Isn't doing any better? Since 343i has taken over, Blue Team has appeared and been referenced in...
Halo Legends
**Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary
Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn
**Halo 4: Scanned Trailer
Halo Glasslands
**Halo 4
Halo Escalation
**Halo 5: Guardians
And Bungie had them in... Not a lot at all. Like I said already, Bungie had novels but they rarely referenced those novels and all promotional material for their games said the Chief was the last surviving Spartan because that's how they wanted it. 343i has done 1000x more with Blue Team than Bungie ever did.
It doesn't matter if you don't like the quality of those pieces, because whether or not the stories are good is irrelevant. The point is Blue Team is appearing in stuff, despite your claim they're being forgotten and erased.
Except for half of the things you just mentioned (that I've marked with a
**) are incredibly brief cameos given with no explanation, no context, and have no impact on the story at large - they're just easter eggs for lore nerds. More does not always equal better, and that is exactly the case here. 343i may be giving Blue Team a number cameos that Bungie didn't, but they're not treating them with any more consideration in terms of actually
involving them in the story than Bungie ever did.
Fred and Kelly's appearance in 'Forward Unto Dawn' (in which Kelly was completely OOC and Fred wasn't even named) was a complete waste. As was their inclusion in 'Escalation', and even the end of issue #10 acts like they were never even there.
The quality of these pieces does matter. Because despite the quantity of appearances they make, if those appearances constantly amount to nothing and ignore their established characters and relevance to the Chief's story, it's hardly better than not including them at all. And now we see with things like this "encyclopedia" entry they've been
deliberately left out in spite of the fact that it would be incredibly easy and prudent to mention them.
Do you even know how the Halo Channel Encyclopedia works? The IGN video demonstrates that you can be watching a video, like Foward Unto Dawn or Nightfall and at anytime you can pause the video and bring up information such as scene description, character bios, locations, weapons, vehicles, etc. Example...
Menu
This menu is opened while watching Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn. You can see it shows a description of the scene, includes the characters who are in that scene, as well as the location the scene takes place in. You can click on those links to bring up the information about them.
Character Bio
Here they clicked on the Chief and brought up his bio. The image used for his bio is of him as he appeared in the movie the person is currently watching.
Now if this is how the Halo Channel Encyclopedia works, then what do you think would happen when you opened it during the scenes that included Kelly-087 and Fred-104? It would probably include their bio and the image used would be how they appeared in that film, just like the Chief above.
Official images of Fred and Kelly.
That still doesn't explain why Blue Team was completely cut from the Chief's biography though - particularly if the one they showed was supposed to be geared toward the content of 'Forward Unto Dawn', one of only two pieces of video content that we have of John and Blue Team together. In fact using your own logic, it actually makes even less sense for them to not even be mentioned if that is the case.
Which is subjective since not everyone is going to think those stories are bad. You wanted to see Blue Team and they gave you Blue Team. I'm sorry those stories didn't rock your world but as I said before, your argument is that they're being erased and their appearances contradict that erasure.
Well I haven't come across one single Blue Team fan that believes that their appearance in 'Escalation' was well handled or that it did their characters justice. So I don't think my criticisms are entirely subjective. Yes, after years and years of waiting - we got Blue Team in a lackluster, short, and poorly edited/drawn comic book that in the end still treated them like they didn't matter. That is precisely the type of erasure I'm talking about; because in spite of everything that past canon has shown us of just how relevant they are to the Chief's character and story, 343i is not treating them as such. As I said before, it's not simply about
how many appearances they get, it's about the
nature of those appearances and the weight they are given/not given.
It's spoiled because they gave you what you wanted and you just threw it back at their faces and said it wasn't good enough. It seems like what ever they do people are going to be unsatisfied and they'll take to crying and whining on the forums.
All this constant half glass empty negativity is getting tiresome.
But they
didn't give me what I wanted - I wanted to see Blue Team treated like actual characters that matter to the Chief and his story - and what I got certainly
wasn't good enough. It wouldn't have been hard to give their relationship to the Chief just a little more gravitas, but they're delberately not doing that and just treating them like one big easter egg. If we had gotten just one Spartan smile in 'Escalation' and just a few lines of meaningful dialogue between Chief and his team, and if Blue Team had gotten just
one single mention in the Chief's biography, I wouldn't have anything to say.
I didn't force you to come on this thread, read what was posted here, and let alone respond to any of it. Frankly it's getting tiresome for me to continue to be strung around for years and years by empty promises and incredibly vague "hints" that my favorite characters
might get to be included in the main story finally. Particulary when I keep seeing them treated poorly and left out of content where they're actually relevant. If you'd rather go spend your time on a more "optimistic" thread, by all means. But this is really the only channel of communication I have to try and make my concerns known to the the developers, so I'm going to keep on this until we get some real answers.