: "Sterile" is a good word to describe it. 343i's take on Halo feels
: more safe, sanitized and committee-driven than Bungie's ever did. And I'm
: not just talking about the games. 343's post-war universe has a very
: stable status quo which means they can keep churning out serial stories
: with their stock cast without threatening or meaningfully affecting the
: overall setup. With the Bungie-era games and novels you felt that things
: actually happened and moved the universe and characters forward, even
: though the games didn't always connect with the EU as well as they
: could've.

: I mean, I like 343's basic idea that the expanded universe and games should
: be more connected but this feels like a waste when most of the plots and
: characters from the previous expanded universe have been all but tossed
: away. I was looking forward to reading more about the adventures of Dr.
: Halsey, Mendez and the newly-reinforced Blue Team where Nylund left them
: and then what we get is one half of a book which basically unravels
: everything that was exciting about Nylund's setup and manages to mangle
: many of the characters almost beyond repair. But that hardly matters since
: most of them haven't been heard of since. Or the whole deal with the
: Elite-Brute feud that was supposed to be going on that's basically
: forgotten about. And a ton of other plot threads left flaccidly dangling
: in the breeze, never to be revisited.

: Moving beyond that the post-war era just lacks the believability and tension
: we were treated to earlier. Everything is cheap and nothing has an element
: of sacrifice to it anymore. 343i's post-war UNSC is so far removed from
: the idea of a broken and battered civilization recovering from a war with
: technologically superior xenocidal enemy it's not even funny. After Halo 3
: the UNSC apparently gained infinite resources from... somewhere, meaning
: that none of their massive investments or losses matter at all anymore. A
: few Spartans died? Oh well, we have a thousand more, with top-tier armor
: for all of them, along with an insane selection of incredibly specific
: purpose-built variants. This infinite industrial capability would've come
: in real handy a few months back when they had to equip a few hundred
: SPARTAN-IIIs, but then that was when the basic laws of cause and effect
: still functioned.

I'm a fan of the new Halo direction admittedly, but I do agree there are some parts that are generalized for the public at large. The unfortunate thing is I think we all need to get used to that happening a lot more these days, as even Bungie has taken that approach with their expensive, glorified mobile-game grind.

- MacGyver10