Halo

Do Halo games have good stories or just expand a great universe?

Halo has a story?

To answer your question of "do Halo games have good stories"

>Bungie Halo
>Yes

>343 "Halo"
>No

It depends on who you ask.

Because yunno, opinions.

1-3 have a decent story, but the narrative execution is particularly really good in CE alone.

2 has a good story

CE barely even has a narrative and 3's is just a generic video game plot.

I think this is generalizing. CE, 3, and Reach don't have that good of stories, they are pretty generic. ODST's is good but not great but 2's is great.

4's story would be good if it were it's own thing and it didn't butcher Cheif and Cortana's personality and drop the ball on so many things, but it does and it's shit as a result. 5's is just as generic as 3 and reach but executed even worse.

343 should just hire their book authors to do the games since the 343 novels are as good as bungie's

>CE barely even has a narrative
Didn't pay much attention I guess? It has as much of one as 2, except it's not done in a cinematic way, which made it more immersive.

I have at least 3000 hours in each game in the series, like twice that in a few of them.

I'm very aware of Halo's use of envoirmental storytelling, but in CE's case it's mostly people trying to defend their nostalgia for a game that hasn't aged as well as it's sequels.

HALO 3 ANNIVERSARY WHEN

>but in CE's case it's mostly people trying to defend their nostalgia for a game that hasn't aged as well as it's sequels.
Not really. Do you remember that 2 got criticism for its story? There was a reason for that, it's because 2 became very cinematic and people didn't like that tonal shift, plus they kind of ruined some things they had set us up to believe in the first game about the game world.

>Do you remember that 2 got criticism for its story?

I do, and I thought it was just as retarded back in the day as I do now.

99% of it was people either butthurt over not being able to play as MUH CHEEF for the entire campaign, or butthurt over the marketing campaign, or butthurt over the cliffhanger, not actual narrative issues.

2 is certainly more cinematic, but it's well executed and there's still plenty of in mission storytelling either via dialog or just via stuff in the environment or how enemies are placed and so on.

>tfw you will never Finish The Fight ™ on PC

They had good stories when it was just books and Halo 1 & 2. But then Bungie didn't really know how to "Finish the Fight" properly or what to do with the expanded universe material so we ended up with the mediocre 3 and the awful Reach instead.

Thankfully it all ended there when Bungie decided not to hand over the IP and let it rest in peace. I can't imagine what M$ would have done with it.

I was butthurt about getting to play as the Covenant but still being stuck fighting the same old Covenant/Flood.

343 has been on a roll with the novels lately, 2015 alone had like 5 book releases, all of which were fall of reach tier or better.

Stop being in denial and praise 343 when they deserve it and shit on them when they don't.

Yes but you should really only be playing them for customs.

>but it's well executed
To the dismay of immersion, because it really does not make sense from the player's perspective to switch to any other character POV other than the player character's. Which is the real issue with 2.

But you aren't playing as a single character?

If the complaint is more "the cheif is no longer a stand in for the player and he's treated more as an actual character in universe that you are just occupying", then sure, that's true, but I don't think that's a inherently bad thing, since that was always the case, and you'd know that had you read TfoR/TF/FS back in the day at the time

Karen Travis = Fall of Reach tier

My giddy aunt

I'm not talking about the travis books; none of them came out in 2005 did they faggot?

Here

>God tier
Silentium (343)
Contact Harvest (bungie)

>Great tier
Ghosts of Onyx (Bungie)
Broken Circle (343)
Cryptum (343)
Last Light (343)
Evolutions (343)
Shadow of Intent (343)

>Good tier
Fall of Reach (Bungie)
Fractures (343)
Smoke and Shadow (343)
Primordium (343)
First Strike (Bungie)
Hunters in the Dark (343)
Saints Testimoney (343)

>Okay Tier
Glasslands (343)
Cole Protocol (Bungie)
Thursday War (343)
New Blood (343)

>Ehh tier
The flood (Bungie)

>Shit tier
Mortal Dictatata (343)

Broken Circle, Last Light, Shadow of Intent, Hunters in the Dark, and Saints Testimoney all came out in 2015.

*came out in 2015, wew

>tfw you will never Finish The Fight ™ on PC

>But you aren't playing as a single character?
That's not good for immersion though. We don't have multiple POVs in real life, do we?

I have no problem with them expanding the universe in 2, but it could have been done in a better way. Also, Arbiter was mechanically the same as MC, another thing that was pretty offputting, immersion-wise.

It depends on how you define "immersion", I guess.

If you mean, immersing yourself in the game as you, sure, but if you mean just immersing yourself as the character, I don't think it's an issue

You bring up arby playing too similarly but it was established at the time that higher ranking elites were physical equals to S2's so I don't think it's a problem