Halo doesn't have anywhere near that level of gore outside of the flood and the engine probably didn't have the ability to replicate that. Else bodies would dismember after a grenade or needler explosion.
Also elites shield and armor most likely softened the blow.
Theres also a few instances of elites holding for a while against spartans.
Edit:When I say halo I mean the games specifically, the EU rarely holds back on gore.
I just went through the Cole protocol and read about Thels first encounter with Spartans. He's lucky Jai didn't kill him and left. But Thel bent a rifle barrel in that fight. Elites are no joke. But neither are Spartans.
I believe OPs question is valid and I think your reply is spot on cuz in Ghosts of Onyx, spartan Will either kicked or punched a Hunter in the stomach and it knocked it back or knocked it down and he was able to fight its partner in hand to hand combat for a small bit until his demise. But I suspect in lore, the shields probably slow the punch. In game, probably just engine or they didn't want full gore.
Keep in mind Thel is also a very strong Sangheili in comparison to others. An exception to the rule that Spartans are way stronger than Sangheili. Thel can definitely hold his own, same for Rtas I reckon given he is one of if not the greatest living Sangheili Swordsmen and Commander.
Agreed. And Thel was still "losing" in a melee scuffle/brawl. I think Jai had him but decided to disengage as he had other priorities than fighting 2 elites. Now if he knew who Thel was or would become, he probably would have finished him off but at the time he was just another elite.
But I believe OPs question was answered already with the shields in lore dampening a spartan punch and engine capability in game or just they didn't want that level of gore.
Thel likely had a much better harness than lesser elites too. Though a 300 pound elite should not be able to even come close to contesting a 1 ton spartan.
It was a bizzare decison to include the girl. The only audience for that show would have been the generation that played Halo as teens or younger. We're talking almost exclusively white males born in the late 1990s to mid 2000s who are now in their late 20s and early 30s. The Brandenns and Hunters and Kaylans and Jaydens, chugging Mountain Dew, searing the empathy out of brains with Rotten.com.
So understandably the show is quite gory and cynical, with the UNSC already occupying its role as a vaguely ominous semi-totalitarian police state that later Halo lore establishes it as.
So that part was fine.
But child sidekick, what in the heck.
Obviously the show producers were trying to emulate the successful formula of pairing a grizzled warrior up with a cute plucky ward, activating a parent-child bond.
Famously Halo 2 got an entire generation of these kids online in game chat, where they became well versed in some of the most mercilessly racist dialogue ever developed by the human race, far outstripping the rhetoric of the Axis Powers in the 20th century. So you put an obnoxious Asian teenager in as the sidekick? My guy. Every single comment I read was about how fast people would have executed that girl on the spot if they were Master Chief
Well, it made chief lose character. He is a hardened war vet who has had it pounded into his brain since 6 years old to be always alert and careful. Never letting his guard down except in the safety of a base behind UNSC lines or on a flagship etc... He took his helmet off when this girl had a weapon pointed at his face. Chief would never ever do that. There are a few flaws in the show that really confused me. Like this girls dad. He screamed and started firing his AK and chief somehow didn't hear it when nothing was going on until it was too late? That elite should have been on his sensors and all that.
Her story seems very pointless to me. Like I'm not one who would have said "I'd execute that bitch before it even told me" cuz I can see chief trying to save someone who he himself deems not a threat. But he did go completely out of character with her. Not to mention the other lady but that is just funky stuff.
The other stuff like the spartan VS spartan melee brawls were cool and the covenant action was dope. I'm excited for season 2.
>He took his helmet off when this girl had a weapon pointed at his face.
If I'm remembering correctly, he straight up does this exact thing in one of the more recent books. Pretty sure it was right after the Spartans were stopped in going on a mission when it was discovered they were all 15ish.
I haven't read any recent books unfortunately. I'll get there. Been going through them on audible. I'm on the forerunner trilogy after finishing Cole protocol. Next is K5 trilogy. But that seems way out of character based on what was common in the games and the OG books and such.
That situation sounds like they'd only be in the presence of friendly forces/command. Not a known insurgent/resistance fighter...
that just makes the book bad, not the show good
master chief at age 15 is fresh out of anti-human indoctrination. at that stage in time he hasn't really had time to think for himself or develop his own sense of morals, he JUST finished his training as a black-ops assassin that specifically targets other humans.
characters grow, but not THAT fast. master chief should be nothing less than a completely ruthless, cold-blooded killer at that period in time.
Except that doesn't happen. Where would it make sense to train your child soldiers that know they were kidnapped to hate all humans? Your child soldiers that augmentation alone costs more than the GDP of most outer core planets. That would be equivalent to making nukes with no failsafe. They were trained to complete the mission, and loyalty to the UNSC. Being anti-human would be anti-UNSC.
Fall of Reach goes incredibly indepth that Spartans are trained to think for themselves, as they will be required to make decisions that require flexibility. Stopping the Innies is important, but when your choice is killing your target or blowing up a population center, they should know what the proper choice is, even if they fail their mission.
This is why Spartans exist beyond the chain of command. They specifically make John-117 a Petty Officer Master Chief so that enlisted soldiers would have to listen to his orders. Spartans only answer to military high command, ONI, and Halsey.
not hate all humans, but to be totally ruthless and cold-hearted.
compassion is not a desirable trait in assassins, is this really something that's debatable?
The show was not made for Halo fans but for a wider audience. When it was on (Covid) I only heard “fans” complaining (only games never read the books or any other lore). I had a lot of interesting conversations about the show with non fans though. Old/young, guys/girls, non sci-if fans. It did well overall so I imagine that was a good take overall. The hardcore halo fan base wouldn’t carry a show anymore, they barely can carry a game.
Having read all the books and comics, the show was fine. It was enjoyable, even with some of the more questionable choices. Frankly, they get Chief's characterisation closer to the books than the games do. And much like the books, they appropriately show that the UNSC are not the good guys, they are the lesser of two evils.
It’s because the script was for a Mass Effect adaptation but they couldn’t get the rights (because the script fucking sucked) but unfortunately for us Halo was more than willing to slap their name on it with a few changes.
the only good part were the fights, idk how they did it because despite bragging about not playing the games for reference material, they perfectly captured what it's like to fight in the games. scavenging weapons, taking out targets rapidly and exchanging your low ammo weapon for their higher ammo ones, etc. it's like my MCC playthrough right there on the small screen.
I really don't understand how that's a bragging right or anything. Like, why would you not play the games or read the books? Maybe they read the books but still the games are a huge part of the lore and mostly what people know about halo. Why would they refuse? I hate that mentality.
It's like the K5 trilogy. Why wouldn't karen traviss read any previous material? She's done the same to star wars and other things like Gears of War... Read the previous material... I haven't gotten to her trilogy yet. Currently listening to the forerunner book primordium so I got some time before K5 but yeah.
Amazon needs to get their heads out of their asses with that mentality. Well most directors and writers tbh. The halo show could be soooo much better with only a little bit of tweaking. Same with their LOTR show.
HONESTLY, it's the bare minimum and they bragged about not doing it. what DID they research? they didn't even know the capital city of Reach, it was like a child making up halo lore for the whole series for their Playstation friends who can't play it and verify, when they've only played up to the first Flood encounter of CE and heard vaguely about the rest.
the ego of these writers to think their interpretation will be so much better than the source material fans fell in love with that we forget all about it and enjoy theirs is incredible. imagine thinking you can do better than Tolkien without the Silmarillion
It's honestly disgusting. I hate people like that. I almost wish they flopped extremely hard and true fans were able to make a show. Both for LOTR, halo, and I'd love a Mass Effect show... If it was done right.
same, i don't get why it's so difficult as a showrunner/director to just dedicate themselves to something greater than themselves and make a faithful adaptation of these beloved franchises?
it seems so painfully simple, all the hard work is p much done for them. how many sub-par and downright awful adaptations have to be negatively received for them to get that it'd be so much more profitable to do a faithful adaptation?
general audiences will still enjoy a cool show and fans will have something with deep lore that honors what they fell in love
I agree. Like I'm curious if these adaptations that fail, if they sit there like "oh man how did this fail? Why did everyone hate my show???" or if they shrug and move on... I suspect it's the shrug. Or they say "people just don't know what they want"
Zealots have extremely high-strength shield configurations. So the Zealot’s shield more than likely tanked the blow from Noble 6. Also, Noble 6’s punch force was likely significantly reduced due to his body positioning when he threw the punch lying down.
It’s harder to generate substantial force in your punch with minimal room for body rotation, especially on the ground.
Hitting someone with a car is nothing close to a Spartan’s punch.
Chief caved in a man’s skull at 14 with no armor. Mr John Reach should have been able to liquify that elite’s head.
Yeah and Tom B292 and the rest of Beta company were overpowering elites and snapping their limbs and necks with ease at age 12. But throwing a punch from a prone position is far less powerful than a standing picb with proper form. In short, No.. he wouldn't
Nowhere in any of the lore has any Spartan done that kind of damage to an Elite or Brute with a melee attack.
Even the one instant of William supposedly killing a Hunter by punching it through the gut is extremely debatable, since nowhere in the text of the story is it actually specified that that attack killed it.
Spartans readily do that kind of damage to humans, Grunts, or Kig-Yar. But never Brutes or Elites. Naomi supposedly breaking a Brute’s spine with a punch to the back of the neck(?), A) is actually something that regular humans can do to one another, and B) didn’t dismember the Brute.
Then again: Traviss’s books were cringe from top to bottom, anyway, so I hardly hold up her fight scenes as being representative of anything.
There is an insane feat in halo envoy with a spartan shoulder charging an elite and sending them flying 60m away.
It's regarded as a ridiculous high end.
I also remember in rubicon protocol where an injured stone punched a brute in his armored stomach so hard the novel states she turned his insides to mush.
She disemboweled him by driving his armor through his abdomen. Spartans being able to knock Elites that far through the air is actually pretty well in line with their feats. They’re much stronger than everything except for Brutes and Hunters. They’re still, on average, good bit stronger than Brutes as well.
I'll never forget that time masterchief sent a banshee flying into the horizon with a single punch in shadows of reach, aint even the craziest feat in the book lol.
> She disemboweled him by driving his armor through his abdomen.
To be fair, it's still also hardened metal plating. If Stone can punch their body armor with enough force to splinter it into tiny pieces, she's probably strong enough to do it to a brute's skull too.
I completely agree. It wasn’t a refutation, I just wanted to add some context. I think Spartans have demonstrated sufficient strength to gib enemies to the point that it’s really not arguable if they *could*, it’s just not really what the presentation is going for.
If you have sufficient strength to fairly easily snap a limb while said limb is also protected by advance strength amplifying armor, as is the case with Spartans engaging Elites the overwhelming majority of the time, you logically have the strength to twist and straight up tear it off. In one of the books the Master Chief is quoted as ‘turning (an) Elite’s skull to dust’, which lines up with the OP’s question on being able to take a head off with a punch. They certainly can, but even the notoriously more violent novels do try to keep the violence at a serviceable level without going overboard.
That said, if we ever got another campaign featuring the Flood, and if assassinations were to make a return, I imagine you’d get a pretty good visual representation of exactly what a Spartan can do to a body there.
Edit: You may have whooshed me with the quote from ‘The Flood’, unless I’m thinking of a different example.
>Nowhere in any of the lore has any Spartan done that kind of damage to an Elite or Brute with a melee attack.
John very explicitly does that in [The Flood](https://pastebin.com/KPriwwV2).
Beyond that, Spartans have also demonstrated sufficient strength to rip the arm off a promethean knight and smash apart promethean armigers and I doubt that elite and brute bones are intended to be substantially more durable than promethean armor.
>Even the one instant of William supposedly killing a Hunter by punching it through the gut is extremely debatable, since nowhere in the text of the story is it actually specified that that attack killed it.
That blow not being what killed the hunter does not preclude Will from having punched through the hunter's abdomen.
I'm pretty positive they are misremembering when Chief gets in a scuffle with an Elite and shoved a full charge plasma pistol into the Elite's mouth and turns his head into ash.
Though I'm currently listening to the Flood on Scribd so if this punching a head clean off happens I'll edit and make note of the chapter.
Nah he has a link directly to the quote in his post.
Chief jumps a squad of elite guards kills some with a grenade and then punches another's head crushing it and then he flips a warthog.
>Even the one instant of William supposedly killing a Hunter by punching it through the gut is extremely debatable
It's not that it's debatable, what you described just isn't what happened: Will dodges around their blows in melee combat and gets onto one of their backs and just digs into the worms and starts to tear them out.
It's less a punch and more disemboweling
Gotta say I haven't found a Halo novel I enjoyed since Mortal Dictata and even that was a bit of a slog. Nobody seems to know what direction the overall story is supposed to be going in, every time it feels like it might be building towards something it fizzles out and they try something new, but worse. Rinse and repeat.
Because the halo games don't giga wank Spartans to absolutely stupid levels of power like the books do. In the games elites and Spartans are roughly equal with elites having the edge in some areas, while Spartans edge out elites in other areas. The only character that is better than all the elites an brutes is the MC spartan who is usually not stronger, or more durable he's just incredibly efficient in firefights.
If your talking about the scene in the first mission what have to remember is not only do Zealots have stronger shields but 6 was also on his back trying to deliver a right hook. Doubt that the most optimal position for punching.
Listening to earlier halo books like fall of reach, Cole protocol ect, the spartans and elites seem more evenly matched.
I remember chief boarding a covenant ship and barely winning a hand to hand when they first discovered the elites
In cole protocol a spartan charges Thel, forcing into a wall, this breaks a few ribs, but they're still evenly matched to the point where they both disengage and the spartan runs.
That fight usually gets taken out of context, IIRC the Elite Chief struggled with was a meter taller than him or something, so it would have been around 11-12' tall. That is FAR out of the average of most Elites.
i don't think Spartans can really "punch a head off", it's not really how biology and physics work unless it was a corpse attached to an immovable pole. the kinetic energy would sooner liquify the brain or the fist would just cave straight through the skull than pop a whole head off the neck. organic bodies of flesh have a remarkable ability to stay in one piece while insides rupture
Spartans are just barely on equal footing against elites strength wise, but much faster, in the EU chief gets into hand to hand combat and comments that an elites muscles were like solid iron . Add that with armor and shields to make one tough alien species.
They are but Sangheili are INCREDIBLY durable in the lore. There muscle density is on par with spartans afaik. (Games stray from this typically, like Forge fighting the Arbiter in HW) in reality an unaugmented human punching a Sangheili would do next to nothing.
Any human comes in melee range with an elite the ONLY thing saving them is a Spartan or a well placed blade or bullet in a vital organ.
That being said no N6s punch would not explode any elites head, even without shields, even if he threw his whole hip into it. Spartans have never had Superman strength.
Forge is a Spartan I, so he definitely can go hand to hand with your average Elite and come out on top. Arbiters are not inherently special beyond getting a stay of execution until they die on a suicide mission.
Had he been standing, proper form and the Elite took a full force punch? Maybe not explode into purple mist, but a Spartan would cave in an Elites skull at a minimum
The average Elite sure, but the peak of the species can at least kind of measure up. Thel fought a Spartan to a draw pre schism, and there was that like 12 foot tall Elite that almost killed John.
Strength doesn't mean much if you can't reach you're enemy?
A spartan can a hundred percent gib many covenant foes but fighting enemies that can do alot of damage to you with there weapons in cqc is well stupid.
We literally have feats of spartans tearing titanium apart with there bare hands and shattering concrete pillars.
Elites are pretty strong themselves. Pretty much evenly matched with Spartans in some instances.
On top of being quite durable compared to simple unaugmented humans, That elite was a Zealot, which get pretty high-quality gear and have stronger shielding.
Many books give a more "accurate" depiction of how 1v1s go between Spartans and the alien species:
Elites and Spartans: Evenly matched for the most part.
Brutes and Spartans: Brutes are physically stronger. (A single brute jobber almost killed Chief in cqc during First Strike; and blue team had plenty of close calls during Shadows of Reach. Atriox 1v3'd Red team, and beat Chief during Infinite's prologue)
Hunters and Spartans: Save for very few rare instances, a Hunter will easily overpower Spartans.
Grunts/Jackals/Drones/the rest vs Spartans: Spartans will beat the shit out of them unless they have no shields, in which case they get bodied by virtue of Plasma weapons tearing through Mjolnir.
This isn't true. The average elite has consistently been portrayed as significantly weaker than a Spartan. In Ghosts of Onyx, the IIIs in SPI are massacring a Covenant army in CQC, with even Elites believing it's suicide to take on the Spartans in CQC.
As for the Brutes, the examples you cited are missing context. Chief in First Strike was injured, exhausted, at his limits per his own words, and in armour that was quite literally falling apart. Even then, the Brute had to ambush him.
Atriox is also a freak amongst Brutes, and it should be noted that even he had to ambush a Red Team fresh out of cryo and in outdated armour and keep them off balance to win through use of Chainbreaker. When he fought the Chief, he ambushed him and landed a debilitating direct blow on his torso with his hammer, which left him groaning and struggling to get up.
Hunters are the only race that are definitively stronger than Spartans, but Spartans compensate through cunning, speed, agility and tactics.
And Hunters are only stronger as a composite entity. The individual worms don’t appear in the games, but wouldn’t be any threat without Covenant armor and weapons.
Well yeah, hence why I said Hunters (Mgalekgolo) and not hunter worms (Lekgolo).
Though I’d argue even without armor they’d be physically stronger than any Spartan since their strength comes from the structural formation that comes with weaving colonies of worms into what’s essentially a big mass of really dense muscle tissue.
Dude, you’re coping. They said that elites and Spartans were evenly matched for the most part, elites believing that it’s suicide to take them on in cqc does not invalidate that. With the brutes, nothing you said changes his point that they are physically stronger than spartans.
Should’ve clarified I meant unarmored Spartans. Elites are about as strong as Spartans without Mjolnir, though they have considerably slower reflexes.
for brutes, it’s been stated they are strong enough to match Mjolnir in terms of strength alone, but they aren’t generally as good in terms of tactics or technique. It’s still pretty bad for a Spartan if an angry brute gets up to their faces though.
Tbh I’d always read it as Elites being on average, marginally weaker than Spartans and *substantially* slower. Spartans hit hard enough to be lethal with hands alone, but their greatest physical attribute is probably speed and reaction time.
I might be off though. Your average elite is getting mopped by your weakest Spartan any day of the week tho.
The fact that Sangheili are even able to contest Spartans physically is already unreasonable, given that they weigh up to 200kg. That's 3-4 times less than an armored Spartan.
The developers don't care about power scaling. Same thing goes for most visual media
Before you ask "why doesn't this character do x y and z" remember they're running on rule of cool or trying to tell a story first.
Elites have been shown to be very capable against Spartans in hand-to-hand, and Brutes are overwhelming.
Master Chief has gotten into his fair share of scraps with both species, and in almost every case he gets bailed out of the stalemate (or in the Brute example from first strike, his life just saved) by a friendly instead of winning himself.
Halo doesn't have anywhere near that level of gore outside of the flood and the engine probably didn't have the ability to replicate that. Else bodies would dismember after a grenade or needler explosion. Also elites shield and armor most likely softened the blow. Theres also a few instances of elites holding for a while against spartans. Edit:When I say halo I mean the games specifically, the EU rarely holds back on gore.
I just went through the Cole protocol and read about Thels first encounter with Spartans. He's lucky Jai didn't kill him and left. But Thel bent a rifle barrel in that fight. Elites are no joke. But neither are Spartans. I believe OPs question is valid and I think your reply is spot on cuz in Ghosts of Onyx, spartan Will either kicked or punched a Hunter in the stomach and it knocked it back or knocked it down and he was able to fight its partner in hand to hand combat for a small bit until his demise. But I suspect in lore, the shields probably slow the punch. In game, probably just engine or they didn't want full gore.
Keep in mind Thel is also a very strong Sangheili in comparison to others. An exception to the rule that Spartans are way stronger than Sangheili. Thel can definitely hold his own, same for Rtas I reckon given he is one of if not the greatest living Sangheili Swordsmen and Commander.
Agreed. And Thel was still "losing" in a melee scuffle/brawl. I think Jai had him but decided to disengage as he had other priorities than fighting 2 elites. Now if he knew who Thel was or would become, he probably would have finished him off but at the time he was just another elite. But I believe OPs question was answered already with the shields in lore dampening a spartan punch and engine capability in game or just they didn't want that level of gore.
Thel likely had a much better harness than lesser elites too. Though a 300 pound elite should not be able to even come close to contesting a 1 ton spartan.
Yeah not in CQB/hand to hand combat.
Spartans are half a ton
Its (kind of) hyperbole. Spartans still weigh 3-4 times that of an elite.
i'm unaware of lore that says the arbiter has much more raw power than the average sangheilli. can you provide the source?
He’s a named character.
IIRC, dismemberment has been cut from three separate Halo games.
Ironic.
Really wishing they would go deep with a gritty, mature game, really show how awful the war got.
Strangely, the garbage tv show got that part right
I enjoyed the show. I could not care any less about the little girls story but I did enjoy the battles. They did the fights really well I thought.
The Pink Mist being a real thing, the Plasma Rifle deleting parts of people, Plasma Pistol exploding a head.
It was a bizzare decison to include the girl. The only audience for that show would have been the generation that played Halo as teens or younger. We're talking almost exclusively white males born in the late 1990s to mid 2000s who are now in their late 20s and early 30s. The Brandenns and Hunters and Kaylans and Jaydens, chugging Mountain Dew, searing the empathy out of brains with Rotten.com. So understandably the show is quite gory and cynical, with the UNSC already occupying its role as a vaguely ominous semi-totalitarian police state that later Halo lore establishes it as. So that part was fine. But child sidekick, what in the heck. Obviously the show producers were trying to emulate the successful formula of pairing a grizzled warrior up with a cute plucky ward, activating a parent-child bond. Famously Halo 2 got an entire generation of these kids online in game chat, where they became well versed in some of the most mercilessly racist dialogue ever developed by the human race, far outstripping the rhetoric of the Axis Powers in the 20th century. So you put an obnoxious Asian teenager in as the sidekick? My guy. Every single comment I read was about how fast people would have executed that girl on the spot if they were Master Chief
Well, it made chief lose character. He is a hardened war vet who has had it pounded into his brain since 6 years old to be always alert and careful. Never letting his guard down except in the safety of a base behind UNSC lines or on a flagship etc... He took his helmet off when this girl had a weapon pointed at his face. Chief would never ever do that. There are a few flaws in the show that really confused me. Like this girls dad. He screamed and started firing his AK and chief somehow didn't hear it when nothing was going on until it was too late? That elite should have been on his sensors and all that. Her story seems very pointless to me. Like I'm not one who would have said "I'd execute that bitch before it even told me" cuz I can see chief trying to save someone who he himself deems not a threat. But he did go completely out of character with her. Not to mention the other lady but that is just funky stuff. The other stuff like the spartan VS spartan melee brawls were cool and the covenant action was dope. I'm excited for season 2.
>He took his helmet off when this girl had a weapon pointed at his face. If I'm remembering correctly, he straight up does this exact thing in one of the more recent books. Pretty sure it was right after the Spartans were stopped in going on a mission when it was discovered they were all 15ish.
I haven't read any recent books unfortunately. I'll get there. Been going through them on audible. I'm on the forerunner trilogy after finishing Cole protocol. Next is K5 trilogy. But that seems way out of character based on what was common in the games and the OG books and such. That situation sounds like they'd only be in the presence of friendly forces/command. Not a known insurgent/resistance fighter...
that just makes the book bad, not the show good master chief at age 15 is fresh out of anti-human indoctrination. at that stage in time he hasn't really had time to think for himself or develop his own sense of morals, he JUST finished his training as a black-ops assassin that specifically targets other humans. characters grow, but not THAT fast. master chief should be nothing less than a completely ruthless, cold-blooded killer at that period in time.
Except that doesn't happen. Where would it make sense to train your child soldiers that know they were kidnapped to hate all humans? Your child soldiers that augmentation alone costs more than the GDP of most outer core planets. That would be equivalent to making nukes with no failsafe. They were trained to complete the mission, and loyalty to the UNSC. Being anti-human would be anti-UNSC. Fall of Reach goes incredibly indepth that Spartans are trained to think for themselves, as they will be required to make decisions that require flexibility. Stopping the Innies is important, but when your choice is killing your target or blowing up a population center, they should know what the proper choice is, even if they fail their mission. This is why Spartans exist beyond the chain of command. They specifically make John-117 a Petty Officer Master Chief so that enlisted soldiers would have to listen to his orders. Spartans only answer to military high command, ONI, and Halsey.
not hate all humans, but to be totally ruthless and cold-hearted. compassion is not a desirable trait in assassins, is this really something that's debatable?
The show was not made for Halo fans but for a wider audience. When it was on (Covid) I only heard “fans” complaining (only games never read the books or any other lore). I had a lot of interesting conversations about the show with non fans though. Old/young, guys/girls, non sci-if fans. It did well overall so I imagine that was a good take overall. The hardcore halo fan base wouldn’t carry a show anymore, they barely can carry a game.
Having read all the books and comics, the show was fine. It was enjoyable, even with some of the more questionable choices. Frankly, they get Chief's characterisation closer to the books than the games do. And much like the books, they appropriately show that the UNSC are not the good guys, they are the lesser of two evils.
Finally someone I can relate to lol. I got the idea that they actually read the books a lot for their inspiration unlike what some people reported.
It’s because the script was for a Mass Effect adaptation but they couldn’t get the rights (because the script fucking sucked) but unfortunately for us Halo was more than willing to slap their name on it with a few changes.
the only good part were the fights, idk how they did it because despite bragging about not playing the games for reference material, they perfectly captured what it's like to fight in the games. scavenging weapons, taking out targets rapidly and exchanging your low ammo weapon for their higher ammo ones, etc. it's like my MCC playthrough right there on the small screen.
I really don't understand how that's a bragging right or anything. Like, why would you not play the games or read the books? Maybe they read the books but still the games are a huge part of the lore and mostly what people know about halo. Why would they refuse? I hate that mentality. It's like the K5 trilogy. Why wouldn't karen traviss read any previous material? She's done the same to star wars and other things like Gears of War... Read the previous material... I haven't gotten to her trilogy yet. Currently listening to the forerunner book primordium so I got some time before K5 but yeah. Amazon needs to get their heads out of their asses with that mentality. Well most directors and writers tbh. The halo show could be soooo much better with only a little bit of tweaking. Same with their LOTR show.
HONESTLY, it's the bare minimum and they bragged about not doing it. what DID they research? they didn't even know the capital city of Reach, it was like a child making up halo lore for the whole series for their Playstation friends who can't play it and verify, when they've only played up to the first Flood encounter of CE and heard vaguely about the rest. the ego of these writers to think their interpretation will be so much better than the source material fans fell in love with that we forget all about it and enjoy theirs is incredible. imagine thinking you can do better than Tolkien without the Silmarillion
It's honestly disgusting. I hate people like that. I almost wish they flopped extremely hard and true fans were able to make a show. Both for LOTR, halo, and I'd love a Mass Effect show... If it was done right.
same, i don't get why it's so difficult as a showrunner/director to just dedicate themselves to something greater than themselves and make a faithful adaptation of these beloved franchises? it seems so painfully simple, all the hard work is p much done for them. how many sub-par and downright awful adaptations have to be negatively received for them to get that it'd be so much more profitable to do a faithful adaptation? general audiences will still enjoy a cool show and fans will have something with deep lore that honors what they fell in love
I agree. Like I'm curious if these adaptations that fail, if they sit there like "oh man how did this fail? Why did everyone hate my show???" or if they shrug and move on... I suspect it's the shrug. Or they say "people just don't know what they want"
Yeah but live action has been doing it pretty right since FUTD
That really reminds me of the Needler explosion being one of the very, very few accurate things and redeeming qualities of the show.
Having explosive headshots would make any Halo game better, a Doom Eternal style gore system would be a dream.
why? I've read so many people that share that sentiment, but what about gratuitous violence and gore in a halo game is so appealing?
Mona Lisa story
Zealots have extremely high-strength shield configurations. So the Zealot’s shield more than likely tanked the blow from Noble 6. Also, Noble 6’s punch force was likely significantly reduced due to his body positioning when he threw the punch lying down. It’s harder to generate substantial force in your punch with minimal room for body rotation, especially on the ground.
And he’s probably tired as fuck unless he was talking about the scene in the first mission and not lone wolf
Pretty sure he's talking about Winter Contingency.
When Noble was debriefing Halsey at the end of the mission, Six did emphasize their shield strength! That would make a lot of sense, I think
Hitting someone with a car doesn’t make their limbs explode off their body. Spartans aren’t Superman strong
Hitting someone with a car is nothing close to a Spartan’s punch. Chief caved in a man’s skull at 14 with no armor. Mr John Reach should have been able to liquify that elite’s head.
Yeah and Tom B292 and the rest of Beta company were overpowering elites and snapping their limbs and necks with ease at age 12. But throwing a punch from a prone position is far less powerful than a standing picb with proper form. In short, No.. he wouldn't
No
Nowhere in any of the lore has any Spartan done that kind of damage to an Elite or Brute with a melee attack. Even the one instant of William supposedly killing a Hunter by punching it through the gut is extremely debatable, since nowhere in the text of the story is it actually specified that that attack killed it. Spartans readily do that kind of damage to humans, Grunts, or Kig-Yar. But never Brutes or Elites. Naomi supposedly breaking a Brute’s spine with a punch to the back of the neck(?), A) is actually something that regular humans can do to one another, and B) didn’t dismember the Brute. Then again: Traviss’s books were cringe from top to bottom, anyway, so I hardly hold up her fight scenes as being representative of anything.
There is an insane feat in halo envoy with a spartan shoulder charging an elite and sending them flying 60m away. It's regarded as a ridiculous high end. I also remember in rubicon protocol where an injured stone punched a brute in his armored stomach so hard the novel states she turned his insides to mush.
She disemboweled him by driving his armor through his abdomen. Spartans being able to knock Elites that far through the air is actually pretty well in line with their feats. They’re much stronger than everything except for Brutes and Hunters. They’re still, on average, good bit stronger than Brutes as well.
I'll never forget that time masterchief sent a banshee flying into the horizon with a single punch in shadows of reach, aint even the craziest feat in the book lol.
> She disemboweled him by driving his armor through his abdomen. To be fair, it's still also hardened metal plating. If Stone can punch their body armor with enough force to splinter it into tiny pieces, she's probably strong enough to do it to a brute's skull too.
I completely agree. It wasn’t a refutation, I just wanted to add some context. I think Spartans have demonstrated sufficient strength to gib enemies to the point that it’s really not arguable if they *could*, it’s just not really what the presentation is going for. If you have sufficient strength to fairly easily snap a limb while said limb is also protected by advance strength amplifying armor, as is the case with Spartans engaging Elites the overwhelming majority of the time, you logically have the strength to twist and straight up tear it off. In one of the books the Master Chief is quoted as ‘turning (an) Elite’s skull to dust’, which lines up with the OP’s question on being able to take a head off with a punch. They certainly can, but even the notoriously more violent novels do try to keep the violence at a serviceable level without going overboard. That said, if we ever got another campaign featuring the Flood, and if assassinations were to make a return, I imagine you’d get a pretty good visual representation of exactly what a Spartan can do to a body there. Edit: You may have whooshed me with the quote from ‘The Flood’, unless I’m thinking of a different example.
>Nowhere in any of the lore has any Spartan done that kind of damage to an Elite or Brute with a melee attack. John very explicitly does that in [The Flood](https://pastebin.com/KPriwwV2). Beyond that, Spartans have also demonstrated sufficient strength to rip the arm off a promethean knight and smash apart promethean armigers and I doubt that elite and brute bones are intended to be substantially more durable than promethean armor. >Even the one instant of William supposedly killing a Hunter by punching it through the gut is extremely debatable, since nowhere in the text of the story is it actually specified that that attack killed it. That blow not being what killed the hunter does not preclude Will from having punched through the hunter's abdomen.
Wait so this whole time the flood has had a feat of chief just one punching and crushing an elites skull and am just hearing of it?
I'm pretty positive they are misremembering when Chief gets in a scuffle with an Elite and shoved a full charge plasma pistol into the Elite's mouth and turns his head into ash. Though I'm currently listening to the Flood on Scribd so if this punching a head clean off happens I'll edit and make note of the chapter.
Nah he has a link directly to the quote in his post. Chief jumps a squad of elite guards kills some with a grenade and then punches another's head crushing it and then he flips a warthog.
>Even the one instant of William supposedly killing a Hunter by punching it through the gut is extremely debatable It's not that it's debatable, what you described just isn't what happened: Will dodges around their blows in melee combat and gets onto one of their backs and just digs into the worms and starts to tear them out. It's less a punch and more disemboweling
Gotta say I haven't found a Halo novel I enjoyed since Mortal Dictata and even that was a bit of a slog. Nobody seems to know what direction the overall story is supposed to be going in, every time it feels like it might be building towards something it fizzles out and they try something new, but worse. Rinse and repeat.
Because the halo games don't giga wank Spartans to absolutely stupid levels of power like the books do. In the games elites and Spartans are roughly equal with elites having the edge in some areas, while Spartans edge out elites in other areas. The only character that is better than all the elites an brutes is the MC spartan who is usually not stronger, or more durable he's just incredibly efficient in firefights.
That's why I like the games more lol. This is HALO, not 40k.
It was a zealot, his shields could easily eat that punch
Are zealots really that strong to take a punch to the face like that without his shields ?
It still had its shields. Carter kicks it off Six then Kat shoots it repeatedly, at which point it loses its shields.
If your talking about the scene in the first mission what have to remember is not only do Zealots have stronger shields but 6 was also on his back trying to deliver a right hook. Doubt that the most optimal position for punching.
Why didn't John Reach just survive like the mission words said? Is he stupid?
Listening to earlier halo books like fall of reach, Cole protocol ect, the spartans and elites seem more evenly matched. I remember chief boarding a covenant ship and barely winning a hand to hand when they first discovered the elites In cole protocol a spartan charges Thel, forcing into a wall, this breaks a few ribs, but they're still evenly matched to the point where they both disengage and the spartan runs.
That fight usually gets taken out of context, IIRC the Elite Chief struggled with was a meter taller than him or something, so it would have been around 11-12' tall. That is FAR out of the average of most Elites.
i don't think Spartans can really "punch a head off", it's not really how biology and physics work unless it was a corpse attached to an immovable pole. the kinetic energy would sooner liquify the brain or the fist would just cave straight through the skull than pop a whole head off the neck. organic bodies of flesh have a remarkable ability to stay in one piece while insides rupture
Spartans are just barely on equal footing against elites strength wise, but much faster, in the EU chief gets into hand to hand combat and comments that an elites muscles were like solid iron . Add that with armor and shields to make one tough alien species.
They are but Sangheili are INCREDIBLY durable in the lore. There muscle density is on par with spartans afaik. (Games stray from this typically, like Forge fighting the Arbiter in HW) in reality an unaugmented human punching a Sangheili would do next to nothing. Any human comes in melee range with an elite the ONLY thing saving them is a Spartan or a well placed blade or bullet in a vital organ. That being said no N6s punch would not explode any elites head, even without shields, even if he threw his whole hip into it. Spartans have never had Superman strength.
Forge is a Spartan I, so he definitely can go hand to hand with your average Elite and come out on top. Arbiters are not inherently special beyond getting a stay of execution until they die on a suicide mission.
The only reason a spartan can even contest an elite is because of their armour And you reckon forge was able to do so without?
Had he been standing, proper form and the Elite took a full force punch? Maybe not explode into purple mist, but a Spartan would cave in an Elites skull at a minimum
This is why playable elites shouldn't be a thing They're so weak, obviously they'll lose every match to the Spartans
The average Elite sure, but the peak of the species can at least kind of measure up. Thel fought a Spartan to a draw pre schism, and there was that like 12 foot tall Elite that almost killed John.
That’s way too powerful for a Spartan, if they could just much heads off they wouldn’t need most weapons.
Strength doesn't mean much if you can't reach you're enemy? A spartan can a hundred percent gib many covenant foes but fighting enemies that can do alot of damage to you with there weapons in cqc is well stupid. We literally have feats of spartans tearing titanium apart with there bare hands and shattering concrete pillars.
Elites are pretty strong themselves. Pretty much evenly matched with Spartans in some instances. On top of being quite durable compared to simple unaugmented humans, That elite was a Zealot, which get pretty high-quality gear and have stronger shielding. Many books give a more "accurate" depiction of how 1v1s go between Spartans and the alien species: Elites and Spartans: Evenly matched for the most part. Brutes and Spartans: Brutes are physically stronger. (A single brute jobber almost killed Chief in cqc during First Strike; and blue team had plenty of close calls during Shadows of Reach. Atriox 1v3'd Red team, and beat Chief during Infinite's prologue) Hunters and Spartans: Save for very few rare instances, a Hunter will easily overpower Spartans. Grunts/Jackals/Drones/the rest vs Spartans: Spartans will beat the shit out of them unless they have no shields, in which case they get bodied by virtue of Plasma weapons tearing through Mjolnir.
This isn't true. The average elite has consistently been portrayed as significantly weaker than a Spartan. In Ghosts of Onyx, the IIIs in SPI are massacring a Covenant army in CQC, with even Elites believing it's suicide to take on the Spartans in CQC. As for the Brutes, the examples you cited are missing context. Chief in First Strike was injured, exhausted, at his limits per his own words, and in armour that was quite literally falling apart. Even then, the Brute had to ambush him. Atriox is also a freak amongst Brutes, and it should be noted that even he had to ambush a Red Team fresh out of cryo and in outdated armour and keep them off balance to win through use of Chainbreaker. When he fought the Chief, he ambushed him and landed a debilitating direct blow on his torso with his hammer, which left him groaning and struggling to get up. Hunters are the only race that are definitively stronger than Spartans, but Spartans compensate through cunning, speed, agility and tactics.
And Hunters are only stronger as a composite entity. The individual worms don’t appear in the games, but wouldn’t be any threat without Covenant armor and weapons.
Well yeah, hence why I said Hunters (Mgalekgolo) and not hunter worms (Lekgolo). Though I’d argue even without armor they’d be physically stronger than any Spartan since their strength comes from the structural formation that comes with weaving colonies of worms into what’s essentially a big mass of really dense muscle tissue.
Dude, you’re coping. They said that elites and Spartans were evenly matched for the most part, elites believing that it’s suicide to take them on in cqc does not invalidate that. With the brutes, nothing you said changes his point that they are physically stronger than spartans.
Should’ve clarified I meant unarmored Spartans. Elites are about as strong as Spartans without Mjolnir, though they have considerably slower reflexes. for brutes, it’s been stated they are strong enough to match Mjolnir in terms of strength alone, but they aren’t generally as good in terms of tactics or technique. It’s still pretty bad for a Spartan if an angry brute gets up to their faces though.
Tbh I’d always read it as Elites being on average, marginally weaker than Spartans and *substantially* slower. Spartans hit hard enough to be lethal with hands alone, but their greatest physical attribute is probably speed and reaction time. I might be off though. Your average elite is getting mopped by your weakest Spartan any day of the week tho.
He just built different.
I always thought Elites were about on par with Spartans, at least physically
The fact that Sangheili are even able to contest Spartans physically is already unreasonable, given that they weigh up to 200kg. That's 3-4 times less than an armored Spartan.
The developers don't care about power scaling. Same thing goes for most visual media Before you ask "why doesn't this character do x y and z" remember they're running on rule of cool or trying to tell a story first.
They were just playin
Elites have been shown to be very capable against Spartans in hand-to-hand, and Brutes are overwhelming. Master Chief has gotten into his fair share of scraps with both species, and in almost every case he gets bailed out of the stalemate (or in the Brute example from first strike, his life just saved) by a friendly instead of winning himself.