Tag Archives: FPS

Halo Fest 2020 – Spartan Ops

The Story So Far: Adrift for over 4 years, the crippled UNSC frigate Forward Unto Dawn is pulled towards a mysterious object. Cortana wakes the Master Chief from cryosleep and the pair discover that they’re being attacked by a splinter fleet of Covenant loyalists led by the Sangeili Jul’Mdama. Without warning the object opens and violently pulls all nearby ships into it. Crashing onto the interior surface of what they learn is the Forerunner Shield World Requiem, Cortana picks up a faint signal from another UNSC ship, the supercarrier Infinity. Attempting to warn the Infinity of Requiem’s gravity well, the pair unwittingly release an ancient Forerunner warrior leader, the Didact, from stasis. The Didact resumes control of his army of defensive constructs, the Prometheans, with Jul’Mdama’s faction also falling into his ranks. Barely escaping, Master Chief and Cortana reach Infinity’s crash site where Master Chief rallies the UNSC defense, forcing the Didact into retreat. Aboard the Infinity Captain Del Rio dispatches a force to disable Requiem’s gravity generators so that the Infinity can escape. In the process the Master Chief is lured to a Forerunner facility where he’s contacted by the AI imprint of an ancient Forerunner called the Librarian. Explaining that the Didact intends to use a device called the Composer which had been used to digitally conscript living beings, including humans, into Prometheans to fight against the Flood, she insists that he must be stopped. Upon returning to the Infinity, Captain Del Rio observes Cortana’s instability and orders Master Chief to surrender her, ordering his arrest when he refuses. Instead, the Infinity’s executive officer, Commander Lasky, aids the Chief by procuring Pelican gunship for him. The Didact departs Requiem aboard his flagship, the Mantle’s Approach, though the Chief and Cortana make it just in time to stowaway on an accompanying Covenant dropship. Later hijacking the ship, the pair head to Ivanoff Station, a research facility where the Composer has been relocated. They find the station already under assault and attempt to sabotage the Composer before the Didact can reclaim it. Failing, they witness the Didact unleash the Composer on the station to devastating effect. Master Chief and Cortana then arm a Broadsword fighter with a HAVOK nuclear missile and pursue the Mantle’s Approach as it heads for Earth. Crashing into the ship’s interior, Master Chief takes the warhead and continues to fight his way to the Didact on foot. Confronting him, Cortana distracts the Didact for long enough for the Chief to manually arm the warhead. Cortana is able to teleport the Chief safely off of the ship but sacrifices herself in the process. Master Chief is later found and brought back aboard the Infinity where he quietly mourns the loss of Cortana.

“Oh goody, more Knights…”

Replacing the popular Firefight wave survival mode first introduced with Halo 3: ODST and iterated on with Halo: Reach, Halo 4 included a separate episodic co-op oriented campaign called “Spartan Ops”. 343 Industries might have opted to do this as part of an effort to canonize Halo 4’s multiplayer (AKA “Halo: Infinity”) with competitive modes being presented as war games conducted aboard the UNSC Infinity. Similarly, and the reason I wanted to cover Spartan Ops despite not talking too much about multiplayer during my Halo Fest posts is that, unlike Firefight, the Spartan Ops campaign actually includes a full story, taking place just after the events of Halo 4.

Back in the day I had started to work my way through Spartan Ops by myself on “Heroic” difficulty but quickly discovered that it was definitely tuned for 4 person cooperative play. Between this and that it still retained much of Firefight’s wave survival gameplay (and you were fighting damned Prometheans a lot of the time to boot) it was quite the slog. I think I made it as far as episode 2 before burning out, and I believe this is a huge reason for that negative impression of Halo 4 I’d been carrying around for almost a decade now. Going back to the campaign in 2021, I decided that cranking my difficulty down to “Easy” would probably be a solid first step in meeting my goal of making it all the way through this time.

“What can I say? The Warthog never gets old!”

While still not a total cakewalk, there were a few things unique to Spartan Ops that made it a bit more tolerable. For one, weapon racks and ammo crates are generously placed throughout each map. Sure, you may still need to grab a Covenant or Promethean weapon from time to time, but you’ll have the option of using UNSC weapons without worrying about running out of ammo much more often than in Halo 4 proper. There are also special ordnance drops that are given to you during many missions, usually when there’s a particular reason you might need a special weapon; rocket launchers being dropped for you just before a pair (or multiple pairs) of Hunters show up is a common example. You also get to use your multiplayer loadouts which means access to your choice of basic weapons and grenades, equipment, and special “tactical packages” and “support upgrades”. Finally, being multiplayer oriented, you simply respawn if you die rather than having to jump back to your last checkpoint. Nice!

Gameplay wise, your fireteam is dropped into an area and issued a linear string of objectives, coming one at a time to appear more dynamic. For instance, you might be sent to a waypoint, then told to activate a McGuffin, then told to defend the area against a few waves of enemies, then told to reach the extraction point and… oh no, reinforcements! Better defeat a few more waves so you can extract! You get the point. In the first 5 episodes this gets very formulaic and very repetitive very quickly. Even more so when you consider that the same 8 maps are featured multiple times in those 25 levels, and many of them are based on sections from the main Halo 4 campaign or are straight up taken from multiplayer in the first place.

Episodes 6 through 10 greatly improve things by introducing a new batch of maps which feel purposely crafted to be used this way. They also do a better job of varying the gameplay, though the tradeoff is that some chapters end up feeling more like single player campaign missions than Firefight-like scenarios. That said, all 10 episodes have some cool moments, including some awesome vehicle-centric sections. It should also be noted that Spartan Ops doesn’t suffer from the issue of having confined, linear levels that I mentioned in my Halo 4 post. Even some of the small maps feel very open which is refreshing when coming straight from the main campaign.

“Palmer and Majestic capture another Forerunner artifact.”

Presentation is another story. Individual chapters start and end with short in-game cutscenes and there are numerous radio communications from your mission handlers about your objectives throughout. Most notably, the biggest story beats are told via lengthy, beautiful rendered cutscenes created by Axis Animation that kick off every new episode and focus on a core cast of characters, many of whom you’ve already met in Halo 4. Honestly, say what you will about Halo 4, but these cutscenes are peak Halo awesomeness in my opinion and I’d love an entire series done this way.

The story itself is quite good too. Untangled from the legacy of Master Chief’s story and the perceived lore complexities of introducing the Didact and the Librarian, I’d suggest perhaps better than Halo 4’s. I definitely got pretty into it in any case. For one, I know he didn’t originate with Halo 4, but I thought Jul’Mdama was a great, more grounded antagonist. I also like getting some insight into the SPARTAN-IVs and the idea of Dr. Halsey feeling somewhat left behind as more advancements are made without her (which I feel is a more realistic narrative than making her cartoonish traitor.) Hell, I even started to like Sarah Palmer by the end of the campaign thanks in large part to the way her relationship with Lasky is depicted. The 10 episode story arc has a satisfying enough conclusion while also leaving some major developments wide open and begging for a sequel. I don’t know if one was actually planned or not, but sadly, a second season of Spartan Ops would never arrive, leaving the story to need to be fully resolved elsewhere.

“Fun times in the corridors of the Infinity.”

All in all, Spartan Ops is a pretty damn cool batch of bonus content that I doubt a lot of Halo fans have experienced. While I’m not sure I can heartily recommend it to solo players, there were numerous chapters that stuck out to me as likely being incredibly fun when played cooperatively while I was playing through. That said, in the exceedingly likely event that you’re unable to convince even a single buddy to play through this huge 50 mission campaign with you, watching a compilation of its awesome cutscenes is still an absolutely worthy investment of your time and that, at least, gets that my recommendation.

Next up, something completely different…

Halo Fest 2020 – Halo 4

The original Halo trilogy had been wrapped up for over 5 years and Bungie’s last two Halo releases, excellent as they were, were side stories. Now with Halo 4 we were getting an actual sequel, but the first crafted entirely by 343 Industries. Could they execute at anywhere close to Bungie’s level? What new ideas would they have to push the series forward? Most importantly to many fans, what would become of our beloved Master Chief?

As with the last several games, I’d really only played through Halo 4’s campaign once, at launch, though unlike those games I didn’t come away with an extremely positive impression of it. Instead, as I alluded to in my original brief mention of it here, I mostly appreciated it for simply allowing me to revisit a franchise I loved. While I did a fair amount of random matchmaking early on, the days of spending countless hours playing splitscreen and LAN games with family and friends were ancient history. Without those kinds of more enduring memories, Halo 4 is where the series stopped feeling quite so special to me. On top of that, for years now whenever I thought about its campaign I’d often remember it as a bit of a tedious slog. Oof!

“Master Chief and Cortana, 2012 style.”

As with almost everything else I’ve covered as part of Halo Fest 2020 up to this point, I replayed Halo 4 on “Heroic” difficulty as part of the Xbox One’s Master Chief Collection on my Series X. The MCC version of the game doesn’t receive much of an upgrade but, as with Halo: Reach, Halo 4 was already an incredible looking game in the first place. In fact, I’d commented that Reach might have been one of the Xbox 360’s best looking games, and while I think I still favor it artistically, Halo 4 surpasses it.

While Halo 4’s graphics might have been a technical feat, some major aesthetic shifts were less positively received. Bungie tweaked their designs with almost every iteration of the series but 343 took it a lot further. Front and center, Master Chief’s iconic armor was given a major facelift, with a far more futuristic design yet a more gritty and realistic texture and a darker color scheme. Cortana’s new design was particularly jarring, with her model looking far more voluptuous and, well, straight up nude. While I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I dislike her new look, I can’t help but find the choice just a bit questionable. On the sound design front we no longer have Marty O’Donnell working on the soundtrack for the first time in a mainline Halo game. That’s not to say the new soundtrack, which goes in some very different directions, is anywhere close to being bad, but it feels entirely underutilized and nowhere near as notable a part of the whole experience as it did in, say, Halo 3 for example.

“Not really what you want to see first thing after waking up…”

As with Halo: Reach, the campaign features a nice variety of different environments and of course, per Halo tradition, multiple vehicle-centric sections including a couple featuring the new Mantis mech suit. There’s also a level that feels very similar to the Falcon level from Reach where you instead pilot a Pelican gunship, and in a similar throwback to Reach, one that feels like a Star Fox level in which you fly a Broadsword fighter. There’s also a section featuring something of a super-sized Elephant from Halo 3’s Sandtrap multiplayer map called a Mammoth.

One issue with Halo 4’s level design is that there is a major lack of large open areas, especially problematic in those vehicle dominant sections. Really, as a whole the campaign’s levels are rather linear, complete with invisible walls and out-of-bounds kill timers. If you don’t attempt to explore or get too creative you may not even notice, but those hardcore Halo players who like to wring every last drop of gameplay out of each game will definitely be turned off by this. I was also surprised to see some QTE-like interactions very early in the campaign. These don’t make a reappearance until the final boss fight, and while QTEs don’t particularly offend me, having a game that doesn’t really rely on them end with one did feel a little anticlimactic.

“The only thing better than a tank is a tank filled with Spartans.”

I already mentioned the Mantis and the Broadsword, so yes, Halo 4 absolutely continues the trend of featuring a variety of new and updated vehicles and weapons. In fact, it goes even further than previous games by making changes to practically every piece of equipment at your disposal. They’ve also been renamed to designate that, canonically, they’re supposed to be different, newer versions of the classics we know and love. There’s also some new additions, like the Covenant Storm Rifle, the UNSC SAW, and the UNSC Railgun. More notably, there’s the huge addition of a whole arsenal of Promethean weapons. For the most part, these feel like counterparts to UNSC and/or Covenant weapons, but given that ammo can be fairly scarce and you’ll be fighting Prometheans most of the time, you’ll likely end up using them whether you want to or not, and you may not, as several of them are fairly lackluster. I’m looking at you, Pulse Grenade!

Halo 4’s equipment system has also seen some changes. While it works more or less the same as Reach’s Armor Abilities, it now includes several totally new abilities like the Autosentry, Hardlight Shield, Thrusters, and Promethean Vision, in addition to some Reach favorites like my beloved jetpack. The ever controversial Armor Lock is gone, while Sprint is now a standard ability anyone can do.

The new Mantis is badass, thouh not badass enough to shoot down the Cryptum, unfortunately.

“The new Mantis is badass, though not badass enough to shoot down the Cryptum, unfortunately.”

If you’ve not played Halo 4, you’re probably wondering what in the hell a “Promethean” is. In short, they’re a new variety of enemy that you’ll be fighting along with our old Covenant pals. There are three main varieties of Promethean. Crawlers, canine-like cannon fodder enemies that sometimes appear in pretty large groups. Watchers, which are flying Sentinel-like enemies that aren’t a huge source of damage but project shields onto their allies and can even resurrect other dead Prometheans. They also annoyingly love to dodge and dart away before you’ve managed to finish them off. Finally, there’s Promethean Knights. An Elite or Brute-level enemy, these assholes are bullet sponges who can wield a variety of weapons, including some high damage ones. They also love to dodge and even teleport away mid-fight, recharging their shields, which is goddamn annoying when you’re trying to finish one off. More frustratingly, these guys almost always have Watchers around them and can even spawn them themselves, which means extra shields you have to contend with and the possibility of coming back to life after you’ve killed them. Argh!

Prometheans are, in short, not fun. I feel like 343 was trying to capture the more interesting aspects of fighting the Flood, yet missed the mark. Knights might be fine if they only made rare appearances, but in some sections they’re absolutely everywhere. Eventually towards the end of my playthrough I’d developed the reckless but effective tactic of charging them with a high rate of fire weapon and trying to empty a magazine directly into their faces before they could teleport away. Those types of weapons tend to burn through ammo though, and, as mentioned, ammo for UNSC weapons is fairly scarce which makes the best candidate for this the Promethean Suppressor. Much more importantly, the shielding and resurrection abilities of the Watchers means they’re always going to be your priority target, and that leads to favoring mid to long range so you can pick them off from safety, which is, yeah, not the Suppressor’s strength. Beyond these issues, I wouldn’t say Halo 4 isn’t overly difficult, but when you add in the fact that so many areas are, yet again, set up like Firefight style wave defense arenas it can be damn tedious.

“100,000 years of self-reflection and yet, still a dick.”

While Halo 4’s story is probably better than most Halo fans give it credit for, I personally don’t love the direction they took it in. First we have the new antagonist, the Didact. My problem with this plotline is that it totally kills the enigmatic nature of the Forerunners and their murky relationship with humanity (at least, as presented in-game.) With that, 343 Industries has had to really complicate the story to work this all in. Backstory that lived mostly in other media is now vital to the games and, worse yet, is clumsily presented, with the bulk being explained in a single, absolute lore-dump of a cutscene. Finding the hidden terminals on every level and watching their associated cutscenes is practically required to really understand what in the hell is going on, at least if you haven’t been keeping up with the books and the comics.

Hinted at in Halo 3, the other piece of the story is Cortana’s emerging rampancy. It’s a minor part of Halo 4’s plot overall, but it definitely affects how the Chief and Cortana are characterized. Beyond being more chatty than ever before, their flirty quips take on an almost awkward tone, as if 343 is suddenly trying to present their relationship as somehow… romantic?! Still, despite the risk of Master Chief developing a personality, I don’t feel like anything he says is out of character. He’s still the same stoic man of action. His actions, on the other hand? It didn’t occur to me until I wrote up the plot summary for Halo 4 for my next post, but he and Cortana fail constantly in this game. Practically every major story beat involves them utterly fucking up. Well, I guess that’s one approach to humanizing a character!

“Warthog run? Nah, how about a Ghost run? Bop!”

If it’s not obvious by this point, Halo 4 is a divisive game. A lot of the Halo fanbase considers it to be utter trash. As with Halo: Reach, some of that comes from the multiplayer community, who felt like things like custom loadouts and ordinance drops were desperate attempts to chase the Call of Duty crowd. While there is no shortage of genuine criticism of the game to be made, there’s also a lot of silly toxicity around the 343 Industries handoff that muddies the water. The ironic part is that much of what fans bash 343 over in Halo 4 is them continuing exactly where Bungie left off with Halo: Reach. Personally, replaying it again, I enjoyed it a lot more than I’d remembered. In fact, I suspect it was Spartan Ops, not the Halo 4 campaign itself, that soured my impressions of the game so much. I’ll be talking about that in my next post.

Bonus live-action media time! “Scanned” is a trailer for Halo 4 released just after Forward Unto Dawn started being released, also on Halo Waypoint. It depicts Master Chief being restrained by some sort of field and being scanned by what we’ll come to find out is the Didact. As the scan probes his mind, it zooms into scenes showing John as a child being abducted by ONI, his later SPARTAN-II augmentation, and being suited with his Mjolnir armor. It then fast forwards to Master Chief engaging a group of Promethean Knights before being subdued. This one is definitely very cool!

Halo Fest 2020 – Forward Unto Dawn

The Story So Far: As the Forerunner dreadnought, the Anodyne Spirit, enters Earth’s atmosphere, Master Chief makes a hasty escape, relying only on his armor and a piece of the ship’s heat shielding for protection. Rescued by UNSC and separatist Sangheili Elites troops, the Master Chief is then sent to help clear Covenant air defenses deployed to protect the Prophet of Truth as he attempts to activate a Forerunner artifact excavated near New Mombasa. While successful, the UNSC isn’t able to prevent Truth from activating the artifact, which creates a massive slipspace portal. As Truth and the remaining Covenant fleet jump through the portal, a Flood infested UNSC ship crash-lands nearby, though Elite forces move quickly to contain the Flood threat. Following a message left by Cortana hinting that a way to stop the Flood exists on the other side of the portal, the Elite fleet, accompanied by a small UNSC force and 343 Guilty Spark, travels through it, leading them to a massive Forerunner Halo control and construction installation called the Ark. Master Chief, along with the Arbiter and a squad of UNSC marines, head to the surface to stop Truth from remotely activating the remaining Halo rings. High Charity, now fully controlled by the Flood, jumps in and the Flood begin their own assault on the Ark. The Covenant succeed in activating the rings prompting the Gravemind to offer Master Chief and the Arbiter a truce. With the Flood’s assistance, the pair fight their way through the Prophet of Truth’s remaining forces, killing him and halting the activation. With the threat of the Halos being activated out of the way, the Flood immediately turn on their new allies. Devising a plan to wipe out the remaining Flood by activating the still under construction Halo Installation 04 replacement ring, Master Chief heads to the Flood infested High Charity to recover Cortana. Despite 343 Guilty Spark attempting to stop them, Cortana is able to activate the incomplete ring and the Master Chief, Cortana, and the Arbiter make a last minute escape aboard the now abandoned UNSC frigate Forward Unto Dawn. The activation of the incomplete ring causes it to self-destruct, destroying the Ark and the Flood along with it as planned. An unintended side effect of the destruction, the slipspace portal ruptures just as the Forward Unto Dawn is traveling through it, ripping the ship in half, and stranding the Master Chief and Cortana in unknown space. While the Arbiter makes it through the portal, the Master Chief is presumed dead.

Now, before we jump into Halo 4, it’s worth a brief mention that the Halo: CE Anniversary was released in 2011. These days it’s usually thought of as a foundational piece of the Master Chief Collection, but it was a standalone Xbox 360 release first. I’ve already talked a bit about the Anniversary edition when talking about Halo: CE, which has continued to be improved in the MCC even since that post, but there was, no surprise, another live action trailer around its release. No real story here, it simply depicts a UNSC Commander giving a speech at some sort of a remembrance ceremony. Not bad, but entirely skippable.

“Our protagonist, a very young Thomas Lasky.”

Moving on to 2012, no, this isn’t about Halo 4, but Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn. I didn’t necessarily plan on giving Forward Unto Dawn its own post, but between its plot setup and its release date, I suppose it makes the most sense to talk about it separately first. Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn is really the culmination of these sorts of live action promotional shorts, at least up to this point. Another marketing effort itself, Forward Unto Dawn was released as five 15 minute web shorts and then compiled into a single movie for a DVD release, which makes it the closest thing we had to a Halo movie by 2012. I watched it around the time I played through Halo 4 and was pleasantly surprised that it actually surpassed my (admittedly, rather low) expectations. In fact, in my brief original post about Halo 4 I joked that I probably enjoyed Forward Unto Dawn more than Halo 4’s campaign. I’m curious about how that statement holds up.

So it’s not Halo 4 proper, but what is Forward Unto Dawn about? Well, for the first time in this series I think I’m going to go ahead and recap its plot in the same post as I just recapped the previous game’s. The reason for that is, despite being set immediately following the events of Halo 3 described above (and also depicted in the Origins sections of Halo: Legends) the movie is essentially one big flashback. That means it mostly takes place out of chronological order from the main series and the parts that don’t are more setup for Halo 4 rather than plot spoilers. As usual, while I’m fairly vague in these plot summaries they absolutely do still contain spoilers, so skip the next two paragraphs if you want to avoid them.

“The freshmen of Hastati squad bonding over some light illegal espionage.”

The Story: Commander Lasky, executive officer of the UNSC Infinity, reviews a distress signal sent by the AI Cortana aboard the UNSC frigate Forward Unto Dawn. This triggers a flashback to his time as a cadet at the Corbulo Academy of Military Science on Circinius IV some 30 years earlier. The son of a high ranking officer and brother of another graduate of CAMS who became an elite ODST trooper, Lasky was under a lot of pressure to perform. With ailing health due to cryosleep sickness and grief over the loss of his brother, Lasky began developing a reckless disregard for orders, causing his squad to underperform in combat exercises and leading to him to clashing with his classmates. With the help of one of his professors, Lasky has a breakthrough just before the last combat exercise of the term and leads his squad to a major victory. His sickness worsening, Lasky is given the option of being medically discharged from the academy. As he contemplates his future, a campus-wide alarm sounds and he and his classmates gather at the academy’s space elevator to evacuate. As ODST drop pods land all around them, Covenant corvettes appear overhead and destroy the elevator. Fleeing in terror from this unknown threat, Lasky and his classmates seek refuge as Covenant attackers viciously cut down anyone they see. Unsuccessfully attempting to breach an armory, the cadets are forced to hide from an Elite Zealot stalking them. Just as the Elite is about to find them it’s struck down by an SPARTAN-II. As unknown to them as the Covenant aliens, the cadets cautiously follow the Spartan, who introduces himself as Master Chief before helping to arm them and leading them to an evacuation site. Clashing with more Covenant forces along the way, the few shell-shocked surviving cadets, including Lasky, eventually board a Pelican with Master Chief and the other Spartans of his squad. Back on the Infinity, the ship and its escorts prepare to jump to the origin of Cortana’s signal. Meanwhile, Cortana considers waking Master Chief from cryosleep as the wreckage of the Forward Unto Dawn is pulled off course.

My favorite aspect of the story is that Lasky’s flashback takes place before the existence of the Covenant and even the Spartan program were declassified, and Forward Unto Dawn does an excellent job at conveying that. Seeing the cadets’ wonder at Sullivan’s footage depicting these huge, armor clad soldiers, the panic as they realize the ODST dropping at the school is a really bad sign, their confusion and shock as Covenant ships appear overhead, how terrifying the Covenant Elites hunting them down are, and their awe over Master Chief’s size, strength, and professionalism: it’s all great and helps ground some of the more fantastical elements of Halo that have been somewhat taken for granted in the games. Not only that, but the sheer badassery of Master Chief in contrast to what we’d seen from these young cadets up to this point (further contrasted with how slow the first 2/3s of the movie is) is a great moment of fan service that I loved almost as much during this viewing as I did the first time around.

“Master Chief firing his AR one-handed for extra cool points.”

For a web series, Forward Unto Dawn is surprisingly solid on the production front. The actors are all at least adequate, the direction is, I suppose, fine, and the score, peppered with the excellent tracks from Halo 4 as well as callbacks to earlier games, is good. Besides the fact that most of the action takes place in some very dark environments being a bit of a cheat, CGI is used fairly subtly, and the costumes, props, and practical effects look pretty good (with that old Weta Workshop Warthog making yet another appearance!) It absolutely is not, however, the big budget Halo movie that no doubt both Microsoft and Hollywood executives have been hoping will have major crossover appeal at the box office for years on end now. I believe that by this time any serious efforts tied to the Peter Jackson produced effort had died off, although it seems that the idea was never completely abandoned. After what seems like an eternity, its current incarnation, a gritty Showtime series (now bound for Paramount+) just got a teaser trailer this week.

In conclusion, Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn might not do an awful lot to fill any story gaps as we go into Halo 4, but it did at least help build the excitement for its launch. More importantly, it still stands up as a solid entry in the expanded media of the franchise, even if it is a bit of a side story. I’d easily recommend it to Halo fans, but this sadly isn’t the one that is going to win over masses of non-gamers.

“Capt. Del Rio: ‘Red means bad, right?'”

While we’re here, the CG Halo 4 teaser trailer “Awakening” from 2011 shows Cortana waking Chief up and him scrambling to survey the situation, only to find his chunk of the Forward Unto Dawn being pulled towards a massive constructed object that resembles the Forerunner Shield World we encountered in Halo Wars. More notably, the live-action Halo 4 trailer “The Commissioning” released later in 2012 shows the commencement ceremony for the UNSC Infinity’s new mission as Captain Del Rio gives a speech. As the trailer continues, we see the Infinity sometime later being scanned by a mysterious orange light, then erupting in chaos as systems malfunction and crewmembers strain from the pressure as the ship is pulled to the very same object. Pretty cool trailer, and I think I’d chalk this one up as essential as well. More about what is actually going on here when we get to Halo 4 itself, of course!