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Re: Why retcons do bother me.
Posted By: Narcogen <narcogen@rampancy.net>	Date: 5/26/11 12:10 a.m.
: I think Reach, the game, would have played nicer with established canon if it : wasn't Bungie's last kick at the can. Hmm. Possible. However I still think it's more likely that Bungie considers the game canon itself more heavily when making games, whether they intend to make more or not. What seems likely to me is that Halo 1-3 is the Halo story Bungie wanted to tell (expanded to 3 games instead of 2 because of roadbumps during Halo 2's development, and MS' insistence on keeping the schedule). ODST was a way to take mostly existing technology and try to bang out something relatively quickly with a relatively small team, and it snowballed to something bigger than they intended and MS ended up marketing it as a full price title. Oops. By this time Bungie has already moved some people onto The Next Big Thing and would probably have preferred to go their own way. However, independence needs Microsoft's signoff. It's not inconceivable to me that part of the deal-- Bungie gets out, MS gets Halo-- was sweetened by one more Halo game developed by Bungie. So Reach was a story Bungie could tell, and that MS wanted told-- but Bungie's push back was that they be allowed to tell it the way they wanted, just as if they were still the owners of the property. That may have resulted in less continuity than there might have been under different circumstances, I suppose. : Bungie's embraced novel-only concepts and events in the past (Stanforth in : ODST, Jericho VII in Reach, Dr. Halsey in Reach, Spartan-IIIs in Reach) : but Reach doesn't play nice with the others. That means embracing those concepts individually-- not embracing the novels in their entirety. There's more canon value, in my mind, in the fact that their inclusion in Reach gives the very existence of Spartan IIIs a canonical value higher than what they had prior to this-- than the retcons of the invasion's precise timeline. Reach was invaded and fell. The outcome was never seriously in doubt. Whether it fell fast or slow, whether it was a surprise or not, it places MC and Cortana aboard the Autumn, without additional support, at a special location that proves to be the real turning point in the war. Those are the essential facts, and they are untouched.

Death by intelligence

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