Posted at oxm.co.uk on May 7, 2012:
Thoughts on Master Chief’s new nemesis
Great franchises often boil down to great characters – it’s a lot easier to sell a face, after all, than a neat gravity mechanic or a mind-boggling premise – and Halo is no exception. Master Chief isn’t the only one who’s spent years in stasis; according to Microsoft’s Phil Spencer, the series hasn’t really been itself since the tanked UNSC frigate Forward Unto Dawn began its lonely voyage through galactic backwaters.
But Halo’s claim to fame doesn’t rest entirely on the Chief’s chunky shoulders. Once you’ve slid down the visor, pulled on those bottle-green gauntlets and whipped out an Assault Rifle, the man otherwise known as John-117 fades from view, and the experience is defined – and distinguished – by the creatures you fight. In the lily-livered Grunts, honour-bound Elites, feckless Brutes and conniving Jackals, Halo proffers the most complex yet intuitive lore-based AI ecology ever glimpsed in a game, a vibrant culture whose inner workings can be deduced from Covenant battle tactics. And with fascinating perversity, it also gives us the polar opposite in the form of the Flood – an all-consuming, homogenising biomass which serves as a spectacularly brutal palate-cleanser.
Dealing with the Flood was once Halo’s core dilemma, both in terms of the lore and in terms of how campaigns are organised and paced. But all has changed with Halo 4. The Covenant are back, rudely awakening the Chief from cryosleep as the Forward Unto Dawn approaches a mysterious Forerunner planet. The Flood, however, are long gone – obliterated or at least temporarily thwarted by the premature firing of the replacement Halo 04 facility. Or so franchise custodians 343 Industries would have us believe. In their place, we’re told to expect a new enemy – an ancient threat composed, like the Covenant, of elegantly interacting unit types. In the first of this week’s Halo features, I speculate about who or what that enemy might be.
The Forerunners
The Forerunners weren’t always good mates with humanity. Hundreds of thousands of years before the events of the Halo trilogy, the two species waged a galaxy-wide war. The Forerunners won that particular scrap, imposing a harsh peace settlement whereby the surviving humans were rewritten at the DNA level, but their victory would prove their undoing. Humanity had developed a cure for the Flood parasite with the assistance of the Prophets, later to become the Covenant’s ruling species; reduced to a pre-technological society, our ancestors were unable or unwilling to pass this knowledge on.
343’s Frank O’Connor has hinted that we’ll encounter living, breathing Forerunners on Requiem, the Dyson Sphere glimpsed in the first Halo 4 trailer. It’s possible that these survivors nurture a degree of enmity towards mankind, and even if they don’t, the Forerunners – or at least, their AI minions – have an in-game history of visiting dire vengeance on those who tamper with their installations. Blowing them up presumably counts.
The Didact and Prometheans
Once boss of the Forerunner military, the Didact campaigned against the creation and firing of the Halo array as an ultimate solution to the Flood menace. While his lover the Librarian argued for wiping the galaxy clean of susceptible organic life, then repopulating it using samples preserved at Forerunner Shield Worlds, the Didact believed the war could be won via conventional naval tactics. A brilliant strategist and fearsome warrior, standing four metres tall, his precise fate is unknown. 343 has hinted, however, that the Didact may have a part to play. In new animated films hidden away in Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, back-stabbing monitor 343 Guilty Spark suggests that the Halo’s capture may “awaken” the Didact along with his Promethean retinue. He also suggests that Master Chief may prefer the company of the Flood. Gulp.
A Rampant Cortana
343 hasn’t shied away from broaching the topic of Cortana’s impending Rampancy – the final stage in most AI life cycles characterized by hatred and resentment of one’s makers – but has yet to discuss the precise ramifications. As we’ve written elsewhere, Cortana is a bit of a special case – she’s absorbed huge chunks of mind-altering Forerunner and Covenant data in her travels, and her trajectory is thus hard to gauge. A “dark” turn seems likely at some point however, and that may be why 343’s looking to get under Cortana’s skin a little more in Halo 4; as the nearest thing Cortana has to a blood relative, his emotional arc will doubtless intersect with hers.