Microsoft Will Ruin Master Chief Between ‘Halo Infinite’ And Paramount If It’s Not Careful

This week, it was reported that 343 has absolutely no plans to continue Master Chief’s story in Halo Infinite, and almost all current plans for the Halo series are multiplayer focused, based on current PvP seasons, Forge and an upcoming battle royale-type game built in Unreal Engine 5.

That makes it seem like we may be headed into another extremely long period where Master Chief himself is put into hibernation, only this time, he has someone to replace him. It seems that with 343 shelving Master Chief, the only new Chief/Cortana stories we are going to be getting over the next few years are from the Paramount Plus Halo TV series, which most fans consider something of an abomination, given how the character of Chief has been handled.

We have a prime example in media right now of how to properly handle beloved game characters when they transition between game and the screen. The Last of Us has the quality and budget of an HBO production, the brilliant, TV-focused mind of Chernobyl writer Craig Mazin and one of the original creators working on the adaptation, Neil Druckmann. In contrast, it feels like Halo and Master Chief were shoveled off to Paramount’s team and they were allowed to do absolutely anything they wanted to change the character, the source material, all of it.

The result is that we are now entering an era where there will be no game stories for Master Chief indefinitely, which leaves season 2 of this show (and possibly more, given its good-for-Paramount-Plus viewership) as the main portrayal of chief in media. Non-helmet wearing, sex-having, war-crime-committing Master Chief, who ended the second season actually dead with Cortana remote piloting his corpse.

If I were Microsoft, I would keep a tighter leash on the character that is supposed to be its flagship icon for its entire brand. Even with all Microsoft’s new acquisitions, Master Chief is always going to be the face of Xbox, but it sure feels like they don’t care about the character or his legacy at all, given recent events. I know Halo Infinite’s campaign got some praise at launch, but I was in the camp that didn’t like it, as way, way too much happened offscreen (including Cortana’s supposed death) and it felt like an interlude between two much more interesting chapters. It also ended on a massive cliffhanger that now has absolutely no return date attached to it.

Instead, Microsoft is content to let Paramount bulldoze Chief’s legacy with a portrayal of the character so wacky and bizarre it feels like an entirely different sci-fi series. If The Last of Us is a model of how to do a video game justice with an adaptation, Halo is the opposite in every way, even more so, I’d argue, than something like Netflix’s Resident Evil. There, at least, some of the onscreen absurdity was warranted, and there was not a central iconic hero like Master Chief they were turning into a meme. What the Paramount show has done to Master Chief, what 343 and Microsoft have let them do, is pretty horrific, and they may destroy the character altogether without some sort of coherent plan to bring him back to his old glory days. A plan which they very clearly do not have.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.