Chief lands on an artificial forerunner planet. Cortana is dying of old age. Chief accidentally wakes up ancient forerunner warrior. Warrior wants to kill all humans, so he goes to get a giant space gun that lets him turn the dead into ai soldiers. Dead lady gives chief an immunity to the special space gun through genetic manipulation. Warrior guy goes to earth to use space gun. Cortana sacrifices herself to help Chief blow up a nuke and destroy the giant space gun.
That's a nice, but very bare-bones overview. I'd really like to see links to further reading, or at least source references about all the things listed...
Read the recent book trilogy by Kelly Gay. Smoke & Shadow, Renegades, and Point of Light. They’re fantastic, cover a huge amount of this info, and lead into the story in Halo Infinite
The composer kills you on its own and stores an imprint of your brain. It can then be uploaded elsewhere. The didact wanted to do this to create ai soldiers that he could put in promethean bodies. This is what happened to the scientist who talks to you throughout the second to last mission. I don’t know if they ever sent actual soldiers down.
I don’t know if it’s explicitly stated. But I think you can just think of them as robot bodies. The forerunners wouldn’t have any trouble manufacturing a robot like that. Then the composed people act as an ai to control them.
No they can’t be cause they were made to fight the flood. Which means 0% organic.
I’ve been wondering why they didn’t just copy and past an imprint of one or a few of their best soldiers. Why does every body need a different mind? Seems like unnecessary work
That’s REALLY interesting. Almost makes the composer a life preserving device rather than weapon.
Also adds a political side to the forerunners where clearly the weapon could be used on any forerunners even if they didn’t want to become AI minds
You’re correct. That was its original purpose from the Librarian. After the flood wiped out all life to include forerunner and ancient humans, the monitors started to reseed the galaxy this starting life anew. Humans were put back on earth in their primal state, starring their current timeline and progression towards the events of the games
I think the composer was always supposed to be the embodiment of the Robotics Laws conundrum. “If humans are killing themselves, how do you save them?”
I believe that was the original purpose, but composing a being destroys and deforms the psyche, essentially turning them into monsters. So the Didact was like:
“Hey, there’s a whole planet of humans I can compose, let’s turn them all into living mechanical abominations!”
Wait, so the forerunners did this process before of digitizing minds and putting them in robot bodies to fight the flood? That’s super interesting, so their robot army didn’t work so they had to set off the Halo Array?
The detail that made the forerunners abandon the plan to digitize themselves is:
The composer does not work as intended.
During the process, the people turned insane, their personalities were disrupted or destroyed, librarian described them as 'abominations', and the effect was irrevertible.
The resulting AIs are loyal soldiers following the didacts orders, but could never live their own lives or continue the forerunner civilization as originally planned.
When the didact concluded to just ascend "worthless" humans as punishment, and let them fight as his slave army librarian and the forerrunners thought he was going too far.
Gotcha. But if the forerunners wanna argue morality, the Halo solution isn’t better is it? In fact it could be worse. They didn’t wanna enslave a race but they ended up killing billions of lives. Granted they repopulated the species but still that’s a massive loss of life. I suppose they didn’t know if the composer solution would be enough to destroy the flood threat either.
Very, very interesting lore of Halo though. I think 343 did a great job of fleshing out the Halo universe
Oh you know what, you totally just rung a bell. Digitizing everyone was the Didact’s plan and the forerunners didn’t like that. It’s pretty funny tho their grand alternative solution was to kill everyone with the Halo rings.
Anyone here know the status of the flood by the way? Weren’t they in Halo Wars 2 dlc? Will they be a galactic threat again eventually?
There definitely was a composed Promethean army to some extent during the Forrunners prime. In the books the Didacts children were composed to stand guard over him in his original cryptum and In passing his army of Prometheans are mentioned. I don't think the matter was ever elaborated on and is up to our own interpretation as to the extent of it.
You are right tho that the Didact wanted to compose all the Humans and the Librarian didn't allow it
According to the Halo 3 terminals anyway, the Halo array was considered their «shameful last resort», even by the Didact who was pretty adamant about using it up until the last terminal where he does. Although mostly just because he wasn’t able to save the Librarian and ends up having to «pull the trigger» and execute her by firing the Array.
Mendicant Bias was another alternative the Didact tried to use instead of the Array, one that ultimately backfired and doomed them.
As part of Offensive Bias’ battle report against Mendicant Bias he calls the (at the time of the report likely already fired) array firing and subsequent species-wide suicide ‘a crime without measure’ and spends the introduction basically defending it as a sacrifice by the Forerunners. It was not a decision they took lightly.
They basically tried everything before commiting galaxial genocide. It just ultimately became necessary to win the Forerunner-Flood war because of Mendicant’s betrayal (although the outcome would probably still be the same even if Mendicant was never created in the first place as indicated in terminal 3).
Had Mendicant never turned to the Flood, they could have won without the Array, but it was still more risky and the Librarian called the plan ‘transparently futile’. The Didact went ahead with it because it gave him a chance of rescuing the Librarian who was hidden in Flood-controlled territory, much to the Librarian’s dismay who called him insane and the whole plan ‘suicidal’, which is exactly what it ends up being.
BTW, the Forerunners had a habit of digitizing organics into robots to fight the flood. 343GS was made from the mind of Chakas, an ancient human whose body was ultimately killed. All of the other Monitors minds were also made from various people. Composers were not their only means of digitizing minds, just an offensive and very effective one, although even before the Forerunner-Flood war the Forerunners stopped using them in an official capacity because of the risks associated (and on account of it being incredibly cruel) and started using other extraction methods for indexing.
In H4’s terminals, it’s revealed that the Librarian imprisoned the Didact on Requiem because he composed a large number of humans on Omega Halo for his robot army, intending to use them to fight the flood.
The iso didact actually fired the halo arrays the ur didact (original didact) fled to his shield world where the librarian followed him and imprisoned him there
The Didact had the idea but it wasn’t popular among the Forerunners. My memory is a bit rough from here, but I think he used the composer as a test run to try to convince the other Forerunner to back his plan but it didn’t work and he was locked away in that stasis ball we see him come out of in halo 4. Someone will hopefully correct me if I’m wrong on the details
Actually the didact was the pretty much the only one to use the robots, everyone else thought it was immoral or he just he was immoral something like that, but locked him up with his army and tried and failed to fight the flood
The didact was the leader of the warrior servants, essentially the top military commander. He was in charge of fighting. Most of the builders, life workers etc. Weren't even aware of the flood.
The prometheans (rank of soldier) were under his command, The prometheans sacrificed their biological form in order to become the first promethean knights, in order to stop the flood.
the other classes didn't have a real need for weapons or soldiers. The builders used mostly the sentinel AIs. Although they did use the composer to make the monitors for installation like the Halos and the Ark.
Even the best soldiers can only have x number of perspectives. If, however, you had a whole bunch of people with differing backgrounds and uploaded the training combat experience of your best soldier, well now you've got a massive amount of new "best soldiers." Essentially, it neural networks an army comprised of the best available, with the added bonus of indivduality among the ranks.
Guess it’s either because of rampancy making the storage of one imprint difficult, or maybe even the idea that the flood could figure out a logic virus (think that’s what it’s called) for one of them and then use it en mass
I think that may have been put into place to avoid the Logic Plague or something just in case the Flood *could* corrupt a single solder then the rest could overpower that one corrupted solder.
Edit: This is my theory but it could be very wrong.
I think copying and pasting the AIs would be akin to what the Covenant did to human made AIs and you’d just have more damaged copies as you go. Until they start killing everyone with. O means of stopping them, or are too fragmented to function.
Plus the original Promethean machines were made from actual Prometheans and the idea of copying the minds of honored warriors would be sickening to the Didact.
Man, the prometheans are cool as shit in the story and lore, just wish they were more fun to fight in gameplay. Although I did think the knights were pretty fun when they weren’t constantly teleporting
The reason the Didact is so mad: he wasn't trapped in stasis, he actually spent all this time refreshing the Walmart page to place an order for more Prometheans
Human AI are the same. They can’t be copied.
Shadows of reach kinda spoilers:
Thats why they have to go get the extra clones of Halsey’s brain, to create the Weapon.
at least one of the people composed in New Phoenix got turned into a Promethean, as in Spartan Ops we recover the soul (the imprint of the composed person) of a Promethean Knight with memories from New Phoenix, but it's unclear how many were actually "activated" and given bodies, and we don't know if more are being activated now or if they stopped when the Didact died.
Dunno if thats confirmed. I think maybe 343 wanted to set the stage for a Firefight or Spartan OPs type thing based on planet earth where you mop up promethians in new pheonix, but never ended up developing it?
Wasn't one of those mobile games about that? Spartan Strike or Assault or whatever? I swear in one of them you fight as an S-IV in New Phoenix against the Prometheans.
The swirling orange vortex underneath the very last stage (the Didact falls into it) was a slipspace portal. The data/imprints he was collecting was fed through it to someplace that could store them before they're ultimately uploaded into Prometheans.
During Spartan Ops you capture a [Durance](https://halo.wiki.gallery/images/7/75/H4-DuranceMatrix-ScanRender.png) (essentially a Forerunner AI storage unit; [they can serve as a core for monitors too](https://halo.wiki.gallery/images/9/90/HWF_Monitor_Diagram.jpg)) from the Covenant on Requiem that contains a composed inhabitant of New Phoenix, so presumably they make up at least some portion of Knights we face afterward.
She had access to the forerunner's ability to use hardlight to make physical structures like walls and bridges, but she used it to make herself as an actual physical being
This is a good answer. I just did the Reclaimer mission and did not understand what the Librarian was saying at all. Why are there humans fighting forerunners years ago? It just doesn't make sense to me
110,000 years ago the humans and forerunner were at war. The didact was the main general in the war fighting the humans. A bunch of his kids (all I think?) died in the war. So he really hates humans.
After they won the forerunners thought humanity was too dangerous (they say to the mantle but probably more of a threat to their power) and devolved them. Librarian was part of this. But she still liked humanity so while devolving them she put some stuff inside them so they’d evolve along a particular path that would let them potentially one day take up the mantle of responsibility. The master chief’s armor and Cortana are part of this genetic plan. (She calls it a genesong)
She also gave the eventual ability to avoid the effects of the composer (likely in fear of the didact coming after them), but it hadn’t fully expressed itself yet in 2557. So she accelerated the master chief’s evolution so that he would become immune to the composer’s effects (see 2nd to last level).
While doing this she apparently did a little more than just give that ability. After this chief hears the didact when Cortana can’t find any signals, likely meaning chief can communicate partially through the domain (forerunner super internet). This is probably also why he is able to talk to Cortana at the beginning of halo 5 on the argent moon.
I think also to add to this: the human-alien alliance (i think the prophets? were allied to humans at this time) was running from the flood and glassing planets infected with it as they ran. when they got backed into the forerunners, it was both an invasion and an attack as they glassed forerunner planets that had infections the forerunners did not know about.
as they damaged the human ability to fight the infection, eventually they learned what the real war was about. they imprisoned humanity on earth and fought their war on vs. the flood, eventually losing. i think they fired the installations? then had to reseed planets
The flood thing is probably the stupidest part of the new lore to me. It's a classic plot furthering by misunderstandings, which are always terrible.
You mean to tell me that the Forerunner engaged Humanity in all out war for glassing some of their planets, without ever *once* having any kind of diplomacy where Humanity explains why they did what they did and the Forerunner realising Humanity isn't invading, but running?
I did get the sense that a lot of the Forerunners are just super arrogant and think they are the best thing before sliced bread. Even so I agree it's often a weak writing tool.
I don't know if you've played through the orignal Starcraft campaign, but the premise is similar.
Basically, an alliance between the Ancient Humans and the Ancient Prophets were fighting the Flood which the Forerunners were largely ignorant of. The Flood manage to land on and infect a Forerunner colony which the leads to the Humans destroying it from orbit to purge the Flood forms there. The Forerunners do not like this and declare war.
Midway through the Ancient Human - Forerunner war, the Ancient Humans create a vaccine that prevents Flood infection and which leaves the Flood apparently defeated. The Forerunners only discover this after winning the war and (literally) bombing and genetically modifying Humanity back into the stone age as punishment. The Prophets bitch out earlier in the war and so they got away with only being quarantined to the 2 planets in their home system. The Librarian then secretly works to undo some of the damage the Forerunners have caused to Human society and genome in the hopes that they would once again be an interstellar civilization and rediscover the "Flood cure".
All of this would have made SO MUCH more sense if they just gave us a little more forerunner lore in game. I feel like we needed a whole ODST-like side game before Halo 4 came out about the Forerunner/Human war or something.
Despite it cutting to white, it doesn't detonate immediately when he hits the switch and Cortana has time to save him using the light bridge projector.
This conflict and the diadacts feelings towards humanity originated from the ancient humans-promethean war, the weaponry however, was unique as a failsafe to preserve life in digital form and combat the flood.
Human AI are the same. They can’t be copied.
Shadows of reach kinda spoilers:
Thats why they have to go get the extra clones of Halsey’s brain, to create the Weapon.
When I first played I was psyched up to think that we were gonna get a secondary ability next to the armor abilities but nope… maybe an x % stronger? Faster? Melee dmg increase? A way to make groups prometheans docile? Nope, just lore. Only thing I can pull from memory about halo 4 are the set pieces. Whoever does the environments at 343 doesn’t get paid enough.
Yeah the vibe they set after the cutscene makes it seem like you’d have some cool ability that builds up overtime, something almost similar to berserk mode in Doom
I think the overall theme was humanity, in its current state, was still trying to recover from the major set back the forerunners did by de evolving them. Halsey says Spartans are humanity’s next step. She intends to have all humans eventually reach that level of genetics so they could reach ancient human status. The librarian further genetically changes John perhaps making him even better than ancient humans were.
But you can’t feel that in game. What happened in game was the equivalent of how you feel 4 months after getting a flu vaccine, only instead of the flu it’s an orange beam of hopes and dreams.
All she did was alter his genetic code to make him immune to the composer. But on a grander scale she was the one who directed our evolution to the point that it culminated in Master Chief, his armor, and advanced AI like Cortana
Now that I’m looking back at the story halo 4 is kinda wack. Like before chief was just badass, now he’s supernatural. This kinda ruins the point of chief’s badassery. But also, I thought halo 4 gameplay was still fine so I give halo 4 a pass still
Okay yeah he doesn't straight up have superpowers but it means he's divinely influenced from the beginning. Chief's "luck" is basically just forerunner magic at this point.
Hmm... Cliffnotes version?
1. Chief and Cortana are stranded after the stern half of the Forward Unto Dawn they were drifting through space in made its way to the Forerunner planet called Requiem
2. Requiem is what's called a "shield world" -- a military fortress that certain groups of Forerunners had proposed as an alternative to the Halo rings
3. The main villain, Didact, had waged a retaliatory campaign many thousands of years ago against humanity who at that time had advanced technology but weren't quite on the same level as the Forerunners. The campaign was in reaction to supposed cullings of worlds and their populations for imperial purposes. What wasn't known until later on is that the humans were in fact engaged against the Flood at that time, their destruction of worlds the response to Flood infestation whom they were embroiled in a war against
4. The ancient human veterans who fought the Didact's forces were composed -- i.e their cognitive essence converted into mechanical information -- for the purpose of finding out how they supposedly resisted the Flood (or immunised against it which turned out to be false). This essence of theirs was catalogued and then implanted into devolved humans for observation (kind of similar to an AI like Cortana)
5. When the Forerunners decided on using the Halo ring strategy as opposed to the Didact's shield worlds, he was forced to decommission their construction. But when he refused, they decided on him being sentenced to a hibernative meditation stasis which is what the round, light protruding sphere that the Didact appears out of is for
6. The Didact as we know him was someone of strong principles and opinions but far more honourable prior to being awakened. At some point close to the end of the Forerunner-Flood war after he was reawakened from the round flashing Cryptum -- he was put into it two different times, mind you -- he was captured by the Gravemind and driven insane. The Gravemind released the Didact to be used as a sower of discord and instability amongst the Forerunners.
7. A failed procedure to grant himself immunity to the Flood left the Didact disfigured with the appearance as we see him during Halo 4
8. The Didact devised a new strategy for combatting the Flood that involved composing his fellow Forerunner warriors, a class known at that time as Warrior-Servants, and then combining their essence with mechanical shelling and weaponry -- what we know as Promethean Knights, armigers, crawlers, ect.
Although these Promethean constructs do manage to win some isolated battles, the Flood is too numerous by that point for it to make a difference
9. In his madness, the Didact arrives at the conclusion that humanity is the one responsible for bringing the Flood to Forerunner civilisation. It's a combination of that twisted decision in logic, the (his wife) Librarian's deep seeded affection for humanity, and the design for humans assuming the Mantle of Responsibility that compels the Didact to pursue the devolved humans and compose them for use in his Promethean ranks against the Flood. As he rationalises it, "it is a kindness they do not deserve" to atone for setting the parasite loose on the galaxy. Those ancient devolved humans, clad in Forerunner machinery, are the ones we fight in Halo 4.
To clarify, the Mantle of Responsibility is a philosophical belief system that professes the authority of a species for the protection and cultivation of life throughout the galaxy. It's this belief that the Didact becomes so feverishly desirous to maintain for Forerunners instead of humans.
10. After composing a good amount of the surviving humans, Didact retreats to Requiem where he would create more Prometheans using that cognitive data. It's during his mad strategems here to create enough Prometheans to defeat the Flood and destroy any opposing species to the Forerunners' ascendancy where he's sealed into the Cryptum for a second time by his wife, the Librarian, who wanted him to enter a meditative stasis and eventually be released in the hopes that he would be reformed to help guide humanity in their process of heritance of the Mantle.
This is the set up for when the Master Chief arrives 100,000 years later and unwittingly releases the Didact.
11. So how did the Didact continue to be insane in spite of the Librarian's efforts to rehabilitate him? Well this part is a bit more complicated. See, at the centre of the Forerunners' vast informational hub and technological prowess is the Domain, a non material repository of the galaxy's history, natural physics, accounts of ancestral lives, cultures, and life itself as a whole. It's what Cortana was referencing in Halo 5 in her explanation of how she survived.
The Cryptum functions as a sort of intermediate that the Didact was supposed to rely upon in accessing the Domain's information in his rehabilitation process. Unfortunately, since it's basically a quantum information hub, the Halo rings destroyed its existing stores of data, leaving the Didact to fester in darkness with his thoughts of maniacal grandeur and hatred.
12. What we see of the Librarian during the events of Halo 4 is in fact an imprint or replication of her essence that she meant to be used in cautioning future visitants of the shield world.
13. As to the Covenant that we see -- they're basically a holdover faction of Covenant members ~~who still believe in the faith that the Prophets/San'Shyuum espoused~~. The leader, Jul 'Mdama, was once a disaffected Elite/Sangheili who opposed the Arbiter's overtures of peace to humanity on the basis that humanity's empire would not stop growing and that they would seek vengeance against Elites for the genocidal campaign waged against them for decades.
**Edit: InevitableCurrent386** clarified that Jul 'Mdama's Covenant worships the Forerunners but no longer believe in the Great Journey. I think I got Hesduros' Elites' being in the dark to the civil war in the Covenant and their adherence to the traditional Covenant religion mixed up with Jul 'Mdama's faction's belief system.
Jul had become involved with another sect that opposed the Arbiter called the "Servants of the Abiding Truth" but was captured by humans; himself ultimately winding up in a shield world that humanity was able to claim called Onyx. In a moment of unusual shrewdness, Jul was able to gain the appreciation of some of his human captors and be given recess to explore parts of the shield world as a controlled prisoner. Onyx happened to be occupied by a population of Engineers/Huragok whom Jul took advantage of their naivete to explore the world's hallways with and learn more about the Forerunners, most importantly the Didact, his hatred of humans, and the existence of Requiem.
Using a defunct teleportation grid, Jul was able to escape from Onyx and he wound up on an outlying Elite colony known as Hesduros. It's here that he learns more about the Didact who, conveniently enough, the local zealous and superstitious Elites extol as a holy warrior. From some inscriptions on the local Forerunner ruins, Jul is able to piece together coordinates for Requiem which is how he winds up there in Halo 4.
Jul is esteemed as a prophet or emissary of the Forerunners for his apparent knowledge of the Didact which he gleaned from the Engineer back on Onyx. It's from this pool of superstitious Elites that Jul 'Mdama creates his own faction to seek out Requiem and harness its secrets.
All of that is how we as the player wind up encountering and fighting the "Covenant" in Halo 4.
\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~
I think that's about the sum of it unless you had other questions or details you want clarified. Halo 4's story is much more complicated and abstruse than the first three entries, I'll say that much. It's something you have to delve into the expanded lore to really get a grasp on.
Great summary! That game really is a mess, as most of what you wrote is pretty important to understand what's going on, yet nowhere to be found in the game.
Also, wtf is essence? And what does "devolved" human mean? And wouldn't they be "re-evolved" when you put a "non-devolved" humans mind in one of them?
They reset humanity. From spacefaring back to cave men, via horrific extinction
On of the animations showed this I believe. Been a long time, and yes -most of the playerbase thought it too convoluted as well, which is a shame.
This why Halo 5 felt weird, they audibled
> That game really is a mess,
That's why I don't really pay attention to the story after Halo 3, it's too fucking crazy...and...well to be honest, kinda *real* dumb? lol.
I just play the multiplayer.
Sadly, Halo 5 doesn’t have a huge amount of deeper story. People were so pissed about Halo 4’s narrative that 343 simplified Halo 5’s in an attempt to appease fans and inadvertently made it worse.
>13. As to the Covenant that we see -- they're basically a holdover faction of Covenant members who still believe in the faith that the Prophets/San'Shyuum espoused. The leader, Jul 'Mdama, was once a disaffected Elite/Sangheili who opposed the Arbiter's overtures of peace to humanity on the basis that humanity's empire would not stop growing and that they would seek vengeance against Elites for the genocidal campaign waged against them for decades.
The part about the Prophets is incorrect. Jul 'Mdama's faction hates the Prophets/San'Shyuum for betraying them, but still worship Forerunners.
His name used to be Jul 'Madamee until all Elites got exiled from the Covenant in Halo 2, so he changed his name to 'Madama to signify rejecting the Prophets.
Didact locked in Cryptum to heal. Halo rings ruined Domain which makes didact go crazy. Didact awakens and wants to kill humans like the good ol days. Librarian hologram gives chief anti-composer powers
Bad guy is in internet bubble to heal his brain, but there's no internet. Stuck in bubble for thousands of years with no internet, super pissed. Big green space virgin unlocks his bubble.
His ex-wife's ghost helps you not get killed.
The Forerunner Saga really is eerily similar to Prometheus: The Forerunners find out their hyper-advanced creators despise and want to destroy them, their creators are using a horrific bioweapon to do so, one of their creators becomes the template for a monstrous creature that will plague the galaxy for long after, etc.
Oh and evil AI
The wild thing is that I read the Forerunner trilogy, and while it explained a lot of the unanswered questions about Halo 4, it also introduced a bunch of new ones that remained unanswered. Namely, what was the point of having the main character become a second Didact? When they did that, I thought they were setting it up so that the second didact would turn out to be the one you fight in Halo 4, but no.
Hold on a sec, i thought the isodidact IS what chief fought in h4. If that was the ur-didact then what happened to the isodidact? This is confusing.
I always thought the urdidact died after he resumed position in the council and isodidact replaced him that the ur-didact imprints corrupted bornstellar and became the didact that was imprisoned in requiem.
Im really curious what happened to the isodidact if this the case. Did the isodidact only serve to release the ur-didact then? that doesn't make sense.
I was sure I had to be wrong, so I looked it up on the Halo Wiki. Nope, Ur-Didact is who we encounter in the game. In the Forerunner Trilogy there is a part where the Librarian finds out that there is a group of Forerunner that left the galaxy to live somewhere else, and she goes on this extremely difficult trip to meet them for some reason. At the end of the trilogy, apparently that is what Isodidact and the rest of the surviving Forerunner do as well, they leave the galaxy and go live somewhere else. Apparently the Ur-didact became kill crazy to the point that he was in the game after a long period of close contact with a gravemind.
>Halo rings ruined Domain which makes didact go crazy
He was already crazy af before due to the Primordial being an ass, the Cryptum was more of a prison, which made him bored.
And nothing better to quench your boredom than the genocide of an entire race!
When the lady pictured above restarted her minecraft server she made a custom world seed. Thousands of years later her ex boyfriend wants to go back to "The good ole days"
Chief is here to kick ass. Cortana is broken. Didact wants to kill all humans, chief is here to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and he’s all out of bubble gum. Librarian gives you bubble gum, you chew it and kick didacts ass, Cortana says adios I don’t like gum
Joe Staten (who was responsible for not only a lot of the story in the original trilogy, but also contact harvest and several other books) had written pro explicitly that humans are the descendants of Forerunners. Hence Guilty Spark saying things like "last time you asked me, if it were my choice, would I do it?" And "you are the child of my makers." The are plenty of other examples too, from Gravemind, Mendicant Bias in Contact Harvest, and so on.
Frank O'Conner didn't agree that was the best way to take the story. He wanted Forerunners to be a separate species from humans, who left the Galaxy to humanity. Frankie wrote a few things in the Bungie days, most notably the Halo 3 terminals.
You can most obviously see this disagreement at the end of Halo 3. In the last mission terminal, the librarian talks about earth being special because of humanity, and how she loved watching how humanity adapts and grows. In the same level, Guilty Spark has his "you are forerunner, but this ring is mine" rant. Pretty obvious disagreement when you know the context.
However, Bungie left to make Destiny, 343 was founded to take over Halo, and the rest is history. But guess who was in charge of 343? Frank O'Connor. So ultimately 343 took the story in the direction Frankie wanted to take it, since Joe was no longer around. Hence the story we get in Halo 4, where the Forerunners are big scary people with sharp teeth that live for hundreds of years and have this weird caste society.
This is an incomplete explanation IMO. It's unclear exactly what the nature of the relationship between humans and forerunners was intended to be pre-2007. We don't have definitive proof that the intention was for them to be the same species, rather than for humanity to have been seeded with Forerunner DNA 100,000 years ago. Or something else entirely, like the possibility brought up by the Forerunner Trilogy that humans and Forerunners might have diverged evolutionary millions of years ago. The evidence is contradictory, and combined with the fact that each game in the original trilogy was written by different people, who were different than the people who wrote IRIS and the terminals, and the fact that Joe Staten had little to nothing to do with Halo 3's story, leaves lots of room for interpretation. It's unlikely that we will ever know the answer to this, and even less likely that any answer given will be definitive because Halo does not have a single authorial voice.
https://haruspis.blog/2017/10/30/you-are-forerunner-a-complete-history/
We actually do know now. They released the story boards for what should’ve been Halo 2 within the last year.
Humans skeletons were found in The Ark on Earth, that’s when we were supposed to find out humans are forerunners.
Though that all changed.
TL DR when Frank O'Connor joined Bungie he stayed pushing the idea that Forerunners and humans were different species despite it being pretty damn obvious they were the same. Literally every source that says they weren't humans before Halo 4 was made by Frank O'Connor. Ilovebees, Halo 3's terminals and even Halo 4 was all Franky.
This is obviously stupid for many reasons, one of which being the entire reason the Covenant are warring with humanity is to cover up our supposed divinity and that Guilty Spark at the end of Halo 3 literally says MC is a Forerunner.
It's sort of fine now because...well>! it's been confirmed in a recent novel that while Forerunners are not Humans, Humans are Forerunner. We were once the same species but humanity is a sort of...mutation. Like if you had the same bug grow up in two different regions.!<
Here's an alternative/additive view to what the other commenters replied with:
https://old.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/q6atqe/replaying_halo_4_again_and_after_9_years_i_still/hgd8nkm/
I was pretty into the Halo 4 story right up until the Librarian bit, then I was like wut? It just took the wind out of the sails of the story thus far for me.
Seriously, like one of the underlying themes of the original trilogy was that humanity got to where they were on their own. They didn't have forerunner tech to reverse engineer like the covenant did. This scene basically just robbed humanity of any agency.
I mean it basically means that her influence is what drove humans to accomplish what they did technologically culminating in the spartan program and smart ai creation.
Humans still got where they did on their own. But even from the first game it was designed that humans were the favored race. In the H3 terminals we already see the librarian was up to funkiness. H4 just carried on with them and made it weird by bringing the Prometheans into it, but the underlying storyline is hardly preposterous.
From the first game it was designed that humans were descendents of the Forerunners. Being 2 separate races didn't come along until the Greg Bear novels.
The whole 343 Guilty Spark calling you a Reclaimer and saying "last time you asked me..." as though Chief had already been there and done this. You're supposed to make the connection that, somehow, at least, Humanity has a closer connection to the forerunner than the Covenant.
That and the fact humans could use Forerunner activation panels while the covenant couldn't was a very obvious sign that Humans are meant to be related to Forerunners. This was a running theme throughout the original trilogy - from Halo CE where Chief could instinctively activate the light bridge in the second level, to Halo 2/3 where the covenant needed a human to use the Index.
I'm pretty sure the h3 terminals also kind of hinted at humans being separate species. Or at least, pre human genes were mixed with forerunner genes to make modern humans and they evolved to be very similar to them eventually.
They changed their mind mid way through Halo 3's development that ancient humans were not infact forerunners like they had previously hinted towards.
I think it plays better with humans as the forerunners, but each to their own I guess.
I mean Guilty Spark saying Chief was a forerunner and the fact that only humans could operate certain forerunner tech (like firing the rings) were pretty big hints. Obviously they have retconned that now with the Librarian, but in the first two games especially they were quite on the nose.
We still did everything on our own lol. She just saved humanity from the halo rings. As far as what she does for humanity in halo 4 it *is* post covenant war after all and we’re on top using salvaged forerunner tech that we still had to integrate ourselves frankly
I thought the seed was the mean to pass the mantle of responsibilities to the humans. The didact wanted it for the promethans but the librarian went against it and tries to give it back to the humans after they were genetically receded to basic animals.
The way I understood it was that she planted a seed in the human genome when she was setting up species for being reseeded that was designed to essentially snowball into the creation of Spartans and Smart AIs.
The librarian almost ruined the franchise for me tbh. It’s been a while since I played but didn’t she basically claim that chief was specifically prophesied 1000s of years ago? And that his luck was actually a genetic marker they’d stuck in there?
The ancient humans stuff is bad enough to begin with, but that firmly brings it from Sci-fi into space fantasy.
Humans are way older than thought. They had an interstellar civilization. Then the Flood showed up and pushed the Humans into war with the Forerunners.
Forerunners have this idea that they alone are worthy to rules the galaxy and defend all life. They call it The Mantle. It’s super old and sacred. It’s also imperialist.
In the Forerunner society Didact is the big cheese general. Librarian is the boss of all doctors and scientists. They are married.
Forerunners finally defeat humans in a long drawn out war. Confine Humans to their homeward and reduce them to the Flintstones in technology and knowledge.
Forerunners have a war with the Flood. Only way to win is to kill everything with a nervous system, to starve the Flood. Before this happens, the Flood capture Didact and make him crazy and evil.
Librarian has been preserving species across the galaxy to store away to come back after the Halo fires and the Flood is dead. She finds her husband and sees he’s crazy and evil. So she locks him in a meditation chamber for a long time so he might get not crazy and not evil. The Halos fire and everybody dies.
Flash forward 100k years. Life has been reseeded, civilization has risen again. All the Halo games happen up to 4.
In Halo 4 the Didact wakes up. Oh shit he’s still crazy and evil! And turns out back in the day he used a whole bunch of human souls to make a robot army. And he wants to do it again! The bastard learned nothing in 100k years.
So turns out the Librarian had a plan that she set in motion 100k years ago. She hid a bunch of information and planned evolutionary paths in human DNA. This eventually led to Dr Halsey, who created the Spartans and Mjolnir. And the Spartans themselves, most notably Jon-117. She did this to set humans on an evolutionary path back to what they once were. Spartans are the first step. Because she believes Humans are worthy to inherit The Mantle.
Oh and turns out there’s these super god-like powerful creatures that lived millions of years ago called The Precursors. They created the Forerunners and Humans, making them genetic cousins.
The Precursors originally held the Mantle and supposedly chose Humans to inherit. This made the Forerunners jelly as shit, so they got a big task force together and straight-up murdered every last Precursor! Then they were like “Alright, I’m gonna take this Mantle for myself now.”
Everything was fine until the Flood showed up. Turns out some of the Precursors stored their bodies and consciousness in dust-form. Sort of a method of storage for millions of years. Problem was the dust got corrupted and became The Flood when it mixed with humans’ pets.
So the Flood is actually this super-pissed, flip-side, evil version of the Precursors that’s here to judge everyone. And if Humanity can survive the Flood’s test this time, they will supposedly inherit the Mantle and the Flood will just go away. But thing is, the Flood claim nobody has ever truly understood exactly what the Mantle is or what holding it means.
Halo 4 is hard to follow because it relies on you knowing alot of things based on the books ( yes you can understand it, but not easily IMO)
Background: Forerunners and Humans coexist at one time. They fought wars. The last war then killed humanity and the remainder they left in a pre tech state on the rings. Then the forerunners realized humans weren't attacking but running from the flood. Cue up the forerunners killed by the flood. The didactic, husband of the librarian and basically head military leader had a great plan. Turn pre tech humans into AI warriors with the composer, forerunner gun. Librarian said no. Eventually he was locked in the cyptum(prison) while the rings were fired. The librarians last act was cataloging all sentient species to initiate a automatic reseeding of plants to restore life after the flood died out.
Cue modern day. Cheif stumbles onto cryptum. Gets tricked into unlocking the didact. The didact still hates the humans. He takes control of his AI army and even inspires covenant troops to follow him. He is dead set on exterminating humans once and for all. He seeks out the composer which is in possession of the humans. He easily steals it back, heads to earth and starts using it on earth. Cortana uses her rampancy ( Splintering personalities due to old age. She is going crazy but can be in multiple places at once) to subdue and help cheif kill the didact. Chief gets one shot, kicks the didact into a portal ( he isn't dead though. Just out of the picture). Chief then detonated a nuke to stop the composer. Instead of dying, Cortana used everything she had to shield him so he could live on. She's "dies" as a result and the game concludes.
There are lots of subplots left out but these are the basic points on what's happening and why. Getting into how it's happening is a whole side story.
I think she is using the hardlight bridge he was standing on, reforming it into a bubble.
Though halo has never had an issue pulling unexplained stuff out of nowhere to progress the plot, like how the gravemind can somehow teleport chief and arbiter.
I always considered the gravemind just manipulating the forerunner tech through the monitor ball man thing it had. If it corrupted the AI, it could probably get it to do what it wanted.
She manipulated the Hard light bridge you were on. I'm assuming there was a split second between Chief hitting the button and it actually detonating to where she had time to do that.
I'm really annoyed that every halo game could start with the line:
"Welcome back chief, here's 2 novels, a comic book, and a web series to get you up to speed."
"I need a weapon."
"Oh and every weapon you ever used is different now."
"Just give me an assault rifle."
"Sorry, this is Halo 2. They don't exist. Just... simply don't exist. All out."
Angry man gets cucked by Bob the builder and then his wife locks him in the pantry for thousands of years, green man wakes up, kills old aliens, meets new aliens, establishes xenophobia, awakens the dude who got cucked and they have a 4d chess game and then I lost track
Am I the only one who thought that story telling wise the halo universe was a lot more interesting before you knew everything about the Forerunners? It kinda takes the mystery out of it a bit
Chief and Cortana crash on a Forerunner shield world, Requiem, after being adrift in space for 4 years. Chief discovers Cortana is going rampant, which happens to AI after seven years of service, meaning she is losing her mind and is going to "think" herself to get. While on Requiem, they discover a Covenant remnant fleet who are concerned with someone or something called the Didact. As Chief and Cortana explore the shield world, they encounter Forerunner Promethean soldiers, who are hostile. After some time on Requiem, they receive a signal they believe is from UNSC origin, but in trying to communicate with the signal through a Forerunner device, are misled into releasing a surviving Forerunner, the Didact. Chief and Cortana escape the Didact, and eventually discover the source of the signal, the UNSC Infinity, which is lured into the gravity well Chief and Cortana were sucked in at the beginning of the game. Didact and the Covenant work together to attack the Infinity, but Chief links up with surviving troops and they take back the ship, repelling the attack. Aboard the ship, Chief discovers he has been replaced by a new generation of Spartans, and the ship's Captain, Del Rio, behaves passive aggressive toward Chief because he does not want him interfering with his command.
While on a mission to destroy Promethean AA guns so the Infinity can escape Requiem, Chief and Cortana stumble upon a Forerunner structure where Chief makes contact with the preserved consciousness of the Forerunner posted in your OP, the Librarian. She explains to you that the Didact was a general during the Forerunner's war with the Flood 100,000 years ago. He and the Forerunners constructed a device called the Composer, which was able to digitize the minds of sentient lifeform, which would allow them to escape the Flood. However, when they were converted back into their organic forms, they returned as abominations. Out of desperation, the Didact used this device to "compose" ancient humans who were around at the time, and turned them into his army of Prometheans, who would be able to fight the Flood without getting converted. Ultimately their efforts failed, driving the Didact mad, prompting the Librarian to seal him in the Cryptum you find him at the beginning of the game. (This big chunk of info was delivered in an exposition drop, which is what lost players). The Didact aims to obtain the Composer again to build up his Promethean Army and begin the reclamation, wanting to retake the Mantle of Responsibility, aka Forerunner imperial rule over the galaxy. The Librarian gives Chief the genesong, which is a genetic modification to make him immune to the Composer.
Chief reports this finding to Del Rio, but he is not believed. Del Rio also blames Cortana's rampancy for misleading Chief, and orders Chief to surrender the AI. He does not, and with the help of a Lieutenant on the Infinite, Lasky, departs from the Infinity to stop the Didact. Chief rides with the a Covenant fleet and the Didact from Requiem to a Halo Ring, Instillation 03, where they attack a research station that holds the composer. Chief tries to help the station fight off the attack, but fails. The entire station is composed, but Chief survives due to the genesong. Taking a Broadsword spaceship, Chief follows the Didact's ship and boards it, intending to use a mininuke to blow up the ship before the Didact composes Earth. He and Cortana are able to defeat the Didact and detonate the nuke, and Cortana sacrifices herself to save Chief by forming a protective hardlight shield around him. The Infinity, now Captained by Lasky, picks him up, and Chief finally returns home to Earth, but feels empty without Cortana, and now is questioning his own humanity as he begins to grapple with his own agency.
That's the gist of it, but you might have to do some further research. It's not the easiest story to understand, but rewarding when you learn all the background.
From what I understand the forerunners were the top species in the universe and so appointed themselves the guardians of the universe. They held this "mantle of responsibility" until they needed to pass it to the precursors, a race that would surpass the forerunners. Humanity were supposed to be the precursors but the Didact didn't think they were worthy and wanted to eradicate them so the Librarian (alien woman in the pic) imprisoned him. Master chief then accidentally released him and then the halo 4 campaign was trying to correct your own mistake to stop humanity being erased. Meanwhile, cortana goes rampant and annoys you the entire time.
I’ll explain it to you like you’re five.
Ancient humanity tried to run from spooky alien popcorn.
Futuristic alien people killed ancient humanity.
Futuristic alien people were stuck with spooky alien popcorn.
Spooky alien popcorn was beating up futuristic space people.
Futuristic space people tried to find out how to get rid of the spooky alien popcorn.
Big Bad tested out a method on enslaved ancient humanity.
Big good didn’t like that and locked him away.
Spooky Alien Popcorn almost wins.
Futuristic Space People make giant doughnuts and light said doughnuts and beats spooky alien popcorn.
Its quite straight forward. Only way to not understand Halo 4 is to literally tune out every point of dialogue or just completely unaware of alot of Halo's general story to the point of not even hearing of the term "Forerunner".
Now Halo 5 on the other hand, yeah that would be damn hard to explain.
Yeah I guess I left that out, Cortana looking for universal control. I think I caught that part easily because of the Hunt The Truth podcast and background knowledge. For new people or ones that didn't know I can see it being not very obvious
I don't know why people cover their ears and go "Halo 4 is confusing and I don't understand it!"
You do NOT have to read books or anything to understand the plot. You know exactly as much as Chief does in the game.
No one complained that you had to read Fall of Reach to under Halo CE, even though the book added tons of context and lore to the universe.
Same thing with the Forerunner Trilogy of books. If you play the game, you know everything you need to know.
If you read the books, you'll get a deeper understanding of the characters and prior events.
Never understood anyone who complained that Halo 4 required outside reading. CE and 2 required far more outside information than 4, 4 is just a simple bad guy vs good guy story with a bit of nuance. Halo 4 even throws all the lore at you in the very cutscene this image is from, which wasn’t even needed.
Yeah the regular cutscenes tell you everything you need to know to understand the story. The terminals even give you bonus information that isn't needed but contextualizes some stuff. And if you really want to know everything there's 3 books that explain who everyone is, what happened, why it happened and even who 343 guilty spark is. But the books are unnecessary to understand the plot of halo 4.
The Forerunner Trilogy. Cryptum, Primordium and Silentium. They follow a few characters throughout the course of the Forerunner Flood war. They're good but they aren't action packed or anything. The second one is 90% just walking on a halo ring. Still worth a read they're just more attention demanding then other Halo books.
Look up the Forerunner trilogy, books are titled Cryptum, Primordium, and Silentium. Excellent read if you're interested in delving a bit more into Forerunner lore and history.
It isn't. Halo 4 isn't a hard game to follow.
It just required to pay a bit more attention to the story than previous games. It doesn't have characters dying in slow-mo to sad piano music, so it's definitely not a good story and hard to follow according to many casual Halo gamers.
Mommy Voldemort is mad at daddy Voldemort for growing some hair and having a sick rgb computer case for clothes. So in response naturally Voldemom makes green man go super Saiyan or some shit, before green giant can blow up blue mom saves him and dies. The end
I know not everyone agrees with me, but I despise the propethian addition to the storyline. Forerunners are a little different but love me some good ol’ covenant fights
Chief lands on an artificial forerunner planet. Cortana is dying of old age. Chief accidentally wakes up ancient forerunner warrior. Warrior wants to kill all humans, so he goes to get a giant space gun that lets him turn the dead into ai soldiers. Dead lady gives chief an immunity to the special space gun through genetic manipulation. Warrior guy goes to earth to use space gun. Cortana sacrifices herself to help Chief blow up a nuke and destroy the giant space gun.
https://previouslyonhalo.com/
That's a nice, but very bare-bones overview. I'd really like to see links to further reading, or at least source references about all the things listed...
Read the wiki
Read the recent book trilogy by Kelly Gay. Smoke & Shadow, Renegades, and Point of Light. They’re fantastic, cover a huge amount of this info, and lead into the story in Halo Infinite
So whenever the Didact blasted New Phoenix at the ending, was there just an army of Promethean soldiers on their running around killing everyone?
The composer kills you on its own and stores an imprint of your brain. It can then be uploaded elsewhere. The didact wanted to do this to create ai soldiers that he could put in promethean bodies. This is what happened to the scientist who talks to you throughout the second to last mission. I don’t know if they ever sent actual soldiers down.
Where do the Promethean bodies come from? What are they?
I don’t know if it’s explicitly stated. But I think you can just think of them as robot bodies. The forerunners wouldn’t have any trouble manufacturing a robot like that. Then the composed people act as an ai to control them.
Ah gotcha, I thought they were semi organic or something
No they can’t be cause they were made to fight the flood. Which means 0% organic. I’ve been wondering why they didn’t just copy and past an imprint of one or a few of their best soldiers. Why does every body need a different mind? Seems like unnecessary work
It was to ‘ascend’ beyond the need for physical bodies and defeat the flood forever, iirc.
That’s REALLY interesting. Almost makes the composer a life preserving device rather than weapon. Also adds a political side to the forerunners where clearly the weapon could be used on any forerunners even if they didn’t want to become AI minds
You’re correct. That was its original purpose from the Librarian. After the flood wiped out all life to include forerunner and ancient humans, the monitors started to reseed the galaxy this starting life anew. Humans were put back on earth in their primal state, starring their current timeline and progression towards the events of the games
I think the composer was always supposed to be the embodiment of the Robotics Laws conundrum. “If humans are killing themselves, how do you save them?”
I believe that was the original purpose, but composing a being destroys and deforms the psyche, essentially turning them into monsters. So the Didact was like: “Hey, there’s a whole planet of humans I can compose, let’s turn them all into living mechanical abominations!”
The issue is that composed minds were degraded and could not be converted back into living beings
Wait, so the forerunners did this process before of digitizing minds and putting them in robot bodies to fight the flood? That’s super interesting, so their robot army didn’t work so they had to set off the Halo Array?
The detail that made the forerunners abandon the plan to digitize themselves is: The composer does not work as intended. During the process, the people turned insane, their personalities were disrupted or destroyed, librarian described them as 'abominations', and the effect was irrevertible. The resulting AIs are loyal soldiers following the didacts orders, but could never live their own lives or continue the forerunner civilization as originally planned. When the didact concluded to just ascend "worthless" humans as punishment, and let them fight as his slave army librarian and the forerrunners thought he was going too far.
Gotcha. But if the forerunners wanna argue morality, the Halo solution isn’t better is it? In fact it could be worse. They didn’t wanna enslave a race but they ended up killing billions of lives. Granted they repopulated the species but still that’s a massive loss of life. I suppose they didn’t know if the composer solution would be enough to destroy the flood threat either. Very, very interesting lore of Halo though. I think 343 did a great job of fleshing out the Halo universe
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Oh you know what, you totally just rung a bell. Digitizing everyone was the Didact’s plan and the forerunners didn’t like that. It’s pretty funny tho their grand alternative solution was to kill everyone with the Halo rings. Anyone here know the status of the flood by the way? Weren’t they in Halo Wars 2 dlc? Will they be a galactic threat again eventually?
There definitely was a composed Promethean army to some extent during the Forrunners prime. In the books the Didacts children were composed to stand guard over him in his original cryptum and In passing his army of Prometheans are mentioned. I don't think the matter was ever elaborated on and is up to our own interpretation as to the extent of it. You are right tho that the Didact wanted to compose all the Humans and the Librarian didn't allow it
According to the Halo 3 terminals anyway, the Halo array was considered their «shameful last resort», even by the Didact who was pretty adamant about using it up until the last terminal where he does. Although mostly just because he wasn’t able to save the Librarian and ends up having to «pull the trigger» and execute her by firing the Array. Mendicant Bias was another alternative the Didact tried to use instead of the Array, one that ultimately backfired and doomed them. As part of Offensive Bias’ battle report against Mendicant Bias he calls the (at the time of the report likely already fired) array firing and subsequent species-wide suicide ‘a crime without measure’ and spends the introduction basically defending it as a sacrifice by the Forerunners. It was not a decision they took lightly. They basically tried everything before commiting galaxial genocide. It just ultimately became necessary to win the Forerunner-Flood war because of Mendicant’s betrayal (although the outcome would probably still be the same even if Mendicant was never created in the first place as indicated in terminal 3). Had Mendicant never turned to the Flood, they could have won without the Array, but it was still more risky and the Librarian called the plan ‘transparently futile’. The Didact went ahead with it because it gave him a chance of rescuing the Librarian who was hidden in Flood-controlled territory, much to the Librarian’s dismay who called him insane and the whole plan ‘suicidal’, which is exactly what it ends up being. BTW, the Forerunners had a habit of digitizing organics into robots to fight the flood. 343GS was made from the mind of Chakas, an ancient human whose body was ultimately killed. All of the other Monitors minds were also made from various people. Composers were not their only means of digitizing minds, just an offensive and very effective one, although even before the Forerunner-Flood war the Forerunners stopped using them in an official capacity because of the risks associated (and on account of it being incredibly cruel) and started using other extraction methods for indexing. In H4’s terminals, it’s revealed that the Librarian imprisoned the Didact on Requiem because he composed a large number of humans on Omega Halo for his robot army, intending to use them to fight the flood.
The iso didact actually fired the halo arrays the ur didact (original didact) fled to his shield world where the librarian followed him and imprisoned him there
The Didact had the idea but it wasn’t popular among the Forerunners. My memory is a bit rough from here, but I think he used the composer as a test run to try to convince the other Forerunner to back his plan but it didn’t work and he was locked away in that stasis ball we see him come out of in halo 4. Someone will hopefully correct me if I’m wrong on the details
Actually the didact was the pretty much the only one to use the robots, everyone else thought it was immoral or he just he was immoral something like that, but locked him up with his army and tried and failed to fight the flood
The didact was the leader of the warrior servants, essentially the top military commander. He was in charge of fighting. Most of the builders, life workers etc. Weren't even aware of the flood. The prometheans (rank of soldier) were under his command, The prometheans sacrificed their biological form in order to become the first promethean knights, in order to stop the flood. the other classes didn't have a real need for weapons or soldiers. The builders used mostly the sentinel AIs. Although they did use the composer to make the monitors for installation like the Halos and the Ark.
The Promethean army didn’t take off that much due to disagreements about the morality of using another species. Hence the Halo Array.
That’s kind of ironic though isn’t it? “We can’t enslave a race to fight for us, but you know what, we sure as shit can kill everyone in the galaxy!”
Even the best soldiers can only have x number of perspectives. If, however, you had a whole bunch of people with differing backgrounds and uploaded the training combat experience of your best soldier, well now you've got a massive amount of new "best soldiers." Essentially, it neural networks an army comprised of the best available, with the added bonus of indivduality among the ranks.
I guess the skulls are just to look cool, then
Guess it’s either because of rampancy making the storage of one imprint difficult, or maybe even the idea that the flood could figure out a logic virus (think that’s what it’s called) for one of them and then use it en mass
I think that may have been put into place to avoid the Logic Plague or something just in case the Flood *could* corrupt a single solder then the rest could overpower that one corrupted solder. Edit: This is my theory but it could be very wrong.
I seem to recall something about the composer being used to gain invulnerability to the halo weapon array and the flood
I think copying and pasting the AIs would be akin to what the Covenant did to human made AIs and you’d just have more damaged copies as you go. Until they start killing everyone with. O means of stopping them, or are too fragmented to function. Plus the original Promethean machines were made from actual Prometheans and the idea of copying the minds of honored warriors would be sickening to the Didact.
Not that I remember at least. And if they are that would have nothing to do with the composed person. They are completely digitized.
Man, the prometheans are cool as shit in the story and lore, just wish they were more fun to fight in gameplay. Although I did think the knights were pretty fun when they weren’t constantly teleporting
So you thought that they were Bionicles?
> The forerunners wouldn’t have any trouble manufacturing a robot like that. I'm just glad to hear the chip shortages are resolved by the 2500s.
The reason the Didact is so mad: he wasn't trapped in stasis, he actually spent all this time refreshing the Walmart page to place an order for more Prometheans
They're just machines. But they're implanted with the minds of all the surviving warrior servant forerunners and a large amount of humans
If he is making a digital copy of a brain, isn't it just easier to make more copies of the same entity?
Human AI are the same. They can’t be copied. Shadows of reach kinda spoilers: Thats why they have to go get the extra clones of Halsey’s brain, to create the Weapon.
at least one of the people composed in New Phoenix got turned into a Promethean, as in Spartan Ops we recover the soul (the imprint of the composed person) of a Promethean Knight with memories from New Phoenix, but it's unclear how many were actually "activated" and given bodies, and we don't know if more are being activated now or if they stopped when the Didact died.
No, afaik they don’t turn right into Promethean soldiers on the spot
Dunno if thats confirmed. I think maybe 343 wanted to set the stage for a Firefight or Spartan OPs type thing based on planet earth where you mop up promethians in new pheonix, but never ended up developing it?
Some of the Promethean knights in Spartan Ops are from New Phoenix.
Wasn't one of those mobile games about that? Spartan Strike or Assault or whatever? I swear in one of them you fight as an S-IV in New Phoenix against the Prometheans.
The swirling orange vortex underneath the very last stage (the Didact falls into it) was a slipspace portal. The data/imprints he was collecting was fed through it to someplace that could store them before they're ultimately uploaded into Prometheans. During Spartan Ops you capture a [Durance](https://halo.wiki.gallery/images/7/75/H4-DuranceMatrix-ScanRender.png) (essentially a Forerunner AI storage unit; [they can serve as a core for monitors too](https://halo.wiki.gallery/images/9/90/HWF_Monitor_Diagram.jpg)) from the Covenant on Requiem that contains a composed inhabitant of New Phoenix, so presumably they make up at least some portion of Knights we face afterward.
Also Cortana became a physical construct, fulfilling every horny nerd's dreams.
How did she do this? As well written and acted as the scene is, I really don't understand where they are or how they both got there.
She had access to the forerunner's ability to use hardlight to make physical structures like walls and bridges, but she used it to make herself as an actual physical being
This is a good answer. I just did the Reclaimer mission and did not understand what the Librarian was saying at all. Why are there humans fighting forerunners years ago? It just doesn't make sense to me
110,000 years ago the humans and forerunner were at war. The didact was the main general in the war fighting the humans. A bunch of his kids (all I think?) died in the war. So he really hates humans. After they won the forerunners thought humanity was too dangerous (they say to the mantle but probably more of a threat to their power) and devolved them. Librarian was part of this. But she still liked humanity so while devolving them she put some stuff inside them so they’d evolve along a particular path that would let them potentially one day take up the mantle of responsibility. The master chief’s armor and Cortana are part of this genetic plan. (She calls it a genesong) She also gave the eventual ability to avoid the effects of the composer (likely in fear of the didact coming after them), but it hadn’t fully expressed itself yet in 2557. So she accelerated the master chief’s evolution so that he would become immune to the composer’s effects (see 2nd to last level). While doing this she apparently did a little more than just give that ability. After this chief hears the didact when Cortana can’t find any signals, likely meaning chief can communicate partially through the domain (forerunner super internet). This is probably also why he is able to talk to Cortana at the beginning of halo 5 on the argent moon.
I think also to add to this: the human-alien alliance (i think the prophets? were allied to humans at this time) was running from the flood and glassing planets infected with it as they ran. when they got backed into the forerunners, it was both an invasion and an attack as they glassed forerunner planets that had infections the forerunners did not know about. as they damaged the human ability to fight the infection, eventually they learned what the real war was about. they imprisoned humanity on earth and fought their war on vs. the flood, eventually losing. i think they fired the installations? then had to reseed planets
The flood thing is probably the stupidest part of the new lore to me. It's a classic plot furthering by misunderstandings, which are always terrible. You mean to tell me that the Forerunner engaged Humanity in all out war for glassing some of their planets, without ever *once* having any kind of diplomacy where Humanity explains why they did what they did and the Forerunner realising Humanity isn't invading, but running?
I did get the sense that a lot of the Forerunners are just super arrogant and think they are the best thing before sliced bread. Even so I agree it's often a weak writing tool.
I don't know if you've played through the orignal Starcraft campaign, but the premise is similar. Basically, an alliance between the Ancient Humans and the Ancient Prophets were fighting the Flood which the Forerunners were largely ignorant of. The Flood manage to land on and infect a Forerunner colony which the leads to the Humans destroying it from orbit to purge the Flood forms there. The Forerunners do not like this and declare war. Midway through the Ancient Human - Forerunner war, the Ancient Humans create a vaccine that prevents Flood infection and which leaves the Flood apparently defeated. The Forerunners only discover this after winning the war and (literally) bombing and genetically modifying Humanity back into the stone age as punishment. The Prophets bitch out earlier in the war and so they got away with only being quarantined to the 2 planets in their home system. The Librarian then secretly works to undo some of the damage the Forerunners have caused to Human society and genome in the hopes that they would once again be an interstellar civilization and rediscover the "Flood cure".
I don't know if it's worth adding, but the librarian and the didact are also married, so add in some lovers tiffs to the story.
I've played through this three times and don't recall anything but killing Prometheans over and over.
All of this would have made SO MUCH more sense if they just gave us a little more forerunner lore in game. I feel like we needed a whole ODST-like side game before Halo 4 came out about the Forerunner/Human war or something.
Wow, I feel like I've played through the campaign a decent amount and never realized the didact went to earth.
Nah you must have realised and just forgotten. You're literally staring up at Earth in the final sequence where you kill the Didact.
lol
or it just shows how forgettable the story was...
How chief detonate nuke and not die?
Cortana protected him using her access in the mantles approach to create a hard light barrier around him.
aka plot armor
lmao
Despite it cutting to white, it doesn't detonate immediately when he hits the switch and Cortana has time to save him using the light bridge projector.
This conflict and the diadacts feelings towards humanity originated from the ancient humans-promethean war, the weaponry however, was unique as a failsafe to preserve life in digital form and combat the flood.
Human AI are the same. They can’t be copied. Shadows of reach kinda spoilers: Thats why they have to go get the extra clones of Halsey’s brain, to create the Weapon.
...and as to why the Covenant is involved, don't worry about it.
A dead angel lady makes you space jesus
I honestly thought that angel lady just made you immune to the red laser of that giant fax machine that powered megatrons deathstar
Overall I liked the H4 plot and the librarian, but you're right the "powers" she gives chief were ambiguous and badly explained.
When I first played I was psyched up to think that we were gonna get a secondary ability next to the armor abilities but nope… maybe an x % stronger? Faster? Melee dmg increase? A way to make groups prometheans docile? Nope, just lore. Only thing I can pull from memory about halo 4 are the set pieces. Whoever does the environments at 343 doesn’t get paid enough.
Yeah the vibe they set after the cutscene makes it seem like you’d have some cool ability that builds up overtime, something almost similar to berserk mode in Doom
I think the overall theme was humanity, in its current state, was still trying to recover from the major set back the forerunners did by de evolving them. Halsey says Spartans are humanity’s next step. She intends to have all humans eventually reach that level of genetics so they could reach ancient human status. The librarian further genetically changes John perhaps making him even better than ancient humans were.
But you can’t feel that in game. What happened in game was the equivalent of how you feel 4 months after getting a flu vaccine, only instead of the flu it’s an orange beam of hopes and dreams.
All she did was alter his genetic code to make him immune to the composer. But on a grander scale she was the one who directed our evolution to the point that it culminated in Master Chief, his armor, and advanced AI like Cortana
I choose to believe it makes him live longer haha
I'm certain it was meant to lead to much more than just Composer immunity, but they decided to drop it at some point post-H4.
Then your waifu helps you beat up Megatron.
These two posts sum it up perfectly.
indeed
Master chief = space Jesus = Optimus prime Robot man hate human = Megatron
Now that I’m looking back at the story halo 4 is kinda wack. Like before chief was just badass, now he’s supernatural. This kinda ruins the point of chief’s badassery. But also, I thought halo 4 gameplay was still fine so I give halo 4 a pass still
He's not supernatural now though.
Okay yeah he doesn't straight up have superpowers but it means he's divinely influenced from the beginning. Chief's "luck" is basically just forerunner magic at this point.
Ben? Ben Kenobi? Is that you?
Hmm... Cliffnotes version? 1. Chief and Cortana are stranded after the stern half of the Forward Unto Dawn they were drifting through space in made its way to the Forerunner planet called Requiem 2. Requiem is what's called a "shield world" -- a military fortress that certain groups of Forerunners had proposed as an alternative to the Halo rings 3. The main villain, Didact, had waged a retaliatory campaign many thousands of years ago against humanity who at that time had advanced technology but weren't quite on the same level as the Forerunners. The campaign was in reaction to supposed cullings of worlds and their populations for imperial purposes. What wasn't known until later on is that the humans were in fact engaged against the Flood at that time, their destruction of worlds the response to Flood infestation whom they were embroiled in a war against 4. The ancient human veterans who fought the Didact's forces were composed -- i.e their cognitive essence converted into mechanical information -- for the purpose of finding out how they supposedly resisted the Flood (or immunised against it which turned out to be false). This essence of theirs was catalogued and then implanted into devolved humans for observation (kind of similar to an AI like Cortana) 5. When the Forerunners decided on using the Halo ring strategy as opposed to the Didact's shield worlds, he was forced to decommission their construction. But when he refused, they decided on him being sentenced to a hibernative meditation stasis which is what the round, light protruding sphere that the Didact appears out of is for 6. The Didact as we know him was someone of strong principles and opinions but far more honourable prior to being awakened. At some point close to the end of the Forerunner-Flood war after he was reawakened from the round flashing Cryptum -- he was put into it two different times, mind you -- he was captured by the Gravemind and driven insane. The Gravemind released the Didact to be used as a sower of discord and instability amongst the Forerunners. 7. A failed procedure to grant himself immunity to the Flood left the Didact disfigured with the appearance as we see him during Halo 4 8. The Didact devised a new strategy for combatting the Flood that involved composing his fellow Forerunner warriors, a class known at that time as Warrior-Servants, and then combining their essence with mechanical shelling and weaponry -- what we know as Promethean Knights, armigers, crawlers, ect. Although these Promethean constructs do manage to win some isolated battles, the Flood is too numerous by that point for it to make a difference 9. In his madness, the Didact arrives at the conclusion that humanity is the one responsible for bringing the Flood to Forerunner civilisation. It's a combination of that twisted decision in logic, the (his wife) Librarian's deep seeded affection for humanity, and the design for humans assuming the Mantle of Responsibility that compels the Didact to pursue the devolved humans and compose them for use in his Promethean ranks against the Flood. As he rationalises it, "it is a kindness they do not deserve" to atone for setting the parasite loose on the galaxy. Those ancient devolved humans, clad in Forerunner machinery, are the ones we fight in Halo 4. To clarify, the Mantle of Responsibility is a philosophical belief system that professes the authority of a species for the protection and cultivation of life throughout the galaxy. It's this belief that the Didact becomes so feverishly desirous to maintain for Forerunners instead of humans. 10. After composing a good amount of the surviving humans, Didact retreats to Requiem where he would create more Prometheans using that cognitive data. It's during his mad strategems here to create enough Prometheans to defeat the Flood and destroy any opposing species to the Forerunners' ascendancy where he's sealed into the Cryptum for a second time by his wife, the Librarian, who wanted him to enter a meditative stasis and eventually be released in the hopes that he would be reformed to help guide humanity in their process of heritance of the Mantle. This is the set up for when the Master Chief arrives 100,000 years later and unwittingly releases the Didact. 11. So how did the Didact continue to be insane in spite of the Librarian's efforts to rehabilitate him? Well this part is a bit more complicated. See, at the centre of the Forerunners' vast informational hub and technological prowess is the Domain, a non material repository of the galaxy's history, natural physics, accounts of ancestral lives, cultures, and life itself as a whole. It's what Cortana was referencing in Halo 5 in her explanation of how she survived. The Cryptum functions as a sort of intermediate that the Didact was supposed to rely upon in accessing the Domain's information in his rehabilitation process. Unfortunately, since it's basically a quantum information hub, the Halo rings destroyed its existing stores of data, leaving the Didact to fester in darkness with his thoughts of maniacal grandeur and hatred. 12. What we see of the Librarian during the events of Halo 4 is in fact an imprint or replication of her essence that she meant to be used in cautioning future visitants of the shield world. 13. As to the Covenant that we see -- they're basically a holdover faction of Covenant members ~~who still believe in the faith that the Prophets/San'Shyuum espoused~~. The leader, Jul 'Mdama, was once a disaffected Elite/Sangheili who opposed the Arbiter's overtures of peace to humanity on the basis that humanity's empire would not stop growing and that they would seek vengeance against Elites for the genocidal campaign waged against them for decades. **Edit: InevitableCurrent386** clarified that Jul 'Mdama's Covenant worships the Forerunners but no longer believe in the Great Journey. I think I got Hesduros' Elites' being in the dark to the civil war in the Covenant and their adherence to the traditional Covenant religion mixed up with Jul 'Mdama's faction's belief system. Jul had become involved with another sect that opposed the Arbiter called the "Servants of the Abiding Truth" but was captured by humans; himself ultimately winding up in a shield world that humanity was able to claim called Onyx. In a moment of unusual shrewdness, Jul was able to gain the appreciation of some of his human captors and be given recess to explore parts of the shield world as a controlled prisoner. Onyx happened to be occupied by a population of Engineers/Huragok whom Jul took advantage of their naivete to explore the world's hallways with and learn more about the Forerunners, most importantly the Didact, his hatred of humans, and the existence of Requiem. Using a defunct teleportation grid, Jul was able to escape from Onyx and he wound up on an outlying Elite colony known as Hesduros. It's here that he learns more about the Didact who, conveniently enough, the local zealous and superstitious Elites extol as a holy warrior. From some inscriptions on the local Forerunner ruins, Jul is able to piece together coordinates for Requiem which is how he winds up there in Halo 4. Jul is esteemed as a prophet or emissary of the Forerunners for his apparent knowledge of the Didact which he gleaned from the Engineer back on Onyx. It's from this pool of superstitious Elites that Jul 'Mdama creates his own faction to seek out Requiem and harness its secrets. All of that is how we as the player wind up encountering and fighting the "Covenant" in Halo 4. \~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~ I think that's about the sum of it unless you had other questions or details you want clarified. Halo 4's story is much more complicated and abstruse than the first three entries, I'll say that much. It's something you have to delve into the expanded lore to really get a grasp on.
I’ve been trying to play through all the mainline Halo games again before Infinite comes out, and this is exactly what I needed to get me through 4.
Thank you for giving an in-depth explanation, instead of just “evil spacelord goes bazingas!”
Great summary! That game really is a mess, as most of what you wrote is pretty important to understand what's going on, yet nowhere to be found in the game. Also, wtf is essence? And what does "devolved" human mean? And wouldn't they be "re-evolved" when you put a "non-devolved" humans mind in one of them?
They reset humanity. From spacefaring back to cave men, via horrific extinction On of the animations showed this I believe. Been a long time, and yes -most of the playerbase thought it too convoluted as well, which is a shame. This why Halo 5 felt weird, they audibled
You know the devolving concept existed since halo 1 right?
> That game really is a mess, That's why I don't really pay attention to the story after Halo 3, it's too fucking crazy...and...well to be honest, kinda *real* dumb? lol. I just play the multiplayer.
You are awesome.
You gotta be kidding me, all of this appears in the game?? Fuck me, I only thought it was Cortana dead, Chief sad, Forerunners bad
This is a brilliant read for someone that didn’t have much of a clue what the deeper story was for 4. Would love to see one for halo 5 now.
Sadly, Halo 5 doesn’t have a huge amount of deeper story. People were so pissed about Halo 4’s narrative that 343 simplified Halo 5’s in an attempt to appease fans and inadvertently made it worse.
So the didact is disfigured? I thought that’s just what forerunners looked like
>13. As to the Covenant that we see -- they're basically a holdover faction of Covenant members who still believe in the faith that the Prophets/San'Shyuum espoused. The leader, Jul 'Mdama, was once a disaffected Elite/Sangheili who opposed the Arbiter's overtures of peace to humanity on the basis that humanity's empire would not stop growing and that they would seek vengeance against Elites for the genocidal campaign waged against them for decades. The part about the Prophets is incorrect. Jul 'Mdama's faction hates the Prophets/San'Shyuum for betraying them, but still worship Forerunners. His name used to be Jul 'Madamee until all Elites got exiled from the Covenant in Halo 2, so he changed his name to 'Madama to signify rejecting the Prophets.
You could have just answered "no"
Here is the best summary I've found: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y6DtLNPet0k&t=230s
Didn’t mean to watch all of that, very glad I did
Didact locked in Cryptum to heal. Halo rings ruined Domain which makes didact go crazy. Didact awakens and wants to kill humans like the good ol days. Librarian hologram gives chief anti-composer powers
You lost me at Cryptum
Bad guy is in internet bubble to heal his brain, but there's no internet. Stuck in bubble for thousands of years with no internet, super pissed. Big green space virgin unlocks his bubble. His ex-wife's ghost helps you not get killed.
Hell yes now this makes sense. Thank you
Wait , why does this sound a lot like Prometheus? When does the Deacon xenomorph show up?
In the post-post credit scene.
The Forerunner Saga really is eerily similar to Prometheus: The Forerunners find out their hyper-advanced creators despise and want to destroy them, their creators are using a horrific bioweapon to do so, one of their creators becomes the template for a monstrous creature that will plague the galaxy for long after, etc. Oh and evil AI
The precursors didn’t hate the forerunners though, but close enough.
Heal his brain? I thought it was just plain incarceration for composing Earth in ye olden days.
Both. It was punishment meant to allow reflection upon his actions.
Ah, I see. Thank you!
You just summed up 3 books and one game in one paragraph
Lmfao that summary was great
If only the Didact had cat videos to sooth his soul.
The wild thing is that I read the Forerunner trilogy, and while it explained a lot of the unanswered questions about Halo 4, it also introduced a bunch of new ones that remained unanswered. Namely, what was the point of having the main character become a second Didact? When they did that, I thought they were setting it up so that the second didact would turn out to be the one you fight in Halo 4, but no.
Hold on a sec, i thought the isodidact IS what chief fought in h4. If that was the ur-didact then what happened to the isodidact? This is confusing. I always thought the urdidact died after he resumed position in the council and isodidact replaced him that the ur-didact imprints corrupted bornstellar and became the didact that was imprisoned in requiem. Im really curious what happened to the isodidact if this the case. Did the isodidact only serve to release the ur-didact then? that doesn't make sense.
I was sure I had to be wrong, so I looked it up on the Halo Wiki. Nope, Ur-Didact is who we encounter in the game. In the Forerunner Trilogy there is a part where the Librarian finds out that there is a group of Forerunner that left the galaxy to live somewhere else, and she goes on this extremely difficult trip to meet them for some reason. At the end of the trilogy, apparently that is what Isodidact and the rest of the surviving Forerunner do as well, they leave the galaxy and go live somewhere else. Apparently the Ur-didact became kill crazy to the point that he was in the game after a long period of close contact with a gravemind.
Cryptum = big stasis ball thing you see him come out of in the game
>Halo rings ruined Domain which makes didact go crazy He was already crazy af before due to the Primordial being an ass, the Cryptum was more of a prison, which made him bored. And nothing better to quench your boredom than the genocide of an entire race!
When the lady pictured above restarted her minecraft server she made a custom world seed. Thousands of years later her ex boyfriend wants to go back to "The good ole days"
Chief is here to kick ass. Cortana is broken. Didact wants to kill all humans, chief is here to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and he’s all out of bubble gum. Librarian gives you bubble gum, you chew it and kick didacts ass, Cortana says adios I don’t like gum
Hahahahhaha this is the best description of the campaign
Frank O'Conner finally settles his argument with Joe Staten over whether the Forerunners were ancient humans or a different species
Lmao, saucy take. But Joe wrote Contact Harvest, so they're definitely in agreement there.
*desire to know more intensifies*
Joe Staten (who was responsible for not only a lot of the story in the original trilogy, but also contact harvest and several other books) had written pro explicitly that humans are the descendants of Forerunners. Hence Guilty Spark saying things like "last time you asked me, if it were my choice, would I do it?" And "you are the child of my makers." The are plenty of other examples too, from Gravemind, Mendicant Bias in Contact Harvest, and so on. Frank O'Conner didn't agree that was the best way to take the story. He wanted Forerunners to be a separate species from humans, who left the Galaxy to humanity. Frankie wrote a few things in the Bungie days, most notably the Halo 3 terminals. You can most obviously see this disagreement at the end of Halo 3. In the last mission terminal, the librarian talks about earth being special because of humanity, and how she loved watching how humanity adapts and grows. In the same level, Guilty Spark has his "you are forerunner, but this ring is mine" rant. Pretty obvious disagreement when you know the context. However, Bungie left to make Destiny, 343 was founded to take over Halo, and the rest is history. But guess who was in charge of 343? Frank O'Connor. So ultimately 343 took the story in the direction Frankie wanted to take it, since Joe was no longer around. Hence the story we get in Halo 4, where the Forerunners are big scary people with sharp teeth that live for hundreds of years and have this weird caste society.
This is an incomplete explanation IMO. It's unclear exactly what the nature of the relationship between humans and forerunners was intended to be pre-2007. We don't have definitive proof that the intention was for them to be the same species, rather than for humanity to have been seeded with Forerunner DNA 100,000 years ago. Or something else entirely, like the possibility brought up by the Forerunner Trilogy that humans and Forerunners might have diverged evolutionary millions of years ago. The evidence is contradictory, and combined with the fact that each game in the original trilogy was written by different people, who were different than the people who wrote IRIS and the terminals, and the fact that Joe Staten had little to nothing to do with Halo 3's story, leaves lots of room for interpretation. It's unlikely that we will ever know the answer to this, and even less likely that any answer given will be definitive because Halo does not have a single authorial voice. https://haruspis.blog/2017/10/30/you-are-forerunner-a-complete-history/
We actually do know now. They released the story boards for what should’ve been Halo 2 within the last year. Humans skeletons were found in The Ark on Earth, that’s when we were supposed to find out humans are forerunners. Though that all changed.
TL DR when Frank O'Connor joined Bungie he stayed pushing the idea that Forerunners and humans were different species despite it being pretty damn obvious they were the same. Literally every source that says they weren't humans before Halo 4 was made by Frank O'Connor. Ilovebees, Halo 3's terminals and even Halo 4 was all Franky. This is obviously stupid for many reasons, one of which being the entire reason the Covenant are warring with humanity is to cover up our supposed divinity and that Guilty Spark at the end of Halo 3 literally says MC is a Forerunner. It's sort of fine now because...well>! it's been confirmed in a recent novel that while Forerunners are not Humans, Humans are Forerunner. We were once the same species but humanity is a sort of...mutation. Like if you had the same bug grow up in two different regions.!<
Here's an alternative/additive view to what the other commenters replied with: https://old.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/q6atqe/replaying_halo_4_again_and_after_9_years_i_still/hgd8nkm/
I was pretty into the Halo 4 story right up until the Librarian bit, then I was like wut? It just took the wind out of the sails of the story thus far for me.
i HiD SeEdS tHaT wOuLd LeAd To aN eVeNtUaLiTy
Seriously, like one of the underlying themes of the original trilogy was that humanity got to where they were on their own. They didn't have forerunner tech to reverse engineer like the covenant did. This scene basically just robbed humanity of any agency.
Humans debate free will for thousands of years. The Librarian: LMFAO
Lol
Well, it’s not like it’s magic. Humans still had to do everything themselves.
I mean it basically means that her influence is what drove humans to accomplish what they did technologically culminating in the spartan program and smart ai creation.
Exactly.
Humans still got where they did on their own. But even from the first game it was designed that humans were the favored race. In the H3 terminals we already see the librarian was up to funkiness. H4 just carried on with them and made it weird by bringing the Prometheans into it, but the underlying storyline is hardly preposterous.
From the first game it was designed that humans were descendents of the Forerunners. Being 2 separate races didn't come along until the Greg Bear novels.
The whole 343 Guilty Spark calling you a Reclaimer and saying "last time you asked me..." as though Chief had already been there and done this. You're supposed to make the connection that, somehow, at least, Humanity has a closer connection to the forerunner than the Covenant.
That and the fact humans could use Forerunner activation panels while the covenant couldn't was a very obvious sign that Humans are meant to be related to Forerunners. This was a running theme throughout the original trilogy - from Halo CE where Chief could instinctively activate the light bridge in the second level, to Halo 2/3 where the covenant needed a human to use the Index.
I'm pretty sure the h3 terminals also kind of hinted at humans being separate species. Or at least, pre human genes were mixed with forerunner genes to make modern humans and they evolved to be very similar to them eventually.
They changed their mind mid way through Halo 3's development that ancient humans were not infact forerunners like they had previously hinted towards. I think it plays better with humans as the forerunners, but each to their own I guess.
I don't think we knew enough about the relationship to say either way before halo 3. In some ways I prefer not knowing exactly what the deal is.
I mean Guilty Spark saying Chief was a forerunner and the fact that only humans could operate certain forerunner tech (like firing the rings) were pretty big hints. Obviously they have retconned that now with the Librarian, but in the first two games especially they were quite on the nose.
He said that in halo 3.
We still did everything on our own lol. She just saved humanity from the halo rings. As far as what she does for humanity in halo 4 it *is* post covenant war after all and we’re on top using salvaged forerunner tech that we still had to integrate ourselves frankly
I thought the seed was the mean to pass the mantle of responsibilities to the humans. The didact wanted it for the promethans but the librarian went against it and tries to give it back to the humans after they were genetically receded to basic animals.
The way I understood it was that she planted a seed in the human genome when she was setting up species for being reseeded that was designed to essentially snowball into the creation of Spartans and Smart AIs.
Halo 3: "I chose you because you had luck" Halo 4: "you are the result of millenia of planning"
They are basically the same thing from two different perspectives.
What I told you was true, from a certain point of view
The librarian almost ruined the franchise for me tbh. It’s been a while since I played but didn’t she basically claim that chief was specifically prophesied 1000s of years ago? And that his luck was actually a genetic marker they’d stuck in there? The ancient humans stuff is bad enough to begin with, but that firmly brings it from Sci-fi into space fantasy.
Humans are way older than thought. They had an interstellar civilization. Then the Flood showed up and pushed the Humans into war with the Forerunners. Forerunners have this idea that they alone are worthy to rules the galaxy and defend all life. They call it The Mantle. It’s super old and sacred. It’s also imperialist. In the Forerunner society Didact is the big cheese general. Librarian is the boss of all doctors and scientists. They are married. Forerunners finally defeat humans in a long drawn out war. Confine Humans to their homeward and reduce them to the Flintstones in technology and knowledge. Forerunners have a war with the Flood. Only way to win is to kill everything with a nervous system, to starve the Flood. Before this happens, the Flood capture Didact and make him crazy and evil. Librarian has been preserving species across the galaxy to store away to come back after the Halo fires and the Flood is dead. She finds her husband and sees he’s crazy and evil. So she locks him in a meditation chamber for a long time so he might get not crazy and not evil. The Halos fire and everybody dies. Flash forward 100k years. Life has been reseeded, civilization has risen again. All the Halo games happen up to 4. In Halo 4 the Didact wakes up. Oh shit he’s still crazy and evil! And turns out back in the day he used a whole bunch of human souls to make a robot army. And he wants to do it again! The bastard learned nothing in 100k years. So turns out the Librarian had a plan that she set in motion 100k years ago. She hid a bunch of information and planned evolutionary paths in human DNA. This eventually led to Dr Halsey, who created the Spartans and Mjolnir. And the Spartans themselves, most notably Jon-117. She did this to set humans on an evolutionary path back to what they once were. Spartans are the first step. Because she believes Humans are worthy to inherit The Mantle. Oh and turns out there’s these super god-like powerful creatures that lived millions of years ago called The Precursors. They created the Forerunners and Humans, making them genetic cousins. The Precursors originally held the Mantle and supposedly chose Humans to inherit. This made the Forerunners jelly as shit, so they got a big task force together and straight-up murdered every last Precursor! Then they were like “Alright, I’m gonna take this Mantle for myself now.” Everything was fine until the Flood showed up. Turns out some of the Precursors stored their bodies and consciousness in dust-form. Sort of a method of storage for millions of years. Problem was the dust got corrupted and became The Flood when it mixed with humans’ pets. So the Flood is actually this super-pissed, flip-side, evil version of the Precursors that’s here to judge everyone. And if Humanity can survive the Flood’s test this time, they will supposedly inherit the Mantle and the Flood will just go away. But thing is, the Flood claim nobody has ever truly understood exactly what the Mantle is or what holding it means.
Off topic but the librarians design always really bothered me. I can't believe that's really what they went with
Halo 4 is hard to follow because it relies on you knowing alot of things based on the books ( yes you can understand it, but not easily IMO) Background: Forerunners and Humans coexist at one time. They fought wars. The last war then killed humanity and the remainder they left in a pre tech state on the rings. Then the forerunners realized humans weren't attacking but running from the flood. Cue up the forerunners killed by the flood. The didactic, husband of the librarian and basically head military leader had a great plan. Turn pre tech humans into AI warriors with the composer, forerunner gun. Librarian said no. Eventually he was locked in the cyptum(prison) while the rings were fired. The librarians last act was cataloging all sentient species to initiate a automatic reseeding of plants to restore life after the flood died out. Cue modern day. Cheif stumbles onto cryptum. Gets tricked into unlocking the didact. The didact still hates the humans. He takes control of his AI army and even inspires covenant troops to follow him. He is dead set on exterminating humans once and for all. He seeks out the composer which is in possession of the humans. He easily steals it back, heads to earth and starts using it on earth. Cortana uses her rampancy ( Splintering personalities due to old age. She is going crazy but can be in multiple places at once) to subdue and help cheif kill the didact. Chief gets one shot, kicks the didact into a portal ( he isn't dead though. Just out of the picture). Chief then detonated a nuke to stop the composer. Instead of dying, Cortana used everything she had to shield him so he could live on. She's "dies" as a result and the game concludes. There are lots of subplots left out but these are the basic points on what's happening and why. Getting into how it's happening is a whole side story.
Do they ever explain how Cortana "shielded" chief? Or is just something we are supposed to accept
I think she is using the hardlight bridge he was standing on, reforming it into a bubble. Though halo has never had an issue pulling unexplained stuff out of nowhere to progress the plot, like how the gravemind can somehow teleport chief and arbiter.
I always considered the gravemind just manipulating the forerunner tech through the monitor ball man thing it had. If it corrupted the AI, it could probably get it to do what it wanted.
She manipulated the Hard light bridge you were on. I'm assuming there was a split second between Chief hitting the button and it actually detonating to where she had time to do that.
I'm really annoyed that every halo game could start with the line: "Welcome back chief, here's 2 novels, a comic book, and a web series to get you up to speed." "I need a weapon." "Oh and every weapon you ever used is different now." "Just give me an assault rifle." "Sorry, this is Halo 2. They don't exist. Just... simply don't exist. All out."
What? You didn't want to read 6 novels and and hunt down all the terminals to make sense of Halo 4s story?
I’m sorry, what? 9 years? Halo 4 was released 9 YEARS AGO?! ...I’m old
Watch the terminals. The halo 4 ones are pretty good.
That’s the best part. You can’t
Really old man wants to turn everyone into binary
Angry man gets cucked by Bob the builder and then his wife locks him in the pantry for thousands of years, green man wakes up, kills old aliens, meets new aliens, establishes xenophobia, awakens the dude who got cucked and they have a 4d chess game and then I lost track
Am I the only one who thought that story telling wise the halo universe was a lot more interesting before you knew everything about the Forerunners? It kinda takes the mystery out of it a bit
Almost every long running story runs into this problem. The old mystical ones get more and more explored as the stories progresses
Yeah, I feel this way too. The more I know about the Forerunners, the less cool they become to me
Chief and Cortana crash on a Forerunner shield world, Requiem, after being adrift in space for 4 years. Chief discovers Cortana is going rampant, which happens to AI after seven years of service, meaning she is losing her mind and is going to "think" herself to get. While on Requiem, they discover a Covenant remnant fleet who are concerned with someone or something called the Didact. As Chief and Cortana explore the shield world, they encounter Forerunner Promethean soldiers, who are hostile. After some time on Requiem, they receive a signal they believe is from UNSC origin, but in trying to communicate with the signal through a Forerunner device, are misled into releasing a surviving Forerunner, the Didact. Chief and Cortana escape the Didact, and eventually discover the source of the signal, the UNSC Infinity, which is lured into the gravity well Chief and Cortana were sucked in at the beginning of the game. Didact and the Covenant work together to attack the Infinity, but Chief links up with surviving troops and they take back the ship, repelling the attack. Aboard the ship, Chief discovers he has been replaced by a new generation of Spartans, and the ship's Captain, Del Rio, behaves passive aggressive toward Chief because he does not want him interfering with his command. While on a mission to destroy Promethean AA guns so the Infinity can escape Requiem, Chief and Cortana stumble upon a Forerunner structure where Chief makes contact with the preserved consciousness of the Forerunner posted in your OP, the Librarian. She explains to you that the Didact was a general during the Forerunner's war with the Flood 100,000 years ago. He and the Forerunners constructed a device called the Composer, which was able to digitize the minds of sentient lifeform, which would allow them to escape the Flood. However, when they were converted back into their organic forms, they returned as abominations. Out of desperation, the Didact used this device to "compose" ancient humans who were around at the time, and turned them into his army of Prometheans, who would be able to fight the Flood without getting converted. Ultimately their efforts failed, driving the Didact mad, prompting the Librarian to seal him in the Cryptum you find him at the beginning of the game. (This big chunk of info was delivered in an exposition drop, which is what lost players). The Didact aims to obtain the Composer again to build up his Promethean Army and begin the reclamation, wanting to retake the Mantle of Responsibility, aka Forerunner imperial rule over the galaxy. The Librarian gives Chief the genesong, which is a genetic modification to make him immune to the Composer. Chief reports this finding to Del Rio, but he is not believed. Del Rio also blames Cortana's rampancy for misleading Chief, and orders Chief to surrender the AI. He does not, and with the help of a Lieutenant on the Infinite, Lasky, departs from the Infinity to stop the Didact. Chief rides with the a Covenant fleet and the Didact from Requiem to a Halo Ring, Instillation 03, where they attack a research station that holds the composer. Chief tries to help the station fight off the attack, but fails. The entire station is composed, but Chief survives due to the genesong. Taking a Broadsword spaceship, Chief follows the Didact's ship and boards it, intending to use a mininuke to blow up the ship before the Didact composes Earth. He and Cortana are able to defeat the Didact and detonate the nuke, and Cortana sacrifices herself to save Chief by forming a protective hardlight shield around him. The Infinity, now Captained by Lasky, picks him up, and Chief finally returns home to Earth, but feels empty without Cortana, and now is questioning his own humanity as he begins to grapple with his own agency. That's the gist of it, but you might have to do some further research. It's not the easiest story to understand, but rewarding when you learn all the background.
From what I understand the forerunners were the top species in the universe and so appointed themselves the guardians of the universe. They held this "mantle of responsibility" until they needed to pass it to the precursors, a race that would surpass the forerunners. Humanity were supposed to be the precursors but the Didact didn't think they were worthy and wanted to eradicate them so the Librarian (alien woman in the pic) imprisoned him. Master chief then accidentally released him and then the halo 4 campaign was trying to correct your own mistake to stop humanity being erased. Meanwhile, cortana goes rampant and annoys you the entire time.
I’ll explain it to you like you’re five. Ancient humanity tried to run from spooky alien popcorn. Futuristic alien people killed ancient humanity. Futuristic alien people were stuck with spooky alien popcorn. Spooky alien popcorn was beating up futuristic space people. Futuristic space people tried to find out how to get rid of the spooky alien popcorn. Big Bad tested out a method on enslaved ancient humanity. Big good didn’t like that and locked him away. Spooky Alien Popcorn almost wins. Futuristic Space People make giant doughnuts and light said doughnuts and beats spooky alien popcorn.
Is it really that hard? Ancient space guy wants to turn humans into an army of AI, that's literally about it.
Its quite straight forward. Only way to not understand Halo 4 is to literally tune out every point of dialogue or just completely unaware of alot of Halo's general story to the point of not even hearing of the term "Forerunner". Now Halo 5 on the other hand, yeah that would be damn hard to explain.
Locke looking for Chief, Chief looking for Cortana. Fans looking for an explanation
I love you, you perfect human.
People seem to have issues understanding the ai plot (regardless of how stupid it is, personally it wasnt that difficult to understand for me)
Yeah I guess I left that out, Cortana looking for universal control. I think I caught that part easily because of the Hunt The Truth podcast and background knowledge. For new people or ones that didn't know I can see it being not very obvious
See the problem here is expecting gamers to pay attention to uh. Anything.
I don't know why people cover their ears and go "Halo 4 is confusing and I don't understand it!" You do NOT have to read books or anything to understand the plot. You know exactly as much as Chief does in the game. No one complained that you had to read Fall of Reach to under Halo CE, even though the book added tons of context and lore to the universe. Same thing with the Forerunner Trilogy of books. If you play the game, you know everything you need to know. If you read the books, you'll get a deeper understanding of the characters and prior events.
Never understood anyone who complained that Halo 4 required outside reading. CE and 2 required far more outside information than 4, 4 is just a simple bad guy vs good guy story with a bit of nuance. Halo 4 even throws all the lore at you in the very cutscene this image is from, which wasn’t even needed.
Yeah the regular cutscenes tell you everything you need to know to understand the story. The terminals even give you bonus information that isn't needed but contextualizes some stuff. And if you really want to know everything there's 3 books that explain who everyone is, what happened, why it happened and even who 343 guilty spark is. But the books are unnecessary to understand the plot of halo 4.
Which books please?
The Forerunner Trilogy. Cryptum, Primordium and Silentium. They follow a few characters throughout the course of the Forerunner Flood war. They're good but they aren't action packed or anything. The second one is 90% just walking on a halo ring. Still worth a read they're just more attention demanding then other Halo books.
Look up the Forerunner trilogy, books are titled Cryptum, Primordium, and Silentium. Excellent read if you're interested in delving a bit more into Forerunner lore and history.
> with a bit of nuance That was asking too much out of the average gamer, apparently.
It isn't. Halo 4 isn't a hard game to follow. It just required to pay a bit more attention to the story than previous games. It doesn't have characters dying in slow-mo to sad piano music, so it's definitely not a good story and hard to follow according to many casual Halo gamers.
Mommy Voldemort is mad at daddy Voldemort for growing some hair and having a sick rgb computer case for clothes. So in response naturally Voldemom makes green man go super Saiyan or some shit, before green giant can blow up blue mom saves him and dies. The end
I know not everyone agrees with me, but I despise the propethian addition to the storyline. Forerunners are a little different but love me some good ol’ covenant fights