An Ceannaire said:
You're failing to understand Jul's motivations and his capacity as a leader. Jul learnt a lot from his time fighting humanity, and even as leader of the largest Covenant remnant he knows he has no chance of beating humanity conventionally (especially while they remain allied with the Arbiter's forces). That's why - through a combination of very good and very bad luck - Jul ended up pursuing the Forerunners in order to acquire the means of defeating his foes. There's good reason to believe that Jul doesn't even worship the Forerunners any more. He respects them, but unlike most of the Loyalists in his forces, he doesn't consider them Gods. That said, to retain the support of the zealots and religious nuts in his forces, he probably pretends he does.
So in essence, the faction consists of idiots being lead by a person who's betting his life on the chance that the Forerunners aren't going to cast him aside. Frankly, I don't know much about Jul at all, because he's not in Halo 4 and I'll be damned if I go too deep in to detail with their stories, but my issue is that the general soldiers worship The Didact despite Halo 2 and Halo 3 hammering that Forerunner technology leads to the umpteenth Flood outbreak or it leads to your destruction, as it lead to the Forerunner's own destruction. I take issue with them wanting to associate themselves with the faction that betrayed them in their own lifetime (like, less than 15 years ago at this point?)
What was wrong with the terminals?
They manage to be more mechanical and expository than the text based ones from Halo 3. The Heretic Leader becomes just a shell of what he was in Halo 2 (and he was shallow as a puddle as a character anyway). They're hollow, and frankly some of them take away from the games they've been put in to. 343 Guilty Spark sending a message to the Pillar of Autumn seems interesting for instance, but that opens up many questions as to why nobody tried contacting him before he just finds the Chief at the Flood research facility. It made sense in the original game, because nobody had seen him before he finds the Chief.
Well, I don't think any Halo media since 343i took over the franchise has intentionally shit on the original trilogy. But Bungie shouldn't be held up as the paragons of storytelling. They left huge holes and contradictions in their canon, and Halo 3's ending left very little room for 343i to do much within the confines of the existing lore. It was a case of go big or go home. 343i went big, and while I'll readily admit that I disagree with some of the things they have introduced to the Halo universe, overall I'm glad that a company with genuine interest in telling a story embedded in a rich and complex universe is at the helm of Halo today.
Also, there's a good chance the Spirit of Fire will become relevant again in the Halo lore soon.
I don't hold Bungie in some majorly high regard for storytelling. All of the Halo games and most of the books they monitored have relatively simple stories (probably because they're not sure how to do a greatly character driven story or something). That's why so much was left in intrigue. Where Bungie excelled was the small lines and bits here and there. Casually mentioning that Mercy counselled Truth to spare Regret, or the somewhat saddening description of the battle between Offensive and Mendicant Bias as the occupiers of the fleet died during the Halo firing were both nice, small things added to flesh out something so bare bones.
I certainly hold Bungie higher than the creature that was cut off from them, though. A group of fans who for the most part have been spending their time padding out aspects of the universe that didn't need expanding on[footnote]For clarification, I think Origins which IIRC was unrelated to 343 was also over explanation of what we didn't need to know.[/footnote]. If Bungie couldn't handle a big universe, their underlings certainly can't. If the case was for them to go big or go home, I think 343 failed. Instead of making the potential universe more rich, they overstuffed it with pointless information and twists, and then later filled the post original canon full of stuff that's over reliant on the books.
I certainly hope the Spirit of Fire doesn't come back. I know it was left purposely ambiguous in Halo Wars, but it will feel way too convenient that the Spirit of Fire is only rediscovered after everyone already knows the valuable information they obtained.
