- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Posted by: theWhale
ok..as any1 who played Halo:CE knows, the covenant do not speak english. each covenant form seems to speak in its own form of gibberish, even tho some of it, at times, have sounded (imo)like it could be english.
but in halo2, they all seem to magically start speaking english, and all the human characters, as well as urself, can understand what they are saying!
why do you think this is??? isnt this slightly unrealistic (figuratively speaking)? even if they "learned" how to speak our language, isnt this slightly contradicting?? they reguard humans as demons, as evil..why would they want to learn and speak our language???
to me, just the fact that they all speah english in H2 sort of makes the game seem more... like a cartoon or sumthing..
ill tell u wat would have been cool tho; if you couldnt understand the covenant as MC (they talk gibberish), but, you can as the arbiter...i think it would have made the campaign seem just that lil bit cooler. youd be like "cool, we know wat they are saying!".
i suspect that this was bungies plan, in the beginning... covenant talk thier own languages when you MC, and english when your the Arbiter...but maybe they didnt have time, in the end, to do this.. and thought people wouldnt really care, since wat the covenant said needed to be translated during certain cutscenes, anyways.
on another rantish note; i think people found it cooler to not know the inside details/politics of the covenant, and thier armada.. after the first game, people had come to hate the covenant, and saw them as a more mysterious enemy. making us play as a covenant, and writing in a covenant racial fraction/rebellion, and then making us ally with some of them, imo, was a stroyline gamble that wasnt very effective.
as i said, people had come to hate the covenant, and i think that playing on this hate, and making us to hate them even more in the 2nd game, would have been a more effective, and dramatic stroy line move. i think the public would have preferred to loathe and hate the covenant for wat they have done to us, and use this hate to feul them in the quest of standing at arms against them. fighting no matter wat the odds were -and never giving up. this could have lead to a story that ended with a deep emotional bang. and a dramatic ending that wouldnt have been too complex, but could have been powerful.
instead of feeling hate (which i beleve is something we wanted to feel, and kept telling ourselves to feel throughout the H2 campaign) we found that the story was trying to make us feel sympathy for a race that was trying to wipe us out! we then find ourselves with mixed emotions at the end of the game, and makes the idea of marching into an all out war against them a little less appealing..a little less dramatic..
did we know all of Germany's or Japans inner politics during WW2?? no. wat we knew was that the -blam!-'s were evil, and the japanese were allied with them.
i think that the inner-meaning of the original story(CEs campaign) was about humans rising up against astounding odds, to be victorious, because of our determination, and instinctive habit of adaptation, and survival, we are able to out perform other races that are statistically more powerful than us in all aspects..this is wat we have done for millions of years in order be the dominant species on our planet. overcome the odds.
if halo 2 had simply built on its foundation, and expanded it to a grander scale (all of humanity being the under dog, not just MC) i think we could have had something serious.
my suggestion to Bungie; keep the story simple, easy to understand, but powerful. the it was in CE, rather than have a complex, and harder to understand story with multiple factors to keep track of (the dual story lin of H2).
1)The covenant CAN speak english.
2)If they had made it a single line story, and had not had the whole break up in the covenant thing, for one it wouldn't have worked out right, and also since when has bungie liked simple????????????????
3)personally i like playing as the arbiter and actually if you payed attention during the game, you should understand that the covenant is now devided, and part of them are on our side, and that if we hated both sides we would have a MUCH more complicated game, and the humans would die indefinately. And we'd probably end up hating the humans for being traitors.