- StealthSlasher2
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- Exalted Mythic Member
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Posted by: Cmdr DaeFaron
Posted by: raganok99
Funny thing is that if SC somehow gets in the Reach via cloaking, then Covenant would have won the war against humanity in 20 years ago.
And Covenant aren't exactly smart bunch, you know. Speaking militarily and scientifically...
and how does that connect at all?
As somebody said, Reach was the first (or one of the very few) planets the Covenant entered the system KNOWING humans were there.
I hope you're not implying that the no one in the Covenant was even remotely aware of some degree of human presence on Earth. It's true Regret may have jumped the gun as well as Cortana expressing shock that the Covenant would proceed to Earth with such an insignificant fleet.
Yet, keep in mind, prior to Operation: First Strike the Covenant intended to go to Earth with a fleet as big if not larger than the one that would go on to conquer Reach. It's a tad bit of overkill to commit so many resources to a planet with no potential hostiles in the first place.
Furthermore if their intent was to only find and secure the Ark without knowledge of humanity why not just send in a small scout force. As we know from Reach, the advanced scouting party happened to house quite a few Zealots. From Halsey's little debriefing she adds that there have been numerous reports on other worlds where such teams (comprised of Zealots or without) have been deployed whose primary purpose was to search out and find such things quickly and efficiently.
Why not do the same for Earth?
Now of course, it still was overkill back before Halo: Reach ever came out, but back then there was no existence of Covenant scout teams, particularly small ones used to recon a planet for Forerunner goods. So it was relatively safe to come up with the reasoning that it was standard procedure for the Covenant to recover artifacts with as large a force they can muster at the time. Could they have known about the Ark beforehand and thus necessitated a large fleet?
Maybe, but then (under the assumption there is no rush to beat humans to such a location) how does the Covenant discern when a potential Forerunner site is worth sending a massive battlegroup versus a smaller task force.
It's the problem that comes with adding things on the fly retroactively in story telling. While things that happen later on may not be outright broken, it leads to some instances where previous writing is loosened up a bit rather than kept tight in the face of all these new possibilities that seemingly vanished by the time of the original storyiine.
Such issues are the result of careless writing. And I don't mean it in the harshest of ways, but rather instead the writing overlooked minor issues that would strike up more minor issues down the line that results in people debating over what is essentially something that people shouldn't be making an issue out of in the first place because everything was initially fine in the first place. It is great when such discrepancies are explained away though.
The Brute power armor discrepancy is a good example though of what I'm talking about. When Brutes made the transition from 2-3 they gained power armor that possessed shields. Now from a gameplay perspective, we can all come to understand that it's a necessity to change that to balance out the hole left by Elites. Storywise though it was incredibly strange to find that all the Brutes you see went from being walking carpets to armored battle monkeys over the course of two weeks. Considering the vast number of Brutes in the Covenant along with the ongoing civil war that just started, those two weeks might as well have been overnight relatively speaking. The logistics behind producing and then distributing all that new gear to Brutes everywhere was just ridiculous and stupid. Gameplay takes precedence no doubt, but when it came to the story it was just left completely unsaid how the change went on and if it was a total recton in which all Brutes including the ones in Halo 2 should have power armor from the get go.
Then Contact Harvest came out which explained to us that Power Armor was already available to the Brutes before the war even started, yet it still didn't explain why there was none present in Halo 2, particularly with Tartarus having his own set. This in turn, led to the evidence suggesting that the Brutes in Halo 2 were rectonned to posses power armor. But then Evolutions came out, and finally the whole picture is painted a good many years later. From a cultural standard Brutes may choose to rely on their own strength and as minimal Covenant tech as possible as a show of force a la the Halo 2 and Reach Brutes, or choose to wear that power armor and be more accepting of Covenant tech a la Halo 3/ODST Brutes.
Despite being solved eventually, good story writing would have never let that be up for grabs for such varied debate back then in the first place.
And now the same concept seems to be applying here to the whole space scenario in Reach. No doubt it will be cleared in full at some point, but considering all the possibilities both sides are presenting speaks for itself as to how tight the writing was for Reach. Which is to say not very...