Halo 4 goes deep in the lore
James Haresign October 24, 2012 - 10:20 amBlog: James Haresign briefly explores Halo’s new marketing strategy, and how it’s helping to fill in the gaps for the series’ fans.
Halo has a rich lore, but that hasn’t always been shown in the games. Since the release of the first game there have been accompanying books, comics, and even an anime collection. We’ve read the first human contact with the Covenant from Sgt Johnson’s perspective, and the fallout of the end of Halo 3. Some could say that Halo is getting a little hard to follow without the extra material.
Halo 4′s marketing seems to be addressing that. It’s bringing that knowledge to the general audience that never bothers with the ancillary material. With the web series Forward Unto Dawn’s mention of the civil war, a war that was raging just as the Covenant turned up, a lot of gaps are starting to get filled in.
Then this turned up:
We already knew the new bad guys are Prometheans, a subsect of the Forerunners, an alien group we spent the last trilogy running around their abandoned facilities. It was no shock to see them. However, it’s the other sequences that really surprised me.
Until now the gaming audience just had Master Chief. He was some armour with a voice. Bar his interactions with Cortana he was a pretty blank slate. In Halo 3 they find out he has a real name, John. In Scanned players see that the UNSC kidnapped John as a little boy and performed some seriously nasty experiments on him and other Spartans to give us the super soldier that would one day save the galaxy.
Frank O’Connor promised that other media would tie-in a lot closer these days. Fincher and Miller certainly live up to that promise with Scanned.
