HALO: We WERE Forerunner! 

I kinda wanna see your thoughts on Marathon and it’s story.

Out of curiosity will you be doing Halo 3's storyboards as well? I don't know if they're fully available or what your process is, but this series has been insanely fun to watch. I heard that the cut Halo 3 mission "Forerunner City" was also supposed to reveal that humans were forerunners, but it was cut for time. I also wonder if the mission Data Hive from ODST is named that not only because of the Superintendent and drone hives, but also as a reference to the cut data vault.

Metastability

@@gabethebabe3337 I’m still debating it. All of Lee Wilson’s pieces for Halo 3 were effectively “lighting tests,” and not actually storyboards - and everything he released pretty closely mirrors what we already received in the finished game. Basically, putting it all together would be a ~10 minute video effectively recreating scenes that are already in Halo 3.

So there were so many retcons that were made only to allow halo 4 to happen. Personally, I thought much of the fan base praised too much of the newer books/ were too optimistic in their view of the books. Could you make a review of the newer ones?

Truly, a subversion of expectations that _succeeded_ . 😑

Ironically you now have 343 likes because of me. My apologies.

In 343s lore the Covenant were basically right...

Its so bad when you think further about it. Why is humanity as a whole able to access Forerunner tech if they were supposed to be a technologically peer hostile race? Isn't the whole Contact Harvest scene now retroactively mistaken, with the Prophets being justified for declaring war on humanity for the wrong reasons - instead of humanity disproving their religion, they instead validate the war by being the ancient enemies of their gods - and thus the wacky trio simply got their casus belli wrong? And worst of all is that the retcon could have worked - I read and actually kinda liked Cryptum - but Halo 4 kinda killed that.

That and making the humans and Forerunners separate species entirely nullifies the whole reason the Covenant waged war to begin with. The whole reason they waged war is because humans essentially read as living Forerunners on their scanners, negating the key point of the Covenant faith that all the Forerunners - the "worthy" - ascended to godhood when the Halos were fired. That some Forerunners remained meant that somehow the Forerunners themselves were not worthy, and thus were not gods. If humans are just another species that some of the Forerunners "chose" to inherit all their technology, then why did the Covenant ever wage war with them? In 343's lore, that means the Covenant waged war over a misunderstanding of a misunderstanding.

@@thecynicaloptimist1884 It was never "just" a misunderstanding; it was always a targeted conspiracy, Truth, Regret, and Mercy deliberately take control of the Covenant in the first place because they know this revelation would tear the Covenant apart. It was easier to manipulate the entire Covenant based on their religion than reconcile with the fact that their entire faith (down to the "we fire Halo to become Gods") had always been a lie.

same here m8 🙋‍♂

Absolutely. This video is a masterpiece, showing all the receipts for the slow poisoning of Halo lore and rightfully dunking on everyone involved.

I was thinking about this ever since he was confirmed to be back on the project. Bro probably cringes at how someone who was just a low level writer and community manager became lead of something he worked on and totally ruined it. Probably breaks his heart every time he looks at it. But then again I’m willing to bet he mentally clocked out way back in 2012 when halo 4 dropped and he seen how butchered the game’s story was.

​@@EggEnjoyerat least je got to do what he wanted to do with Halo, and only the ideas for continuation he left to others was ruined, Destiny never really got off the ground, he never saw the proper vision for Destiny come to fruition

@@peanutgallery4 Yeah Destiny is another story he had to watch get butchered. I forgot about that. I guess it’s just the name of the game, but man it’s gotta hurt. Especially since he can never tell that story or repurpose it in anyway.

@@EggEnjoyer Also he didn't mentally check out of Halo, he wrote another story in 2016 called Shadow of Intent which was post-war

@@EggEnjoyer I'm sure he's absolutely sobbing into his millions, seriously though I don't think he cares all that much, while i'm sure he's still a fantastic person I do think it's important for people to try and stay objective and nuanced in their perspectives towards game devs and lead authors/artists/writers etc... The Joseph Staton that worked on the original trilogy and slaved away hours and hours making Halo 2 in a cave with a box of scrap, is not the same person as the Joseph Staton that sold us Halo infinite with a thumbs up and a sparkling smile, he's been hardened and calloused by decades of work as a big staple name in a industry that's gone mainstream and cutthroat. I have great respect for the man and what he made and built, but we shouldn't let that turn into a weird parasocial relationship with what's essentially a name-brand as that's just as bad as what the 343 sycophants have become, and it's a really easy trap to fall into.

Thanks, man! I _considered_ adding that quote along with the Gravemind’s famous “I am a monument to all your sins,” but I felt like they were both too open to interpretation. The Halo community seems to have largely decided that the Hierarchs all have hypocritical names, so addressing Mercy’s final words as an ultimate display of mercy would be difficult for many to accept. I think Mercy’s dying quote is possibly my favorite from the original trilogy and I definitely agree with you!

@@C3_SABERTOOTH Definitely open to interpretation. I thought Mercy's quote was comparing Truth's mission to Regret's first incursion against Earth. Humanity had beaten back the first Prophet, but now the Covenant was arriving with a full can of whoop ass to make Reach look like a playdate. If Mercy is referring to what you guys are saying, that's even more intriguing.

@@sanchorim8014 Yeah. At face value, it sounds like a threat - but Regret didn’t go to Earth with the intention of killing humans; he went with the intention of starting the Great Journey. _“… And, this time, none of you will be left behind.”_

​@@sanchorim8014 Very true. I think that's what made the mystery so great, the vagueness of the evidence. Open to interpretation so as not to spell it out. Taken as a whole, it poetically hints at something. That's what I miss most now that the backstory us painstakingly spelled out - that feeling of almost knowing something lost to time. Honestly, hard evidence of what the forruners really were had to be the end of the story to pay off, because the not knowing was so satisfying. I think that was 343s biggest mistake really: thinking we needed all the answers

@@C3_SABERTOOTH i never looked at mercy's statement like that but now that you've mentioned it it actually makes way more sense than the alternatives

Jason Jones co-wrote Marathon with Alex Seropian and Greg Kirkpatrick. He was also project lead on Halo: CE and Halo 2, a tiny bit with Halo 3 (he wanted to pull a Half Life and didn't want to work on Halo 3 anymore). I think that's why the lore is rich and has so many references to other literature.

I love Abrahamic theology story notes in my science fiction. It’s just the cherry on top

Not to mention the villain of Abrahamic religion, Satan, led a rebellion with a third of the angles against God and His designs because he wanted be become like God and worshiped as God. He subverts humanity birthright as God's stewards of creation, leading a effort to kill all of humanity, by keeping them enslaved in sin and in ignorance of the truth separated from the source of life which is God through deception. And all out of jealousy of humanity being created in God's image. Sounds a lot like the Covenant doesn't it? :)

And then there's morons who unironically prefer 343's slop over actual good story-telling and say that the Forerunners being humans was "middle-school tier writing" and "so predictable".

@@OmegaF77 Marathon's writing is also fantastic. The veteran writers from the OG Bungie days working with "the rule of cool" and having old Arthurian and Abrahamic symbolism or motifs combined with sci-fi blew me away as a kid playing Bungie games for the first time. I loved Halo so much that I bought Marathon: Durandal and fell in love with the Marathon lore and universe too.

It's finished.

Dude, I really have to give you props for abandoning the familiar and embracing what you know is right. That is exceedingly rare, both when people are regarding fiction and reality.

I know that feeling you described in your first paragraph, I think I was 12 at the time myself when I was first playing through Halo 3 but i'd played the original Halo 1 and 2 obsessively throughout my young life (the Flood reveal of Halo CE marked my poor little 6 year old brain) and I was always trying to rewatch the cutscenes and pay attention to the characters and their motives... But I think it all caps off not even at the ending, but on the short journey to the control room, the same reconstructed control room, on a reconstruction of the very same ring you started this franchise on, and when that haunting looming choir fades in as the blizzard clears... You can just... You can *FEEL* that this is the culmination of a 100,000's years of history coming to an end, that every being that has ever lived in Halo's milky way is holding it's breath watching this moment, that your ancestors (the Forerunners) are watching, ready to see the ultimate judgement of their sacrifice, and Mendicant Bias's unseen final act of atonement.

Not single-handedly. He also had his 343 goons and stooges to follow him blindly.

Frank, Kiki, and Bonnie.

It’s funny how the one guy from bungie who has a chance of destroying the lore like this is the one who gets hired and promoted to lead the franchise

​@@tommurphy4770 Another Microsoft classic

Halos everywhere at the end of time

Imagine if you will just a brief moment, a cutscene of the Arbiter breaking down into an existential crisis as the waves of realization all come crashing in that the Prophets had had him personally murdering his own gods and he hadn't even realized, that he COULDN'T have realized... Never mind the fact this was cut from Halo 2, the fact it wasn't worked into Halo 3 somehow makes it even worse... Likely because Bungie wanted to course correct away from the Arbiter, the Covenant, and the Gravemind etc because there was a lot of 'controversy' surrounding those elements after Halo 2 back in the day, which is ridiculous since that's what's talked about the most in the original story these days as they've all aged like fine wine.

I don't see why that's a bad thing I'd rather it be another species than just humans

The only thing I can say to this playing devils advocate is that it doesn’t retcon this line because guilty spark actively thinks chief is the iso didactic at this point because he’s rampant or whatever. Him bringing up the line “last time you asked me” is him from a long time ago speaking to a forerunner so “something you’ve already done” makes sense either way cause to 343s lore guilty spark thinks he’s talking to a forerunner

@@mariobadia4553congrats to you. For people who grew up with this franchise we really enjoyed the original and more exemplary story.

@@joshuapurdy7065that’s lore that 343 added. Bungie never explains who or what 343 is talking to. Could just be Forerunners as a whole. TL;DR you’re explaining retcons with retcons. Also though, you’d still have to explain Truth and THE GRAVEMIND

@@djanthaz yes I know that that is 343 added lore but it was one of the few things they were able to make sense since they had a simple explanation for that particular thing within the retcon forerunners being different

act man skit for that was so funny

I disagree, what they did with the Forerunners recontextualized everything about Halo's story for the worse and ruined the entire motivation for the Prophets extermination of humanity, that is far worse than one character assassination

noble teams fate was already sealed in the first halo game which was bungies work bru

Cortana was slated to die ever since halo ce. Her 7 year until rampancy life expectancy was set in halo: the fall of reach in 2001. That doesn't mean that nobles actions where worthless, as cortana single handedly propelled the plot and ensured humanities survival many times over in the original trilogy. Neither her dying, not her turning evil takes any of the impact away that she already had on the universe, and therefore, any impact nobles actions had

@@MrMegaMetroid Did you watch the video? Rampancy is not ai schizophrenia nor a death sentence

For extra irony, it’s their own religious leaders, the high prophets who secretly knew the truth, who ordered the execution of their own gods. You don’t have to imagine it, that WAS the grand irony of Halo’s story.

That was the whole point. The Prophets discovered the truth, and it shattered their entire worldview. They couldn't reveal the truth because it would break the Covenant apart. And possibly they didn't want to believe it themselves. Better to let the secret die with humanity. And after all, if they were left behind after the supposed great journey, then surely they weren't worthy.

That's what it was.

It's not just that. The retcons basically justify the Covenant's decision since humanity was literally the enemy of their gods. Bravo 343...

​@nutyyyy Except now in their very own lore they created their own subfaction of San'Shyuum who still remember the Forerunners for being cockheads. Yeah, real good job 343, don't see how those guys wouldn't have put a major hole in the Covenant at all

Amazing heh? Im puting it directly into MS's incopentece and mismanagement skills...

@@TSEDLE333 honestly a lot of the shit around Halo is directly due to Microsoft meddling it’s baffling how Bungie managed to make it work with their interference and now I think I can see it happening with 343, except they’re allowing it unlike Bungie

Then you have dipshits(some of them being Halo RU-vidrs) blindingly going to their defense. 343 fanboys are partially responsible for why Halo has been down bad for a decade.

(Man's kicking an atom bomb that has been bugging me for YEARS) The cool but confused terminals regarding the activation, the forerunner trilogy contradicting said terminals with humans existing 200000 years ago, and the voi portal not being real. 343 guilty spark in the control room, telling us in combat evolved to ignore any notion of forerunners forgetting to leave behind inheritors. It has all bothered and rotted my brain after getting the "marathon man" achievement. The keyships being remote detonated sounds as wack, as forerunners not indexing themselves in anyway, and conveniently never speaking of it. Absurd little frankie fry and his writtings cursed me, with three canons to parse through, to make a book trilogy seem better than griffball!

Are we talking about Frank O’Conner or Kathleen Kennedy?

It's urinalist get it right.😊

The fact of the matter is that in order for the story of Halo to even work, humanity has to have SOME KIND of special connection with the Forerunners, full stop. That will naturally feel a little MarySue-ish no matter how you do it, but there are certainly better ways to do it than others. 343’s route is not one of those better ones, that’s for sure.

@@samlund8543 Humanity's "special connection" got them genocided on a scale we've never even seen in our current history, I really wouldn't call that Mary Sue-esque at all.

Humanity loses against the flood and must reset the universe to try again. Mary Sue's dont lose.

Lmao, that's fucking great.

Props to you for being willing to hear new information instead of being entrenched in your ways. I sick of being gaslight by 343i fans saying “yOu WaNt ThE sAmE gAmE” or “bUnGiE fAnBoY” despite also loving Halo Wars and the books prior to 2011.

@@alexanderrobins7497 Yeah, and I still like some of 343’s stuff, I just get it now that they obviously retconned stuff

I share this sentiment

So weak

I think 343 went through a 'industrialization period' trying to fatten up Halo with as much expansive lore as possible to provide the base for turning Halo into a multi-media franchise like Star Wars and the MCU - with very little critical thinking as to how this lore impacts the worldbuilding of Halo Sure theres a lot of detail, and thats what dazzles these subredditors, but like a painting detail is only effective when incorporated into a greater, structured harmony. 343 lore does not have that. Its trying to be sexy like star wars and marvel for the sake of it.

i got banned for saying one of the books were garbage

@@AimlessJourney its what i said but i got silenced for it lmao

That’s what happens when you hire people who hate Halo to work on a Halo game.

I had to rewatch the cutscene to catch that! "Trutch will finish what we started, and this time, none of will be left behind". Literally stating when the array goes off, no human will be left behind.

Or it implies he knows the Halos are weapons further indicating their desire to shape the galaxy in their own image.

Nah Thr prophets race and humans had a war long ago Maybe it relates to that

@@nolandderlugner1351 only in the post 343 canon is that true. Not the bungie canon

I will never understand the amount of praise 343 had for their narrative. Their narrative that resets with every game, where characters are killed/written off in comics/books, with plot threads that lead nowhere, with retcons that trivialize crucial plotpoints, etc etc.

And people say we need a reboot. We already had 3

@@jurassicarkjordanisgreat1778 The only way to really continue the franchise would have been ODST-style (or arguably Reach too) games focusing on non-Chief and non-mainline characters.

Sounds like the Disney Star Wars trilogy, ngl. Right down to being amazed people actually got paid to write it.

@@jurassicarkjordanisgreat1778 those were all half assed “soft reboots,” we need a hard reboot that picks up where Halo 3 left off with all of 343’s crap completely retconned our of existence.

Still pisses me off to this day, look at the halo show. I got those halo boots and my Dr today seen them and said oh is that from halo? I like that show. My eye twitched as he talked about it, 343i fans always make excuses even for the show, some make it out as if 343i had no control over the show.... Someone greenlit it.

Funnily enough 343 seems to have walked this back, implying the Forerunners are cousins to the Ancestors

343 didnt even do it. bungie did in halo 3 if you read the terminals

@@brenn0818 this is covered in the video

@jamesburgess1011 that's good I honestly just couldn't get through the whole thing. Guy was getting annoying

A passionate Bungie-era fan has started one at bungiehalowiki.miraheze.org!

I only played the original trilogy and don’t really have an interest in the new games. What irritates me the most is not these retcons but how lazy they feel. It’s never be as good as the original but I feel an actual good writer could have made this version of the universe at least adequate. Like instead of war because ancient humans were to dumb to give the forerunners a phone call about the flood you could of had the flood still be a mystery and using tensions between the races and false flag attacks to set off a war between them to weaken both races before the flood invasion

@@C3_SABERTOOTH Thanks for informing me about this.

@@C3_SABERTOOTH Yippie!

​@@C3_SABERTOOTHfantastic! thanks for sharing, I appreciate this

Exactly.

Not to forget everything 343 Guilty Spark said to Chief from day ONE back in Halo CE

@@adambelfast1 the same guy that was going crazy 🤦‍♂️

@@benclark4823 That's a cop out excuse just to give reason for the forerunner not being human. "He was going rampant he didn't know what he was saying". No where in the game did it even remotely imply that he was going crazy or becoming corrupt. Why blatantly give the player an impression and delivlberatley mislead them on such a huge plot point, just to turn around and say "nah we decided to make what he was saying was just bullshit in the end in order to fit this new narrative" I get it, they wanted to make forerunners not human in the end. And in order to do so, they had to fill holes that would contradict that. So they had to throw in Guilty Spark going crazy as an excuse. But its still bullshit to do that. The forerunners were originally meant to be humans, end off. What Guilty Spark said way back then was supposed to the truth. Its the same kind of weak excuses 343i gave to many of their changes. Chiefs armour being different in halo 4 "oh he got an upgrade while in cryosleep" The elites, jackets and grunts looking completely different. "Oh its a subspecies". Ok fair enough plausible reason's yes. But weak excuses to justify their changes for the sake of making changes. But my criticism isn't just aimed it 343i, I'm also pointing my finger a bungie. As the halo 3 temrimals contradict everything that was said that basically implied forerunners were humans.

​@@adambelfast1 48:30, and "the Terminals" section of the video.

I always thought the fact that the halos had ACTUAL FREAKING TREES LIKE FROM EARTH!! to be proof that the rings were built for humans

@@BiomechanicalBrick ^ It was a collection of things Also elites and jackals can breathe air soooo It seams like in the halo universe oxygen breathers are the most varied characters

@@josephcasper8803 Yes, but compare that to Sanghelious or any other Covenant soecies's home planet. It's waaay more similar to something like Earth.

@@tropitropitropo from what we have seen I think its a lot better if we weren't in the spotlight of things

@@josephcasper8803 Meh, fair enough.

*stares down HiddenXperia*

Lol@@sekiko7183

You are 100000% correct

Most Halo RU-vidrs are 343 apologists. I wouldn't take their word seriously, especially since they're high on hopium and forced positivity.

I blame the CiA lmao

It's always the journos.

Just so long as he isn’t _black._

​@@C3_SABERTOOTH I literally alway pictured chief as looking like Locke and I don't know why lol 😂

​@@C3_SABERTOOTHJust don't mention Sprint to you guys or you shit yourself

@@C3_SABERTOOTH You are _nitpicking_ and *BIASED* _I win_ ~byebye (But seriously though, the level to which 343 is able to gaslight their base of underdeveloped, spaceman COD-children is concerning to a level only _my dad_ could replicate with my mother. Both equally POSs' I might add)

@@ThatTallBrendan Ngl, it reminds me a lot of how hard Star Wars sequel fans gaslight themselves to defend those films. There's a lot of similarities between both Halo and Star Wars in how their franchises have progressed lol

"EUGH!!!... Anyway"

My crowning achievement!

That kinda hurts my feelings! (That said, I agree.)

one of the best one-liners in all of halo, and there is tons of competion. Shame it's so underated

Offensive Bias went sicko mode after that

Does sound like something that would be out of marathon

"I throw away all the rules of acceptable conduct during battle; near the ruptures, I throw away all the accepted ideas of how the natural world is supposed to behave. I toss around [37,654 tonne] Dreadnoughts like they were fighters; dimly aware of the former crews being crushed to deliquesce."

Not even just Halo 3, but also in Halo: CE. "A record of all _our_ lost time. Human history is it?" On the last level of CE.

@@DigitalApex Yep. I've used that line before, and also his lines from The Library.

@@agchains78543 I was excited for Halo since before Microsoft bought Bungie. I remember reading the pre-retcon version of The Fall of Reach before the game even came out (the book landed at Borders a month or two before the game released). I was 16, almost 17 at the time, the Twin Towers had been destroyed a few weeks earlier, and it was enjoyable pulpy sci-fi that reminded me of Ender's Game. Anyhow, they kept being indirect about it, but this was what they kept teasing: I remember I think in First Strike one of the Spartans in Red Team captures a Wraith and is shocked that they intuitively know how to operate the equipment. A big deal is made of the way Covenant technology is imitative and derivative of Forerunner technology. Chief and Cortana hijack a Covenant cruiser and it takes little time for Cortana to go fucking S-tier on the jump drives and plasma weapons. Ghosts of Onyx is where the wheels start to fall off the bus, but it does the tease about Forerunner equipment knowing something like Latin. And hint at the possibilities that some Forerunners made it into the Shield Worlds' slipspace bubbles before the Halos fired. There was this compelling mystique about the Forerunners because you knew things were building to a reveal, where you were either going to come face to face with a small group of surviving Forerunner, or a recording of the final minutes of the Forerunner civilization and get to see the full array fire, or both. There was always the question: what exactly _is_ humanity's relationship with the Forerunners? What was the Forerunner civilization like -- the genocidal and casual brutality of the Covenant would suggest narratively the Forerunners would be their opposite. And there was always the question about where the Flood came from. But it was clear that as of the end of Halo 2, for some reason the Halo array could be fired or disarmed from Earth. It seemed like there was adventure and discovery and oh-shit moments waiting for us in the future. But this was in the first half of the 2000s, when it seemed like there would be more of these integrated epic stories -- but almost twenty years on commercial studios have proven they can only start things, they can't bring them to satisfying conclusions. And then you start to see the trickle and then flood of retcons starting with Halo 3 as the story starts to fall apart. Interesting, though, that now that we've seen the storyboards it seems likely that the Librarian from the Terminals is derived from the progenitor Forerunner in the Ark's Data Vault. Halo 3's story sucked, honestly. You had the mechanical wrapping-up of the storyline but it just didn't pay off what Halo and Halo 2 set up. I'm still disappointed over what could have been.

@@Jesse-qy6ur I have to strongly disagree with you about Halo 3. It was the epic conclusion that Halo deserved, and for that reason it remains my favorite to this day. I don't think Halo really is a case of a studio not being able to finish what it started. Bungie set out to tell an epic story, and they did. There are a few plot threads that could have been closed off, but apart from the Flood there's enough evidence to put all that together. The problem isn't that Halo wasn't concluded in a satisfying way. It's that, while I personally would have loved to have more Halo, it did get a satisfying conclusion, but it was picked up by an incompetent studio afterward.

I'm glad I'm not the only one. I was pretty much a games-only Halo fan with only a couple of books and tangential knowledge of the terminals etc by the time 343 took over, but I was so thoroughly confused and disgusted with Halo 4's story that I made a brief post on the Waypoint forums to vent about it. I got swarmed by a bunch of 343 shills that used EVERY lie and excuse in this video and I went back and forth arguing with them about it and trying to research as much as I could because I could've sworn everything under Bungie implied Humans were basically Forerunners. I'm grateful for the existence of this video and this channel because through this guy's content, we not only got THE most blatant confirmation to date in the form of the release of the original H2 storyboards, but he also showed me that the piece I was missing in my old arguments was that Frank O'Connor himself wrote the inconsistent parts of the H3 terminals that 343 shills said vindicated his later retcons.

343 shills say that Spark saying "you are forerunner" isn't a reveal because.. rampancy or something. They just go "nuh uh" and shoehorn a shitty explanation to deny what's evident

@@Gofawevery. fucking. time. it’s the most cop out excuse i’ve ever seen. “nuh uh, he was crazy! you can’t believe a single word he says because he’s crazy! you must now disregard every single piece of important lore and canon he delivers because he’s crazyyyyyyyy!!!1!” so fucking lazy and annoying

i thought delta halo had Italy not Africa

343 always put themselves in the weirdest positions by ignoring what actually worked about Halo.

HA HA ... right ...last words

@@prompthorizon_12 right?! 😂 I'll give them the next hint; UNSC: Rubicon

@@prompthorizon_12 i’m aware that ‘Spark’ survives in 343 canon, but in Bungie’s Halo, that was the last we’d see of 343 Guilty Spark

disregarding the surviving Spark I at least appreciate the slight deviation of the old hat "humans are the ancients" thing. as that was old hat in modern sci-fi.

I'd rather we star from Halo 2, halo 3 dropped the ball a bit (but not as much as 4 or 5). I want to see Arbiter break Truth's neck, then find out he was worshipping humanity, then fly away with Guilty Spark.

I think continuing after Halo 3 was a mistake. It's generally a bad idea to force a story to continue past its obvious conclusion. It would be better for them to have made a trilogy set during the Forerunner-Flood war. Show us what Forerunner tech was like in its prime. How powerful a class 12 combat skin is. Expand on the Flood, show what they are like on a galactic level rather than the smaller localised outbreaks that where in the Bungie trilogy. Doing that they could respect the lore (more importantly not retcon the entire reason for the Human-Covenant war) and have plenty of room to do thier own thing.

Who said 343 Halo ever was canon?

@@cursedwanderer1753 this sounds horrible sorry

Tbh I think the franchise should just end, things don't just end anymore. Why should we milk the story continually?

It's not just a selective stance, it's basically a lie.

I mean guilty spark was hinting we were forerunner since CE. It's just that, that one line is what confirmed mosts people's suspicions.

I feel the exact same way bro

Try to keep it trending if we can.

@@BiomechanicalBrick so you’re saying you don’t like Halo and you prefer someone else’s false interpretation of Halo.

@@BiomechanicalBrick If a different path was chosen and the original vision was never expanded upon, then it would obviously have a lower level of development, you dummy. Unless you had a means to traverse alternate timelines and could see how that original vision would've been developed faithfully over a few more games, you can hardly compare the two in terms like that.

No, they haven't need more views

having timers on pop up excerpts is a nice touch

Your description of the canonical version of the Forerunner-Flood War (the Bungie version that is), sounds like a far more desperate and tragic scenario. Whereas 343's fanfiction seems riddled with contrivances.

​​​@@ToxicBalloon360it's almost like The Flood is a massive unstoppable wave forcing a last ditch attempt to create a big boat to allow life to survive after... It just fits the Religious motifs, otherwise if The Flood isn't beating down everything quickly creating a desperate situation, it wouldn't fit - To reach Heaven you have to die, and for all their sins the final act was them having washed it all away, cleansing them of their sins as they ensured the future would be ready.

1v1 me snipers MLG on Guardian m8

Seeing the 343 zoomies who didn't even watch the video seething in the replies was both hilarious and sad.

So a music composer is telling you about lore cannon 🙄

@@benclark4823 Tell me you know nothing about Marty Odonell without telling me. He was basically the franchise director for all Bungie Halo games.

@@benclark4823 Found the guy who doesn’t know his stuff

They meat ride and blindly follow 343s stupid ass lore

Because then they won't get those sweet influencer bux.

Probably because they want to be on 343s good side for one reason or another so attacking the only thing 343 has going for them which is riding old Bungie’s coattails (by showing that they’ve done basically everything to rip out Bungie’s Halo intentionality) tends to not be so good for that and the fact that usually when the scale of 343s retcons are brought to light fans of the Bungie era such as myself come to reject all of 343s canon which would be career suicide for some of these channels because they depend on people wanting more of 343s Halo

Same here, I was only 10 when I got Halo Legends for Christmas and 11 when I got 4 the year after that, Origins Part 2 and that line in 4 both made no sense to me even then.

Yes, humanity had a tentative truce with the Covenant Separatists/Elites that were led by the Arbiter. They had no peace with the actual Covenant or other Covenant Separatists/Elites who weren't yet following the Arbiter. That nuance completely disappeared. Of course, that's assuming Ghosts of Onyx is even Canon anymore. The Covenant Separatists gather much of their fleets at Joyous Exultation in order to hit back at the Prophets, Brutes, and other Covenant Loyalists AND also finish off Humanity. The Separatists have no idea they were lied to. They just know they were betrayed. They still hate humanity. Their leader was a prominent Elite Admiral/Fleet Master. However, most of the fleet is destroyed by an UNSC Nova Bomb that was taken from Reach, disguised as a forerunner artefact. So it's the Arbiter that convinces much of the Elites to not continue the war against humanity.

Right? Its soo dumb. I could understand if Chief said "I thought we had a truce with the Elites." That would have honestly made perfect sense, even if the Arbiter didn't yet rally all of the Elites. It would make sense that the Chief would think that. But the Covenant? No lmao there was never a point in history where Humanity and the Covenant were friends.

Yeah it really doesn't. Because the Elites are different from the Covenant. Jeez how could Frank O'Connor not know the distinction between a singular alien species and an organized religious group of multiple alien species.

IIRC some of the cod guys who came to work on halo 4 where confused when 343 asked them to add ADS and they said “we came to make halo not cod”

I really liked starting Halo 5 and having no clue why there were all these other spartans around or what any of anything is. Then 343 said it was too complicated and you wouldn't need prior knowledge for Infinite, so instead you start off left for dead on some ring you've never seen before by some space ape you don't know that's not even in the game to stop... something? and then Cortana also destroyed Australia for some reason. Luckily I think I've only played Halo 4 twice and 5 once. I only watched Infinite, so thusly I act as though they don't exist.

Like many pointed out before, 4 is a retcon of 3, 5 retcon 4 and Infinite retcon 5. There is litteraly no continuity in the reclaimer trilogy. The fact infinite wasn't numeroted halo 6 says a lot. Since 343 took control, the entire story has had no direction and no integrity, changing itself completelly everytime they faced the inevitable criticism from disapointed fan. We have reached a point where rebooting again the franchise of sticking to it's messy storyline would make absolutelly no difference.

@@johnwotek3816 That's why I don't care about new stories, everything was destroyed. I realized that this “trilogy” was on the wrong track when it turned the relationship between Chief and Cortana's friends/colleagues or half-siblings into a romantic relationship between Chief and a young version of his mother who is naked 24 hours a day. That “friends/classmates or step-siblings” part, but I’d say Chief and Cortana’s relationship in the Bungie era was more like step-siblings, as they’re both Halsey’s creations. OR maybe everything I said is wrong XD

Or a conspiracy theorist's ideas about the events the military got up to after Halo 3? Or even ONI propaganda to mislead the public from the truth of humanity's situation in the galaxy? Or a Grunt's story about what he thinks the humans are up to as he sits down to lunch around the food nipple with his squadmembers? There's a number of bungie-canon abiding ways to disregard 343i's terrible retcons and misinterpretations of lore.

@@trashjash The funny thing is I think those are ACTUALLY 343 stories especially as advertising campaigns for Halo 5. And then they retconned THOSE.

Was all planned like sjws

Yeah man. It is so frustrating...O'connor is just garbage and sadly a sign of things to come when 343 got their hands on Halo!

How is he still a part of 343?

Because the fans bemoans that Bonnie Toss and Kiki Wolfkill be fired, but they don’t seem to care about Frank. They completely ignore him. Probably because he’s a white guy

@@Arander92 SAD but true most likely.

If you really like Halo, then you’re a fan of Halo. My video shouldn’t take that away from you! I honestly don’t know how 343i can course-correct at this point, but I guess we have to wait and see!

@@C3_SABERTOOTH Your video didn't take any of that away, don't worry. It's more just that you made me realize something I hadn't seen before, which changed my opinions from "there was an interesting plan originally, oh well" to "it would have been so much better if we had gotten that instead of what O'Connor gave us in the end and I'm disappointed now." I'm still excited for the future and can accept that we're stuck with what we have now, and still have hope that they can, if not completely fix, just guide their story to a place that most fans would want to see it go, and now that O'Connor is gone, I think they're that next step closer to it.

it's literally just gaslighting

​@@NGRevenantNow that I think about it, the past decade has been nothing but gaslighting from 343 fans

It’s not even fan fiction, that would imply he knows and respects the source material.

​@@Slender_Man_186 It's literal heresy. He had to understand it almost comprehensively to know how many retcons needed to be deployed lol

Cheers M8 I'll drink to that

Even in Halo: CE, you could just walk through multiple doors with ease, especially during the found footage of them discovering The Flood. "It looks like these covenant worked pretty hard to lock it down" *touches buttons on console* *door opens like it's his house*

@@McBoofus literally this. Every piece of forerunner technology in bungie halo was accessible and usable by just any human. Its how the human made it to the library faster than the covenant in Halo 2, why every gondola, security and any other forerunner tech can be readily used by them. The gondola visual for activation in halo 2 is a six fingered hand but upon closer inspection, it is quite obvious it is just a human left and right hand overlaid on top of each other.

Grunts and jackals are also human sized

@@Arthur-Brown Map packs were a relic of the age of multiplayer shooters that, though not started with Bungie, could've definitely been spurred on in some part by Microsoft, this was a lucrative business model and massive corporations tend to think like cold, uncaring businesses, so its not so surprising after map packs were slowly being phased out through free updates that, after other multiplayer shooters of the time adopted loot boxes and battlepasses, Microsoft would follow suit with Halo 5 and Infinite as their response to these trends. This is also the same company that started merchandising for this franchise with EU books even before Combat Evolved that, while adding to the series, still are a business model in themselves easily well known at this point through, as an example, Star Wars's EU. The distinctions between 343i's gameplay changes and Microsoft's executive decisions tend to blur the line a bit after Halo 4, since after Halo 4's load-outs and COD-styled gameplay, Halo 5's advanced movement, and Halo Infinite's scrapped battle royale game mode, its hard to say which party did which, but at this point, its definitely foolish to deny Microsoft's tampering with the series, so I'll just say that 343 is puppeting Microsoft's wishes directly, they are practically, after all, the same exact company, made purposefully and entirely to serve Microsoft's wishes to preserve their golden goose..... perhaps Halo was never considered anything else to Microsoft, and it's wishful thinking if not.

The Halo community has proved over and over again to have significantly more passion and probably talent than the idiots running 343 Incompetencies.

I wonder what the Efficacy of that would be? Make our own franchise?

@@collaborisgaming2190 "Halo: We Are Forerunners" something like that 🤔

I would hire nothing but cows. Literal cows. That way, the game would never be released and the story would just end where it was meant to

Long as we agree that thematically, us old fans are the heretics

I’m happy to be a heretic! I just spin the 343 shit into a way that makes sense to me in the original lore

Also, with the decrease of reading and people just liking tiktok bs all day, it's not surprising most new fans know nothing of the actual Halo lore itself, since they didn't play the og, the wikias were changed and they can't be bothered to listen to the old lore. But missing the bible references just show people are npcs.

I disagree that they were allegories but simply motifs. Yes people are ignorant. But an allegory, in contradistinction to a parable, metaphor, symbolism or motif, is a 1:1 equivalence with the thing it's allegorizing. Bungie changed enough that nothing in halo would be on-the-nose as an allegory. Surviving the flood on an ark is a motif. There is no 1:1 relation where the prophets of an abrahanic faith are trying to destroy all life with the flood - for that matter, this brings up the fact that the halos were the things that killed everything, and stopped the flood. What's the 1:1 to that? There is none. It was not "The strong east wind" That killed all life on earth, and it didn't stop the flood from destroying all life. So, it's not an allegory. Hopefully that makes sense. There's nevertheless MANY motifs. The prophets act like ayatollahs in Shia islam, and their death cult religion is parallel because the goal is to bring the end of the world and their salvation by murdering all the heretics wholesale. This isn't an allegory to anything in the Bible, it's an extended metaphor for something IRL. And master chief as a christ figure is likewise a motif and not an allegory because Jesus did not rescue humanity from the flood but from their sins. And what would cortana be an allegory for? So no, not allegory. Hope I've made my case

I don't have enough faith that it's ignorance on the part of the industry so much as willfull deviation, especially since Christian motifs and allusions are nowadays pretty faux pas unless you're depicting Christianity as an oppressive monolith. Which ironically Halo always did too since the Covenant were a hostile theocracy. But yeah 343 will never write anything that alludes to Christian mythology unless it's something you're supposed to despise or something already established by Bungie (which 343 will try to retcon or change anyways). Hell, it's already moved far from its roots as hard military sci-fi already (i.e. the art style changes and writing changes that makes the UNSC look less like the Marine Corps and more like SHIELD, removal of ODSTs), so we won't even get characters that have subtle displays of religiousness (i.e. Johnson and Dutch).