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My take on this is that Bungie designed Halo CE with minimal expectations of what they would need to know for any future games they may need to design as follow ups. Other than a few dialogue references thrown in to give people a hint of things that may be, figure a few things:
1-no one knows how a game will do, so you invest the effort you need to in order to make the product you are working on the best it can be and hope there will be the demand for more. You do not waste resources on something that cannot be sold (kind of the cart before the horse thing)
2-they knew that if they did make another game, as time passes, so does game technology and what they had to work with for CE would be lesser than what they would have to work with for a sequel. Knowing that, you benefit by waiting to see what you can accomplish with your new techno toys of game design to make the story do what you want it to do.
Now, I have pretty strong feelings about this, I think that CE's story is far superior to 2's story, mainly because i think that they spent too much effort working the new things in (online play, skulls and 360 stuff) and DID NOT focus enough on telling the story. I compare it to the Matrix movie sequels. The cool thing about the first one was that it was a very great story, well told. The second one gets bogged down in trying to explain why the first one was so cool, and gets very metaphysical, and basically BORING. I play campaign only, and the CE campaign is signifigantly better than 2's campaign, for the same reason, it is BORING compared to the original. It lacks the variety in ways to play the levels.
3-They had to have had a basic framework to be able to generate the story from, it is just good basic planning, but as any good soldier will tell you, all plans are great, they just rarely survive much past the first five minutes of combat. Things change, people! I am sure they had ideas that they thought were great one minute then realized they either could not do something in a way to make the idea work, or found something technological worked even better than they anticipated so the idea gets obsolete before it is even in the game, it is surpassed by what the new fangled science allows them to do.
4-few of us have any clue as to how much work goes into creating these games. The basic idea is one thing, making that idea into a playable shape that can become an ICON in the gaming industry is another! Personally, I would wager that no one at Bungie truly expected their lil game to be what it has become when they were working on it. How can anyone truly expect this after all! This many years after it launched to have such a dedicated fan base, a winning (if not oft criticized by its fans, deservedly or no) franchise, and be a benchmark for gamers.................I am sure they are thrilled, but just as equally surprised, and just as equally proud for bringing this to us.