Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: 343 industries, 343i, entertainment, games, halo, halo 4, Halo 5, microsoft, video games, xbox, xbox one

Take A Look At The Lead Writer Of Halo 4's Original Plan For The Story And Franchise

So, I'm a big Halo guy. I love the gameplay, the story and the lore. That's why I'm always fascinated at little tidbita I can find about the franchise's backstory. Or, perhaps, on occasion, what could have been the franchise's backstory.

That's why this bit news is pretty cool, and it somewhat ties together two of my favorite pieces of Halo fiction, Halo 4 and Hunt the Truth. Lead Writer on Halo 4 Chris Schlerf shared with me a different way 343's first outing and the lore could have gone early on in production.

A few lore terms you should know before going into this:

Requiem: A Forerunner military planet that is encased in metal. It is the location for basically all of Halo 4.

Petra: A human war journalist who features prominently in Hunt the Truth (as played by Cobie Smulders.) She appeared briefly in the book Halo: First Strike, but was fleshed out in comic book Halo: Escalation.

Schlerf revealed:

With the Petra short story, I had originally been looking for a way to tie Cortana's recording in Halo 3 about stopping the Flood without firing the Halo rings to what we were putting together for Halo 4.* I really liked the idea that, to some extent, she'd known about Requiem and that it had been what she was talking about. We got as far as recording a couple lines linking them together, but like a lot of ideas, it was one of those things that just didn't make it through to the final version of the game.

*Just for context, Schlerf added at a later date, "Petra got a hold of that recording."

It's a neat idea and as some one who really digs Petra as a character, I'm all about it. It's hard to say for sure, but this could have literally changed the course of the game and franchise, and if it was explored, who knows where we would be at the end of Halo 5. An interesting alternate universe no?

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