names in Halo:Reach. That's part of what makes them so fun. You don't really expect them to save your ass. If one dies to his own stupidity, so what?

Noble Team... not so much. I think Nightfall could have been salvaged by making Jun snipe enemies from off the map, except when he teleports in (Offscreen) to backstab a Covenant soldier. The others were... not great, but not bad so long as they weren't driving.

Not that I paid much attention to the gameplay sections of Halo 5, but maybe the problem could have been alleviated by simplifying the maps? Remove the clutter and the rubble and smooth everything out to simplify pathfinding? Couldn't hurt, and my personal rule for maps in first person shooters is that unless it's waist high, your character should be able to walk over it without stopping.

: Write a simple story with simple themes and archetypes, have the player's
: interests coincide with the protagonist's.

: Ditch invulnerable, story meaningful, companions. Halo 3
: Gameplay was always best when Arbiter fell asleep.
: ODST
: Not particularly marred by this problem. You spent a lot of time alone and
: your allies tended to turn up just as horde mode was engaged.
: Reach
: Kat should never drive.
: Jorge could be left in the first hanger bay. You could don a backpack in that
: shield generator level, get into the truck and drive him off of the cliff.
: He wouldn't die so he wouldn't respawn and he wouldn't shoot down the
: Banshees you were trying to hijack.

: But doing these things just mitigates the suck and a good game shouldn't have
: any suck.
: Halo 5
: Spartan companions that couldn't keep themselves alive and couldn't climb a
: waist high ledge to revive you.

: Bungie and 343 have had several games to try to make the friendly AI worthy
: of being called Spartans. Accept that it can't be done and move on. Also,
: kick ass allies leave little for you to do but could work if they were
: treated like Scorpions or power weapons. Its nice to break up the
: difficulty with rare stretches were you murderize all in sight.

Damn right.

: more chief?
: Would be nice but ODST and Reach didn't suffer from not enough Chief.

The Chief should still be floating in space.

: But, if you're going to put Chief in a game, then you had better make good
: use of him.

Whatever happened to this whole "Exploring the Chief's humanity" theme? I refuse to believe that it was abandoned because a minority of fans complained that the Chief was talking too much.