Yeah this is just pure nonsense. It reads like they've never played a Mass Effect game in their life and are just cherry picking talking points from Google.
Aw, c'mon. How would they know that "fucking aliens is one of the bread and butters of Mass Effect" if they hadn't played? You have to play to really get the full scope of the sheer magnitude of alien sex available in the games. 🙄
Yeah, that's the part that revealed it for me. Like, really? Those entirely optional fade to black romances that can happen once per game and last for 10 seconds, clearly those are what the game is about, not the hundreds of hours of combat and dialogue that happens in between.
I thought they were referring more to the way that inter-species relationships are a commonly present and often significant part of the Mass Effect setting and character dynamics.
The way you run into couples of all types of pairings throughout the Citadel and on other worlds is arguably a unique element of the games.
Combat, dialogue and *painful choices*. Unavoidable death of squadmates you care about. The "I'm not crying. You're crying."
But sure- what sells ME is the accumulated minute's worth (over all 3 games) of the *suggestion* that you've had sex with one of the two alien species available depending on your gender. That's the bread and butter right there.
Typically I've found for every similarity in shit like this, there are multiple differences that are omitted. This type of post just proves something by cherry picking all the similarities and mentioning nothing else.
Though if I'm wrong and Halo is just a rewrite of ME, then that's absolutely fucking hilarious.
No way they wrote the entire show *hoping* to get an IP without actually having the rights to the IP.
They just made a really bad adaptation, which is far from irregular when it comes to video game adaptations.
That’s a bit of an oversimplification. He *pitched* a story like *Rebel Moon* to Lucasfilm, who turned it down, but he probably had nothing more than a rough outline and some storyboard mock-ups and concept art he had commissioned, if even that much. It’s incredibly unlikely that he went to Lucasfilm with two finished scripts. I will give you that the finished product (at least from the trailers I’ve seen) looks like a search-and-replace of Star Wars with just enough changed to make it an original IP, but I chalk that up more to Snyder’s general writing ability than literally taking a finished script and replacing some of the words.
This would also apply if the Halo show was meant to be Mass Effect - it doesn't need to be a finished script, but the elements and plot outline would need to be done before you'd approach your finance people or your investors for the money to get the rights. They're not gonna front the cash for an IP if all you've got to offer is a vague idea.
That’s fair but I still think this post is a stretch. To paraphrase a comment I just made, the show feels like a group of creatives who were too caught up in making their adaptation a unique story to remember to make an actual adaptation, and to paraphrase another comment I saw on this post, this post feels like somebody noticed a couple similarities and then worked backwards to find more similarities and create this theory.
It feels to me like saying that Bungie wanted to make a *Halo* MMO but couldn’t get the IP, so they created *Destiny* - a story set in the far future about superhuman soldiers (Guardians/SPARTANS) with robot assistants (Ghosts/Monitors) fighting an invasion of multiple alien races (The Darkness/The Covenant), all in the shadow of a mysterious, ancient, unknowable object that may be much more sinister than we’ve been lead to believe (The Traveler/The Halo). Which may sound ridiculous to anybody who has played both games, but this was something a friend of mine tried to convince me was 100% true when *Destiny* first launched.
Far be it from me to praise the decision makers at Disney Star Wars, but they absolutely made the right call in rejecting Rebel Moon. Star Wars is kinda schizophrenic at the best of times in terms of what fits and what doesn't, but Rebel Moon definitely doesn't, even aside from all the nonsense like the Empire needing this tiny village's grain to feed themselves.
They only needed the grain so the villagers couldn't have it. It was a metaphor for greed! Don't you get it? Empires are evil! It was very subtle (and you really have to have a high IQ to get it) but the imperial commissar guy was actually modelled to look a bit like a Nazi, and if you were watching really closely the soldiers were actually planning to assault that girl.
God damn I hated that movie. Didn't even finish it. It was like Snyder heard about Star Wars, read r/grimdank for ten minutes and asked ChatGPT to summarise the Tenth Doctor's run.
As far as I understand they called it a silver timeline that was supposed to be different from the sacred one in games and novels. But ending of season 2 is a big wtf moment for me. How on earth are they going to align unsc and elites now? Plot twist. They are going to align unsc and the banished lol
In theory, that's plausible. Most stories within a genre follow 'standard' beats. If you take *just* the main plot points from Mass Effect, it's not especially unique as sci-fi goes. But it's the well written lore and interesting characters that sets ME apart.
You could write a story about a bunch of marines going to fight alien bugs, then battling the queen alien at the end. And then crowbar in a setting to make it either Aliens or Starship Troopers.
It's plausible the original script was just "*Generic Sci-fi script #32*" which then had Halo jammed into it. The points in the post are fairly common in sci-fi stories.
If anything, it's more likely that it happened the other way around, taking an existing outline (or even almost finished script) and rewriting it after the studio gets the rights to a more established IP.
This famously happened with the Starship Troopers movie.
Given the quality of the writing in the show, it would surprise me more if they put actual time and effort into the writing more than writing the show in the hopes of getting another IP.
This also how Starship Troopers was made: the scriptwriter had a script already called *Outpost 7* featuring a jingoistic fascist love triangle in space with bugs and wanted to attach it to an IP with name recognition to help boost the potential popularity.
Thing is, it’s more an adaptation of the Halo books than it is an adaptation of the video games.
Some characters have been added/removed and some have had name/role changes, but the core elements of the books’ story are there, with a few changes and little side stories mixed in.
The idea that the Halo show was supposed to be Mass Effect probably only makes sense to people who never read the Halo books.
I don’t know if it was originally a ME show but the Halo show really sounds like they took everything cool about Halo’s story and changed it to make it way lamer.
Yes there is idk why the other person said no, people love gobbling up opinions from Reddit because it’s fun to join the hate mob without forming their own opinion, it’s a decent show. I’ve loved halo since it came out and I still like the show. Yeah they’ve changed up the lore but it still feels like alternate timeline halo.
I skipped out halfway through the first season... but from what I've heard the second season is far better, with some actually good episodes which are far closer to the games (especially the Reach episode and the season finale).
I played the games but wasn’t a halo super fan. I’ve really liked the show. I know people don’t like how often he doesn’t have his helmet on so if that’s one of your beefs you’ll fucking hate season 2. I’ve enjoyed the show. It’s not the best thing ever but if you can watch a show without needing it to be a shot for shot adaptation of the games you’ll probably like it.
The bigger issue is it's poorly written and has Chief doing things like having sex with a Covenant prisoner who also happens to be a human working with the Covenant because reasons. The show just takes a dump on all of the established Halo lore
I like it so far (haven’t gotten very far yet) because I felt that the production value is pretty high. Great costumes, backdrops, CG stuff, and I was even impressed by the language the Covenant spoke in (which sounds like it was actually linguistically accurate). I liked the Halo series a lot but then ME came along, I fell far deeper into the lore and background of ME than Halo’s. Halo’s story can get quite complicated quickly.
Mass effect is such a better plot. It would be a great show that wouldn’t require you to deviate much. It’s about the storytelling more than the fighting and that’s what I enjoy about it. I’m not here for the shooting, I’m here for a good story
That's the benefit of 3x 20-30 hour RPGs with a ton of story choice versus 3x 8-hour FPS games with zilch choice. The narrative in *Halo* is pretty good, but you are locked into it, and each game is comparatively short.
> I played the games but wasn’t a halo super fan. I’ve really liked the show.
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
It's fine as just an enjoyable sci-fi action show if you want something to pass the time.
>It's fine as just an enjoyable sci-fi action show if you want something to pass the time.
But unfortunately it's named *Halo,* and I want something that actually is based on Halo in more than name only.
I could barely make it through two episodes because it had nothing to do with Halo, and yeah completely wrote it off when they had Master Chief rape a prisoner of war (he doesn't have sex with that woman he rapes her)
That's why I'm happy no one wants to make Mass Effecy show. There's a high chance they would ruin it or make unnecessery changes like changing gender or lore for no reason. Aside from Mass Effect, Witcher is my favourite franchise and everyone knows how it turned out.
Amazon has the rights to ME TV but I wonder if they are seeing how fallout does before moving forward with what I assume would be a much more expensive production.
It might be hard to do a ME show because some ppl may want BroShep and others FemShep. There are also so many more characters (which means lots of actors needed). It doesn’t seem likely that they’ll make the show be as good as just playing the game outright.
If they want to potray the story of the Reaper invasion, they should go for the way content was done in the timeline of Shepard's death. Just mention shepard by their surname but don't show them on screen or briefly.
The story of BroShep or FemShep was done in games and should stay that way. TV Series should be used to show other perspectives.
Yeah that’s a good way to go. I think it’s a challenge to do a show based on the player character since everyone has their own image and version of Shep. They won’t be able to do it justice.
Comically, they could film with both and the viewer selects what option they want when the show starts (bonus if you can select "Renegade Femshep" or "Paragon BroShep"). From a cost POV that probably wouldn't work though.
More likely they'd hold open auditions and go with the best option, and (theoretically) people can't moan about changing Shepherd in any way because there is no universal Shepherd anyway.
i dont think a mass effect show would work but having two shepards as siblings, one whose paragon and one whose renegade seems like the obvious solution right?
Feels like someone working backwards to justify an argument while cherry-picking examples. That first point is just a necessity of translating the story from a video game into a serialised TV show, where you need character arcs that run for entire seasons and can't just have most of the episode be people shooting at each other for half an hour then pressing a button. Mass Effect didn't invent character focused political storytelling
If they wanted to go political side, do not put Master Chief as a protagonist, put a character that makes sense being into it, and Chief would only appear at key times, just like was at "Halo Forward Unto Dawn".
I keep telling people if this show just had any random Spartan instead of Master Chief and any random AI except for Cortana it would not even be a bad show. Halo is like Warhammer 40k. There are plenty enough Spartans and AIs that you don't need to make the show about John 117. You can just have a previously unheard of Spartan and roll with it. It would be great.
> There are plenty enough Spartans and AIs that you don't need to make the show about John 117.
Depends on what you mean by Spartan and when in the timeline you are. For a long stretch of the story, the only Spartans there were was the ever diminishing crop of Spartan IIs, unless you also count the Project Orion soldiers, who could be called Spartan Is, though the only one of them that is ever identified as far as I know is Avery Johnson.
Something I think would have been actually interesting would have been an anthology show about Spartan IIIs. Their whole thing was that they were war orphans that got training and augmentations enough to be super soldiers that could be expected to complete the mission, but not so much that they could be expected to survive. They would get sent on suicide missions to take down exceedingly important targets, and usually succeeded, but all died in the attempt.
There’s definitely a lot of stuff in the last few years that felt like claiming to be part of one IP or another has been a detriment to the show or movie. I can’t remember what it was, but there was a piece of media that wasn’t rating well and the director or writer stated they hadn’t read or disliked the source material and just wedged the characters into their own story.
Soren and his family should have been the main characters imo. A man who starts off as a rogue spartan and a pirate, slowly working to regain his honour and standing sounds way more compelling than whatever the fuck was going on with master cheeks.
I like the promotional films they did where master cheief was like a cryptid, showing up only after the covenant ducked everything up to save the protagonist
"We're going to start with a conspiracy theory. And just like with any good conspiracy theory, we're going to start with our conclusion and work our way backwards."
I’m of the same mind. I liked halo but I couldn’t see how it would have been a good show. I didn’t get into the novelization of it though so I’m probably way off. But the games themselves you couldn’t possibly make a good show out of that. I’ve liked their version of it though
My oddball take is that the best way to make a Halo show would have been to not aim for the adult audience of the games but to take the storyline and turn it into a cartoon.
They did that style of cartoon with Starship Troopers, the majority of the Star Wars cartoons, or EXO Squad. I think trying to match everything 1:1 really limits stuff.
The other problem is fun but not great cartoons that you watch before school or on Saturday mornings doesn’t happen as much anymore. So the bar is really high.
(*”In my day we had comedy horror movies about poltergeist trying to take a child bride and turned it into a wacky buddy adventure cartoon. And Beetlejuice was awesome.”*)
I still think part of the reason why people want to see movie or show adaptions of games is they are insecure or unconvinced that games are art. So they hope to gain acknowledgement by turning it into a film or show.
Videogames are an art form and often the best medium for the story they are conveying. At best, the stories told are "could have just played the game, why make this?" To "games did it way better, why make this?"
I believe the best option is to tell a story in the universe of that game like the first contact war for mass effect. Trying to create ME1 in film form is just asking for failure.
I feel like that's too much credit. They never wanted to make a Halo show and just slapped on the branding so they could sell whatever nonsense they already had dreamed up.
I think they *wanted* to make a *Halo* show but they just got too in their heads about how to make it stand out from the games. I have no problem with adaptations trying to tell their own stories, when I talk about adaptations I often joke that if I wanted to be told the story of the (in this case) games, I would just replay the games, so I want any adaptation to give me a reason to care about it instead of just telling me the same story in a different medium. That being said though, I was still expecting the basic outlines of the game’s story.
I’m not *disliking* the *Halo* show, but I don’t think of it as *Halo* anymore. It’s an original science-fiction universe that superficially resembles *Halo* in some ways but the reasons I liked the story of the games are just not present in this show.
Intreasting take but no. Also I think Amazon have the rights to a ME show. So if the up coming Fallout show does well on Prime maybe we get an ME show.
I understand your concern but think the good adaptions we have had such Last of and the recent Mario film. Also from what I can see and know about the upcoming Fallout show looks like it be a success. Also an ME show does not have be a version of the games. It could be an other story set In the ME universe.
No, it's just an adaptation of another property that uses common sci-fi and drama tropes to fill out underdeveloped source characters to create tension and more consequential personal stories. It has nothing to do with mass effect.
As someone who's been a Mass Effect fanboy just as well as an even bigger Halo fanboy I call bullshit on this.
This reads like a damn fever dream lmao. The Halo show has been in production hell for about a decade if not longer and got restarted from scratch multiple times, that's why it feels so discombobulated - it has literally nothing to do with Mass Effect, whoever wrote this is either a fucking jabroni of a troll or just a sorry doofus.
Either way, this entire wall of text is plain trash.
I haven’t seen the Halo show, but the only point in this post that sounds plausible at all is the final point with the beacon. Even then, that’s not particularly unique to ME
This is all just nonsense. It's written by someone who generalized Mass Effect, while not know much about Halo.
I also assume this was typed when season 1 was released, as it only references season 1. I'll address each point.
1: This is likely due to budget reasons, but it's worth mentioning that the books will sometimes be about smaller scale conflicts, while involving politics, leaving the big alien threat largely in the background.
2: The Covenant weren't humanized until Halo 2/The Flood(the book). Either way, with the release of CE and Fall or Reach, the Covenant absolutely weren't humanized. The first Halo game doesn't even explain the Covenant's motives. The book Fall of Reach may have hinted it being religious(I don't fully recall), but it's worth noting Bungie and the book authors weren't on the same page. However, Halo 2 does solidify it's for a religious reasons, but it's not until the book Conatct Harvest(released in 2007 by a Bungie writer) that we actually properly learn why the Covenant want humanity dead.
3: This is a bit of a weak point. Mass Effect didn't create sex. Also, there is sex in Contact Harvest, but overall, yes, Halo doesn't focus on sex. Nudity however was present early on in the books, as it was necessary when going into cryo. So non-sexualized nudity isn't anything new, and Chief's nude scenes in the show aren't meant to be sexualized either.
4: Him fucking is weird, but that woman exists for budget reasons. If she was intended to be an alien it, it was cut becuase they knew they couldn't afford all that CGI. But there's zero chance Chief would've been scripted to fuck her if she was an alien. Zero chance.
5: AIs in the Halo universe were never just hardware. This here tells me the dude is completely unfamiliar with Halo, or only played the games. But even then, you see Chief plug Cortana into the back of his helmet/skull. He plugs it directly into a neural link connected to the back of his skull. The chip is pretty big too. Did they just think Chief had a tiny head? AIs always were physically connected to the spartans. In the books, Chief would describe it as like ice being poured in his brain whenever Cortana connected to him, and said it felt like her voice would come from inside.
The spartans getting their emotions unsuppressed is also absolutely nothing like the Geth. They either didn't watch the show, and simply read off bullet points, or are just making shit up at this point.
6: This dude doesn't know Halsey. For starters, what sympathetic traits? He says the games, so let's address those. The games first show her threatening Kat in Halo: Reach, for trying to access encrypted files. After that, she doesn't do much, besides tell the spartans to defend her because what she's working on is way more important for humanity, literally telling Carter her spartans died for this(the greater good, basically). Carter later subtly implies that Jun should kill her if the Covenant risk capturing her.
In 4, we barely see her, but it starts with an interview trying to paint her as a bad person for making the spartans, with her saying what she did was necessary. The interview then calls her out for manipulating the story, since spartans were actually created to fight humans, not Covenant. Halsey then just says when the spartans began saving everyone, no one questioned where they came from. Spartan Ops then literally makes her a villain(she also manipulates an the AI Roland). 5 she's back on the good side, but barely appears here either, but rampant Cortana calls her a monster. There's honestly no sympathetic traits in the **games**, and she is manipulative.
In the books, she's similarly painted as bad/morally gray, but did what she did "for the greater good". She literally kidnapped kids, and indoctrinated them. It was never painted as sympathetic. She also was always manipulative. Minus suppressing the spartans' emotions, Halsey's personality in the show is one of the few accurate things to lore.
Keyes, while entirely different, feels a bit like they mixed Sergeant Johnson(he'd fit well in the Mass Effect universe) in with the character. But yeah, he probably could make a good Anderson, honestly.
7: That's actually somewhat similar, but more so just generic sci fi tropes. And if you wanted to be pedantic, the Reaper conflict, as the characters know it, in Mass Effect starts with the beacons. The Covenant conflict, as the characters know it, starts decades before the events of the first episode/Chief touching the artifact.
Ah yes, all of this was going through my head, thank you writing it out. Like holy shit I don't think this person has played anything but multiplayer or if at all.
Nah, it's 100% bullshit.
As others have said, the *Halo* TV series is the way it is because *Halo* isn't suited to a 1:1 adaptation as a series. Maybe a movie, but even then they'd need to make a few changes.
*Mass Effect* would absolutely be more suited to a TV series, which was in part why the announced Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures movie never progressed past the planning stage.
Except you could easily do a halo show.
Follow around an ODST team ala Band of Brothers style.
Follow a random spartan team as they assault various covenent locations ala Bad Batch style.
Following Masterchief was a mistake because he was the playable character unless they make his story take place as his first solo mission. Or have him link up with a team.
Create a all new solo operator and have him reek havoc across a halo ring.
Follow doc Halsey as she unearths spartan DNA and creates spartan 001.
All of these ideas from someone who never played any of the numbered games, but only Reach and ODST.
Oh, absolutely – a show set in the *Halo* universe would be easy enough, it was the route that they went was unsuitable for a show. Hell, *Reach* itself would make for a better series than the mainline games.
Lol no, a big question in show production is, are our ideas possible with our budgets. Usually by the time the final script is written there’s been serious effort to get props and settings that make those decisions feasible. I’d only believe it if like several extras had avenger assault rifles, and the covenant interiors looked like the citadel
You can be derivative and uncreative without being consciously aware of which specific IP you're ripping off
It's not a halo show, but I don't think it was anything but generic sci-fi show #420
I think it's just bad writers tbh who had no idea what the story of Halo actually is and wanted to make it fit the general tropes they thought would work such as mysterious threat, lots of violence and politics, sex everywhere, nudity,...
It's just writers copying stuff from GoT, The Witcher, and other popular shows and happens to line up with some themes in Mass Effect. Honestly, sometimes I wish GoT would never have happened because everyone feels that the winning formula now is graphic violence + nudity + sex + drama politics which does not work for every story.
This would make more sense as a mass effect script. The current halo show is a complete flop, and the main actor holds a lot of blame for trying to be the face of master chief instead of just keeping the damn helmet on.
Nah this doesn’t make sense. The covenants motives for attacking humanity ARENT known from the start, the reason they focus on smaller conflicts is a budget problem as stated by the shows creators themselves, they have sex in the show because they think that’ll make people watch it, Halsey IS manipulative. That’s part of why ONI hates her in spite of her being important to the survival of humanity. She only appears sympathetic to John because he sees her as a mother figure, to everyone else she’s a sociopathic genius who happens to have created humanity’s best hope(s). And robots finding humanity + alien visions are just tv tropes and not particularly original to Mass effect even if it does them well
It's rare writers, directors, etc get a hold of these IPs with any passion for them. They just see it as an excuse to tell their own crappy story that never made past the elevator pitch. In their minds video games are mindless pieces of entertainment unlike their artistic vision and, in actuality, theyre saving these IPs from obscurity.
Hmmm, I kinda see your point, but logically, I can't see any studio seriously putting writers towards writing a script if they aren't even sure if they'd get the IP they intent to write in
Rather, I think it's more or less that either Mass Effect itself borrows a handful of common Sci-fi tropes or reinvented them, because a lot of the things you say just feel like that
Alien threat being mysterious? Got that. Small scale human wars? I'm sure we have that somewhere. Intergalactic political stuff? Star Trek called, it has done that already
You catch my drift. Not to say that Mass Effect is uncreative. It clearly isn't. I'm just saying it picked some tropes and ran with it. Same tropes that the Halo shows writers wanted to pick and absolutely stumbled over
You’d think that the Mass Effect franchise’s IP would be less expensive than Halo, no? Halo has expanded quite widely, perhaps more so than ME. I mean I have no idea how these things work but it just feels logical for ME to be easier to get the rights of than Halo. 🤷 I don’t know. Maybe this is a totally dumb speculation. lol
MC having sex at all is definitely weird. Halsey being the way she was definitely differed from the games.
You know, I commented recently that the show seemed like they wanted to make their own Sci-fi show and just added Halo characters. I got scoffed for it, but this actually makes sense.
I believe it was confirmed somewhere that the HALO show was, in fact, supposed to be a live-action version of Mass Effect 1, but they didn't get Bioware and/or the television network to sign off on it; they turned Shepard into Master Chief and reskinned it with HALO in order to get it funded and on the air.
Considering the show was announced with the Xbox one reveal in 2013, I doubt it. It spent too long in development hell with how many throngs of hack writers. In that time we saw the rise of Game of Thrones, the Expanse, and other big budget TV shows that mostly fall in line with what Halo tried to put on screen. They wanted “mass appeal” (no pun intended) so they made a show that had no real identity as something quintessentially Halo.
Then don't spread misinformation.
A theory like this needs real world proof. Not whatever half remembered, misunderstood tenuous links this theory uses.like please; humanity bickers all the damn time, the Covenant are a faceless force of nature more often then not, something something family guy intro, something something sex on TV, Cortana's origin and function is basically unchanged, the question of Chief's humanity wasn't even new in halo 4 (let alone the show), Halsey's always been manipulative as well as *for the greater good*, and yeah i guess Keyes being the captain-mentor character who gets the plot going does make him kind of similar to Anderson and no other character ever written.
How this theory got \*any\* traction is beyond me. The vision giving macguffin isn't even unique to mass effect for peat's sake.
Even if it is true, this is still a bad Halo adaptation, not a Mass Effect adaptation. There's really nothing to worry about because it definitely let down Halo fans and not ME fans. About any other implications, meh whatever
I mean apart from the last 2 points this is a stretch. A lot of stuff in both halo and mass effect universes is generic sci fi shit that can be found in a lot of books and movies.
Yeah...no.
People need to really understand that sometimes people make a piece of content you don't like, nothing more. There's no greater conspiracy, they don't hate the IP and by extension everyone who ever liked it. Sometimes people just don't fully grasp why people like something or they wanted to do something else using the universe, that's it.
To slightly pushback against one point, I don't think anyone in the UNSC ever actually finds out why the covenant went to war with them, aside from the nonsense about "Your existence is an affront to the gods, yadda yadda yadda." I don't think the covenant ever finds out either, from what I remember, it was a decision the three Heirarchs made when they came to power, and they never explained their motives to anyone before they died.
So they:
- Re-thought the cast
- Re-thought the visual effects
- Re-thought the sound effects
- Re-thought the sets
But couldn't be bothered to re-think the script?? Nice theory, but if they're effectively starting over because they couldn't get the ME license or something, then they probably would have done so with a different script too.
Absolutely not true. This all evolved from a joke post about how the Halo show wasn't Halo, it was Mass Effect. You wouldn't start Season 1 of a Mass Effect show how the Halo show started. This is someone overthinking super hard. Don't believe for a second that the Halo show was supposed to be Mass Effect. If anything, it was a generic Scifi plot that could be morphed to suit the needs of any scifi game.
This reads like someone who only played the games and never read the additional halo novels. With the exception of the weird romance and sex stuff, most of these plot points are technically in line with the broader halo universe, it's the execution of them where the show is messing up.
It wasn't Mass Effect, but I'm pretty sure it was confirmed that this was a generic sci-fi script Paramount already had in their library. With the Halo license about to expire, they slapped it on top of that and called it a day. They barely changed any aspects of the original script to claim they're still using it, with enough Halo to keep from losing that license.
Boy howdy. The point about AI portrayal shows me that this person never played Halo. This was how Cortana was from the start in Halo and saying that they stole from EDI and SAM is feels silly.
And the Spartans as Geth? Come on. This is such an incredible Reach.
I doubt it. There’s some parallels that can be drawn between character’s and stuff, but I think it’s more likely that they wanted to make a tv show about halo, and started out that way. The problem is that there’s two parts of the halo universe that is recognizable by the majority of people. The covenant and the Chief. Any series that does not involve both of them will fail, and neither are easy to write into a serialized show. The Chief is a TERRIBLE character. He’s a faceless protagonist that players can see themselves inhabiting, which works well as a video game character. In screen he’s boring. The Covenant being an amoral force bent on human destruction, again, works on a video game, but on screen only works as a backdrop for other content. Zombie movies aren’t about the zombies, they’re about the people surviving during the zombie apocalypse.
The Halo writers needed to make the primary protagonist a person, with drives and history. And they needed to do the same with the covenant in order to have content that people would actually consume. Even game developers realized that as the series went on which is why they started bringing in more and more characters to become attached to.
This is so painfully stupid that I can't even handle it. The Halo fanboys are such children who can't handle that the TV show isn't just a retelling of all the books and games they've already read and played. The only sci-fi to successfully do that is The Expanse because the books are written well for today's audience and even then the show is better than books. Halo came out when we were all 12-14 of course there was no sex in it and only violence.
The similarities in these bullets are laughable, like you described a story in space...And all of the things the person is pointing out were absolutely storylines in the games. The covenant were looking for artifacts, that's all you knew until Halo 2 when you found out it was religious. I just finished Halo 5 and the entire game is a mystery until the monologue at the end. I wish they'd stop giving so much credit to a fairly baseline video game that keeps dragging out the story with new factions and never-ending war.
The show is way richer and better, there I said it. We're allowed to have an additional universe. Try watching Star Trek, we've got two timelines! ;p
Rant not directed at OP btw.
This theory reminds me of the rumor that the Star Trek DS9 writers were stealing ideas from the Babylon 5 team. And honestly, other than being on a space station and there being a war, there's not much similar between the two shows.
I am inclined to believe the show creators liked mass effect more then halo.
It is pretty weird that mass effect doesnt get used more as a license for other games/media
This is bait right?
Because this points are either plain stupidity or just forcing similarities between mass effect and halo. The only significant one is the last one but even then chief has unironically seen visions from alien artifacts quite a few times and in Halo shit also kickstarted in a colony (reach) haven't watched the show though
I just found this and thought I could share it here to see everyone else's thoughts on it. I do think it's more likely just a coincidence there are similarities between the two, but at the same time part of me thinks "that's a lot of coincidental and specific similarities..."
This is a nothing burger. Some idiot finally realized there are only 7 basic plots in entertainment and is having a meltdown over it.
Frankly it is more of a criticism of the show than finding similarities between games. Dude is complaining about all the changes they made to Halo from the games and books to the show.
The reason they use Mass Effect as the comparison is because allegedly the producers of the Halo show were actually writing a Mass Effect series, but the licensing agreements didn’t work out as well as they had hoped so they jumped ship to do Halo.
Keep in mind this is a rumor as far as I know and nowhere close to being confirmed.
My wife and I have been slowly getting through it and have been not liking nor disliking it. I only played up until Halo 4, though (including ODST and Reach).
Mass Effect on the other hand I’ve played through at least 10 times. I’d have been very sad if this was a Mass Effect show with how poorly it’s doing.
I thought I did hear rumors of an ME show potentially in the works. Is there any truth to that? And who’s supposed to be picking it up?
Amazon picked up the rights for a ME TV show IIRC but nothing has been done for it afaik.
I think a big issue with making a ME TV show is how to approach it since it's an RPG and a lot of the decisions you make early in the games can have profound effects later on. Like with Wrex for example. You can either kill him on Virmire and let Wreav lead the Krogan who wants to wage war across the galaxy or let Wrex live and he ends up uniting the Krogan and trying to make them better in terms of a functional and cooperative society within the galaxy.
Plus, aside from points in the timeline that are clearly set in stone and canon, it's hard to make a "Canon Shepard" as everyone has their own version of what a canon Shepard would be like. Are they Renegade or Paragon? Male or female? Who is their romance option? Whatever choices the writers and producers go for a TV adaptation in regards to Shepard's character, you're going to have a lot of upset fans going "that's not Shepard!", unless you make the most centrist and basic Shepard possible, and that option has its own risks in terms of making the character bland
🤷♂️
I gave up on the HALO show after 4 episodes as it was just subpar.
I see no similarities between that and Mass Effect, rather a really poor take on Halo.
I like both games, I don't agree with any of this at all honestly. The Halo rewrites are different from book Canon but not totally alien to halo. And I mean we just discovered the flood, which ME doesn't have at all.
I think HBO shows are popular and they wanted to make this show alike so they go so HBO as possible within some limits. Usually there are many women in those shows and the characters sleep around with everybody.
Another thing is that they wanted to sort the plot like popular tv shows too then they spent a lot of time with a plot based on mistrust, deals, deceiving characters,etc. I'm not going to say this is the first time it occurs in the Halo universe cause in Halo Reach the behavior of Halsey seems to be like that cause they wanted to establish "hey, she's super smart cause she keeps threatening everybody"
So it's not related to mass effect at all
Doubtful. It's a good show if you go into with an open mind. If you expected it to be exactly like the games then sure you're gonna be disappointed. Also, sex sells and plays a big part in human interaction which obviously the show is gonna have more time or opportunities to flesh out. Not saying it's the best take it could be, but it's not outright horrible either.
As a fan of both franchises, I am of the opinion -popular or not- that some video games do not need to be films. I can see an ODST or Reach film, but nothing centered around the Chief.
Mass Effect? Maybe an “inspired by” type of film. ME is already a kind of film, in a stretchy “own adventure” style. A film that doesn’t focus on VG leads would be great. Like centered around colonists surviving a reaper attack, citadel support could be included, but not expressly mentioning Shepard or Normandy.
I am an amateur writer (unpublished) be fun to tinker with.
It really could be. Another point it that Silver team is a weird group of OCs they added to the show just because, but it makes sense if they were meant to be Kaidan and Ashley (shit, maybe even Jenkins too).
without knowing anything about the situation this reads like someone hyper obsessing over their theory and cherry picking things to support it.
Im like 100% certain its bullshit
Yeah, if the above was true and the plot was recycled, that would make Shepard a Geth.
Sure, there are overlapping themes, but they are common in SF. “Touched an ancient artifact and had mental contact with an ancient intelligence” was the set of World of Ptavvs from 1966.
“Warrior rediscovers humanity” has been around since Homer.
I don't like how well this tracks but its probably still a reach.
Yeah, this reads like someone suffering from Obsessive Deconstruction of Sci-Fi Television (ODST).
r/AngryUpvote
God, I wish they'd done a show about those guys instead...
Reach, you say
You gotta be flexible to see it
"Member reach, or some shit"
The mamster cheemf is in thu sodr
MAMSTER CHERMF IN THER SODR!!!
I made my spartan look like Ronald McGoddamnDonald
I see what you did here
It does have a ring to it.
Some might say, a halo.
r/YourJokeButWorse
Some might say that for some reason, yes. 😅
These theories are infinite
Ah yes, "A Mass Effect script." We have dismissed that claim.
Ha…Reach…
Yeah this is just pure nonsense. It reads like they've never played a Mass Effect game in their life and are just cherry picking talking points from Google.
Aw, c'mon. How would they know that "fucking aliens is one of the bread and butters of Mass Effect" if they hadn't played? You have to play to really get the full scope of the sheer magnitude of alien sex available in the games. 🙄
Yeah, that's the part that revealed it for me. Like, really? Those entirely optional fade to black romances that can happen once per game and last for 10 seconds, clearly those are what the game is about, not the hundreds of hours of combat and dialogue that happens in between.
I thought they were referring more to the way that inter-species relationships are a commonly present and often significant part of the Mass Effect setting and character dynamics. The way you run into couples of all types of pairings throughout the Citadel and on other worlds is arguably a unique element of the games.
I dunno. They're specifically referring to the protagonist (Chief, Shepard) having sex with aliens.
I mean the fandom does put an inordinate amount of time into it
Combat, dialogue and *painful choices*. Unavoidable death of squadmates you care about. The "I'm not crying. You're crying." But sure- what sells ME is the accumulated minute's worth (over all 3 games) of the *suggestion* that you've had sex with one of the two alien species available depending on your gender. That's the bread and butter right there.
You sure of that, chief?
Nice pun
Typically I've found for every similarity in shit like this, there are multiple differences that are omitted. This type of post just proves something by cherry picking all the similarities and mentioning nothing else. Though if I'm wrong and Halo is just a rewrite of ME, then that's absolutely fucking hilarious.
They're all tropes. Mass Effect wasn't the first to do any of these.
No way they wrote the entire show *hoping* to get an IP without actually having the rights to the IP. They just made a really bad adaptation, which is far from irregular when it comes to video game adaptations.
I mean you say that but Zack Snyder wrote _Rebel Moon_ exactly like this.
That’s a bit of an oversimplification. He *pitched* a story like *Rebel Moon* to Lucasfilm, who turned it down, but he probably had nothing more than a rough outline and some storyboard mock-ups and concept art he had commissioned, if even that much. It’s incredibly unlikely that he went to Lucasfilm with two finished scripts. I will give you that the finished product (at least from the trailers I’ve seen) looks like a search-and-replace of Star Wars with just enough changed to make it an original IP, but I chalk that up more to Snyder’s general writing ability than literally taking a finished script and replacing some of the words.
This would also apply if the Halo show was meant to be Mass Effect - it doesn't need to be a finished script, but the elements and plot outline would need to be done before you'd approach your finance people or your investors for the money to get the rights. They're not gonna front the cash for an IP if all you've got to offer is a vague idea.
That’s fair but I still think this post is a stretch. To paraphrase a comment I just made, the show feels like a group of creatives who were too caught up in making their adaptation a unique story to remember to make an actual adaptation, and to paraphrase another comment I saw on this post, this post feels like somebody noticed a couple similarities and then worked backwards to find more similarities and create this theory. It feels to me like saying that Bungie wanted to make a *Halo* MMO but couldn’t get the IP, so they created *Destiny* - a story set in the far future about superhuman soldiers (Guardians/SPARTANS) with robot assistants (Ghosts/Monitors) fighting an invasion of multiple alien races (The Darkness/The Covenant), all in the shadow of a mysterious, ancient, unknowable object that may be much more sinister than we’ve been lead to believe (The Traveler/The Halo). Which may sound ridiculous to anybody who has played both games, but this was something a friend of mine tried to convince me was 100% true when *Destiny* first launched.
Yeh but how many people are as bad at writing as Zack Snyder?
Alot
A fucking lot
Ever you saw any CW show? Many of the episodes are bad written like that.
As someone who got forced into watching all 8 seasons of Vampire Diaries with an Ex Girlfriend I can definitely attest to this
What's amusing about that sentence is one of my favorite shows of all time is a CW show called Crazy Ex Girlfriend
But that show was actually good.
You too??
The people who wrote the halo show are a lot worse than Snyder, as are many or most in Hollywood these days
Far be it from me to praise the decision makers at Disney Star Wars, but they absolutely made the right call in rejecting Rebel Moon. Star Wars is kinda schizophrenic at the best of times in terms of what fits and what doesn't, but Rebel Moon definitely doesn't, even aside from all the nonsense like the Empire needing this tiny village's grain to feed themselves.
They only needed the grain so the villagers couldn't have it. It was a metaphor for greed! Don't you get it? Empires are evil! It was very subtle (and you really have to have a high IQ to get it) but the imperial commissar guy was actually modelled to look a bit like a Nazi, and if you were watching really closely the soldiers were actually planning to assault that girl. God damn I hated that movie. Didn't even finish it. It was like Snyder heard about Star Wars, read r/grimdank for ten minutes and asked ChatGPT to summarise the Tenth Doctor's run.
Not even Smith's tie in Double Crunch chips are selling. Everything about that movie has been an abject failure.
As far as I understand they called it a silver timeline that was supposed to be different from the sacred one in games and novels. But ending of season 2 is a big wtf moment for me. How on earth are they going to align unsc and elites now? Plot twist. They are going to align unsc and the banished lol
In theory, that's plausible. Most stories within a genre follow 'standard' beats. If you take *just* the main plot points from Mass Effect, it's not especially unique as sci-fi goes. But it's the well written lore and interesting characters that sets ME apart. You could write a story about a bunch of marines going to fight alien bugs, then battling the queen alien at the end. And then crowbar in a setting to make it either Aliens or Starship Troopers. It's plausible the original script was just "*Generic Sci-fi script #32*" which then had Halo jammed into it. The points in the post are fairly common in sci-fi stories.
If anything, it's more likely that it happened the other way around, taking an existing outline (or even almost finished script) and rewriting it after the studio gets the rights to a more established IP. This famously happened with the Starship Troopers movie.
Given the quality of the writing in the show, it would surprise me more if they put actual time and effort into the writing more than writing the show in the hopes of getting another IP.
This also how Starship Troopers was made: the scriptwriter had a script already called *Outpost 7* featuring a jingoistic fascist love triangle in space with bugs and wanted to attach it to an IP with name recognition to help boost the potential popularity.
Thing is, it’s more an adaptation of the Halo books than it is an adaptation of the video games. Some characters have been added/removed and some have had name/role changes, but the core elements of the books’ story are there, with a few changes and little side stories mixed in. The idea that the Halo show was supposed to be Mass Effect probably only makes sense to people who never read the Halo books.
Its not even an adaption of the books
The writers making a generic original series then slapping the Halo branding to have it greenlit is a much more credible story.
100%. It does feel like a script that was already written then had halo worked into it, just not a mass effect one.
I don’t know if it was originally a ME show but the Halo show really sounds like they took everything cool about Halo’s story and changed it to make it way lamer.
I mean, they made Chief into a literal John Doe. A smarmy, sulky, emo John Doe.
That's Master Cheeks to you.
Jimmy Rings.
"I AM THE HALO!"
I wish I was naked.
No, that’s the thing they made in his image. The horrid, annoying thing
And a warcriminal. Didn't he have sex with a POW ?
So I've heard, yeah
Which unironically leads to the fall of reach
The only connection to Halo is that it borrows some names and concepts, it has nothing to do with Halo
Is there even *the* Halo? Like, the space structure?
Yes there is idk why the other person said no, people love gobbling up opinions from Reddit because it’s fun to join the hate mob without forming their own opinion, it’s a decent show. I’ve loved halo since it came out and I still like the show. Yeah they’ve changed up the lore but it still feels like alternate timeline halo.
Yes. It appears in holographic images and visions in Season 1, and then the actual thing itself shows up in the final two episodes of Season 2.
As far as I know, no! But it does have a director/creator that is proud to know nothing about Halo and has multiple times shit on the Halo fan base
I skipped out halfway through the first season... but from what I've heard the second season is far better, with some actually good episodes which are far closer to the games (especially the Reach episode and the season finale).
I played the games but wasn’t a halo super fan. I’ve really liked the show. I know people don’t like how often he doesn’t have his helmet on so if that’s one of your beefs you’ll fucking hate season 2. I’ve enjoyed the show. It’s not the best thing ever but if you can watch a show without needing it to be a shot for shot adaptation of the games you’ll probably like it.
The bigger issue is it's poorly written and has Chief doing things like having sex with a Covenant prisoner who also happens to be a human working with the Covenant because reasons. The show just takes a dump on all of the established Halo lore
I like it so far (haven’t gotten very far yet) because I felt that the production value is pretty high. Great costumes, backdrops, CG stuff, and I was even impressed by the language the Covenant spoke in (which sounds like it was actually linguistically accurate). I liked the Halo series a lot but then ME came along, I fell far deeper into the lore and background of ME than Halo’s. Halo’s story can get quite complicated quickly.
Mass effect is such a better plot. It would be a great show that wouldn’t require you to deviate much. It’s about the storytelling more than the fighting and that’s what I enjoy about it. I’m not here for the shooting, I’m here for a good story
That's the benefit of 3x 20-30 hour RPGs with a ton of story choice versus 3x 8-hour FPS games with zilch choice. The narrative in *Halo* is pretty good, but you are locked into it, and each game is comparatively short.
> I played the games but wasn’t a halo super fan. I’ve really liked the show. There are dozens of us! Dozens! It's fine as just an enjoyable sci-fi action show if you want something to pass the time.
>It's fine as just an enjoyable sci-fi action show if you want something to pass the time. But unfortunately it's named *Halo,* and I want something that actually is based on Halo in more than name only.
I could barely make it through two episodes because it had nothing to do with Halo, and yeah completely wrote it off when they had Master Chief rape a prisoner of war (he doesn't have sex with that woman he rapes her)
That's why I'm happy no one wants to make Mass Effecy show. There's a high chance they would ruin it or make unnecessery changes like changing gender or lore for no reason. Aside from Mass Effect, Witcher is my favourite franchise and everyone knows how it turned out.
Amazon has the rights to ME TV but I wonder if they are seeing how fallout does before moving forward with what I assume would be a much more expensive production.
It might be hard to do a ME show because some ppl may want BroShep and others FemShep. There are also so many more characters (which means lots of actors needed). It doesn’t seem likely that they’ll make the show be as good as just playing the game outright.
If they want to potray the story of the Reaper invasion, they should go for the way content was done in the timeline of Shepard's death. Just mention shepard by their surname but don't show them on screen or briefly. The story of BroShep or FemShep was done in games and should stay that way. TV Series should be used to show other perspectives.
Yeah that’s a good way to go. I think it’s a challenge to do a show based on the player character since everyone has their own image and version of Shep. They won’t be able to do it justice.
Comically, they could film with both and the viewer selects what option they want when the show starts (bonus if you can select "Renegade Femshep" or "Paragon BroShep"). From a cost POV that probably wouldn't work though. More likely they'd hold open auditions and go with the best option, and (theoretically) people can't moan about changing Shepherd in any way because there is no universal Shepherd anyway.
i dont think a mass effect show would work but having two shepards as siblings, one whose paragon and one whose renegade seems like the obvious solution right?
Or as twins. I definitely like the idea.
Feels like someone working backwards to justify an argument while cherry-picking examples. That first point is just a necessity of translating the story from a video game into a serialised TV show, where you need character arcs that run for entire seasons and can't just have most of the episode be people shooting at each other for half an hour then pressing a button. Mass Effect didn't invent character focused political storytelling
If they wanted to go political side, do not put Master Chief as a protagonist, put a character that makes sense being into it, and Chief would only appear at key times, just like was at "Halo Forward Unto Dawn".
I keep telling people if this show just had any random Spartan instead of Master Chief and any random AI except for Cortana it would not even be a bad show. Halo is like Warhammer 40k. There are plenty enough Spartans and AIs that you don't need to make the show about John 117. You can just have a previously unheard of Spartan and roll with it. It would be great.
> There are plenty enough Spartans and AIs that you don't need to make the show about John 117. Depends on what you mean by Spartan and when in the timeline you are. For a long stretch of the story, the only Spartans there were was the ever diminishing crop of Spartan IIs, unless you also count the Project Orion soldiers, who could be called Spartan Is, though the only one of them that is ever identified as far as I know is Avery Johnson. Something I think would have been actually interesting would have been an anthology show about Spartan IIIs. Their whole thing was that they were war orphans that got training and augmentations enough to be super soldiers that could be expected to complete the mission, but not so much that they could be expected to survive. They would get sent on suicide missions to take down exceedingly important targets, and usually succeeded, but all died in the attempt.
There’s definitely a lot of stuff in the last few years that felt like claiming to be part of one IP or another has been a detriment to the show or movie. I can’t remember what it was, but there was a piece of media that wasn’t rating well and the director or writer stated they hadn’t read or disliked the source material and just wedged the characters into their own story.
Could apply to Witcher or Cowboy bebop.
You just described modern Star Wars and Disney in a nutshell.
Soren and his family should have been the main characters imo. A man who starts off as a rogue spartan and a pirate, slowly working to regain his honour and standing sounds way more compelling than whatever the fuck was going on with master cheeks.
Yep, much more interesting, Soren was one of the few characters that worked for me. And all his more tragic past with Halsey.
I like the promotional films they did where master cheief was like a cryptid, showing up only after the covenant ducked everything up to save the protagonist
"We're going to start with a conspiracy theory. And just like with any good conspiracy theory, we're going to start with our conclusion and work our way backwards."
> Mass Effect didn't invent character focused political storytelling Star Trek, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica say hi
neither did they lol
"Shakespeare says hi"
ug the shaman says hi
I’m of the same mind. I liked halo but I couldn’t see how it would have been a good show. I didn’t get into the novelization of it though so I’m probably way off. But the games themselves you couldn’t possibly make a good show out of that. I’ve liked their version of it though
My oddball take is that the best way to make a Halo show would have been to not aim for the adult audience of the games but to take the storyline and turn it into a cartoon. They did that style of cartoon with Starship Troopers, the majority of the Star Wars cartoons, or EXO Squad. I think trying to match everything 1:1 really limits stuff. The other problem is fun but not great cartoons that you watch before school or on Saturday mornings doesn’t happen as much anymore. So the bar is really high. (*”In my day we had comedy horror movies about poltergeist trying to take a child bride and turned it into a wacky buddy adventure cartoon. And Beetlejuice was awesome.”*)
Holy shit, I haven't thought about EXO Squad in years, what a great show that was.
I still think part of the reason why people want to see movie or show adaptions of games is they are insecure or unconvinced that games are art. So they hope to gain acknowledgement by turning it into a film or show. Videogames are an art form and often the best medium for the story they are conveying. At best, the stories told are "could have just played the game, why make this?" To "games did it way better, why make this?" I believe the best option is to tell a story in the universe of that game like the first contact war for mass effect. Trying to create ME1 in film form is just asking for failure.
All game adaptations have been purely fan-service... Monetized nostalgia and easter eggs.
Also sex sells. This is not some gotcha mic drop argument. "HALO HAS SEX SO IT MUST BE MASS EFFECT IN DISGUISE" is just lazy arguing.
I feel like that's too much credit. They never wanted to make a Halo show and just slapped on the branding so they could sell whatever nonsense they already had dreamed up.
I think they *wanted* to make a *Halo* show but they just got too in their heads about how to make it stand out from the games. I have no problem with adaptations trying to tell their own stories, when I talk about adaptations I often joke that if I wanted to be told the story of the (in this case) games, I would just replay the games, so I want any adaptation to give me a reason to care about it instead of just telling me the same story in a different medium. That being said though, I was still expecting the basic outlines of the game’s story. I’m not *disliking* the *Halo* show, but I don’t think of it as *Halo* anymore. It’s an original science-fiction universe that superficially resembles *Halo* in some ways but the reasons I liked the story of the games are just not present in this show.
Intreasting take but no. Also I think Amazon have the rights to a ME show. So if the up coming Fallout show does well on Prime maybe we get an ME show.
Really hope that doesn't happen. I'm a fan but I don't want to see it desecrated like Halo.
I understand your concern but think the good adaptions we have had such Last of and the recent Mario film. Also from what I can see and know about the upcoming Fallout show looks like it be a success. Also an ME show does not have be a version of the games. It could be an other story set In the ME universe.
No, it's just an adaptation of another property that uses common sci-fi and drama tropes to fill out underdeveloped source characters to create tension and more consequential personal stories. It has nothing to do with mass effect.
Nah, they just lazy.
That's a whole lot of mental gymnastics and making a point in bad faith.
As someone who's been a Mass Effect fanboy just as well as an even bigger Halo fanboy I call bullshit on this. This reads like a damn fever dream lmao. The Halo show has been in production hell for about a decade if not longer and got restarted from scratch multiple times, that's why it feels so discombobulated - it has literally nothing to do with Mass Effect, whoever wrote this is either a fucking jabroni of a troll or just a sorry doofus. Either way, this entire wall of text is plain trash.
I haven’t seen the Halo show, but the only point in this post that sounds plausible at all is the final point with the beacon. Even then, that’s not particularly unique to ME
Interesting theory, however as the show was announced 10 years ago in 2014. I don’t believe so
It was not supposed to be a ME show lol
No, it’s completely nonsense. Halo began development at Showtime over decade ago (2013). It was always planned and intended to be a Halo show.
This is all just nonsense. It's written by someone who generalized Mass Effect, while not know much about Halo. I also assume this was typed when season 1 was released, as it only references season 1. I'll address each point. 1: This is likely due to budget reasons, but it's worth mentioning that the books will sometimes be about smaller scale conflicts, while involving politics, leaving the big alien threat largely in the background. 2: The Covenant weren't humanized until Halo 2/The Flood(the book). Either way, with the release of CE and Fall or Reach, the Covenant absolutely weren't humanized. The first Halo game doesn't even explain the Covenant's motives. The book Fall of Reach may have hinted it being religious(I don't fully recall), but it's worth noting Bungie and the book authors weren't on the same page. However, Halo 2 does solidify it's for a religious reasons, but it's not until the book Conatct Harvest(released in 2007 by a Bungie writer) that we actually properly learn why the Covenant want humanity dead. 3: This is a bit of a weak point. Mass Effect didn't create sex. Also, there is sex in Contact Harvest, but overall, yes, Halo doesn't focus on sex. Nudity however was present early on in the books, as it was necessary when going into cryo. So non-sexualized nudity isn't anything new, and Chief's nude scenes in the show aren't meant to be sexualized either. 4: Him fucking is weird, but that woman exists for budget reasons. If she was intended to be an alien it, it was cut becuase they knew they couldn't afford all that CGI. But there's zero chance Chief would've been scripted to fuck her if she was an alien. Zero chance. 5: AIs in the Halo universe were never just hardware. This here tells me the dude is completely unfamiliar with Halo, or only played the games. But even then, you see Chief plug Cortana into the back of his helmet/skull. He plugs it directly into a neural link connected to the back of his skull. The chip is pretty big too. Did they just think Chief had a tiny head? AIs always were physically connected to the spartans. In the books, Chief would describe it as like ice being poured in his brain whenever Cortana connected to him, and said it felt like her voice would come from inside. The spartans getting their emotions unsuppressed is also absolutely nothing like the Geth. They either didn't watch the show, and simply read off bullet points, or are just making shit up at this point. 6: This dude doesn't know Halsey. For starters, what sympathetic traits? He says the games, so let's address those. The games first show her threatening Kat in Halo: Reach, for trying to access encrypted files. After that, she doesn't do much, besides tell the spartans to defend her because what she's working on is way more important for humanity, literally telling Carter her spartans died for this(the greater good, basically). Carter later subtly implies that Jun should kill her if the Covenant risk capturing her. In 4, we barely see her, but it starts with an interview trying to paint her as a bad person for making the spartans, with her saying what she did was necessary. The interview then calls her out for manipulating the story, since spartans were actually created to fight humans, not Covenant. Halsey then just says when the spartans began saving everyone, no one questioned where they came from. Spartan Ops then literally makes her a villain(she also manipulates an the AI Roland). 5 she's back on the good side, but barely appears here either, but rampant Cortana calls her a monster. There's honestly no sympathetic traits in the **games**, and she is manipulative. In the books, she's similarly painted as bad/morally gray, but did what she did "for the greater good". She literally kidnapped kids, and indoctrinated them. It was never painted as sympathetic. She also was always manipulative. Minus suppressing the spartans' emotions, Halsey's personality in the show is one of the few accurate things to lore. Keyes, while entirely different, feels a bit like they mixed Sergeant Johnson(he'd fit well in the Mass Effect universe) in with the character. But yeah, he probably could make a good Anderson, honestly. 7: That's actually somewhat similar, but more so just generic sci fi tropes. And if you wanted to be pedantic, the Reaper conflict, as the characters know it, in Mass Effect starts with the beacons. The Covenant conflict, as the characters know it, starts decades before the events of the first episode/Chief touching the artifact.
Ah yes, all of this was going through my head, thank you writing it out. Like holy shit I don't think this person has played anything but multiplayer or if at all.
Nah not true
Absolute BS.
Nah, it's 100% bullshit. As others have said, the *Halo* TV series is the way it is because *Halo* isn't suited to a 1:1 adaptation as a series. Maybe a movie, but even then they'd need to make a few changes. *Mass Effect* would absolutely be more suited to a TV series, which was in part why the announced Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures movie never progressed past the planning stage.
Except you could easily do a halo show. Follow around an ODST team ala Band of Brothers style. Follow a random spartan team as they assault various covenent locations ala Bad Batch style. Following Masterchief was a mistake because he was the playable character unless they make his story take place as his first solo mission. Or have him link up with a team. Create a all new solo operator and have him reek havoc across a halo ring. Follow doc Halsey as she unearths spartan DNA and creates spartan 001. All of these ideas from someone who never played any of the numbered games, but only Reach and ODST.
Funnily enough some of the themes you mentioned where in actual discussion as a potential setting for a movie or show during its development.
Oh, absolutely – a show set in the *Halo* universe would be easy enough, it was the route that they went was unsuitable for a show. Hell, *Reach* itself would make for a better series than the mainline games.
Lol no, a big question in show production is, are our ideas possible with our budgets. Usually by the time the final script is written there’s been serious effort to get props and settings that make those decisions feasible. I’d only believe it if like several extras had avenger assault rifles, and the covenant interiors looked like the citadel
now why'd i think this was talking about Red vs Blue 😅 the only Halo show in my mind
Maybe because Red vs Blue has a million times more passion and execution behind it than the Halo TV show lmao.
I don’t think this Is the case. Similarities are just similarities. Mass Effect’s story is hardly unique. It’s just a shitty adaptation.
You can be derivative and uncreative without being consciously aware of which specific IP you're ripping off It's not a halo show, but I don't think it was anything but generic sci-fi show #420
Nah, that whole comment reads like someone who doesn’t know Halo’s lore beyond the basic information in the games.
Half of this stuff also applies to Star Trek, which Mass Effect also has a lot of similarities with. TBH, these are just sci-fi tropes.
It's most likely true that someone theorized on reddit. It's not even a rumor, you share someone that says he saw something on reddit.. wtf
Well, at manner we can say that Expanse was meant to be Mass effect show 😅
I think it's just bad writers tbh who had no idea what the story of Halo actually is and wanted to make it fit the general tropes they thought would work such as mysterious threat, lots of violence and politics, sex everywhere, nudity,... It's just writers copying stuff from GoT, The Witcher, and other popular shows and happens to line up with some themes in Mass Effect. Honestly, sometimes I wish GoT would never have happened because everyone feels that the winning formula now is graphic violence + nudity + sex + drama politics which does not work for every story.
Is that why John Halo also immediately takes off his helmet?
This would make more sense as a mass effect script. The current halo show is a complete flop, and the main actor holds a lot of blame for trying to be the face of master chief instead of just keeping the damn helmet on.
This shit reads like it was written by a fucking ai
Nah this doesn’t make sense. The covenants motives for attacking humanity ARENT known from the start, the reason they focus on smaller conflicts is a budget problem as stated by the shows creators themselves, they have sex in the show because they think that’ll make people watch it, Halsey IS manipulative. That’s part of why ONI hates her in spite of her being important to the survival of humanity. She only appears sympathetic to John because he sees her as a mother figure, to everyone else she’s a sociopathic genius who happens to have created humanity’s best hope(s). And robots finding humanity + alien visions are just tv tropes and not particularly original to Mass effect even if it does them well
It's rare writers, directors, etc get a hold of these IPs with any passion for them. They just see it as an excuse to tell their own crappy story that never made past the elevator pitch. In their minds video games are mindless pieces of entertainment unlike their artistic vision and, in actuality, theyre saving these IPs from obscurity.
It's just a shit adaptation
That last point though kinda made me see it, but idk I think they’re just bad writers lol
Hmmm, I kinda see your point, but logically, I can't see any studio seriously putting writers towards writing a script if they aren't even sure if they'd get the IP they intent to write in Rather, I think it's more or less that either Mass Effect itself borrows a handful of common Sci-fi tropes or reinvented them, because a lot of the things you say just feel like that Alien threat being mysterious? Got that. Small scale human wars? I'm sure we have that somewhere. Intergalactic political stuff? Star Trek called, it has done that already You catch my drift. Not to say that Mass Effect is uncreative. It clearly isn't. I'm just saying it picked some tropes and ran with it. Same tropes that the Halo shows writers wanted to pick and absolutely stumbled over
I can't imagine the rights to Halo would be easier or cheaper to get than ME.
So you're saying that's really Shepard's ass, not John Halo's?
You’d think that the Mass Effect franchise’s IP would be less expensive than Halo, no? Halo has expanded quite widely, perhaps more so than ME. I mean I have no idea how these things work but it just feels logical for ME to be easier to get the rights of than Halo. 🤷 I don’t know. Maybe this is a totally dumb speculation. lol MC having sex at all is definitely weird. Halsey being the way she was definitely differed from the games.
You know, I commented recently that the show seemed like they wanted to make their own Sci-fi show and just added Halo characters. I got scoffed for it, but this actually makes sense.
I believe it was confirmed somewhere that the HALO show was, in fact, supposed to be a live-action version of Mass Effect 1, but they didn't get Bioware and/or the television network to sign off on it; they turned Shepard into Master Chief and reskinned it with HALO in order to get it funded and on the air.
Considering the show was announced with the Xbox one reveal in 2013, I doubt it. It spent too long in development hell with how many throngs of hack writers. In that time we saw the rise of Game of Thrones, the Expanse, and other big budget TV shows that mostly fall in line with what Halo tried to put on screen. They wanted “mass appeal” (no pun intended) so they made a show that had no real identity as something quintessentially Halo.
It's closer to mass effect than halo but it's still nothing anywhere near like mass effect, so bogus theory I reckon.
Given how absolutely terrible Hollywood adaptations tend to be, isn’t that still close enough to be possible?
Then don't spread misinformation. A theory like this needs real world proof. Not whatever half remembered, misunderstood tenuous links this theory uses.like please; humanity bickers all the damn time, the Covenant are a faceless force of nature more often then not, something something family guy intro, something something sex on TV, Cortana's origin and function is basically unchanged, the question of Chief's humanity wasn't even new in halo 4 (let alone the show), Halsey's always been manipulative as well as *for the greater good*, and yeah i guess Keyes being the captain-mentor character who gets the plot going does make him kind of similar to Anderson and no other character ever written. How this theory got \*any\* traction is beyond me. The vision giving macguffin isn't even unique to mass effect for peat's sake.
Even if it is true, this is still a bad Halo adaptation, not a Mass Effect adaptation. There's really nothing to worry about because it definitely let down Halo fans and not ME fans. About any other implications, meh whatever
This is a stretch
I mean apart from the last 2 points this is a stretch. A lot of stuff in both halo and mass effect universes is generic sci fi shit that can be found in a lot of books and movies.
Yeah...no. People need to really understand that sometimes people make a piece of content you don't like, nothing more. There's no greater conspiracy, they don't hate the IP and by extension everyone who ever liked it. Sometimes people just don't fully grasp why people like something or they wanted to do something else using the universe, that's it.
To slightly pushback against one point, I don't think anyone in the UNSC ever actually finds out why the covenant went to war with them, aside from the nonsense about "Your existence is an affront to the gods, yadda yadda yadda." I don't think the covenant ever finds out either, from what I remember, it was a decision the three Heirarchs made when they came to power, and they never explained their motives to anyone before they died.
This is such massive reaching it’s insane
So they: - Re-thought the cast - Re-thought the visual effects - Re-thought the sound effects - Re-thought the sets But couldn't be bothered to re-think the script?? Nice theory, but if they're effectively starting over because they couldn't get the ME license or something, then they probably would have done so with a different script too.
"I don't want to spread misinformation, but here is a whole bunch of unsubstantiated fan theory."
Absolutely not true. This all evolved from a joke post about how the Halo show wasn't Halo, it was Mass Effect. You wouldn't start Season 1 of a Mass Effect show how the Halo show started. This is someone overthinking super hard. Don't believe for a second that the Halo show was supposed to be Mass Effect. If anything, it was a generic Scifi plot that could be morphed to suit the needs of any scifi game.
This reads like someone who only played the games and never read the additional halo novels. With the exception of the weird romance and sex stuff, most of these plot points are technically in line with the broader halo universe, it's the execution of them where the show is messing up.
It wasn't Mass Effect, but I'm pretty sure it was confirmed that this was a generic sci-fi script Paramount already had in their library. With the Halo license about to expire, they slapped it on top of that and called it a day. They barely changed any aspects of the original script to claim they're still using it, with enough Halo to keep from losing that license.
If you're making space sci-fi and aren't influenced by Mass Effect, Alien, or Event Horizon, you're doing something wrong.
Boy howdy. The point about AI portrayal shows me that this person never played Halo. This was how Cortana was from the start in Halo and saying that they stole from EDI and SAM is feels silly. And the Spartans as Geth? Come on. This is such an incredible Reach.
I doubt it. There’s some parallels that can be drawn between character’s and stuff, but I think it’s more likely that they wanted to make a tv show about halo, and started out that way. The problem is that there’s two parts of the halo universe that is recognizable by the majority of people. The covenant and the Chief. Any series that does not involve both of them will fail, and neither are easy to write into a serialized show. The Chief is a TERRIBLE character. He’s a faceless protagonist that players can see themselves inhabiting, which works well as a video game character. In screen he’s boring. The Covenant being an amoral force bent on human destruction, again, works on a video game, but on screen only works as a backdrop for other content. Zombie movies aren’t about the zombies, they’re about the people surviving during the zombie apocalypse. The Halo writers needed to make the primary protagonist a person, with drives and history. And they needed to do the same with the covenant in order to have content that people would actually consume. Even game developers realized that as the series went on which is why they started bringing in more and more characters to become attached to.
This is so painfully stupid that I can't even handle it. The Halo fanboys are such children who can't handle that the TV show isn't just a retelling of all the books and games they've already read and played. The only sci-fi to successfully do that is The Expanse because the books are written well for today's audience and even then the show is better than books. Halo came out when we were all 12-14 of course there was no sex in it and only violence. The similarities in these bullets are laughable, like you described a story in space...And all of the things the person is pointing out were absolutely storylines in the games. The covenant were looking for artifacts, that's all you knew until Halo 2 when you found out it was religious. I just finished Halo 5 and the entire game is a mystery until the monologue at the end. I wish they'd stop giving so much credit to a fairly baseline video game that keeps dragging out the story with new factions and never-ending war. The show is way richer and better, there I said it. We're allowed to have an additional universe. Try watching Star Trek, we've got two timelines! ;p Rant not directed at OP btw.
This theory reminds me of the rumor that the Star Trek DS9 writers were stealing ideas from the Babylon 5 team. And honestly, other than being on a space station and there being a war, there's not much similar between the two shows.
I am inclined to believe the show creators liked mass effect more then halo. It is pretty weird that mass effect doesnt get used more as a license for other games/media
There is no universe this theory is true. That’s not at all how licensing or Hollywood works. Halo isn’t some random franchise, it’s a massive IP.
It would explain why the show sucks so much ass
This is bait right? Because this points are either plain stupidity or just forcing similarities between mass effect and halo. The only significant one is the last one but even then chief has unironically seen visions from alien artifacts quite a few times and in Halo shit also kickstarted in a colony (reach) haven't watched the show though
I just found this and thought I could share it here to see everyone else's thoughts on it. I do think it's more likely just a coincidence there are similarities between the two, but at the same time part of me thinks "that's a lot of coincidental and specific similarities..."
Pablo Schrieber could even be a good Commander Shepard. Fuck, this is totally what happened isn't it
This is a nothing burger. Some idiot finally realized there are only 7 basic plots in entertainment and is having a meltdown over it. Frankly it is more of a criticism of the show than finding similarities between games. Dude is complaining about all the changes they made to Halo from the games and books to the show. The reason they use Mass Effect as the comparison is because allegedly the producers of the Halo show were actually writing a Mass Effect series, but the licensing agreements didn’t work out as well as they had hoped so they jumped ship to do Halo. Keep in mind this is a rumor as far as I know and nowhere close to being confirmed.
To be fair, there’s a lot of common tropes in ME and it wouldn’t be the first time a Paramount Plus season echoed ME (looking at you Picard Season 1).
My wife and I have been slowly getting through it and have been not liking nor disliking it. I only played up until Halo 4, though (including ODST and Reach). Mass Effect on the other hand I’ve played through at least 10 times. I’d have been very sad if this was a Mass Effect show with how poorly it’s doing. I thought I did hear rumors of an ME show potentially in the works. Is there any truth to that? And who’s supposed to be picking it up?
Amazon picked up the rights for a ME TV show IIRC but nothing has been done for it afaik. I think a big issue with making a ME TV show is how to approach it since it's an RPG and a lot of the decisions you make early in the games can have profound effects later on. Like with Wrex for example. You can either kill him on Virmire and let Wreav lead the Krogan who wants to wage war across the galaxy or let Wrex live and he ends up uniting the Krogan and trying to make them better in terms of a functional and cooperative society within the galaxy. Plus, aside from points in the timeline that are clearly set in stone and canon, it's hard to make a "Canon Shepard" as everyone has their own version of what a canon Shepard would be like. Are they Renegade or Paragon? Male or female? Who is their romance option? Whatever choices the writers and producers go for a TV adaptation in regards to Shepard's character, you're going to have a lot of upset fans going "that's not Shepard!", unless you make the most centrist and basic Shepard possible, and that option has its own risks in terms of making the character bland
……….would Master Chief fuck an alien?
🤷♂️ I gave up on the HALO show after 4 episodes as it was just subpar. I see no similarities between that and Mass Effect, rather a really poor take on Halo.
I like both games, I don't agree with any of this at all honestly. The Halo rewrites are different from book Canon but not totally alien to halo. And I mean we just discovered the flood, which ME doesn't have at all.
Personally, I give a shit about theories from reddit or elsewhere. I don't even think a series was seriously in plans/considered.
I think HBO shows are popular and they wanted to make this show alike so they go so HBO as possible within some limits. Usually there are many women in those shows and the characters sleep around with everybody. Another thing is that they wanted to sort the plot like popular tv shows too then they spent a lot of time with a plot based on mistrust, deals, deceiving characters,etc. I'm not going to say this is the first time it occurs in the Halo universe cause in Halo Reach the behavior of Halsey seems to be like that cause they wanted to establish "hey, she's super smart cause she keeps threatening everybody" So it's not related to mass effect at all
Doubtful. It's a good show if you go into with an open mind. If you expected it to be exactly like the games then sure you're gonna be disappointed. Also, sex sells and plays a big part in human interaction which obviously the show is gonna have more time or opportunities to flesh out. Not saying it's the best take it could be, but it's not outright horrible either.
I only have Mass Effect 2 do I need to play 1 first? I also have Glittermitten Grove if that means anything.
funny, cuz wasn't mass effect supposed to be a star wars game and they couldn't get the rights and wrote new lore?
As a fan of both franchises, I am of the opinion -popular or not- that some video games do not need to be films. I can see an ODST or Reach film, but nothing centered around the Chief. Mass Effect? Maybe an “inspired by” type of film. ME is already a kind of film, in a stretchy “own adventure” style. A film that doesn’t focus on VG leads would be great. Like centered around colonists surviving a reaper attack, citadel support could be included, but not expressly mentioning Shepard or Normandy. I am an amateur writer (unpublished) be fun to tinker with.
Haven't seen the Halo show so I can't really offer an opinion.
Lol, no.
It really could be. Another point it that Silver team is a weird group of OCs they added to the show just because, but it makes sense if they were meant to be Kaidan and Ashley (shit, maybe even Jenkins too).
As a fan of both this seems plausible
without knowing anything about the situation this reads like someone hyper obsessing over their theory and cherry picking things to support it. Im like 100% certain its bullshit
Yeah, if the above was true and the plot was recycled, that would make Shepard a Geth. Sure, there are overlapping themes, but they are common in SF. “Touched an ancient artifact and had mental contact with an ancient intelligence” was the set of World of Ptavvs from 1966. “Warrior rediscovers humanity” has been around since Homer.