Poll of the Day > Halo lore doesn't make any sense to me (spoilers for 20 year old video games!)

(+) Yeah! (+)

So I got Halo the Master Chief Collection in the Steam sale, and previously I had only played Halo 1 and I'm liking Reach so far. But the Halos themselves don't make any sense to me. So they're superweapons that kill all complex life in the galaxy when fired to stop the Flood. So the Forerunners put ecological preserves on the surface of the rings so they can repopulate the galaxy in case they ever need to fire the rings to kill the Flood. But, they also put Flood on the rings to contain and study them, so if they ever break out (and they seem to always break out) they then have an entire world of food available to them, thus requiring the rings to be fired. Which is makes the entire ecological preserves on the rings moot because the act of firing the ring would kill all life on the ring anyway.

Either the Forerunners are the dumbest aliens in all of scifi, or Bungee are hack frauds at writing.

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well, in halo 1 its the covenants fault for releasing the flood again because theyre a bunch of idiots

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there is an interesting thread about it on halo waypoint if you Google why did the forerunners keep the flood on the rings

id post a link but its apparently too long for gamefaqs lol

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It was a simpler time when devs didn't expect gamers would stop to think about the stories in video games. That's also why the RE franchise exists.

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Plenty of people think their plans will go off without a hitch, I'm sure any aliens would be the same, past, present, and future

So it was a dumb move, yeah, but all life makes dumb moves

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There's a specific reason for it but I can't remember it right now.

I watched a shit ton of Halo lore videos like a month ago and can't recall shit lol

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Zeus posted...

That's also why the RE franchise exists.

Youre too much.

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Maybe they were friends with those flood

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they put them there to study and ultimately find a way to just kill the flood without killing everything else, which is what chief ultimately pulls off due to the research from the installations and monitors.

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helIy posted...

they put them there to study and ultimately find a way to just kill the flood without killing everything else, which is what chief ultimately pulls off due to the research from the installations and monitors.

This. If i recall in halo 1. That halo was the only one with the flood. Till the covenant woke them up and released them.

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I think the ecological preserves wouldn't necessarily be destroyed though. I don't know if it's ever been made clear exactly how the halo rings would destroy all sentient life

papercup posted...

Halo lore doesn't make any sense to me

Part of the problem there is that Bungie was mostly just kind of making it up as they went.

And they wrote most of their games with certain intentions in mind, and then 343 went a completely different (worse) way later, so it gets even more muddled from Halo 4 on (especially with most of the newer novels and other stuff).

That being said, your issue is with Bungie's stuff, sooooo...



papercup posted...

Halo lore doesn't make any sense to me

So they're superweapons that kill all complex life in the galaxy when fired to stop the Flood. So the Forerunners put ecological preserves on the surface of the rings so they can repopulate the galaxy in case they ever need to fire the rings to kill the Flood. But, they also put Flood on the rings to contain and study them, so if they ever break out (and they seem to always break out) they then have an entire world of food available to them, thus requiring the rings to be fired. Which is makes the entire ecological preserves on the rings moot because the act of firing the ring would kill all life on the ring anyway.

Either the Forerunners are the dumbest aliens in all of scifi

Forerunners are pretty dumb.

Because they're us.

At least according to Bungie's original intention (343 changed it for the worse).

But as for the rest...

First, when the halos fire, they don't kill everything ON the halo (or, at least, they weren't originally supposed to - I'm going to try and ignore everything 343 added later). So anything stored there will actually survive the pulse to be reseeded later. On top of which, the life on the halos aren't necessarily there to entirely repopulate the galaxy, because there are also shield worlds and the Ark that also contain indexed life.

Second, it may seem stupid to put stored life as well as samples of the Flood on the weapon designed to kill them, but this is at least partly because the plan to build the halos was last-minute in the face of utter annihilation, and there was a lot of politicking going on behind the scenes. The Librarian pushed to have as much life as possible indexed, but other Forerunner weren't necessarily as bothered about the idea. So she sort of co-opted the technology that was already being built, as least to some degree. It's possible the decision to store the Flood there was last-minute as well, and poorly considered.

Third, even if there was an outbreak of Flood, there are methods for controlling the resulting leak and the Sentinels should generally be effective enough at purifying both infection forms and any infected hosts. The outbreak on Installation 4 really only goes catastrophically wrong because there's lots of humans and lots of Covenant there to serve as hosts, and most of them are heavily armed. The Forerunner containment protocols didn't really anticipate tons of ignorant people fighting a running war on the ring and deliberately compromising multiple systems (perhaps they should have, but they were desperate and in a race against time when they were building the halos, so stuff probably got overlooked).

Fourth, the Forerunners were originally supposed to be humans. Basically, humans who evolved, built cities, evolved technology, and slowly spread out to conquer the galaxy. After the halos fire the entirety of human civilization is destroyed, and the few survivors who remain wind up settling on Earth, having to to rebuilt civilization from scratch, and all memory of what came before is eventually lost. This explains why we've never managed to find a "Missing Link" - we're literally not originally from Earth. Earth is just the world where humans wound up in the aftermath. It's also why Guilty Spark "recognized" Master Chief as the "Reclaimer" - from Spark's perspective, Chief is literally the same species as the Forerunners who built him. So if we accept that humans are more than capable of making profoundly stupid decisions and consistently fucking things up, there's no reason why our ancient ancestors wouldn't have been capable of making really poor decisions of their own.
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even that doesn't make any sense considering he doesn't call any other human that.

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GTurtlte posted...

This. If i recall in halo 1. That halo was the only one with the flood. Till the covenant woke them up and released them.

Well, in Halo 1 there's literally ONLY one halo. They don't add the concept of their being more halos until Halo 2.

In Halo 2, the idea of it being an array with seven installations is introduced, but at the same time it's established that there are Flood on Installation 05 as well. So it does imply they all have one.

It's also implied in one of the multiplayer map descriptions that the Flood containment chambers are supposed to be almost completely impregnable, and containment protocol can handle anything but the most severe outbreaks - basically, 04 went to shit because of the Covenant fighting the humans, and 05 went to shit because the Flood managed to evolve into a Gravemind and capture the Monitor so the system's response was compromised.

It's also somewhat implied that in both those cases the Monitors in question are at least somewhat (to severely) Rampant, which was a concept Bungie always loved (it shows up as a major plot element in the Marathon games before Halo). Which suggests those problems might not have happened at all if the Monitors were functioning properly (but tens of thousands of years of total isolation isn't good for even an AI's sanity).
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helIy posted...

even that doesn't make any sense considering he doesn't call any other human that.

He also doesn't interact with any other human in Halo 1. By Halo 2 he's already more familiar with humans (and somewhat pissed at us), so he may be less deferential by that point.

In Halo 2 they explicitly need a human to both retrieve the Index and to fire the halo (a Reclaimer is specifically required - though I'm not 100% if anyone ever explicitly refers to Miranda or Johnson as one), the Covenant can't do it themselves. Penitent Tangent does immediately recognize Master Chief as a Reclaimer in Halo 2, though.

I know it's also explicitly stated that the only reason Guilty Spark allows Pillar of Autumn to approach/crash into the halo at all in Halo 1 is because he detects that the ship is crewed by Reclaimers, but I don't remember if that was in the original game or only the Anniversary edition.
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Spark calls chief reclaimer because MC is the person he designated to fire the ring, like his champion.

In the lore, Spark has been calling random people to fire the rings for a while.

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"Reclaimer is what the Forerunners called humans who can use forerunner technology. Not all humans are reclaimers, but many of the important characters in the Halo Universe are, such as Master Chief, all the other Spartan-II's, Dr. Halsey, and many others."

I was sort right lol

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I always read halo lore and then forget it like a month later lol. Brilliant story overall even if 343 is trying to ruin it. Probably my favorite sci fi saga

EvilMegas posted...

In the lore, Spark has been calling random people to fire the rings for a while.

EvilMegas posted...

"Reclaimer is what the Forerunners called humans who can use forerunner technology. Not all humans are reclaimers, but many of the important characters in the Halo Universe are, such as Master Chief, all the other Spartan-II's, Dr. Halsey, and many others."

Not in the original lore.

I can't tell you what the lore is now because 343 has kind of ruined it and I've stopped paying attention entirely, but back in the day when Bungie still ran the franchise the intention was pretty clearly that Master Chief is literally the first person Guilty Spark has ever seen since the halos first fired. It's why he says something like "The last time we spoke". He's conflating him with the last Forerunner he spoke to before the halos fired.

And even in 343 lore (but definitely in Bungie lore), "Reclaimer" has a very specific context. It explicitly means humans (even if 343 made a mess of it).

It's why the Covenant declared war on humans in the first place - the first planet of humans they found sent their Forerunner AI crazy, because the symbol the Covenant had always mistaken for "Reclamation" turned out to actually be "Reclaimer", and it indicated the race the Forerunner intended to rule the galaxy in their place after they were gone. The Prophets basically realized that their entire religion was a lie and that they'd just found the people who were the ACTUAL chosen ones... so they decided they had to kill them all as soon as possible before the other Covenant races realized the truth and they lost their power.

It's also a bit of an easter egg relating to the names of the Prophets in Halo 2 - two of them are ironically the opposite of their chosen names. Mercy is the one who is most bloodthirsty about purging the humans, Truth is the one who pushes hardest to wipe them out to keep the secret and keep lying to the rest of the Covenant. Regret is the only one who actually regrets what they're doing (and chooses his name specifically to remind him that what they're doing is ultimately wrong even if it's necessary). But they all know that every human is explicitly a Reclaimer, and thus the true inheritors of the Forerunner's legacy. Which is why they declared total war on us rather than attempting to bring us into the Covenant like the other races they'd encountered.
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i dont really have anything to add to the conversation other than 3v4i is truly terrible

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Well, in Halo 1 there's literally ONLY one halo. They don't add the concept of their being more halos until Halo 2.

aside from 343 saying that he was in charge of installation 4, which implies the existence of at least 3 others, sure.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

He also doesn't interact with any other human in Halo 1.

he does. marvin mobuto.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Regret is the only one who actually regrets what they're doing (and chooses his name specifically to remind him that what they're doing is ultimately wrong even if it's necessary).

this isn't true at all. regret was arguably the most bloodthirsty of the three high prophets, nor did he ever show regret, much like mercy not showing mercy, and truth not ever telling the truth.

in fact, the three prophets before them, tranquility, restraint, and obligation, also did the opposite of their names.

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I too have gotten back into Halo series of late. Played 1-4 in the last couple weeks and am currently halfway through H4 Spartan Ops.

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I will add. After years of halo burnout. I did manage to buy the Halo MCC cheap

i played reach all the way through 4. Cant wait for halo infinite. Even though 343 took what bungie had. Kicked it outside and shot it like a poor malnourished mutt that your son loved

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anyone here down to play some MCC sometime? Ive been playing a lot by myself the last month or so.

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Forerunners are a name that someone calls you long after you're gone and your history is forgotten. It's not a name your species calls itself.

The Halos exist to wipe out the food source of the Flood and halt their spread. This is apparently necessary because they can't be killed or contained. Yet your weapons do just fine against them and they were contained on the Halo for probably millennia before the Covenant arrived.

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SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Forerunners are a name that someone calls you long after you're gone and your history is forgotten. It's not a name your species calls itself.

The Halos exist to wipe out the food source of the Flood and halt their spread. This is apparently necessary because they can't be killed or contained. Yet your weapons do just fine against them and they were contained on the Halo for probably millennia before the Covenant arrived.

The last time the halos fired was like 100,000 years ago, so they've been there a while

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helIy posted...

aside from 343 saying that he was in charge of installation 4, which implies the existence of at least 3 others, sure.

Three other installations, not necessarily three other halos.

Installation 00 is part of the same numbering chain, and it's the Ark and not a halo. There are also other installations mentioned later that are part of the defensive line not the halo array.

Nor does numbering necessarily mean the prior three installations still exist (sort of like how, in Babylon 5, Babylon's 1-4 no longer exist). The replacement halo the Ark is making in Halo 3 is classified as Installation 08, not 04.

Nothing in the first game explicitly states there are multiple halos still extant (whether Bungie already planned for their to be more or just came up with the others as a way to justify having another halo in the sequel is up for question). It's why it comes as a shock in Halo 2 when you see Installation 05 for the first time.



helIy posted...

he does. marvin mobuto.

Only in a book that is borderline non-canon, because it was written by someone outside of Bungie as an adaptation of the game and had multiple elements that contradicted other things. It's also been implied since then (in response towards some of the negativity towards it) that he had a really tight schedule and didn't necessarily have time or access to Bungie's actual story bible to get details right.

The general consensus is (or at least used to be) that the canonical timeline is Fall of Reach, then Halo 1, then First Strike, then Halo 2.

343 might have re-canonized it (because they released an edited/updated version of it after they took over everything Halo), but that's outside of the scope of what I was talking about.



helIy posted...

this isn't true at all. regret was arguably the most bloodthirsty of the three high prophets, nor did he ever show regret, much like mercy not showing mercy, and truth not ever telling the truth

This one I'll grant you - I was confusing Mercy and Regret in my head (I went and grabbed my copy of Contact Harvest to check). I tend to mix them up a lot.

Regret was Tranquility (the young one), Mercy was the Philologist (the older one).

Mercy was the one I was remembering who didn't fit, because the Philologist is the devout priest who hated what they were doing (at least at first). And he doesn't really have a ton of "merciless" moments to really throw him into contrast (though he does die because no one shows HIM mercy). Though to be fair he does commit to the plan to kill all humans after they talk him into it, so "no mercy" would probably fit for him as well.

On the subject though, Contact Harvest is also the book where they explicitly spell out that the Luminaries that detect "Reclaimer" are identifying humans:

<THIS IS NOT RECLAMATION. THIS IS RECLAIMER. AND THOSE IT REPRESENTS ARE MY MAKERS>

"The Forerunners," the Minister whispered. "Some were left behind."

<I WILL REJECT MY BIAS. MY MAKERS ARE MY MASTERS. I WILL BRING THEM SAFELY TO THE ARK>

...and then the Prophets basically lobotomize High Charity to prevent it taking off.

Truth also explicitly mentions in his inner dialogue that he deliberately chooses the name Truth because of all the lies he's going to have to tell, and the ultimate truth he can never, ever reveal.



helIy posted...

in fact, the three prophets before them, tranquility, restraint, and obligation, also did the opposite of their names.

Well, Tranquility is Regret, so yeah. Though I think you mean Tolerance.

But the prior three really don't fit the pattern as well. Restraint's only real lack of restraint (that we know of) is illegally having kids, while Tolerance actually seems to make a concerted effort to live up to the name (he's described as helping improve relations between the various races). And Obligation is mentioned to have shirked some responsibility during her pregnancy, but is described as being both prolific and beloved (it's why Fortitude/Truth has trouble leveraging those two out of their seats while Restraint is much easier to blackmail).
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SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

This is apparently necessary because they can't be killed or contained. Yet your weapons do just fine against them and they were contained on the Halo for probably millennia before the Covenant arrived.

There's a difference between fighting off a dozen zombies with a machine gun and fighting off a hundred million zombies who've spread out across hundreds of planets.

Infections are easy to contain and cauterize in their early stages, much less so once they start to spread wide.
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