You really should. 50,000 words is publishing-length. He wrote a small book, just on Halo 4's campaign. That takes [i]serious f*cking dedication[/i]. At least read it so he didn't go through all that work for nothing.

My point exactly. Why would you bother writing 50k words about a video game's campaign mode? I mean, if you've got absolutely nothing better to do then I guess that's okay, but that's still way too much effort for too little reward.

The reward is having been dedicated enough to see such a lengthy project through from start to finish, I've had some spare time here at uni and chose to start up a writing project because I [i]wanted[/i] to - not because I expect to get notoriety for it.

How long did it take, by the way?

Something under 2 months, I started back in mid-February and did my best to pump out a new post every week.

How did you stay interested in it? I'm trying to write a novel, and it became extremely difficult to keep working on it after the first few weeks.

Oh yeah, I'm normally [i]terrible[/i] with stuff like this. Whenever I try to write even a short story, I'll spend wholes days planning the thing and then have my enthusiasm fizzle out after finishing the prologue. I had a lot of long, late night discussions with Lord of Admirals, Gojira and Grey101 about Halo over the last few months which kept the enthusiasm for wanting to talk about Halo alive. I've had a blog since last August and have been getting lots of views for my Halo posts, so something Halo-related seemed like a good fit for something to talk about. Then I started seeing my referrers feed pop up with sites like Reddit and Tumblr with some rather large view numbers, so I knew I had a good thing going. About half way through, the lead writer of Halo 4 himself congratulated me for my effort and said he was immensely humbled that he'd worked on a project which spawned this kind of analysis - that was a [i]major[/i] boost for me. I had the motivation of friends at uni pushing me to keep posting as well. Then, of course, there's the simple fact that I am just overly invested in this franchise and have been for almost 13 years now. This pretty much ended up being my love letter to the series for being with me all these years and I wanted some way to articulate it on paper, so to speak. Best of luck with your novel, they really are tricky things to stick with - it's finding ways to persevere through those stages of doubt and detachment which are key. Hope it all works out for you. :)

You wanted to write a 50k word document on Halo 4's campaign? You are a strange, strange man.

46,200 actually. :P I did, and Chris Schlerf himself, the lead writer for Halo 4, took notice of it on Twitter. Not going to lie, I got [i]a lot[/i] out of this as a writer and as a fan...

Well I imagine Bioware also took notice of that fan's 500 pages about ME3, because with writing anything that long pretty much guarantees somebody is going to notice. Glad that you got something out of it, but I can't imagine why anyone would put that much work into a document about Halo 4's campaign, of all things.

nah, this? this is impressive. [url=http://www.ubergizmo.com/2014/01/fan-details-alternative-mass-effect-3-ending-in-500-page-document/]true levels of "what" are things like this.[/url]

yes, he does. probably not people from #gaming though. and i can confirm that at least one person [i]has[/i] read through every word of this.