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View Full Version : The problem I had with Halo 4's story.



McDouggal
2013-12-12, 10:57 AM
Take this with a grain of salt; I have not played it myself, but I have watched 2 different let's plays.

They really didn't change much of anything. They replaced the Flood with the Prometheans, who... want to do the exact same thing that the Flood did, but with just humanity.

I get that they had the time constraint of 4 in-game years due to the life expectancy of an AI in the Halo-verse. However, Cortana was the most powerful AI in the Haloverse if I remember my lore correctly. It wouldn't be out of the question for her to be able to last longer, as well. Also, maybe she could... I dunno... shut down? Have what remains of the ship power her on if it is in danger of going offline or a problem develops that requires her attention? There were a whole bunch of ways that 343 could've justified it that would've made sense without requiring a huge retcon.

Anyway, that last paragraph was to explain why this could happen.

They did nothing new, other than introduce some flashy new weapons and enemies. It's 4 years later, the Covenant have apparently forgotten the peace that was achieved between the two groups, and fight them pretty much on sight, for reasons that are never well explained.

Instead, they could've kept him in cryo for, say, 100 years. In which time a kind of cult grew up around his legend, and he has to deal with the ramifications of this.

They could've done SOMETHING other than classic "aliens want to kill humanity, kill them first" shooter.

Artanis
2013-12-12, 01:35 PM
I get that they had the time constraint of 4 in-game years due to the life expectancy of an AI in the Halo-verse. However, Cortana was the most powerful AI in the Haloverse if I remember my lore correctly. It wouldn't be out of the question for her to be able to last longer, as well.
Actually, that power is the very thing that killed her.

In the Haloverse, there are two types of AIs: "smart" AIs and "dumb" AIs. Mind you, "dumb" AIs are still incredibly intelligent, but they're also very limited. They do a job, they do it well, and they don't grow beyond that job. A "dumb" AI that aims a ship's guns, for example, will aim those guns really really well, but it won't be any good at hacking an enemy computer network. "Smart" AIs like Cortana, on the other hand, do grow. They get smarter and smarter and smarter until, after about 7 years or so, they get so smart that they essentially think themselves to death.