I like what Bear brought, and I don't mind much of what Halo 4 brought; liked some of it even. I can't stand Traviss though, and don't really put much faith in 343i for allowing her to put such rubbish into the fiction. For me her stuff degraded the enjoyment I got out of following this franchise; dragged it all through the muck. Her novels just retread the well beaten path and at worst will be a one way ticket to mediocrity without aspiration or any central sci-fi elements that previously lay at the core of Halo. I'm not sure if 343i is actually taking Halo down the path she wants it to go. Halo 4 and Spartan Ops seemed to refute some of her points, which was good. However they also reinforce some others, which makes them hard to ignore unlike other poor quality instalments which were standalone. I can't really agree with you on the portrayal of the Forerunners as being supposedly enlightened before. The Halo 3 Terminals did imply that something was wrong with the way they ruled. It didn't explicitly state any one particular thing, but something wasn't right when it said the Forerunners stripped the galaxy of all capacity for self-defence. Species' aren't all likely to give up their independence to a foreign power they don't know all too well. Of course that could be interpreted broadly, and maybe they did flanderize it by going straight to base desires and corruption. It could have meant misguided belief in a greater good which drove them. I don't agree that the Forerunners were ever well grounded in reality though. A lot of their technology from the previous trilogy was outright impossible by known physics, literal hard light included. Agreed on the artistic licence. I don't think it's a nit-pick though, as it doesn't exist in a vacuum. The Covenant's aesthetics contributed to their character. With these, frankly, unoriginal redesigns their characterization has been negatively impacted in many ways. They are anachronistic. The narrative style that 343i have been following in general with respect to the Covenant has been one that feels as if Reach was the last game in the series narratively speaking rather than it being Halo 3, and is one of the largest things that degrades my faith in them. They need to sit up and start taking themselves seriously here, because an entire third of the story (The Covenant) is being flanderized and neglected. This includes the complete lack of explanation of any kind as to the nature, identity and purpose of these "Covenant" in Halo 4. What a testament it is to how mistreated and rather poorly planned out this section of the story has been in that we still cannot say, for 100% definite, whether or not they are a faction or a Neo-Covenant Empire. That's a rather big question people had after Halo 3, too. It could also have been answered with a single line of exposition from a character in the know. I felt that extremely conservative exposition was the biggest thing wrong with the story, really.