Halo's Banished Spartans Explained

While the Halo franchise owes a lot of its success to the huge technical and gameplay-related leaps that it made within the industry, the IP can also attribute a lot of its longevity to the captivating setting and lore that flows through its narratives. Of course, the mainline titles for the franchise can only portray so much of this, with the wider IP nourishing huge amounts of extended information that is ripe for inclusion in any future projects.

The narrative of the most recent release for the franchise, Halo Infinite, had some massive implications for the major antagonist forces that have come to define the franchise, with a new faction called the Banished now being major mainline players. The Banished are essentially set to take over from the likes of the Covenant and Prometheans in Halo going forward, and recent expansions to the franchise’s lore have introduced the fascinating concept of human Spartan super-soldiers joining the Banished’s ranks.

Halo Infinite Player Gives Their Spartan a Borderlands-Themed Makeover

A Halo Infinite player online gets creative to transform their multiplayer Spartan into an enemy type found in the Borderlands series.

Banished Spartans Take Halo Infinite’s Major Antagonist Group a Step Further

The Banished were introduced to the mainline narrative of the Halo franchise with 2021’s Halo Infinite, with the imposing faction having roots as far back as 2017’s Halo Wars 2. Halo Infinite was an ambitious game in many of its core aspects, opting away from more linear missions in favor of an open world and straying even further from the Covenant as the main antagonist faction of the franchise.

Following the events of Halo 3 and the defeat of the Covenant, the franchise has been slowly turning more towards other major enemy factions, with Halo 4 famously introducing a new enemy race known as the Prometheans. While the Prometheans arc back to factions and conflicts that pre-exist the human-Covenant war by around 100,000 years, the Banished are a much more recent group that is directly tied to the Covenant itself.

The Banished are a mercenary group that broke away from the dying stages of the Covenant Empire, largely led and formed by Jiralhanae warriors, otherwise known as Brutes. As showcased in Halo Infinite, the Banished are led by an imposing Jiralhanae named Atriox, with the faction forming due to the mounting losses faced by the Covenant during a time of great injury and insult to the Jiralhanae under Covenant rule.

Halo’s Banished Spartans May Pose a Serious Threat Going Forward

Due to their prior allegiances, the Banished use a wide range of Covenant equipment and vehicles, as well as Forerunner technology, with many alien species within the Covenant appearing in the ranks of the Banished. Unlike the Covenant, however, the Banished hold no regard for interspecies hierarchy or feuds, allowing races of all kinds into their ranks as long as they submit to the will of Atriox. This fascinatingly means that humans are free to join the Banished, a feat that would have been impossible under Covenant rule, giving the Banished one distinct advantage over its old faction.

Recent Halo Chronicles have detailed how an original Spartan-IV named Ilsa Zane was recruited into the ranks of the Banished. With knowledge of Spartan genetic augmentation and power armor, an Outer Colony planet named Venezia began a program dedicated to the transformation of unwilling children into Spartan super-soldiers, with this next generation of killing machines being sold to the highest bidder. The Banished, as a mercenary group without reservations against human involvement, is the primary candidate for use of these new super-soldiers, giving way to a concerning number of Banished Spartan soldiers that seem likely to make a big splash in the future narratives of the Halo franchise.