By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe.
Posted by: cortana 5
I care.
James May looked eerily like Stephen Fry there for a second. o_O
I wish 343i well, but the fact of the matter is that they haven't worked on a game from the ground up on their own. CEA does NOT count.
You make it sound as if they're totally inexperienced in the gaming industry, I would amend your post by saying that they haven't worked on a Halo game before. The employees they have come from a wide variety of backgrounds, in their ViDocs you see the companies they've worked with before. Some of the level designers are from the Metroid series, for instance.
Anyways, Bungie intended for the trilogy to end at Halo 3. One example of this truth is a common western writing technique that most would call "coming full circle." At the beginning of Halo: CE, the chief gets out of a cryo tube, while at the end of Halo 3, he gets back into the cryo tube. It's a subtle symbolism that speaks volumes.
So, yeah, I care if it's not Bungie. The story was meant to end and I feel like it's doing Halo a disservice by continuing it in this manner.
You don't know that though. They sure as hell made a good job of leaving a -blam!--ton of loose ends toward the end of the game and even had a plot outline for a Halo 4 before they decided that it would be too much baggage to handle for their last Halo game so they moved on to Reach. Isaac Hannaford, one of their wonderful concept artists, had concept work done for a Forerunner promethean, that's a relatively good indication that they had some of the more intimate details ironed out during the early stages.
Hell, there aren't any flood in Halo 4. Halo was about the flood.
Correction: Frankie said that we won't be FIGHTING the Flood in Halo 4, he never specifically said that they aren't in the game.
Also, you can't just expect the Flood to immediately pop into the picture again. These things require build-up, for someone who seems to be so invested in the story you should understand that.
They could have at least changed the name. Of course, that wouldn't mean as much money because consumers are lemmings and will better gravitate to the name Halo.
Why? It's in the same universe as Halo, it has the same characters, the same engine (albeit a heavily modified one), the same weapons, the same voice actors and even some of the same employees.
Conclusion: It's still Halo.