General Halo Discussion

Not even just natural evolution of canon. It’s military tradition to try and make more of things that worked even if the cost is high. For example stormtroopers of World War One became rangers and commandos of World War Two which were further refined and became the 75th Ranger Regiment and Marine Force Recon or alternatively the SEAL’s.

So the Spartan IV’s are the culmination of similar evolution like that. A new idea (Project Orion/Spartan 1) got refined and became a super prototype that was expensive (Spartan 2) and then got cheaped down but was far less effective (Spartan 3) but with the threat of Covenant annihilation lifted they couldn’t rely on panic wartime conditions dictating a cheaper model but implemented and refined other things that eventually brought the performance level up better than the previous generation but far more psychologically well adjusted than both generations using the base standard of volunteering adults like the very first generation while still being able to produce them in higher quantities (Spartan 4).

It wouldn’t surprise me if far future Halo universe has a Spartan 5 program that implements all of it as standard issue for all UNSC forces. In effect becoming just like the Forerunners or Sangheilli in terms of combat.

The very short version of response is that there's no Watsonian to my objection, only Doylist.

The Master Chief is the sole surviving Spartan for much of the game canon and the product of a horrifically unethical (let's say outright evil) program that has nevertheless made a One-Man Army. The Spartan III's are really every bit as scummy and evil with the II Is still barely existing in any large numbers because they're suicide troops designed to delay the Covenant as long as possible.

Most of the jen es say qua of the Spartans is from the juxtaposition of necessity versus the horrors in their creation contrasted against Karma Houdini status of ONI. A lot of drama is also derived from the fact Doctor Halsey would be a purely evil Mad Scientist anywhere else but she seems to genuinely suffer from Blue-and-Orange Morality.

There's a handful of these guys, most of them died heroically (because they're Spartans), making them is evil as fuck, and yet they may be our only hope.

And then there's the I Vs.

• Made from volunteers
• Made from adults
• Seemingly an unlimited replaceable number of them.
• Portrayed as awesome heroes with none of the tragedy or horror. We even get Nathan Fillon's ODT character "promoted" to Spartan.
• They're portrayed as a great big welcoming family to Master Chief in 4 with their own super-duper ship and Band of Brothers mentality.

Basically, they feel like they come from another less tragic more gung ho military franchise.

It is the difference between Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and Call of Duty: Ghosts or Advanced Warfare.

I would agree with that. In-universe I suppose it makes sense, but it also handwaves a ton of questions and scientific limitations that were raised in the first games and books. Specifically, the IIs were intended to be instruments of terror (regardless of the UNSC's successful PR pivot to put them against the Covenant) and it took horrific sacrifices to make them what they are. They're a deeply unethical military experiment that happened to land a long-shot between armor tech that outstripped what unmodified humans could bear and a scattershot attempt to build humans up to that standard. And sure, the games never quite address that the II program is a giant question of "what exactly is permissible if the alternative is total annihilation," which itself overshadows the realization that the UNSC intended to use the Spartans against political protesters...

But the most recent games lean way too hard into the oo-rah aspect by cleaning everything up. With the assiduous reassurances that the IVs are all adult volunteers and the armor never malfunctions, and the way the overall feel of Infinite's multiplayer is more... how to put it. It feels more CoD-like, with the posturing and the quippy Spartans and AI. With that and the increased focus on Halsey as the original evil of the Spartan program, it feels like 343 cut the whole you-get-props-and-training-but-you-can't-say-anything-bad-about-us standard deal with the US military.

Edited by RedSavant on Jan 23rd 2024 at 12:46:25 AM

Pretty much.

I feel like it's a bit like Dragon Age: Origin to Dragon Age: Inquisition. A lot of the rougher edges have been sanded off when the rougher edges were what made it all interesting in the first place.

Like, I still vividly remember the section in the Fall of Reach novel where the original prototypes for the Mjolnir armor were being tested, and one suit with faulty or inadequate failsafes ended up pulping a Marine volunteer because his own spasms of pain caused the overtuned armor to break his bones even more.

So it's a little jarring to go from that to the in-universe acknowledgement that the multiplayer war games kill people, which I think has never happened before (I didn't play a lot of 4 multiplayer and I never played 5, so I can't say), with the in-suit AI making quips about writing consolation letters to next-of-kin. And I'm no hand-wringer when it comes to multiplayer shooters, I just feel like if you're going to put a story around your deathmatch mode then you should consider how it affects the rest of your narrative.

(Honestly, it just feels like they wanted to have the Ghosts from Destiny, but at least that's a setting where your characters explicitly come back to life after dying.)

Sarah Palmer also seems to hit a weird, "We have Commander Shepard at home" vibe that I wonder was just bad presentation.

But the Spartan I Vs also had a bad presentation in Halo 5 as well. They get their awesome Cutscene Power to the Max introduction and kill the leader of the Neo-Covenant (who we barely got to know outside of the novels, where if you DID read them, it's They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character) while setting Locke up against the Master Chief. Which automatically inclines people to dislike him.

EXCEPT they immediately team up, rendering the plot drama-less.

And then they fail to stop Cortana.

Which leave a sense that the I Vs are kind of lame despite their cutscene "Extreme Sports Skip Trip" opening.

Basically, if the game wanted to sell us on the I Vs, they failed. Mike Coulter got a semi-okay movie but Locke would have been better served by a spin off game like ODST.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jan 22nd 2024 at 8:42:03 AM

Essentially the II's and III's have a tragedy factor that lends them pathos. The tragedy helps keep them interesting.

The IV's though completely lack that so they are just bogstandard super-soldiers.

The lack of any sort of conflict makes them appear flatter as characters as a result and too power fantasy gung-ho with how in love with their powers all the IV's we've seen are.

I think I was also turned off by the Infinity too. It's a supercarrier starship that's supposedly laden down with Forerunner artifacts and I was like, "Wait, how the hell does the UNSC know how any of that works? The Covenant can do that but even if the UNSC did know how that worked, they'd just be equal with the Covenant."

It seemed like they were trying too hard to be cool and that's purely a YMMV.

" A lot of drama is also derived from the fact Doctor Halsey would be a purely evil Mad Scientist anywhere else but she seems to genuinely suffer from Blue-and-Orange Morality. "

I can't be the only one who's bothered by the fact that Halsey is always portrayed as "correct" in that her program, which ruined and even outright killed numerous children. Like, did the Covenant and Flood vindicate the existence of the Spartans? Yes, but that doesn't really mean she isn't a war criminal. It really gets under my skin how everyone but Karen Traviss (who went the opposite direction by making people arguably worse than Halsey all of a sudden gain the moral high ground) seems to stop short of saying what she did was legitimately bad, good results notwithstanding.

Of course what she did was bad. She committed atrocities, fully knowing she was committing atrocities. But I think the complexity of her character, especially how she interacts with the IIs with a sort of ersatz parental pride she doesn't even show Miranda and she knows she doesn't deserve to feel, is more interesting than litigating whether what she did was evil (it was).

The Spartan program was a government atrocity perpetrated against children that maimed and killed dozens, with the intention of making weapons of terror to use against protestors. It's also the only thing that kept humanity from being wiped out. Neither of those statements interacts morally with the other. They don't cancel out, and they don't have to.

Edited by RedSavant on Jan 23rd 2024 at 6:15:10 PM

Reminds me that one messages of the director of projet freelancer.

"I don't give a damn about your committee and its opinions of my work! Have you forgotten sir, we were at war? A fight with an alien race for the very survival of our species. I feel I must remind you that it is an undeniable, and may I say a fundamental quality of man, that when faced with extinction, every alternative is preferable."

Well, that's kind of the thing. ONI was going to do it anyway, IIRC there's outright a part where Halsey talks with an AI about how if she tries to slow the project to kill and maim less people she'll be replaced with a Yes Man who will do a worse job of it.

Mjolnir killing marines who tried wearing it was also iirc them disabling safeties designed to keep it from doing that since Halsey knew it would kill normal people and that someone would try it anyway.

Edited by doineedaname on Jan 23rd 2024 at 10:20:16 AM

Someone animated the fight between Locke and Chief. I cannot describe it, you need to see this.

I mean, does it handwave those things? You cite scientific limitations but the Spartan 4s were created decades after the 2s. It makes sense that the UNSC would overcome the scientific hurdles that stood in the way of producing them cost-effectively. That is after all how technological development works. You have the early version which is horrendously expensive and then you have later iterations which tend to be (relatively) cheaper. Going from the hyper-specialized 2s to the more producible 4s makes perfect sense from a worldbuilding perspective.

As for out-of-universe criticism, I will note that "Spartan 2s were created from orphans as instruments of state violence against insurrectionists" is not something that has ever been alluded to in-game. It was purely present in the EU and was easy to ignore if one wasn't a lore nerd. The games didn't "become" oo-rah, they were always like that. Ironically the only time the moral dimensions were ever addressed in a game was the opening cinematic to Halo 4, the very game that introduced the Spartan 4s. Now that fell to the wayside almost immediately but it is more than Bungie ever cared to do. Which is telling. Unlike the EU the games have never been remotely skeptical of the UNSC in-universe or Western militaries out of the universe. In that sense 343 is simply continuing the precedent that Bungie set.

I think the real two problems about spartan-4s is that 1) their not real super soldiers like they have training above the regular troop but not grueling like how the twos got, augments that are weaker and most of their armor does the heavy lifting and 2) the have your cake and eat it too with the in-story simulations for multiplayer, because of this it feels like you're just seeing/playing an average Joe and not a badass super soldier like it was before.

Hmm, I do understand that point of view, and you're definitely not wrong. I can't declare that I have a substantive source for how things feel different, but I think things do feel differently - especially since the original expanded universe books were written by the scriptwriters for the original games.

I wouldn't be able to put my finger on the specific differences, I think. Maybe it's the tonal and... for lack of a better word, inspirational shift? Halo 1 is clearly drawing from references like Starship Troopers and Alien, down to the visuals. I won't say that that's enough to make the first game a critical text, but it does feel like it fits in with the first set of novels, which are, while the later games feel more closely in line with other milsci.

Maybe if I had to be specific - it's not that Halo 1 is critical of the military or the UNSC and Halo Infinite isn't, it's that Halo 1 is uncritical and the later games are supportive, if that makes sense.

Edited by RedSavant on Jan 23rd 2024 at 10:51:55 PM

It's logical in-universe and boring as all get out for characters. There's a reason there's a tragedy that works about John being Last of His Kind.

Yeah but at this point, with the TV show, it's not even All There in the Manual. Given some major plot points (Didact, Jul'Adama) and so on got resolved in the EU, any discussion of Halo's larger story now incorporates the EU.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jan 23rd 2024 at 6:40:17 AM

I don't think citing the show makes much sense. It's very brazenly doing its own thing and has very little to do with the main series.

The difference between the Didact and Jul'Adama is that they actually featured prominently in the games. 343 has previously incorporated wider multimedia elements in the games but not everything has been equally present. The more authoritarian elements of the UNSC are still very much an EU only product. Hence my point.

This is fair. But I would argue that in practice uncritical depictions of something is a form of support. The UNSC's presence in the game was defined by 1) its opposition to existential threats like the Covenant/Banished/Flood/ect and 2) the cast of at least inoffensive if not outright likable characters. Combine that and you have a recipe for a by the numbers Good Guy (TM) faction.

The greater nuance added by the books clearly wasn't an accident or done against Bungie's wishes (IIRC the first mention of the origins of the Spartan 2s was Fall of Reach which was released alongside CE) but it also wasn't something they cared to focus on.

That said I will say that you are onto something when you mention inspiration. While Halo was always willing to play footsie with the less pleasant aspects of mil-scifi (the aforementioned glorification, Miranda's insipid "To War" line in Halo 3, etc) Bungie was generally willing to reign it in and stop things from going too far. 343 has in many ways been unable/unwilling to do that. So there is a difference, albeit one of degrees instead of fundamental kind.

Respectfully I think you're operating on a far too limited definition of supersoldier. The Spartan 4s are still augmented fighters that can face off against legions of Covenant remnants, Banished forces and Flood outbreaks. They're "super" in every way that matters.

That they don't involve the same amount of insane training is frankly a mark in their favor, training is a means to an end. What matters is the type of soldier produced and how they fit into the greater war machine. Spartan 2s were great in many ways but their insane cost isn't what any military would want.

This I would agree with, yeah. Like I said, I don't think that drawing inspiration from texts that are actually critical like Starship Troopers counts as being critical yourself, but Halo 1 has an element of... for lack of a better word, playfulness, to it? Elements like the Grunts' voice lines and, to a lesser extent, most of the Marines' voice lines and hammy performances make it easier to be a little distanced, and Halo 1 itself also doesn't present that ooh-rah feeling unexamined. Later games take things much more seriously and make it much harder to get that distance from the ooh-rah feel.

Edited by RedSavant on Jan 26th 2024 at 11:08:34 PM

Well yes I limited on how the 4s are super soldiers as they are just slightly above ODS Ts to the point that ODS Ts are very much dissolved if not going be dissolved, while 2s shows what a real in-universe super soldier really is to the series.