The weapons are not meant to destroy the Flood directly. However, when he’s eventually reunited with Cortana, it turns out that the Halo rings are not what they first seemed. He quickly sets about trying to activate the ring in the hopes that it will end the threat posed by the Flood. Master Chief is then met by a Forerunner AI known as 343 Guilty Spark, who explains that the Halo ring was built to contain and destroy the Flood by the Forerunners. The Flood is a terrifying parasitic life form under the control of a hive mind intelligence with the only goal of infecting all sentient life. Pursued by Covenant vessels, the Pillar of Autumn arrives at a previously unknown structure later dubbed Installation 04, just one of seven Halo rings scattered throughout the galaxy.Īs Master Chief, Cortana, and the ship’s crew begin to explore the mysterious structure after crash landing, they discover that the attacking Covenant has released an even greater threat. Master Chief is onboard the UNSC ship Pillar of Autumn, which just made a random jump into slipstream space as it fled the Covenant attack on the planet Reach.
The first game in the series is set in 2552, with humanity becoming ever more desperate as the Covenant wins many decisive victories and begins to close in on Earth. Halo: Combat Evolved – The Discovery Of Installation 04 Halo 1 They worship the Forerunners, an extinct ancient civilization that built the Halo rings and is responsible for much of the technology that the various alien species use. Along with the Elites and Prophets, the Covenant is made up of Grunts, Jackals, Engineers, Hunters, Drones, and Brutes. Led by the Prophets, they view humanity as a heresy that must be wiped out and go to war with the UNSC in an attempt to destroy every human planet. The Arbiter is a disgraced but highly skilled Elite and part of the Convent, a group of alien species that have formed alliances to work together.
This can make AI incredibly unstable and lead them to break free of their programming or even harm their creators. Cortana has more sentience and free will compared to other AI but a limitation of this extra processing power is that she’ll eventually think herself to death in a process that is called rampancy. She accompanies Master Chief on his various missions and is implanted in his head via a chip. Halsey, who was responsible for creating the Spartans and Master Chief.
The other major character is Cortana, an artificial intelligence modeled on Dr. For the most part, Master Chief acts as the protagonist and is the character that players assume control of the majority of the time in the five main Halo titles. The character is essentially an elite special forces commando who works for the United Nations Space Command, sent on dangerous missions across the galaxy. The controversial Spartan program produced dozens of these warriors, though only a few survive by the time the first game gets underway. The main character throughout all of the Halo games is Master Chief, also known as John-117, a cybernetically enhanced human who went through a series of physical and mental augmentations as a child.