Foes and false friends are all around me, Lord Davos. They infest my city like roaches, and at night I feel them crawling over me. The fat mans fingers coiled into a fist, and all his chins trembled. "Halo came to the Twins a guest. He ate Lord Frankie's bread and salt, and hung his sword upon the wall to feast with his friends. And they murdered him. Murdered, I say, and may 343i choke upon their fables. I drink with Jessica jape with Bonnie, promise Kiki the hand of my own beloved granddson
but never think that means I have forgotten. The fans remember, Lord Davos. The fans remember, and the mummers farce is almost done, my son is home
Microsoft and 343i
What happened? Everything happened, Microsoft, the core fanbase, 343i, everything.
Microsoft having greater control over the series was always going to be a problem, Microsoft are incompetent and have mishandled and greatly damaged
every single entertainment IP they've ever been responsible for. Their management, perhaps indisputably, are fucking stupid; not one of them challenged
- Releasing ODST at full price vs Modern Warfare 2
- Having Halo: Reach try and emulate CoD
- Making an independant canon that doesn't at all link to the series
- The low standards introduced by Halo: Spartan Assault
- The absolute massacre of the canon we saw in Halo 4
343i also proved to be a disaster. Frank O' Connor goaded the community relentlessly, bragging that their own vision was superior to that of the Halo fans that had lived and breathed since that beautiful day in 2001. Little care was put into Halo 4 at all
- They lazily reintroduced the Covenant as foes, essentially retconning the entire Halo trilogy in the opening 10 minutes of the game
- They have EVEN retconned the new trilogy, admitting they had absolutely no long term plans with the story of Halo 4, and as a result have cancelled Halo 5 and 6.
- They answered
none of the questions the old trilogy left behind, and made no attempt to do so. The Master Chief; the greatest hero in humanity's history, was discovered to be alive.
"I THOUGHT YOU'D BE TALLER, LOL"
- The new faction were if anything, an afterthought, and were introduced unsuccessfully into the series.
- They
slaughtered the canon. The ODST's were removed, old characters were nowhere to be seen, new Spartan's were introduced. They were the worst, the specialness of the Spartan programme was finally laid to rest, and the new Spartan's were your average bro figures, what was even worse was that they were not even questioned by the Master Chief. You want to make the Chief a human character? WHY NOT FUCKING HAVE HIM VOCALISE SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT A NEW PROGRAMME BEING INTRODUCED, WHICH WAS THE BASIS OF HIS ENTIRE EXISTENCE, AS OPPOSED TO SOME SHITTY FUCKING LOVE STORY WITH AN OVER SEXUALISED BLUE BLOB, YOU FUCKING CUNTS.
It was a great tragedy what the two companies did to Halo and look how the fanbase have suffered for it. Not that the fanbase are entirely blameless...
The fanbase
Neogaf was a wonderful opportunity. Members of 343i were active on this forum, and we had a large community to vocalise our ideas to them. unfortunately however, they were a community and not a fanbase. All of the Halo fans died at the Red Wedding with the Chief, me included. There are perhaps three real Halo fans left on this forum, the rest are a fucking joke. People would refuse to see the importance of custom game browsing and dedicated servers for the future of this IP, they ridiculed the thought that Microsoft's most important IP should be feature competitive with CoD, Battlefield and the Valve FPS's. Instead they only cared about trivial issues, such as the frame rate, camopaign scoring, whether theatre should be co-operative. They didn't even seem to care that Forge had been outsourced, and Halo 4 was in no condition ready to launch.
I valiantly called out 343i, but was shouted down by the greater community. See below an actual quote from a Halo Gaf member
And so as you can see, the Halo fanbase will never recover, it will never again be what it was.
Afterword
With Destiny soon to be released, the real Halo fans, who now live on a peaceful haven on a solitary asteroid somewhere in the stars, will once again be looking to Bungie to be their saviours, we will pray for them and hope they are brought to peace.
As for Microsoft? They should have done the noble thing and sold the IP to Nintendo or Rockstar, of course they didn't however and this whole disaster has been completely out of control.
Goodbye Halo, we will never forget you.