So everyone knows who the villain is except the audience.

I don't like how Patrick tends to get more and more aggressive and negative in his news articles. This and the Witcher 3 DLC news kinda makes me wonder what his aim is.

Can't be any worse than where the original trilogy went.

I didn't play the original Halo trilogy, but if Halo 4 is any indication, the two franchises seem to cover very similar ground, plotwise, so one writer moving from one to the other wouldn't feel too out of place.

How about hiring from established mediums that have awesome writers like movies or books? More movement between the mediums would be awesome.

Definitely agree! Although I think some people are unfairly writing (nailed it) him off because Halo 4 wasn't that great of a story. It doesn't make him a bad writer. Halo fiction has been spiraling out of control for a while now.

Mass Effect fiction though? Oh, crap. Nevermind.

Either way, I'm fine with waiting this out and not automatically assuming this is going to be bad.

I don't understand why the lead writer isn't someone who already wrote for Mass Effect. A lot of those people exist. I don't want someone with a movie and tv background.

Halo 4's storyline wasn't exactly the best. It depended far too much on the player being familiar with the backstory of the Halo Universe, and as someone who likes the Halo games but wouldn't describe myself as a "superfan", the story felt borderline incomprehensible at times. Mass Effect was great in that it had a huge backstory, but you didn't NEED to read it to understand the basic plot points.

I hope to whatever deity is out there that he is not the lead writer.

I disagree, I think Halo 4 had a fine story. Out of all the Halo games, Halo 4 was the only one where I actually understood what was going on.

more like halo bore amirite

I'm still confused when it comes to writing story in videogames. But yeah, I wouldn't hold it against him for Halo 4's story (which I didn't play, just going by the general consensus here). The thing is, like in movies, so many bad things can occur between writing a story up to the final product, I can never fully blame the writer on just a single project.

Also: say what you want about the ending of the Mass Effect trilogy, I appreciate it more and more for the single fact that it had a definite ending.

'Had'. To be fair, the writer for Destiny left mid-project.

I don't like this.

Hopefully he got tired of writing about rampancy. They kind of have to nail ME4 or its going to be the Medal of Honor "we cant make another one of these for a while" situation all over again.

As a Halo fan, the weakest part of Halo 4 wasn't its story. Yes, it relied on you knowing aspects of the larger Halo fiction, but that does not make its story weak.

I liked moments from Halo 4 and some of the characters like Sarah Palmer but the Forerunner stuff was handled sloppily and the villain was super generic.

I'm still very curious to what changed that made Ryan Payton leave the project. One of the writers of Destiny recently left Bungie for Telltale. Halo's focus is gameplay so I imagine its very tempting for a writer to go from a studio where story is a secondary concern to a studio where story is the driving force behind design is very appealing.

Then it's a story told badly so...bad story. If the audience doesn't know what the hell you're characters are talking about then you're doing a bad job. Whether that is Schlerf's fault or someone else we do not know.

Halo 4 had a good story as long as you got to know what was going on. Sure, if you merely saw what was in the cutscenes during the campaign, it'd be a bit confusing, like who are the Prometheans, and who is Didact? That's, with the collectibles in game easy to figure out. The story isn't bad, so I'm not sure how that's rightfully seen as one of the worst parts.

The story is only not so great to those that have little interest in going past just the cutscenes, otherwise I think those that have enough interest would already know what's what... I just think it's a weird complaint, and not a completely valid one, unless like I said, you simply stop at the cutscenes, which isn't all the game has to offer, but I guess having to go on the internet to get some of the stuff isn't a good option.

@ntm said:

Yes, part of the problem with leaving players confused and lacking in story motivations for what they were doing was first having to find the terminals, which is normally something you seek out on later replays of the campaign, then once you find one, having to quit the game, go to the waypoint app and read/watch a short clip on there, then load up the game and carry on. Or you could play the spartan-ops to get more snippets of background plot and suffer a drip feed interspersed with fighting all possible combinations of enemies/locations which got repetitive because there weren't many of each.

Even then if you happened to find half of the terminals, some key plot points would still be missing and combined with the actual gameplay which got frustratingly tedious thanks to the low diversity of enemies, I wound up just playing Halo to see what was going on with Cortana/MC. Combined with a disappointing multiplayer that had a scheme alienating large portions of the world by locking levels based on pre-order bullshit in some countries, while offering full unlocks in other countries just for launching the game once. 343 managed to take me from a big halo fan to having zero interest in playing any future halo games.

lol rip mass effect

I liked halo 4

@jedted said:

Maybe he's being brought on to make Mac Walters look good.

"You think I suck, huh? Well, let's show you what would happen if someone worse had a go at it."

“As a writer, I write for characters,”

see, that quote makes halo 4 make a lot of sense, as it did a piss poor job setting up the trilogy, but was a good story about Chief and Cortana.

Considering Bioware's in-house writers over the last few years have done a really poor job with writing this can only be good news.

I just want to be a C-Sec cop.

@mrfluke said:

And in the end, that's the only reason I really come for BioWare games. All of their plots have been actually quite dull but its the characters that are memorable and make those games fun to play.

INTERNET COMMENT OF THE YEAR

I'm not going to trash anyone's writing ability. Writing for games must be a thankless job, its a hard medium to tell a story in like trying to write a theater production where YOU KNOW the audience will interrupt your actors to make them teabag each other.

The best aspects of the Mass Effect series were it's characters, story, and lore. Unless they do something crazy with the combat, I can see Mass Effect 4 being a huge disappointment. While I enjoyed the Halo games, I couldn't care less about it's characters or really couldn't tell you what the hell happened story wise. That says a lot.

@tdot: Thanks Toronto! :D

Hmm, no thank you.

Halo 4's writing was bad. ME3's writing was bad. Oh well.

I really can't understand how anyone could like the story in halo 4. Convoluted nonsense, generic ass vilain, boring ass new secondary characters with next to no screen time. I guess there's some alright but brief MC/Cortana moments but I can't get into them at all when they take place in whatever space heaven land. I mean look at this shit:

(bonus points for reminding me the game ends in a fucking quick time event)

Now compare this with the much maligned mass effect 3.

At least mass effect had great, colorful and reletable characters. That new lead writer hasn't shown he can even write a single good character. The kind that can make it through a whole trilogy. The kind you still want to hang out with after it's all over (looking at you citadel DLC).

Eh, not too bothered by this. I don't remember the dialogue in H4 being any better or worse than that of ME, and I say that as a big fan of both series.

What is important, is that some KOA: Reckoning and Gears Judgment guys are working on this, so if nothing else, the ME series will finally have some great gameplay.

I don't understand this. I paid attention and was able to follow everything just fine. I didn't read that Forerunner book trilogy.

I read Fall of Reach back in the day, sure, but I had no other knowledge leading Halo 4 and understood what was happening and what the Didact was up to.

i'm just hoping there's a "Biggest Blown Out Of Proportion Internet Freak-Out Award" in the GOTY this year.

I thought you were describing Half-Life there for a sec until you said console, makes me wonder how many kids would have attached to Half-Life instead of Halo if they just had access to a PC. Halo is solid but it always seemed like a descendant of generic and over militarized games like Doom. I cant blame the guy for having a simpler take on halo 4 with the whole all story thing, not a lot of interesting stuff there in my opinion (but hey some people didn't have a PC in 1995 so I understand if you don't see where i'm coming from).

I was in high school in 1995 and I built a PC specifically to play Half-Life. It was a great gaming experience. There was nothing else like it at the time either. You're right - Half-Life is the reason I qualified my Halo statement with "console". After Halo was released, it felt like a better overall package to me in terms of story and accessibility, but I recognize that the format of a cinematic shooter was established more or less by Half-Life.

In terms of multiplayer, it was easier for me to get a group of friends together to play a few rounds of Halo than it was Half-Life after college. They're both great games. Halo just left the more lasting impression on me.

@theterriblefamiliar: Halo did not leave a more lasting impression on me

still a great game

@ripelivejam: Wait, because I said I didn't like it?

Infinity Ward hired the writer of Traffic to work on Call of Duty: Ghosts, and it was easily the worst CoD story ever made.

Famed military author Jim DeFelice worked on Assault Horizon, but it was as generic as any other video game story involving Russians as the enemy.

Great writers from other forms of media don't translate well into video games. I imagine that they write the story like a regular book or movie without recognizing that it's a game. The developers then have to rip apart the story just to make it work as an interactive medium.

I don't know much about Halo 4 but I know what I think about 1 and 2 - and god help me if he's as bad as the people who wrote that schlock. Boy oh boy.

@jangowuzhere:

Terry Pratchett's daughter did a pretty slick job in Tomb Raider (the new one) the writing was .... very surprisingly good.

Really? I thought the writing was the worst thing about that game. All of the characters were one dimensional stereotypes and Lara's arc from normal everyday girl to bad ass adventurer is completely unbelievable.

Again, it felt like a story that did not work for a video game. A woman thrust unto a deadly island who changes by the end could work for a movie or book, but it doesn't work for a shooter.

Good luck to him. It can't be easy to have this many eyes on him.

Any writer coming over from the Halo franchise to Mass Effect would be bad news. None of the Halo games had particularly deep or involved stories. People like to dump on Halo 4 but seriously, Halo 1 is as generic as it gets. Halo has always been the super generic sci fi shooter experience. Maybe in the Mass Effect universe this guy can spread his wings now that he's not writing for an emotionless green helmet that goes around shooting bad guys and then wins in about 7-8 hours.

Yeah, pretty much.

Anecdotal evidence. We have no clue how much creative control they had, if any.

@humanity: The difference between halo 1-3 and 4 ( also Reach and ODST to some extent) is that the main line games knew what they were. Cool sci fi action games with just enough character and mystery to the universe to keep you interested. Cortana and master chief were never the greatest duo but they had an interesting dynamic going. The halo universe was not the most original sci fi universe but it was interesting (giant space rings super weapons, unstoppable alien parasite, etc) and had enough mystery to keep you hooked. In halo 4 and the side stories they focused too much on characters when those characters really couldn't deliver beyond the usual ''man of action'' persona. They also lost the mystery when everything was pretty much known by the end of halo 3 and they only added new stuff that didn't fit in the universe or were all that intriguing.

What's interesting about a villain known by everyone except the player with next to no character and generic motivations(Halo 4)? What's interesting about a new race of alien they pulled out of their ass but were somehow instrumental in winning the war even though we've never seen them before (ODST)? What's interesting about the origin story of cortana when it didn't amount to anything relevant in the main events of the franchise?

@pyrodactyl: As ridiculous as a drama between a stoic space grunt and a computer program was I actually considered it the best part of Halo 4. This emotional bond that forms between Master Chief and Cortana kind of underlines how messed up that character really is - how basically a computer program is the dearest "person" in his entire life. All the other stuff surrounding their affairs was your standard Halo space-opera: here come the big bad aliens and we have to stop them again, albeit this time no one had time to introduce them so they're even more arbitrary than the covenant. All that wasn't very interesting to me personally, but the part where Master Chief is sort of like an emotionally stunted child thats suddenly discovering emotions when this little hologram he's grown up with is about to go away was really intriguing. In the grand scheme of things it didn't really make sense why Cortana was suddenly becoming so lifelike (not to mention the body overhaul) but I genuinely enjoyed all her scenes and thought they were delivered quite well. The fact that all her melodrama was being bounced off this emotionless husk only amplified the nuance of their "relationship."

EDIT: You know, if by the end of that game they suddenly found a magic machine that would transfer Cortana into a human body and she'd become this real person and they had that scene in the end where she touches him for the first time and takes off his helmet.. that would be cheesy as all hell but I'd be totally into it.

I have played, beaten, and enjoyed every Halo game and I cannot explain the story at all besides kill aliens.