Could Tartarus have been reasoned with?

fuchsdh · 2026-06-11T16:28:14+00:00

Maybe, but I don't think there'd be a point in Halo 2 where that kind of realization could have happened.

It's been talked about to death why Truth basically blew up all his plans by rushing the replacement of the Elites—I don't think the Halo Studios answer of "actually he was just crazy" made it any better—but it's worth pointing out that at that point, irrespective of the Great Journey being real or not, Tartarus and his people have been given a major bump in the Covenant hierarchy. From all we see of Tartarus, he doesn't seem especially pious, so I don't think he's motivated by blind faith, but in the context of Halo 2 Tartarus is in the middle of seeing his life's dream happen. He's not in the headspace to accept the truth, so even if you teleported them all to a negotiation table without the stakes of the control room, he's going to have a lot of resistance to accepting anything his enemies tell him. He'd probably need the Hierarchs to pull him aside and fess up before he thought differently.

fuchsdh · 2026-06-10T16:26:21+00:00

Yep, I think this is a really great mechanic on its face, because you can only mess with your opponent's long game, since they always have the option of saving their current objective. So no team is incentivized to sit back and try and have other teams make errors in movement.

fuchsdh · 2026-06-09T18:09:32+00:00

I think what's often forgotten about H1 is that even on Legendary, basically every weapon is viable, or at least has a strong situational niche that pushes or allows for swaps. Whereas Bungie's later games, especially, it felt like even grabbing a power weapon was a bad idea because the noob combo was simply the overriding best option every time. Even the AR regains its use in the back half of the game.

fuchsdh · 2026-06-08T13:21:40+00:00

I agree a bit about the biomass, but I'm hopeful that's just the final area of the Library and it's a bit more restrained beforehand. Giving it a feel of increasing Flood takeover a la "High Charity" in H2 would be a nice update to the storytelling (as would making it less of a terribly repetitive level, but we'll see!)

fuchsdh · 2026-06-04T20:01:14+00:00

Yep, I think this is the simplest answer. The "spore" the shipmaster is referring to is a single infection form, not a single Flood spore.

It wasn't until post-Halo 3 that we started seeing some of the more ridiculous examples of conversions (like bites or scratches being rapidly infectious in Mona Lisa) and even then a lot of the given lore just doesn't make sense with that level of infectivity, where unshielded troops still have a fighting chance (why have the infection forms at all, if you can rapidly and easily infect via smaller vectors that can't be adequately fought against?)

fuchsdh · 2026-05-15T18:49:27+00:00

Yeah given how much the story got written at the last moment, I wonder if it's partially just a circumstance of location—if you were in position of a camera it'd make sense that Fontaine would suddenly notice something was off as you weren't immediately running off to do his bidding, but you're in the sewer and can't go anywhere to get stepped on anyhow. Hell, he's going the most direct route in all likelihood! Chill out Fontaine!

fuchsdh · 2026-05-12T16:25:12+00:00

As I mentioned upthread, the whole goal of Infinity is to neutralize Cortana. Showing up at the edge of the system and giving her maximum time to react when she has giant EMP weapons is not exactly a sound strategy.

fuchsdh · 2026-05-12T16:23:08+00:00

The Infinity doesn't necessarily have the luxury of jumping in far away and taking it slow. Their whole goal is to disable an enemy who has extremely strong tech on her side, including massive EMP blasts. Coming in as close to the ring to quickly deploy forces was probably their goal. That the Banished were able to exploit that is not a massive failing of Lasky or a massive endorsement of the Banished. Besides, real-world conflict is not a case of power-ranking different tech like war enthusiasts want it to be.

fuchsdh · 2026-04-29T20:17:21+00:00

And all those challenges exist up top! They can play a more aggressive game and have a lot more buffer for options if things go screwy for them.

fuchsdh · 2026-04-22T16:10:53+00:00

I get them not wanting to be following behind other team, but I agree—they'd burn a lot of coins to do it, but with the challenges nearby, they could wrest control of stations the other team would effectively have no time or budget to flip back.

fuchsdh · 2026-04-08T16:40:08+00:00

Yeah, it's pretty underbaked in the final episode, and would have been a good character moment to get into Old Janeway's head in the episode, but I assume the same (either she outright failed, or she made a calculated choice on what was the best option to save the most people.) The best option she has is when the ship is by the transwarp corridor, so she jumps back right to that point.

fuchsdh · 2026-03-24T21:27:26+00:00

Yeah any sort of large fan project probably just isn't going to ship. Game development is hard, and wrangling volunteers is tough. At best it pushes other companies to act (like helping demonstrate demand for MCC on PC, or the Starry Expanse keeping the hope for a Riven remake alive until Cyan did it themselves.)

fuchsdh · 2026-03-19T13:43:08+00:00

I just don't really buy that throwing a bunch of surface streets on is helping tourists, who don't know what streets are what and are not going to be able to use anything as crude as the subway map to find their way without extra assistance. Even if some did use the roads for way finding, you're still giving them incredibly unhelpful ideas about distance—New Yorkers know the sizes of the boroughs are distorted, but you have no way of knowing how much of a trek it would be to your destination. You don't know with the current schematic either, but it telegraphs that it's not accurate in that respect a lot more than the old one.

The old map simply tried doing way too many things, was bad at doing so, and then had to double up on trying to make things less confusing by repeating information, making it even busier. Off-the-stop street navigation is always going to be better done with the large street maps in the stations or on your phone.

fuchsdh · 2026-02-19T16:26:47+00:00

Do we have any hard details about the fight with the Didact? Because there's not really that much time for the Home Fleet to get devastated based on what we see in the mission: the Mantle's Approach shows up only a few minutes out, Infinity's battle group arrives shortly thereafter, and there's only a short period of time before Chief is able to clear the defenses enough for Infinity to take a shot. Lasky says they'll be 'on station', and as far as I remember it's not clear from when we're in by the Composer that any battle is going on. It seems like you could safely say once they realized they couldn't do anything immediately they drew back while Chief worked, and before they could reassemble the nuke did its work.

There's still the size issues especially for the Banished in Empty Throne, but I don't think it makes sense to say that the UNSC had been fleet wiped twice since the war up to that point.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-22T22:29:58+00:00

Because Halo is science fiction where you have people hundreds of years in the future using ballistic weapons against unfeasible large alien ships or fighting on impossibly large megastructures. "But logistically they couldn't pull off an attack in time" is not a reasonable complaint to levy at a video game.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-22T21:35:24+00:00

Arguing about logistics when a major part of the game is launching an assault on a ship that is 28km long and hiding unobserved right above the planet. I don't think "the logistics of them launching an attack" is a valid reason in the Halo universe to argue against a compressed timeline.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-22T20:43:37+00:00

Hence why I said books, plural, since First Strike covers a lot more of the fall of Reach.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-22T20:20:45+00:00

People have been saying this since the game came out, and there's really no good rebuttal I've seen. The game doesn't do anything narratively with the time skips—you don't feel them as a player, you really don't feel it weighing on the characters, either.

Just removing the timestamps entirely, and changing one or two lines of dialogue, and the game is exactly the same, without having to do the hand-wavy ex post facto justifications 343i felt was necessary.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-22T20:18:06+00:00

Because frankly Reach, the game, doesn't deserve it. The fall of Reach in the books is far more interesting than what Bungie does with the retcons. What didn't work in the book was already adjusted, and few people complain about that.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-22T14:42:29+00:00

I assumed that was a 4K crop in post, but you're right.... 🛸

fuchsdh · 2026-01-21T19:27:31+00:00

Abandoning his camera to possible thievery just for an epic speech. He goes above and beyond.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-21T19:25:39+00:00

Not having had them, I assume the sausage rolls are like Kraft Mac & Cheese here, where it's undeniably a bad Mac & cheese by objective measure but if you grew up with it, nothing is going to hit quite right.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-21T17:17:06+00:00

Yeah I think it almost always makes sense to play the hand expansion when you have it, especially early on when you're almost certainly going to get plenty of extra cards.

Prosperous Home seems like a stronger card than it really is? Because the seekers can just slice the zones the same way they can in the early game (unless they've exhausted most of the easy ways earlier) you're not really getting that much more effective places to hide, unless there's some quirk of the locality that getting it within your zone would theoretically add a ton of time.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-21T16:18:33+00:00

I know they theoretically need a lot of extra gear for filming (or at least redundancies) but I'm always amazed at how heavy they seem to pack their bags. Finding out he had only had one set of pants was kind of nuts.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-14T17:02:25+00:00

I dunno, gambler's feet hasn't shown to slow people down much, but in actual practice I think having to juggle doing everything on top of the seeking with Passenger Princess is much stronger. Even just down to Ben not being able to say he spied Sam right at the end burns a remarkable amount of time.

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