With the launch of Halo 4 just around the corner, I find myself reflecting on my own experiences with the long running Sci-Fi FPS. I’ve never played Halo or Halo 2 (aside from some local multiplayer) and Halo 3 seems to have occurred so long ago that I don’t even remember what happened. I enjoyed ODST for what it was because it was a side story about a soldier wandering around New Mombasa, while trying to piece together what happened to his squad, and Halo: Reach because it was simply a prequel. I wasn’t required to know anything about the original Halo trilogy to keep up and was instead introduced to Noble Team. It was also the first Halo title I technically owned and stayed up playing long into the night.
ODST and Reach had nothing to do with Master Chief.
I’m excited for Halo 4, I am, but despite everything I’ve seen so far looking really good, I’m still looking for a reason to give a crap about Master Chief. And I sincerely hope that the full game will give me that reason.
I associate my lack of love towards Master Chief with the fact that I leap of faithed into the series with Halo 3. That, combined with no experience with Halo and Halo 2, results in me never really meeting Master Chief for the first time and seeing him develop over the course of three games.
At the time, Master Chief was just the dude I was controlling and I only knew he was the ‘one man who could get the job done’ because the game told me so; and I wasn’t about to go disagreeing with someone 3 ft taller than me. It was clear to me that he and Cortana had a deep relationship due to how they interact with one another and how Chief would fight the Flood by himself to rescue her, but outside of that, they didn’t mean anything to me. I’m fully aware that this is a fault on my part, as I could’ve done a simple Wikipedia read-through, but hey, I didn’t think the plot of Halo was all that important at the time. Forgive me.
This trailer for Halo 4 showed a few scenes of Chief’s past as a child and the process in which to become a Spartan; I want more of that. I’m like the alien in that trailer, in the sense that I, too, am trying to learn about Master Chief. It doesn’t have to be a long cutscene either. Maybe some lines of dialogue between characters or something akin to the Terminals that you could find in Halo 3 (Hey, I do remember something from that!). Believe me, if there are collectibles that expand the story, I will seek them out. Sometimes, it’s the best way to tell a story, as the player may establish a deeper connection to the content because they had to put some effort into finding it.
Yes, it is, in fact, called “Halo 4” and is continuing the story of Master Chief, but it’s also the start of a new trilogy. And the fact that 343 is still using Master Chief is reason enough to think that there’s still more to learn about the man inside the armor. Something I hope comes as a close second to the ‘Ancient Evil’, in terms of the game’s priorities. Well, that and being a good game.
Chief, from my perspective, has been gone for several years now, and it’s with this return, with a ‘new’ developer, that I hope to make the same connection to Master Chief that other huge fans of Halo have.
