[quote][b]Posted by:[/b] TheEasy1JM For all of you posters that think ODST was so great, let me ask you a couple of questions. How many titles in the franchise feature Orbital Drop Shock Troopers as the main character? How many other games are minus the spartan? You can't have a Halo game without spartans. End of story. Bungie knows this now and that is why you will never see a Halo game without spartans again. [/quote] Are you for real? Spartans =/= the basis of Halo. -_- Let's compare ODST with Reach, a game with Spartans as the main characters. Specifically, in Reachg there weren't any characters. The only one who was even remotely interesting was Kat; Jorge had potential but he was just a copypasta of Kurt from Ghosts of Onyx and he died like half way into the game. Everyone else was bland, sterile and one-dimensional. I never felt anything for Noble Team, there was no history explored. Bungie said that they wanted to deliver a "human story" (Marcus Lehto's EXACT words) with this game... SO WHY DID THEY MAKE THE PROTAGONISTS SPARTANS? They're about the most inhuman humans in the series, an extremely prevalent theme throughout the novels is that Spartans are seen as 'freaks' by most of ONI and the ODSTs, you cannot tell a "human story" with these kinds of characters. Now in ODST? Their narrative method in that game was flawless, absolutely masterful in the way they drew direct inspiration from classical literature like Dante's Divine Comedy and film noir movies. The characterisation was told through the music and the atmosphere for the Rookie, we heard what he felt which allowed the player to project themselves into him by drawing on our emotions as we played through the game. The rest was done well with the squad banter, cheesy as -blam!- at times but still there and it showed a lot about the characters we were dealing with. Seeing things from THEIR perspective for half the game was a major way of developing them each and ultimately made me care about them. To conclude - your opinion is totally moronic. Halo isn't about Spartans, it's a universe that SPANS OVER 3 MILLION YEARS going all the way back to when the Precursors created humanity, the Forerunners and the Flood. You most definitely CAN have a Halo game without Spartans, in fact the story of ODST was infinitely better than most of the games WITH Spartans (Halo 2 being the exception). [quote]It is unbelievable to think that we waited so long for them to deliver a terrible game like that. I personally would have fired the game's concept designer.[/quote] wut? Not only was the game developed over an 8 MONTH PERIOD, it was [i]far[/i] from being terrible. Once again, I'm going to use Reach as an example because it saw a full 3 year long development cycle and should have been the game that Bungie put their full effort into. Reach is just a convoluted attempt to rehash previous moments that made the other Halo games amazing but falls on its face every time. Nightfall is a complete joke compared to The Truth and Reconciliation, the fact that that mission can be done SLASO in less than 5 minutes just shows that something's wrong - that's 1/10th of the campaign and what can be laughably called "the story". Which brings me to my next point - the plot. There wasn't one, not until New Alexandria at least, the rest was just moving from farmland to some small bases to fight Covenant just because they were there. Then when we finally did get a 'plot', it was so contrived and horribly done it just came off as Bungie further trying to inject the 'nostalgia factor' into the minds of the players by shoehorning in Captain Keyes, Halsey and Cortana. Going back to my point earlier about the characters, why didn't they learn from their narrative strengths in ODST and improve on it in Reach? Why weren't Six and Kat friends? They were both from S-III Beta Company, why wasn't there any meaningful interaction between these two characters who would have grown up together for over half a decade? How about a scene where Kat is torn between going to save Six or Carter and throughout the game we see flashbacks to both her time on Onyx with Six and her time in Noble Team with Carter. This kind of thing would show a great deal of character development, as well as getting the player emotionally involved and wondering what happens next. I could go on here, but from the reasons above this game was nothing more than a conglomeration of missed opportunities because the writers were either too lazy or too stupid to make a meaningful story with detailed characters in order to tell this "human story". The lack of Joseph Staten on this project REALLY showed by how awful the characters were in Reach. [Edited on 05.28.2012 4:57 PM PDT]