Get rid of the Guyver armor, and I might bring myself to care about him.

: - Blur Studios are producing Halo 2 Anniversary's Terminals.

Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. Hope they give you a decent budget this time.

However, looking over 343i's plans for the H2A terminals, I can't get excited about them because they're probably going to repeat the mistakes of the Halo 4/CEA terminals.

Short CGI videos are expensive as Hell to make, so they have to be easy to find if they're going to be 'hidden' content. Hence the bright flashing light giving away the terminals' positions in CEA, and the ridiculously easy-to-locate* terminals in Halo 4. There were even achievements handed out for finding them.

In Halo 3 and Reach, there was nothing saying "Look! Over here!" with the datapads or the terminals. The only way a new player will find out about them is by stumbling across them. Hunting them all down became a community effort. I guess ODST's terminals were given away with flashing lights and honking horns, but they also existed as a part of the game's narrative.

On a similar note, the more that is invested into making the terminals, the harder it is to justify telling a side-story or delivering background information. I think Anniversary got off scot-free, because it already had a self-contained story. 343i only had opportunity to fill in some backstory with 343GS's logs, and they even managed to mess that up in the first level. But in Halo 4, some genius thought that semi-hidden terminals stored outside the game were the perfect way to explain who the bad guy was. That's information that belongs in the story proper, no matter how nice the terminal videos look.

Finally... well, let's be honest. Text is a far better medium for delivering information than video. You can peruse and reread passages of text at will, but you have to start a video all the way from the beginning. Pure text also lets you focus on the information that needs to be delivered, so you can have a philosophical conversation between the Librarian and Didact without worrying about what Forerunners wear or even look like.

I guess, in short, reading the Halo 3 terminals felt like discovering fragments of a lost epic like the Iliad. Watching the Halo 4 terminals felt like watching a bad soap opera.

*I found all but the last one on my first playthrough, and only missed that last one because I stopped caring. Maybe they were easier for me to find because I tend to scavenge around the maps, but I doubt it.

Also: Why did nobody tell me that THIS existed?