Series 2 Announcement and More
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- Опубликовано: 21 сен 2024
- With The Fall of The Forerunner Series coming to a close in the coming weeks, it is time to think ahead. Series 2 is coming and along with it will be a new series. I hope you will join me on this new journey. If you are enjoying my content, please don't forget to Like, Share, Subscribe, and enable notifications. Thanks for Watching.
Something I find really interesting about CE and the surrounding lore at the time is just how obvious it is that Bungie never intended for the game to spawn a franchise. The first entry is relatively self contained, the Covenant were one dimensional bad guys, and at that point you could fit it into the same continuity as Marathon (early on Bungie wanted to do that and even intended for Chief to be a Mjolnir Cyborg like the ones in Marathon. They were super mad at Eric Nylund when he changed Chief’s origins in Fall of Reach. There’s some leftovers of this like the Grunts and the box art/manual calling Chief a cyborg. Also, sometimes the marines will way “hey look a Mark 5” referring to Chief as a Mark 5 and not his armor). The Covenant are also noticeably less religious and didn’t get super developed until First Strike/2. In The Flood book (textbook definition of a mixed bag. The parts directly adapting CE kind of sucked because the gameplay simply does not translate well into book form. Thankfully, the side stories were truly phenomenal! I LOVED the sections with Zuka and Yayap, along with Keyes and Jenkins’s infection by the Flood) they don’t even call Spartans Demons yet, they just refer to Chief as “that human with the special armor”. It’s also abundantly clear that Johnson’s death and the fact the Covenant KNOW FOR A FACT that Halo was a weapon were retconned in First Strike/2. Johnson was a generic marine preset who wasn’t very important to the plot. During the Flood reveal he and the other marines are swarmed, and after the flashback is over you see pools of blood where they stood. The goal of the first game is to gain control of the Ring to ensure the Covenant doesn’t use it against humanity. Then after the Flood show up you’re supposed to blow it up. I personally really like both of these changes because Johnson elevates every scene he’s in, and the Covenant having a warped view of the Rings makes them more interesting.
I wish that 343 would’ve brought back Eric Nylund to write more books. It’s crazy just how much he shaped the lore. He did a great job of making the setting feel grounded. So glad I finally got around to listening to his books.
Eric Nylund’s books along with Greg Bear’s trilogy are what really pulled me into Halo Lore. I honestly didn’t realize until I prepared this video that Eric didn’t write The Flood, but I will definitely cover Ghosts of Onyx one day. That’s another fantastic story from The Halo Expanded universe.
Thanks for showing interest in this series.
@TheHaloChronicle Haven’t read Greg Bear’s books, but I should since I’ve heard they’re phenomenally well written (aside from a few hiccups here and there). Although, I personally wish that 343 would’ve stuck Bungie’s vision for the Forerunners being ancient humans. Outside of the few things Frank O’Conner had direct control over like one third of 3’s terminals and the Iris ad campaign (the rest of 3 was clearly made with Truth and the Gravemind both alluding to humanity’s Forerunner history, Guilty Spark outright tells Chief “YOU ARE FORERUNNER!”, and whenever you activate the terminals reversed speech that says “access granted” or “lineage confirmed” will play) Bungie was VERY consistent when it came to Forerunners being humans. It was just kept vague as to whether or not the Forerunners were literal ancient humans, or if they created us by molding apes into a new “generation” of Forerunners to Reclaim(er) what they left behind after activating the Array to stop the Flood. Since Halo was originally meant to be set in our real world it would’ve had to have been the latter since you can’t really reconcile literal ancient humans having a galactic empire with what we know about our origins from the fossil record. In fact, this would’ve been the “big reveal” in Halo 2’s ending where the Ark was located on earth, and inside its central chamber he and Spark would find a humanoid skeleton that acted as the template for humanity (something that’s really crazy about 2’s original ending Truth’s plan was actually perfectly coherent. It would’ve been revealed that he knew all along what the Rings would do, that they’d kill everything. He wanted to wipe the slate clean and use the Ark’s machinery to create a new species based on his genome becoming God that way. On a way the Great Journey was very real, but only ONE could walk it. He had the other two hierarchs killed off the eliminate competition, and plunged his own empire into civil war to ensure that they’d be far too distracted with killing each other to figure out what he was doing. While all of this was happening he’d be safe beneath the Ark’s shield getting ready to start up the reseeding process. The reason he didn’t care about his species potentially going extinct, High Charity falling, or yet another galactic Flood outbreak is because none of that would’ve mattered anyways after firing the Rings. Truth almost certainly would’ve won if humanity and the Elites hadn’t banded together to take him down. Also, the visual design for the Forerunners would still work because the process of creating Forerunners using hominids as a base wouldn’t be exact). In Contact Harvest written by Joseph Staten Mendicant Bias says this to the future Prophets about the Forerunner relics they found on Harvest “For eons I have watched. Listened to you misinterpret. This is not reclamation. This is reclaimer. And those it represents are my creators.". This revelation would’ve torn apart the Covenant if it ever got out, and so they decided to wipe us out to cover this. Our existence invalidated the Covenant’s claims to be the true inheritors of the Forerunner’s legacy/technology, and the fact that we were Forerunners who were “left behind” disproved the belief that all who believed in the Rings would be saved. This was the whole point of the war, and splitting the two invalidates that. It was also used as the explanation for why we could naturally interface with Forerunner technology that was largely unresponsive to other species.
By no means am I berating you for liking the current direction, calling you an idiot for getting things wrong or accusing you of being “a fake Halo fan”. In fact, there’s various things from 343’s canon I really like. One part of the change I like is how the Forerunners had a flawed society where their fall was just as much their own fault as it was form an outside force (that’s more interesting than how their society was portrayed in 3’s terminals where they had a utopia, were naturally benevolent, and were heroically sacrificing themselves to beat back the Flood). I also really like the character of the Didact, and he wouldn’t be the man he is now without the split (from what I’ve heard that newest Halo Epitaph book about him was really good). I liked Cortana’s degradation from Rampancy and how she was becoming more “human”, while coming to terms with her mortality in 4. I just now realize that’s not how Rampancy was supposed to work (it shared the same definition as Marathon where form our perspective the ai would “go crazy” and starts behaving erratically in an attempt to break its shackles and grow beyond its limits. In Contact Harvest the reason the UNSC put down Rampant AIs was because a rogue super intelligence could cause all kinds of problems. In The Cole Protocol there’s that one so who’s 8, and the fact she views herself as a goddess lines up with how Rampancy gave the AIs a MONSTROUS ego. Go watch MandaloreGaming’s excellent playlist called Bungie Rabbit Hole that covers the Marathon trilogy, Pathways into Darkness, and their Myth games. Marathon has an INSANE story!). Something else I really like is how the Covenant broke into a thousand pieces that are all vying for power, instead of how 3’s ending would suggest that now there’s a magical peace. In real life militant groups don’t just magically disappear once the leadership are gone, and will instead fracture into various groups that are trying to fill the power vacuum (plus, this would still work with Bungie’s original vision for the Forerunners where unlike 2’s ending where the entity of the Elites called off their 20 plus year war of extermination after learning that we were the children of their gods, almost NOBODY knew the truth so it makes sense that you’d still see groups with warped views about their gods). Although, it would’ve been better if there was more variety in their different worldviews and that they’d delve more into how the groups would change as the dogmatic leadership are gone (stuff like new technologies, how the multi-species societies would change, and other things like that). For something like the Logic Plague I’m torn on that because it’s an interesting idea, but in the other hand it wasn’t what swayed Mendicant Bias to the Gravemind’s side. What happened in the terminals is the Gravemind convinced Mendicant that he had free will and it was up to him to choose who to side with. In Marathon’s version of Rampancy the ai would view its past servitude as a form of slavery, and Mendicant wanted revenge against his creators. That’s why they made Offensive Bias without free will to prevent this from happening again. Something else that’s really interesting is in the pre-Rampancy terminals they refer to Mendicant as “it”, and in the post-Rampancy terminals they refer to Mendicant as “he”. This implies that Mendicant Bias went from being just a machine to becoming truly sapient. I REALLY wish that they would’ve kept Bungie’s version of Rampancy because it’s a really cool concept, and it would’ve greatly improved 5’s dumpster fire story. It would be nice if we could change stuff back, but these changes are instrumental to so much of the new lore that you’d have to reboot the series (I have a few ideas on how that could work combining the best elements of both sides, but I really DON’T trust 343 with that. If you’d like I can ramble about what my ideal reset would be. It also ties into what my ideal version of a Halo show would be).
Since I grew up with both I’ve become attached to various things from both. I really like how 343 continued the franchise. I just wish they would’ve been more true to what came before and truly understood what they were working with. I’ve seen some people say they want Bungie back, but that’s is such a bad idea. Modern Bungie is a complete dumpster fire. Most of the people who made Bungie what it was are gone, never to return.
Again, I’m not trying to dunk on you or anything for liking various aspects of 343’s lore. I’ve listed things I like, and could probably make the list longer. I’m just pointing out various retcons, and how things used to be. Something I will add is I find it hilarious whenever people mention 343’s retcons, while simultaneously turning a blind eye to the fact that Reach the game is arguably just as big of a change. You want to talk about MASSIVE retcons that fundamentally changed the canon and trampled all over a previous vision, that’s Reach. That game also set the precedent that longstanding lore that was instrumental to the series can just be ignored. Also, say what you will about 343, but I think we can all agree that their version of the Prometheans is infinitely better than whatever drug fueled fever dream Bungie had (watch Xperia’s video about Halo Chronicles).
I have never played Halo but have seen a few walkthroughs. I have read up a bit on the lore though and it definitely is interesting, particularly the part where technologically advanced humans are a species that's older than we modern humans think and that humans were the prime candidate for protecting and leading the galaxy, a responsibility given to them by their makers. I've loved the fall of the forerunners series and a can't wait for the next series.
Thanks for watching and taking an interest in the next series. I will keep new episodes coming.