By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe.
Posted by: grey101
Yeah, Lets have an entire game without cortana and the chief try to interact with johnson, Thel, or anybody else. Let's then end the game right after we get cortana.
This is part of the reason why I always thought Halo 4 would be a good idea, since Halo 3 brought absolutely no closure especially for a major character like Cortana. The whole of Halo 3 builds up to rescuing her, but half an hour later we're supposed to just be totally fine with letting her rot inside a derelict ship and pretend she got the conclusion she deserved?
Hell no. There is much that can be said about Halo 4 on the front of character writing, and what stands out most is John and Cortana's relationship. It developed beautifully, to the point where I feel okay with her actually dying now because they made it feel like the relationship has run its course and come to an end with a sense of finality. She has had a profound effect on John to say at the least, and it's because of Cortana (not any other character in the games, her) that John developed at all.
While I do feel the Chief/Cortana story came to a natural end in Halo 4, I still think that John's story needs her in order to avoid making the mistakes Halo 3 did - diminishing the role of Thel and leaving blanket characters like Johnson and Miranda to fill the gap, despite the fact that neither of them are actually developed in the games. Johnson's development was essentially restricted to Contact Harvest, yet he's a fan-favourite character. Why? Because he's an archetype. Yet when a character like the Didact is steadily developed over 5 years, people complain about him being somewhat ambiguous in the game because they don't want to think for themselves and have a simplistic plot spoon-fed to them. I understand that it can be frustrating that certain details in Halo 4 were not covered very well and pouring over 5 years of fiction seems somewhat daunting, but why should a mountain of exposition be artificially injected into the game when the details are at everyone's fingertips?
/tangent
[Edited on 01.02.2013 11:59 AM PST]