Halo

And this is the problem people have had with 343 since the beginning.

They don't have the balls to stand by their creative decisions so there's never any payoff. Sure, a lot of people didn't really care for 5's story, but it had stuff there that would have been interesting. I remember seeing concept art from Halo 6 before it was Infinite, showing a human refugee city patrolled by Spartans. It looked pretty intense, and it would have been such an interesting premise for "what if all the AI slaves turned on the humans?" They control everything, so it would have sent humanity back into a new Dark Age.

As someone who played Halo, like a lot of Halo (fuckin love Halo 3), good lord let the fucking franchise die.

It's products like these that make me realize the infinite growth problem in capitalism is just as much perpetuated by the people at the bottom as it is the people at the top. Let the fucking game die, move on or find a different hobby.

At this point I'm wondering if there's any hope for a complete retcon of the 343 fever dream era.

For all the bad decisions in H5, it had a lot of cool shit too. I was pretty fucking excited for where the story was headed, especially with the Guardians themselves.

And all of the bad shit was damage already done. Making two thirds of the game just following the Chief for absolutely no reason sucked. But that's not an issue for the next game.

Bringing back Cortana sucked. But it was done and it needed to taken advantage of. It ruined H4's ending. But on its own she worked great as a villain. Killing evil Cortana offscreen was terrible and bringing back a good Cortana was just repeating the same mistake as H5 but worse.

Infinite killed Halo for me.

Oh, please. Was the "cool roadmap" gonna end with fighting the same boss SEVEN times? But wait! He cycles thru red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet in each subsequent fight! Isn't that cool?!?1?

Would have been nice to see these ideas in a new IP, because I totally understand why fans reacted poorly to them in the context of Halo.

Halo was exhausted and they should never have continued the franchise after Bungie left.

for me the decline started with the introduction of boss fights in Halo 2. CE blew my mind with zero 'supervillain' level boss fights most games that i played at the time resorted to. i really liked the concept that the three big antagonists were an advanced civilization of never ending zealots hellbent on ending the universe for their religion, then there's the hive mind of mindless swarming parasitic alien lifeform hellbent on eating/becoming the universe aka its own religion, and the ancient remnants droids that watch over it all like an endless production line metal monks guarding and maintaining said remnants like a religion...

anywho by the time of 5 the "villains" were so Marvel level of cheese/boring i was willing to press halo's big red button and just be done with it all.