I watched the first episode. I'm out. It's a dumpster fire. Visually, the show is spot on in terms of everything looking right for the most part. Sadly, it's a CGI ****show. Beyond that, they got the Masterchief's character wrong. I can understand taking some artistic license with the story and even the characters to some degree. However, they are so off the mark its almost unrecognizable.
It's Halo fan-fiction. It's trash.
Bummer. I know you are a die-hard fan and I truly respect you on that. This, and Mass Effect, are two games I know that you have an incredulous amount of time and energy invested in so I trust everything you have to say on it. For what it's worth, I felt the exact same way about X-Men First Class and Dark Phoenix, even while the former reignited that franchise and the ladder finished it. At that time (First Class), I ranted and raved about all the changes Singer made with the characters that, for me, made them almost unrecognizable.
I think at the end of the day I'm so desperate to see sci-fi I'll give just about anything a shot and since I'm not invested in the game I don't have the background to compare it with. After so many, many, years of TV sci-fi where the majority of the characters are on earth, everything either looks shot in LA or Vancouver, and the cast are all either looking like grunge bands from the 90s, or sporting Gucci suits with blasters and glowing eyes, I've lowered the bar just to see things happen space.
What usually kills it for me is the endless will-they won't-they crap and then the usual sub-plots with obvious conclusions and rehashed season-long story arcs. For those reasons, I rarely make it beyond a 1st season with many shows. For now, we'll keep watching this but who knows how I'll feel by the time it's done. I couldn't even count how many shows we started out liking only to drop a few eps into the first or second season.
We watched the third ep last night and there are a number of obvious twists developing so I'm not sure how long until we get bored. We liked it but you never know when the writers will get lazy for easy ways out instead of going deeper with some concepts. The dynamic between Halsey/Cortana/Master Chief is interesting but that can be a tough beast to write. Sort of like writing to telepaths, and such. One moment they sense everything and the next they can't find an itch to scratch on the $$$.