Canon Fodder returns a little earlier in the month for July because, well, I’m not sure whether you’ve heard but there’s a new game releasing in just a few short weeks. Let’s start there!

Halo: Campaign Evolved releases on July 28, but those of you who pre-ordered the Digital Premium Edition or Collector’s Edition will be dropping out of slipspace in the Soell system up to five days earlier on July 23.

Halo: CE has been rebuilt with high-definition visuals, gorgeously enhanced cinematics, new gameplay elements such as a broader arsenal of weapons and vehicles, not to mention a vastly expanded number of gameplay-modifying Skulls. But you’re here for the fiction. For the lore. Well, on that front, we have some compelling new offerings for you!

OPERATION: METEORITE

Set in 2551, one year before Halo: CE’s events, Operation: METEORITE follows the Master Chief and Sergeant Major Avery Johnson on a mission to infiltrate a Covenant research vessel—Triumph of Tolerance—sitting pretty over the glassed human colony of Promise. Their objective: acquire navigation data that could lead them to the Covenant’s homeworld, laying the groundwork for Operation: RED FLAG.

But there’s more going on here than meets the eye. Aboard Tolerance, our heroic duo will encounter the Minister of Harmony, a San’Shyuum conducting experiments on the Covenant client species. The Chief and Johnson soon realize they’ve walked straight into H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau.

It’s not quite time to lift the lid on everything just yet, but over the course of three action-packed missions you will rescue UNSC marines, brave the hunting dome, and do battle with Sacristan warriors—no doubt you will perish many times as you find yourself distracted by their regal regalia.

As has recently been stated, the story of Operation: METEORITE involved working closely with the one and only Troy Denning, author of soon to be eight Halo novels—including Silent Storm which had a great deal to do with the Master Chief and Avery Johnson during the first year of the Covenant War.

TERMINALS

Throughout each mission in Campaign Evolved, you will find a Terminal—that’s thirteen in total. These will unlock some deeper, darker glimpses into the Halo universe which you will be able to read in the main menu under the Collectibles tab (and these are indeed text-based Terminals akin to those in Halo 3 and the data pads in Halo: Reach).

As previews of the game have shown, one of the stories you will find within the bowels of Alpha Halo concern 343 Guilty Spark’s time on the ring during his hundred millennia of isolation. In this time he shared only very brief contact with 2401 Penitent Tangent, the monitor of Delta Halo, but the contents of their conversation will certainly prove… interesting.

The Terminals you find will all be UNSC devices, making them easily identifiable in the different environments throughout the game. They’ll flash up the ONI symbol to confirm their activation, and the ghouls from Naval Intelligence wish to sternly convey that the data held within is highly classified per Project BOOKWORM.

HUNGRY BUZZARDS

Accompanying the Digital Premium Edition and Collector’s Edition of Halo: Campaign Evolved is ‘Hungry Buzzards’, a new short story by acclaimed author Troy Denning that ties in with Operation: METEORITE.

In the heart of a UNSC testing facility on Reach, the Master Chief showcases to Colonel James Ackerson that no matter what competition they are up against, a Spartan is capable of things no other military asset can achieve. It’s a reality that will be put to the test as a team is assembled to board a Covenant research vessel found orbiting the recently glassed world of Promise.

The Master Chief finds himself in combat not just with a group of Mark I(H) ADS exoskeletons but the politics of the UNSC as a disagreement with Colonel James Ackerson over mission personnel turns into a high stakes demonstration to Admiral Whitcomb that a Spartan is the best tool for the job.

Well, there are just a few weeks left until you’ll have the game in your hands and installed on your hard drives, so maybe let’s catch up later on all this new lore, shall we?

Speaking of Troy Denning, just last month we revealed his next novel coming in 2027, Halo: Fireteam Noble.

2560. The galaxy remains fractured in the devastating wake of Cortana’s rise and the Created menace, while the Banished war machine relentlessly consolidates power across former Covenant space. To help counter these ongoing and emerging threats to humanity, Spartan Jun-A266—the last surviving member of Noble Team—struggles to forge a new generation of warriors on the hidden UNSC base Anvil Station, even as he battles the ghosts of his own past.

But when a renowned xenoarcheologist is brazenly abducted by a Banished strike team, Jun is pulled back into active operations alongside both old and new allies for a dangerous rescue mission, leading them all deep into hostile territory. Now Jun must confront the burden of survival and decide what it truly means to carry Noble Team’s legacy into a new era of conflict as this desperate mission may hold dire consequences far beyond a single missing civilian....

Jun-A266 returns and the time has come for him to once again don his Mjolnir armor after spending years out of combat, stepping now into a leadership role for a new Spartan fireteam.

In terms of character, Jun provides a rich canvas for us to explore in this novel. As a member of Noble Team, he already has survivor’s guilt from the devastating events of the fall of Reach, but he is also a Spartan-III of Alpha Company—he’s been outliving his comrades for many years now. This is advanced survivor’s guilt!

What does it mean to be the one who always makes it through? How have his past experiences—from his childhood training on Onyx and his time as a Headhunter, up to his service on Noble Team—turned him into who he is today? How will he deal with the burden of leadership, effectively stepping into Carter’s boots?

(And, perhaps most importantly, do people still like his cooking?)

We’ll have more to share in the coming months about Fireteam Noble, so stay tuned!

In case you missed it, we also recently announced that a full cast audio drama version of Halo: The Fall of Reach is in production.

Featuring Tim Dadabo as narrator, as well as the iconic and beloved voices of Steve Downes (John-117) and Jen Taylor (Cortana, Dr. Halsey), this project has been done in collaboration with our long-term friends and partners at Simon & Schuster Audio and has been based on the updated text for Halo: The Master Chief Omnibus.

We’ll have more casting news to share with you over the coming months.

You can pre-order your copy of the Halo: The Fall of Reach full cast audio drama here today.

Last issue, we took a closer look at some of the editorial work that has been done to Halo: The Flood for the omnibus, and so this issue let’s turn our attention to First Strike.

It has been brought to our attention that, somehow, over the last twenty-three years, the book’s original cover art (illustrated by Lorraine McLees) has never been published in full. So let’s start off by remedying that right away!

First Strike is an interesting one. On the editorial front, it required the fewest overall changes but also came laden with the biggest lore dilemmas posed by things like Johnson’s supposed immunity to the Flood, slipspace crystal timey-wimey shenanigans, Dr. Halsey’s awareness of the SPARTAN-III program as a consequence of Halo: Reach, and more.

Let’s dive into how some of these things have been addressed.

JOHN JOHNSON

First of all, as we know that the Master Chief and Sergeant Major Avery Johnson have more history together than was initially conceived for the book back in 2003, we have added a few lines here and there to build on their relationship a little more.

PLANET CITY

In Halo: The Fall of Reach, Côte d’Azur is a city on Sigma Octanus IV. For reasons unknown, in First Strike it is treated as a colony world—and thereby subsequently in Halo Wars: Genesis and the Halo: Reach data pads there is reference to the Côte d’Azure colony (it’s different, you see, because it has an e on the end!) In the omnibus, it is now consistently referred to as a city again, not a planet.

S-III

Dr. Catherine Halsey is many things, but a fool she certainly is not. When First Strike was originally published, the SPARTAN-III project was not fully conceived, and so the notion was that Halsey knew nothing about it...

Halo: Reach has entered the chat. In the game, she meets Noble Team (twice), identifies them as Spartans, and is escorted to CASTLE Base by Jun.

Halsey’s cluelessness in the book comes across as quite odd as a result of this and has been adjusted. Per the omnibus, Halsey is able to put two and two together with certainty that Colonel Ackerson has been making his own Spartans. What remains unanswered in Halsey’s mind is how far Ackerson managed to get. Were Noble Team his only successes or are there other Spartans out there? It’s a small change but one that helps to smooth over this pretty major narrative beat.

LOCUST LOVE

In Chapter 12, Fred and Kelly encounter Scarabs which are able to be neutralized with a couple of Wraith mortar shots. Not even simply neutralized, but “reduced to piles of half-melted junk”!

We though, y’know what, the Locust just doesn’t appear in enough things and it would fit pretty well as a smaller excavator that can be felled by Wraiths, so we’ve adjusted these Scarabs to Locusts.

NOT SO NEW TOOLS OF DESTRUCTION

Following on from the above, as First Strike was being written to ultimately roll out the red carpet for Halo 2 the following year, references to the BR55 and even the M6C magnum in Chapter 14 seem to suggest that these are totally new, never before seen weapons to explain why they weren’t in Halo: CE.

As the lore has evolved, these have, of course, been incredibly common across all UNSC branches, so any notion that these are new has been thoroughly neutralized. That said, we felt this would be a fun opportunity to make it so the battle rifle here was a unique variant to maintain the spirit of the Spartans excitedly getting their hands on new weaponry.

NAMING NAMES

Speaking of Spartans, many names were obfuscated in the original text regarding the members of Red Team’s splinter groups. As we now know the full roster of Spartans their names have been included.

FIRST TIME?

In Chapter 33, the Chief spots two Unggoy with white methane masks and notes that this is not an armor coloration he’s seen before. This has gone on to be the basis for the Grunt Ultra unit from Halo 2 onwards, so this has been adjusted.

Similarly, as the notion of Jiralhanae being encountered for the first time here has long been retconned, the Chief is no longer unfamiliar with the brute shot when it is mentioned in Chapter 34.

SEEK, LOCATE, DESTROY

Toward the end of The Fall of Reach, the Master Chief leads James-005 and Linda-058 on a mission to Gamma Station with the objective of destroying the navigation database aboard the UNSC Circumference. In First Strike, references made to the mission to Gamma Station consistently state that the Chief’s mission was to “recover” instead of destroy it. This has been corrected.

PROPHET OF TRUTH

In the epilogue, the description for the Prophet of Truth is based on older concept art for the San’Shyuum where their design varied considerably, some even more closely resembled that of S’pht Compilers from Marathon.

"In the middle of the chamber, hovering a meter off the floor upon its imperial dais, sat the Covenant High Prophet of Truth. Its body was barely discernible, covered as it was with a wide red cloak, and upon its head sat a glowing headpiece with sensor and respiratory apparatus that extended like insect antennae. Only its snout and dark eyes protruded... as did tiny claws from the sleeve of its gold underrobes."

The text has been corrected in the omnibus to reflect the final design of the San’Shyuum. But for your viewing pleasure here are a couple of really cool early sketches of what the Prophets could have looked like.

WAGNER’S TALE

When Lieutenant Wagner returns to Earth and gives his report on all that has transpired, a little more detail has been given to his account of Reach’s fall, starting with Visegrád going silent.

ACKERSON’S FILES

As Halsey is looking through Ackerson’s files, she comes across information regarding the Forerunner artifact recovered from Sigma Octanus IV that led the Autumn to the Soell system. Only, after quickly running the mathematics through her head, Halsey seems to conclude that the star chart leads… to the Epsilon Eridani system?

It took a moment of intuition (in conjunction with the data recovered from the vessel beneath SWORD Base) for Cortana to look at the artifact as holding stellar coordinates, so an adjustment has been made here to instead suggest that Ackerson had his own people studying data on the artifact and ultimately came to a very similar conclusion as Cortana. With regard to the Epsilon Eridani system, additional research from Ackerson suggests there might be other things buried beneath Reach that became relevant in later novels. After all, it is in this very book that Halsey laments they will never get to explore the full extent of the subterranean Forerunner ruins.

KIA

Here’s a fun one. At the end of Chapter 27, Halsey speaks as though she has no idea what ONI Directive 930 is—the order that Spartans should be listed as WIA or MIA, not KIA.

In the interest of treating things as a feature instead of a bug, the solution for this was quite simple based on the context of the scene. Dr. Halsey has just erased a bit of Cortana’s memory and in the moment the AI is temporarily responding in a stiffer, more robotic way while Halsey is in her own thoughts and musing out loud. All that is subtracted from the text is Halsey asking why Samuel-034 was marked MIA.

IMMUNITY CONTINUITY

Saving the best for last. Johnson’s alleged immunity to the Flood has been a hot topic since this book’s original publication in 2003.

Dr. Halsey presents the Master Chief with a moral dilemma. Because of a rare condition known as Boren’s Syndrome, Johnson didn’t taste too good to the Flood and represents a biological fluke that could potentially be replicated... but he would need to be killed and dissected to have even the smallest chance of achieving this. Can the Master Chief sacrifice Johnson for what amounts to a point-one percent chance of saving humanity should they encounter the Flood again?

This aspect of First Strike was denounced and retconned rather swiftly. In the Halo Graphic Novel story ‘Breaking Quarantine’ we see that Johnson simply managed to fight his way out of the Flood containment facility on Alpha Halo, and that Boren’s Syndrome was actually a cover for the experimental augmentations that Johnson received as part of the ORION Project. It is also established in Halo: Silent Storm that Halsey knows Johnson was part of ORION, though the Master Chief doesn’t.

As a result, this part of First Strike’s story has been left in a curious spot that has never really been picked at. Until now.

First of all, how do we reconcile the Johnson-Flood element? In the original text, he literally has traces of Flood DNA in his system—dead and noninfectious as a result of his supposed immunity. This has only been slightly adjusted so that there are traces of Flood DNA on his fatigues and skin, and since there are no other survivors from Alpha Halo present who have had this kind of contact with the Flood, Johnson is therefore a unique case. There is nobody else currently present who offers such samples and an opportunity to see how these cells’ biological interaction works. And since this is humanity’s first recorded contact with the Flood, there are a great many unknowns.

As in the original, Halsey concludes that ONI will ultimately not be satisfied with samples and surface-level analysis. If they believe that Johnson possesses any kind of resistance to the Flood—not even something as grandiose as immunity—they will kill and dissect him.

Fundamentally, the most important aspect of this scene is what Halsey is trying to do: to give the Master Chief a choice by presenting him with a moral dilemma. At this point, Halsey is tired of sacrificing others for the greater good, so she asks the Chief whether it is worth sacrificing even a single life for the tiniest fraction of a possibility that it might benefit humanity. But in order to present this to the Chief, Halsey has to lie to him.

Some additional lines have been added, particularly with Cortana after John has left the room, to acknowledge exactly what Halsey knows—and the guilt she feels that this is the manner in which they are parting ways.

ADJUNCT TEASER

After embarking on this grand odyssey across space and time over three books, the last missing piece is a proper farewell...

Halo: Waypoint Chronicles – Volume One has been out for well over a month now and we’ve had a great time seeing all the reactions and responses to the stories come in.

(As a reminder, Halo: Waypoint Chronicles is available in trade paperback, ebook, and unabridged audiobook formats.)

One question we’ve seen come up is in regard to whether the route traveled in ‘London Calling’ is “true to life”, so let’s take a look.

LONDON CALLING MAP

This story takes place on Earth in 2552, following Laurette Agryna in the events depicted in Halo Infinite’s Tutorial cinematic where the Covenant are invading London, and they brought their deadliest weapon: artistic license!

As this is obviously set in a real place, during the making of this story we looked at a map of the area (and I myself did a walk of Agryna’s route) to see how it would logically apply to where she goes in the story.

Obviously in 500 years there may be one or two differences, including the vast arcology dominating the skyline, but the general idea of the ground-level route is as follows.

We’ll have to arrange some kind of official walking tour to follow in Agryna’s footsteps. Maybe have some Spartans drop in to keep you company and you can ask them exactly what “Deltas” means.

STILL MIDNIGHT

Last issue, we announced that ‘Still Midnight’ is a special three-part Waypoint Chronicle audio drama we are working on in collaboration with the fine folks of JumperScape.

The story of Still Midnight follows a group of friends and colleagues aboard the UNSC Infinity as it is en route to Zeta Halo, where the events of Halo Infinite begin. Just recently, the cast of this upcoming story was announced and in case you missed it here’s the breakdown:

Check out this fantastic behind the scenes casting video where you can hear directly from the voice actors about their characters, their personal history with Halo, and more!

Watch on Youtube

Halo Repository is doing the lord’s work, by which I mean he’s put together a 90-minute long-form analysis video on ‘Ghosts of the Gyre’—one of the exclusive new stories in Halo: Waypoint Chronicles – Volume One.

Watch on Youtube

Here rests the vanguard of the Great Journey, every Arbiter from first to last, each one created and consumed in times of extraordinary crisis… and now the subject of this great video by Chance!

Watch on Youtube

The universe is full of cold, hard facts. And this is one of them: The Mjern-pattern agricultural support ship is one of the coolest damn ships in the Covenant fleet. MetaNerdzLore has a new video breaking it down in detail.

Watch on Youtube

GammaCompanyMark, another regular shipyapper in the community, discusses the visual evolutions of the UNSC Pillar of Autumn across Halo: CE, Halo: Reach, and Campaign Evolved.

Watch on Youtube

The Hangar Bay is a big fan of UNSC frigates and has put together a great breakdown of all six known classes.

Watch on Youtube

That’ll do it for today, but we’ll be back before you know it with plenty to discuss once everybody’s had a chance to jump into Halo: Campaign Evolved later this month.

See you on Alpha Halo!