If the coronavirus infection pandemic and the new financial crisis do not make their corrections, a new console awaits us at the end of this year. Xbox Series Xthe shooter will have to sell Halo: infinite. PR machine Microsoft already started to work: detailed information about the “hardware” of the box was announced Phil Spencer, and partners of the IT giant introduced a line of toys for Infinite. However, the most important thing is still incomprehensible – what about the plot? This is a sore point for a series that has clearly gone astray under guardianship. 343 industries.
Franchise Halo is a perfect example of what’s wrong with the entertainment industry. Starting life as a strategy and exclusive Mac, the series came under the control of Microsoft, which sought to turn the history of the Spartan John 117 into a multimedia ram that will knock down arrogance with Sony. Thanks Bungie the players got a truly revolutionary shooter that changed the rules of the game on the console market and simultaneously pushed the industry forward.
At the same time, the developers managed to stay on course for a long time. Yes, books and comics came out, but they complemented the ENT, while the plot outline of the main games was simple and understandable to the mass player.
But over time, the series has a tradition of hiding pieces of the plot of the main product in additional books and comics. Just remember the movie “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith“, which didn’t explain where Anakina Skywalkerand a scar appeared on his face. Or how exactly the chancellor Palpatine was captured by the general Grievous, and why the latter constantly coughed. It was proposed to learn all this from comics, books and a cartoon. Gendy tartakovsky.
The number of additional works gradually increased, but the scale of the disaster increased after the departure of Bungie, when the studio was formed 343 industries. It was at this point that marketing finally began to dominate the story, which at the same time became overly complicated. Now the series was completely controlled by Microsoft, and this happened at the moment when the company began to take positions.
Halo 4 was a great debut project of the new studio, but at the same time became a clear demonstration of errors. The emphasis on graphics is to the detriment of artificial intelligence and the scale of the levels. Trying to shake multiplayer in an era Call of duty – to the detriment of the basic principles.
And, of course, the plot. On the one hand, the developers decided to push the universe forward and presented a luxurious performance with beautiful animation and emotional scenes, but on the other hand, they were afraid to lose the audience. The result is what many people like to call nedoremeyk. And this is also one of the characteristic features of the modern entertainment industry. You could see it again in “Star wars“: when they take a proven formula and carefully repeat it, adding small ruffles in an attempt to mask the foundation and put pressure on nostalgia.
And although Halo 4 does not look like a complete carbon copy Combat evolvedbut the borrowings are obvious. The developers still tried to promote their ideas. And it’s not the Prometheans, whom the authors gave birth literally in agony. We are talking about the story of John 117. In Bungie games, the protagonist rarely showed emotion and barely talked, apart from his relationship with AI Cortana. 343 Industries decided to change that by humanizing the protagonist, who was always a tool in the hands of the United Nations Space Command, originally created to suppress riots on distant worlds.
At the very beginning of the game, it turns out that the life of Cortana came to an end, because of which she literally begins to go crazy. Parallel to this, there is another line – the obsolescence of John himself. The players are shown a new generation of Spartans: instead of the children stolen from their parents, who were subjected to torture and inhuman experiments, ordinary soldiers came who “pumped”.
Then there is a conflict between the captain of the ship Infinity Andrew Del Rio and John 117. The latter is ready to ignore the orders of the higher leadership in order to save the only close friend – Cortana.
The severance of ties with command and the obsolescence of “unstable” John are the central line that 343 Industries wanted to develop. Cortana sacrifices himself, the main villain dies, and the main character has even fewer reasons to submit to earthly command.
The introductory video Halo 4 is also talking about the desire to replace Chif Halo 2where a foreign intelligence agent (Oni) is introduced into the plot Jameson Lockewho asks Referee. He also received a separate (and quite lousy) series, which indicated a desire to cement his position in central history.
All this was a smooth eyeliner to Halo 5: Guardians. The advertising campaign of the game painted approximately the following picture: John-117 goes AWOL right during some incident that claimed many lives, the earth command accuses him of betrayal, invents a tale for the public about the “death” of the Earth’s savior, and sends Locke’s detachment, consisting of from the fourth generation of the Spartans. Everything sounds pretty logical.
But the game itself almost completely ignored it! It seems that they advertised a completely different project. At the same time, a terrible thing happened – those advantages that were laid down in Halo 4 were depreciated thanks to the comics and the reworked script of the fifth part.
Cortana is dead? No, she is alive, healthy and has become a new villain. The main character went AWOL? He discovered a serious threat that poses a danger to all of humanity, and Agent Locke has no particular reason to conflict with the Spartan. Moreover, in the comics it turns out that the main villain of the fourth part has survived. The question is, why? This permanently destroys any value of Halo 4.
In this situation, the most annoying ad campaign called Hunt the truthin which the players were hinted that the leadership of the UNSC seeks to denigrate John-117 and hide the truth. Apparently, marketers and PR people adhered to the original plan of the scriptwriters, but in the end all the videos turned out to be a complete lie.
As for Halo 5 as a whole, its scenario can be described with the word “idiocy”. Despite the fact that Locke was paid much more attention than John, his storyline looks ridiculous: a fool in the company of the same fools rushes after the great hero, and the advertised epic confrontation comes down to an absurd minute brawl.
Moreover, the seams of the history rewritten at the last moment of the story are too noticeable, when the same character already knows about heroes at one level, and sees for the first time on the next.
The very concept of a new generation of Spartans is also dubious. Why are they better? 343 Industries provided an explanation for the augmentation, but it is very lazy (especially the passage about “bone elongation”). As a result, Locke and the company are the same size cabinets as John and friends, who lengthened these bones at an age when puberty occurs and the osteoarticular system grows.
Something went wrong. Presumably, this is due to permutations inside the studio – the team that previously worked on the cooperative mode was responsible for Halo 5 Spartan Ops. The latter was supposed to be a service game, and the plans were Napoleonic. But the players did not appreciate him, so only the first season was completed. And no wonder, because it was a dull shooting of waves on pieces of old maps with a boring plot.
If Bungie’s works tried to advance their story, 343 Industries dumps a ton of new characters and forcibly tries to get players to read various encyclopedias, articles, comics, books and so on. At the same time, the filling itself was greatly degraded. If a “Boundary Fall” Erica Nilanda was a pleasant entertaining sai-fay, then from a later waste paper my head naturally hurts, and the proposed information sounds like notes of a madman.
In such conditions, the question arises: what will happen to Halo: infinite? 343 Industries says the game will be a soft reboot of the series, but what exactly is meant by this is hard to understand. However, there are already several fan theories, some of which have been confirmed by a book synopsis published on the Web. Troy Denning “Shadows of the Reach“which will go on sale in September 2023.
According to one of the assumptions, in the end of Halo 5 players saw one of the Installations in the Epsilon Eridanu system. And the description of the book just says that the detachment of John-117 will return to the planet Limit (Reach), the surface of which was destroyed by the Covenant. Spartans will have to infiltrate the CASTLE base to seize materials related to the doctor Katherine Halsey (the head of the program for the creation of the Spartans of the second generation, the “mother” of Chif and the prototype of Cortana) and which can help humanity in the fight against Cortana. Some alien forces will interfere with the heroes.
The problem is that it cannot be said yet whether penetration of the Limit will be somehow reflected in the game itself, given the love of 343 Industries for waste paper. As for the goal, the Spartans apparently intend to requisition the Halsey’s cloned brains left at the base. It was on the basis of Halsey that Cortana was created. However, an alternative option is also possible in the form of obtaining the coordinates of the Capital – the giant space city of the Forerunner Maethrillian (in the image on the right).
Also, two points are not entirely clear: on which Halo the events of the game will unfold and who will act as the enemy. Several options are available:
- The Halo: Infinite trailer shows Installation 04 – Halo, where the Halo: Combat Evolved events unfolded. The debris shown in one of the clips reinforces this theory.
- The trailer showed Installation 07 – Halo in the area of the Sagittarius Sleeve, which was three times larger than the standard ones, but due to the damage received, its diameter was reduced. The Forerunner’s AI is called “Beggar Slope“who attacked their hosts after infection Grave Mind (the collective mind of parasitic organisms known as Flood (Flood)).
- The trailer showed Installation 4C – the ring that appeared in the game Halo wars 2. According to the plot, the Ark, which is a kind of shipyard for the construction of Halo, was attacked by a brutal commander Atriox – leader of the Exile movement. As a result, the army of people managed to lure a significant part of the enemy’s forces into the freshly built Koltsoy and throw them into open space. At the end of the game, the Halo is torn out of subspace by one of the Guardians of Cortana. This decision may also allow the return to the new part of Halo Brutus enemies and the Flood.
In any case, 343 Industries still runs the risk of completely confusing ordinary players with their unhealthy desire to expand the universe with books and comics. And this is fraught with the loss of scenario integrity Halo: Infinite. Given the information about the constant staff turnover, we can draw a disappointing conclusion: the studio again painfully gives birth to the project, which in the past two times only went to the detriment.
Halo’s main issue: Infinite is a lot like the last trilogyStar wars“from Disney. And here and there is a saga of three projects, which draws to the bottom of the lack of a clear story line that would stitch and cement all three parts into a single structure. New screenwriters carelessly treat cult heroes, directing the plot somewhere in the wrong direction. There is no clear control over the series and a single view of the developers on the available material. Therefore, the result may be a complete collapse of the franchise and a blow to the new console Xbox Series X, which Infinite must sell.
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