: Time moves on...

You can't go back. You can't undo five or six years of continuity with a reboot, because nobody actually likes reboots. You can't go back to the way Halo used to be and make it as popular as it used to be, because Halo has changed. The old fans have gotten older. They've drifted away, because their tastes have changed or because 343i dropped the ball when they tried to cater to those tastes.

: If you want Joe to fix things then I assume that you are talking about story
: problems but where would he start? Does he throw away all the 343 stuff?
: Where do things go after Halo 3?

: It was nice that the Chief went to sleep like King Arthur. Would you like
: some halo without the Chief for a while? I liked ODST and didn't miss the
: Chief. I'm not saying that I dislike the character it's just a little
: disappointing that he is put away only to come back in the very next game.
: There must be other good smaller-scale stories to tell in the haloverse.

How about another ODST game starring Alpha Nine? It starts out in a makeshift hospital room with Buck congratulating the Rookie on surviving a Mauler bayonet to the jaw, and wishing him a swift recovery. Then Dare calls. ONI is short on muscle and she needs Alpha Nine for another job. Covenant hardware is accumulating all over Africa as scavengers pick the battlefields clean. Hundreds of thousands of tons of Covenant technology is flowing into ONI warehouses and back alley weapon shops to be sorted and examined.

And somewhere in Cairo, someone is killing all the weapon dealers.

: What would it have been like to be a human in the post Halo 3 universe if the
: human race hadn't somehow, magically, rebounded and became oober in a few
: short years.

: What was Bungie's number? 200 million people left alive on Earth? With only
: that plus some scattered colonies: we would NEED Sangheli allies. We would
: be small fry, not on the frontline of Elite/Brute/Prophets conflict.

"Meh. Boring. Let's go see what the Forerunner are doing."
-343i

: There could be human and elite ships protecting the Ark portal and allied
: visits to Forerunner sites with a small number of engineers plus
: reclaimers.

I rather like the idea of the Ark Portal being disabled for now. It's just too important and too much of a game-changer to re-enter the story too soon. I'd even put the kibosh on finding new Halos for a while. Assume that they're evenly distributed throughout the galaxy, and we've already destroyed the two closest to Earth and Covenant territory. Oops. =P

: What happens to the prophets? Who would give them shelter? What do they have
: to offer the brutes now that their religion is seen to be a lie? I don't
: think that brutes respect weakness. :-)

"We are the only ones with a complete understanding of our technology. Your warships, your weapons, the food processors that feed your colonies, all of it relies on us to continue. And now that we can drop the pretense that our technology is handed down by the gods, why don't we improve that armor you're wearing?"