I feel 343i missed the chance to continue what Bungie tried to do at the end and normalise making games with stories that don’t need Master Chief as the main character or don’t need world ending stakes. Because in the long run it conditioned the franchise to only accept a limited set of parameters for what can be an accepted as a game story.

In the end, the game stories are the ones feeling fanciful and out of touch with the greater extended universe. Because while every other media is dutifully updating readers or viewers about the various statuses of the adjacent universe, the game stories just seem to be oblivious to it all and always jumping to and solely focusing on the next instance of “Master-Chief-vs-world-ending-threat”.

As I like to say, it’s a failure in building brand recognition if an expansive universe like Halo ultimately still relies on one character’s popularity to sell itself. Even after over two decades of world building.