: What is obvious to some is not necessarily obvious to all- same with the more
: challenging ones.

It took me over a year to hunt down all the non-Legendary Data Pads in Reach. There's no way I'm some sort of savant at finding hidden content.

: I enjoyed the inside story for 343GS in CEA. I was especially intrigued by
: the 'visitors' that crashed on the ring before the Covenant found it. I
: feel it added well to the story and I really liked the stuff with the
: flood. Exploring 343GS rampancy was pretty cool.

Yes, those terminals were great, as a standalone product. The one about Captain Keyes was absolutely great. But you can't tell me that you don't remember the discussions this forum had about the flawed design of the HCEA terminals?

I called the first one a mistake because it basically broke the narrative of the others. Are the HCEA terminals something that's actually discovered by the Chief? Then why doesn't he or Cortana alert the bridge crew to the fact that "Hey, we're being contacted by someone friendly!" And if 343 Guilty Spark learns that the Pillar of Autumn is crewed by humans by logging on and browsing through their history, why does he muse "Human history, is it? Fascinating." in the later levels?

As for the rest, I hope you don't mind if I let Kermit do the talking for me.

: Halo 4's terminals would have been better received had they not required the
: player to exit the game to view them-

True. Then they would have only been sophomoric and poorly conceived.

: So, I'll agree that their
: implementation was botched, but I don't agree that their content was
: pointless to the main story. IT WAS the main story.

I never said that they were pointless. In fact, given how integral they were to the original story, they shouldn't have been hidden terminals at all.

: No. It isn't. It's not better or worse. It depends on the content, or what
: you want to leave open to interpenetration by the reader \ viewer.

0.o

: This is why you hear people almost universally say that a movie adaptation of
: a novel is not as good as the book itself- why? Because what you see on
: the screen is never as good as your imagination.

Yes, precisely!

: Michael Bay's Optimus Prime acts and sounds like my Optimus Prime, but he
: sure doesn't look like my Prime.

I never grew up with Transformers, so I really can't see what Micheal Bay ruined.

: I just hear lazy.

You want to hear lazy? Listen to Dan Ayoub talk about how boring it is to read text in a game.

: Yup. I said that above. Again, your imagination is always going to be better.
: Some stones have to be overturned to advance the story.

You're not advancing the story, you're butchering it to harvest the organs.
Nothing about Halo's story dictated that we'd need to meet the Forerunners next. Nothing dictated that we'd need to meet them in the flesh.

Don't excuse 343i's half-assed attempt at showing the Forerunners with "This is how it had to be."

: Really? See, again, I don't think the Halo 4 terminals are great. But, I
: don't think they're terrible.

I'm talking about feel here. I'm not saying that the Halo 3 terminals were as well-written and important as the Iliad, I'm saying that they had that timeless feel, something that drove home how ancient the Forerunner's war with the Flood was.

: I also don't think the Halo 3 terminals are
: great either, I mean, not great like you say they are. They were
: interesting, but I certainly didn't salivate over them like you seem to,
: and neither did most other average gamers.

I'm not salivating over them. I'm holding them up as a good way to do what 343i failed at.

: That might make you and I and other fans here reel in terror, but hey, the
: average person flat out doesn't like Halo like we like Halo. They don't
: give two shits about the extended universe, they just care about Master
: chief and pwning noobs.

The terminals are not there for them, no more than Mass Effect's Codex was, or the audio journals in Bioshock.

: But how "hidden" do you want things to be, exactly?

I felt like Reach's data pads were a good mix of difficulty. It just took me a long time to find some of them because my initial assumptions were incorrect (And because New Alexandria is frickin' huge).

: Did you play through Arkham Asylum?

Not yet. I'll get around to it one of these years.

: Do you know about the hidden room in the Warden's
: office and how no gamers found it for like a year after it came out, and
: the developers really WANTED people to find it because it hinted to the
: next game?

That's awesome! Tragic, really, but still awesome.

: See, if you hide that content too well, people won't find it, or they'll go
: through the games code and take the fun out of finding it.

Like the Pelican and Falcon on New Alexandria.

To be honest, hiding things too well rarely happens. I mean, Hell, have you seen some of the radio clues Valve gave out about Portal 2? The fan community, working together, decoded the clues with some obscure recording instrumentation and cryptoanalysis.

: How bout dat Hayabus armor amirite?

Man, that crap was ugly.

: If it really bothered me and other people as much as it bothers you, we'd
: stop buying their products.

If this was the only thing 343i was doing wrong, it wouldn't even come close to turning me off the Haloverse.

: It still boggles my mind here that people would waste more energy on posting
: about things they hate than going somewhere else to find something they
: enjoy more.

Because I'm an engineer.
I'm an engineer who hopes to be a published author one day, and you can learn much more from a failure than you can from a success.

It's like I've said before, I can't help picking apart the media I consume. I can't help but adjust the pacing or rewrite the dialog in my head. When something comes along where I am too entertained to do that, I enjoy it thoroughly. Halo 4 was pretty much the opposite.

I still come around here because I enjoy reading what others have to say, even if I disagree with it.

: As Louis Wu said that Cody miller said: "if a game franchise has moved
: away from what made you love it, and you have a few years' experience
: telling you that nobody's listening to you when you say that... maybe it's
: time to find another game."

And here's the other side of the coin. I don't think there's a science fiction franchise out there for me, not in television or video games. StarCraft is a joke, Mass Effect capsized, Destiny has yet to sink its hooks into me, and Titanfall seems to be bereft of narrative. Halo comes close, and I can still talk about some of the good stuff 343i manages to pull off.

: (I love when I reply to a wall-o-text with my own wall, haha.
: Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh.)

Thank you. I enjoyed reading and replying to it.

: I'm thankful I'm not a Star Wars fan.

I'm not a Star Wars fan either. I just really like the original movies and a handful of the books.