Yes its all very interesting...

@Ops: That's some deep analysis :)

Hehe, this is the fun stuff :)

Upon glancing through the book Halo : Primordium again, looking at every single reference of "Composer", I'm pretty positive now that the big secret of the Halo 4 story will revolve around the Composer, and what it is capable of doing. The composer seems to be some mixture of both organic and machine. The composer might have been a forerunner itself once, a lifeworker. But it seems that this lifeworker may have been infected with the flood, and I guess, with it's knowledge or talent on how to convert forerunners and even humans into Machines, or to place the mind and spirit of former human warriors into the genetic code of future humans, pretty much performed its talent on itself while it battled flood infection in a last ditch effort to save itself, and in doing so somehow managed to stabilize itself in the final stages of flood infection. So the composer is nothing remotely close to what it once was, but is probably now a combination of forerunner, flood and machine, that is still capable enough to perform its most important task, the same task it was apparently famous for as a forerunner.

It is implied that the Master Builder made horrible misuse of the composer, something designed once to save them all (forerunners) So perhaps that's it. Someone misused the composer for their own evil goals, and now has themselves a pretty formidable army of Forerunner Promethean rank Warrior Servants that have been turned into impressive combat machines that not just have no semblance of free will, but who will also likely obey whoever it is that created them without question. That's what the Promethean Knights are -- former top forerunner warriors now turned into machines. Even more impressive, whoever this person is likely also has themselves a Didact Promethean Knight under their command.

343 was being pretty cryptic as to why there are differently colored promethean knights, like some (the ones the chief fought) have an orange light all over them, and then there are ones that are covered in a blue light that we saw in the Halo 4 SP trailer, and we have no idea who they are fighting against in that scene. The weapons fired at them, though, seemed like Covenant weapons. You saw a plasma projectile shot at one, and even a plasma grenade tossed, I believe.

excuse me there was a new advert i heard during the footy?


http://halo.xbox.com/blogs/post/2012/06/11/Halo-4-...

SPUNK!

Yep, here you go. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx2kbROpxP8&feature...

You see the Chief at the end. Had trouble initially figuring out if that was the game again, or if it was a live action/cg chief. I'm assuming CG.

chief is so awesome :)

The Chief is too much of a badass for his own good. I can't wait till when this new enemy learns to fear and respect the Chief, like the Covenant did.

An Ancient Evil Awakens... and it's today. Must be foreshadowing Lebron's first ring :( (LOL) Couldn't resist.

Man Chief looks badass! :)

You'd be correct, Grift, if what you saw at E3 was actually the game's first mission. It actually wasn't, believe it or not. That's about a third of the way into the game what they showed at E3.

And yes, Phaethon, quite a bit different, actually.

#1 No game has ever addressed Cortana's impending rampancy. That will be a cool story all in itself that will do a much better job of exposing the gamer to more of the Chief's character, compared to previous Halo games where he was way too damn quiet at times. Halo : Combat Evolved and Halo 2 feel as if they struck a better balance in this regard than Halo 3 did. Speaking of Halo 3, I think it made a complete mockery of the situation that Cortana was left in at the end of Halo 2. A complete mockery. Even as we play through Halo 3, we are led to believe that something pretty damn significant is taking place with Cortana, and it might play a significant role in the story, only for the Chief to go get her, and then nothing at all. All is instantly back to normal, like none of what we were being led to believe was worth a damn.

Chief isn't some chatterbox, but he sure as heck talks a lot more than he is shown doing in the games, and I think it's just a weak excuse to not develop his character properly by exaggerating this strong, silent type cliche that the franchise has going. What we see of the Covenant now are but remnants of the all powerful, well equipped and organized covenant that we fought in previous games. They won't even be the most prominent aspect of the SP story, but they naturally have to play some role, because there are some small factions of the covenant that will not accept a piece with humanity. I welcome that. An immediate, all encompassing love affair with all facets of the Covenant after such a huge war would be a joke, but I see potential for cooperation depending on what the intentions of the new enemies are.

#2 We finally get to learn more about the Forerunners. Remember those crazy religious nutjobs in the Covenant? Well, the Forerunners are who they worship like gods, and soon the forerunners will be forced to worship the Chief like a god. Well worth the price of admission :)

#3 They are saying they are putting more of the books and the Chief's character into the game this time, and they actually look like they're keeping that promise this time around. They're doing more with Cortana's character this time around, and the timing couldn't be any more perfect for that.

#4 The Presentation and overall production value of this next gen Halo finally looks like its deserving of a title that singlehandedly put the Xbox brand on the map. I love Bungie, but it seems like they may have actually been more of an impediment to the proper advancing of this series than some initially thought. Most blamed Microsoft for this, but I honestly believe the more of this game that we see, the more we realize that Bungie shares a great deal of that blame, too, with all due respect to Bungie.

#5 343 already look like they're adding more legitimate changes to the core Halo Sandbox gameplay than anything Bungie has done in a total of 3 next gen attempts (Halo 3, ODST, Reach). Looks like there will legitimately be more fresh ideas on combat sandbox gameplay than in the previous next gen attempts.

Unlike the previous Halo trilogy, this one is actually a planned trilogy from the start. I don't believe for one second that Halo was ever originally planned to be a trilogy from the very beginning, and it shows in a lot of ways. With the first Halo, it looks like Bungie knocked it out of the park, realized it was a massive success, beyond anyone's wildest expectations, and then realized "Oh shit, we gotta actually make a few followups to this thing now, don't we?" Bungie seemed to, at their whim, just dismiss all the strong accompanying fiction around the Halo Universe. You always wondered to yourself why they couldn't bring more of the cool stuff that you read about in the books to the games, and this game seems to make that a major priority. Bungie definitely gave it a shot somewhat in Halo Reach, but there was a much more less ambitious, and more traditional military feel to that game because of what it had to focus on, and I guess you had to expect that considering what it covered. However, when Bungie seemingly tried to go there from a story perspective with Reach, the game seemed all the better for it. You only kinda wish there was more. What Bungie did in those terminals and datapads, weave more of that into the actual story of the game without people having to stop and read a bunch of cryptic text.

#6 343 is finally doing a better job of making the player actually believe that they are controlling a supersoldier. It was easier to do this with the first Halo, because it was new to a lot of people, but the Chief is starting to feel no more special than a random dude in Call of Duty, and so I like 343 actually going out of their way to make the kind of HUD changes that they did, bringing in the kinds of cool hud tech that you read about in even the oldest of Halo books. Instead of forcing us to use our imagination so much, how about doing more of those presentational little things that make the Chief look appropriately superhuman? 343 is focused on this stuff.

#7 COD 4 was a much more epic looking/feeling game than Halo 3 as you played through the SP campaign. I shouldn't even be able to say those words with a straight face. Personally, I think Halo 4 is the first next gen Halo title to actually realize what the hell kind of game it's suppose to be. Halo, by the very nature of being Halo, and having the kind of universe that it does, should have been absolutely smoking the competition from a singleplayer spectacle and experience standpoint. Other SP experiences should have felt as if they were fighting with two arms tied behind their backs, but that really hasn't been the case. I can remember the death of some random soldier in COD better than I can the death of Miranda Keyes and Sergeant Johnson in Halo 3. That's a disaster. Halo : CE handled Captain Keye's death in truly memorable fashion. Halo : CE handled our initial experience with the flood through that video playing in the chief's helmet in truly memorable fashion. Even Halo 2, for all the crap it gets, was superior to any next gen Halo in ways that are too long to bother going into.

The point is I don't want it to be that much different. Just bring the series the kind of attention that a next gen Halo has deserved from the get go, and it hasn't always felt as if it was getting that kind of attention. You make a comparison to Halo 1's story and Halo 4's story. Well, if Halo 4 can be the next gen equivalent of the kind of experience, wonder and discovery that Halo 1's story represented at the time, then I'll be more than happy that they share basic similarities