Plot spoilers below.
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Follow the Guardian! ...later.
- When Osiris escaped Meridian on their Pelican while its Guardian went into slipspace, why didn't they try following it then rather than fleeing and having to try again on Sanghelios?
- The pulses that thing was outputting at the time probably made that too dangerous. The main reason they used the Sanghelios Guardian was so they could get reactivate it at will, and get onboard before the pulses became ship destroyers. Plus, they may not have had time to follow the Meridian Guardian before it went into Slipspace, and/or they wanted to alert the UNSC about where they were going and what they were doing... basically, there's a whole list of reasons as to why Osiris didn't follow the Meridian Guardian.
- At this point, Osiris had only just learned of the Guardians. Asides from knowing that Blue Team was practically welcomed aboard, there was no indication that they could safely follow let alone hitch a ride. The priority - and the wise thing to do - was to survive and formulate a more effective plan of approach rather than needlessly risk four SPARTAN-IV assets without any intel.
Leaving Palmer and Halsey
- Why did Palmer and Halsey, when deploying Osiris on the Sanghelios Guardian, just drop them off rather than have their Pelican travel into slipspace with it?
- Well, given that the Genesis levels seem to indicate that every flying vehicle that got pulled in by the Guardians ended up crash-landing (often with fatal results to the occupants), it's probably for the best that the Pelican didn't follow (given that the relatively fragile Dr. Halsey was on-board; she might have even already calculated that a potentially fatal hard crash would be the result of sending the Pelican in). The real question is, did Dr. Halsey really need to be on-board that Pelican to begin with, considering the vicious air battle going on around Sunaion?
Thirty Warden Swarm
- If the Warden can summon dozens of himself at once, why didn't he do that on the last level when Osiris was screwing up Cortana's plans with the Cryptum? Not to mention all the previous times he could've done that...
- He owed a lot of favors to one of the surviving Forerunners, and therefore had to lend away most of his bodies until he finally paid his debts off at the end. :P
- There's no indication as to how many bodies he can summon at one time, or where they're stored. For all we know, the majority of the Warden's "million bodies" are scattered all over the galaxy. As for not using the swarm of bodies earlier, it seems plausible that most of his Genesis bodies were spread out all over the planet, slaughtering the survivors brought in by the Guardians. It was only when Chief came close to Cortana that Warden was like "Oh, hell no!" and made a beeline for Blue Team with every body he had available in order to stop them. As for why he never used them against Osiris in the last level: it's possible that in her bid to protect Blue Team, Cortana destroyed every one of the bodies on Genesis, to ensure John's safety from him.
Return of the Domain
- How is the Domain back in existence again? At the end of the Flood-Forerunner War, it was destroyed when the Halos fired. This was confirmed in the games by hints like Guilty Spark being unable to access the Domain in Combat Evolved Anniversary's Terminals, and Cortana mentioned a Terminal in Halo 4 appeared to be stuck in an infinite loop of trying unsuccessfully to access the Domain. But here it's just back all of a sudden, and seems very different because now one can physically enter it, which didn't seem to be possible in the EU; it seemed like it'd be like "trying to walk into the Internet".
- As for the Domain's new form; it's possible that Genesis was a secret Builder project to create a physical link to the Domain. As for why the Domain survived, Silentium hints that the Precursor artifacts in transit may have been able to escape the firing of the Array. This may be foreshadowing to the possibility that there are still Precursor artifacts out there. This is born out in the game itself, where several logs mention that the Domain is damaged, so it clearly suffered damage from the Halo Array. Come to think of it, that may also be why Cortana just randomly dives into megalomania: Due its own damage the Domain was unable to properly fix her.
- One of the Intel you can collect throughout the game is a log from a Forerunner Builder who mentions that the Domain is "repairing" itself, so there's that.
Warden Eternal and Cortana
- If the Warden Eternal is supposed to be in love with Cortana, why did he say he would have 'burned [her] from the Domain', had she less clever? Is it really love? Or is it something else altogether?
- I think all that statement means is that Cortana's cleverness is the reason why the Warden likes her to begin with. Or to put it this way, the Warden wouldn't have supposedly fallen in "love" with her at all had she been the type to be burned from the Domain.
- I think he's less "in love" with her than he is singularly devoted to her and her cause. I doubt AI, let alone a Forerunner AI, really feel what a human would call love. I'd even say he's less loyal to her than to her cause and her capability; you wouldn't tell someone you hold affection for that you'd have killed them if they'd been less extraordinary, and he goes out of his way to defy her whenever he's able.
Late Comm Check
- Why did Locke and his team wait until after they jumped out of their Pelican before doing a comm check? It's going to be hard to fix any comm issues when Covenant are shooting at them?
