It was a Halo highlight. Just like the moment her theme plays when Cortana appears in Halo: Reach.
Halo can be awesome, I so want this to be awesome.
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Halo remains the best CGI action movie story ever and maybe the best action adventure.
Star Wars quality stuff in the early days and then somehow it just started to suck?
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Because by the end of Halo 3 the story was pretty much wrapped up? There’s barely a franchise in any game universe that survives a reboot with the love and playability intact.
I think that’s why Reach worked and 4 and 5 didn’t work as well, because it added to the legend, it didn’t wander off.
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Reach was wonderful. ODST was good. 4 and 5 were lost in bad storytelling. They acknowledged between 3 and 4 that they needed to restart the story. They failed.
Then 5 tried to toss a shadow over the Chief?
S-117 has saved humanity so many times it was simply wrong to try and throw him under a bus to save your own asses. it failed. Hire some writers and find someone with a story that they are excited to tell – 5 was not a good story and did not honor the series. It drove the failure of four hard into the ground.
This game has a lot of ground to make up, but so much of the Halo games and universe has been wonderful.
I agree, Reach was great, even though you knew the ending was tragic, and ODST was good because it showed what it was like for the soldiers who weren’t superhero Spartans.
It is a universe with lot of potential; here’s hoping this one manages to get a little magic back. Give us a story we want to finish, not just shiny new enemies.
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S-312 is perhaps even more awesome than the Chief. I have immense respect for Noble 6 and PRAISE TO THE FSM they have not tried to bring him back – their story is sad but proud. He may have been the last great Halo character addition to the universe via the games?
Pretty much. The only other character that I remember from 5 is Buck, but then he was from ODST anyway. Who wants to play as Locke…?
I’m getting confused by all this talk about the story of Halo games. I thought the story was: get guns, shoot things. How did they mess that up with a reboot?
I kid, I kid.
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Locke is _cool, but they made a mistake making him a deuteragonist in a game that was a sequel to a book that absolutely nobody read. A game in which you play as a “regular” human tasked with taking down Gen 1 and Gen 2 rogue squadrons and Spartans would be cool.
Instead, we got a weird love triangle in a story about a self-destructive relationship due to early onset of Alzheimer’s.
Halo, a series in which you play as the good guys, alongside a friend, became Halo, a series in which you chase after your dementia-suffering ex in an attempt to rekindle a flame.
“A cyborg’s love for his USB stick will save the galaxy.”
Doesn’t sound awesome… 
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Kind of like how they should have stopped after RotJ? 
<ducks, runs>
King actually has a few thousand employees (which, granted, would make up a single digit number of AAA dev teams) and about a dozen studios. They probably churn out dozens of games a year, almost all of which sink without making the slightest cultural ripple (whereas every Activision/Blizzard game thrusts itself into the popular consciousness with a splash). And while AAA games spend more money on advertising than developing, I suspect well over 90% of King’s actual operating budget is marketing and monetization strategies for the few games they make that don’t immediately disappear. So there are still costs, just not so much for the actual games.
But that’s still far more sustainable than spending a quarter billion dollars to launch one game. All it takes is one solid failure to wipe out the entire company once it gets that ridiculous.
Yeah, I was kidding about King. I imagine most of their money comes from extremely little work, but like anything, they are not able to predict which little bit of work is going to make the money, so they need to do a lot of work.
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It’s more or less true, though. Those runaway hits from small studios (Candy Crush, Angry Birds, Minecraft) get made for zero money (the development and original marketing budget are less than a rounding error for a AAA game’s budget). The studio then expands and spends almost all of its money trying to replicate the success/find new ways of making money from the original game.
Which is sort of how game development used to work in general - spend (relative to modern budgets) very little money to make a whole bunch of games, hoping one of them is successful enough to pay for all the other failures. Studios could survive quite well off one hit or several minor successes. That sometimes works for mobile games, where one person really can make a game, but not at all for PC/console. Even with small dev teams, there are so many games out there, one successful game (unless it’s an outlier) won’t make enough to pay for many (or any) failures, especially if it’s a AAA game. So it’s all about endless sequels (and desperate monetization strategies for online games).
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