8 Biggest Differences Between The Show And The Games

The conclusion of the first season of Paramonut Plus' Halo series means we can stop and take stock of the whole thing. We can look at the ways the show remained true to the source material and the ways in which it really didn't. Given that this show's narrative takes place in the "Silver" timeline, a timeline completely removed from the canon events of the games and books, it makes sense that plenty of facets would be different.

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However, there are clearly areas of the show that massively deviated from what a Halo fan would expect to see in a narrative that stems from the lore that started with Halo: Combat Evolved. Read on if you want to check out the major differences between what we get in the games and what we see in this show.

8 Master Chief Regularly Shows His Face

Even though it has become a bit of a joke that Master Chief never shows his face in the games, it's a large part of what makes the Chief's character who he is. Master Chief is all about protecting humanity and finishing fights. He doesn't have time to whip off his helmet every chance he can get. The Master Chief we see in the Paramount Plus show, on the other hand, always does. More often than not, you're going to be looking at John's face rather than the Master Chief's helmet when you watch an episode. The series tries to tackle John coping with his stolen childhood and mysterious connection to ancient artifacts, and it might have been thought that showcasing his emotions on a face would be a good route to take. Whether or not that's true is largely up to you.

7 A Human Working With The Covenant Prophets

This change is actually a very interesting one. In the games, humans have a connection to Forerunners. We are "Reclaimers." As such, when the Covenant hierarchs want to activate a Halo ring, they always capture a human in order to make the Forerunner machinery work. The show reveals that the Prophets are aware that a human is handy to have for this reason, so they keep and protect Makee, a displaced human woman who is called the "Blessed One" by the Covenant.

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Having a human willingly working alongside the Covenant when they are at the height of their anti-human crusade is not something that has been done in the games, and it's an intriguing premise that was sadly cut short during the show's season finale.

6 Blue Team's Identity

Blue Team is Master Chief's original team of Spartans from way back during his training and the fall of Reach. Fred, Kelly, and Linda are notable presences in the books, several comics, and Halo 5: Guardians. In the show, they are replaced by Kai, Vannak, and Riz, three Spartans who seemingly fill in the shoes of Blue Team but under the name of Silver Team. They have different story arcs in the show than their counterparts in the game, and if the TV series continues, we'll hopefully see if their development progresses further than just being cookie cutter Blue Team replacements.

5 Room-Spying Technology

The Halo universe is home to many astounding feats of sci-fi ingenuity. There's Slipspace technology that allows ships FTL travel, plasma weaponry, Mjolnir armor, all that jazz. And while the show displays these wonders of fictional technology to great effect, it also introduces a new thing that is puzzling in its implications. In the Paramount Plus series, some characters can essentially spy on a room by sitting on these fancy chairs and placing these metallic balls on their heads. This allows them to become apparitions in a room. Anyone using these chairs can see each other standing in the room, but people who are actually in the room can't see them.

4 John And Makee's Connection To Halo

In the games, humans in general have a special ability to interact with a Halo's controls thanks to their Reclaimer status. In the show, the group of people with a connection to Halo is much more exclusive. Both Makee and John are the only ones shown so far to have this deeper relationship with the Halo installation. It is still unclear what this relationship is and why it only affects a select amount of people. As it stands, Makee and John are the only ones able to activate the artifacts that can show the way to a Halo ring.

3 Halsey's On The Run

Dr. Halsey's actions in creating the Spartan program are criminal and unethical; that goes without saying. She kidnaps children, trains and experiments on them, and replaces them with flash-clones that die in a matter of weeks. She does this in both the games and the show. However, she is held accountable for these actions a lot sooner in the show than she ever was in the games.

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Game-wise, when the Covenant attacked, no one in the UNSC or ONI bothered to accuse Catherine of anything due to how valuable her skill set and Spartans were to the war effort. The show dispenses with this plot point by making their Halsey a scapegoat for other government officials. By the end of this first season, Halsey is on the run from the law even though the war is still going on.

2 The Covenant Don't Speak English

Halo 2 introduced the nuances of the Covenant to fans for the first time. We got to see what things were like on the other side, with bickering Grunts, politically-maneuvering Prophets, and honor-bound Elites. Explaining what the Covenant was like to players was made easier by having the Covenant speak English during cutscenes. The TV series does away with this and gives the Covenant their own language, which admittedly makes more sense from a logical perspective.

1 The Spartans Rebel

A huge portion of the show is devoted to Master Chief figuring out what was done to him at the hands of Catherine Halsey. He finds out he was stolen from his home and parents by her and turned into the super-soldier he now is. This makes him understandably angry, as it does with Kai when she finds out the same things. In the games, this is an event that has never happened. For the most part, the Spartans remain duty-driven, focused on performing any task that is given to them.

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