Hard to say if I like the story here more than the first Halo Wars. The Banished are a hell of a lot more intriguing a villian than the Covenant were and playing as them in the flood DLC was fun and actually made me connect to them more than I thought it would. Still though, knowing these are the enemies in Halo: Infinite makes me really confused why they were introduced in this game. The overlap of people who play main-series Halo titles and ones that play this seem not that big, and risks connecting their story to a game that most people probably haven't played. Having played this before going into Infinite, it'll be interesting to see how they handle introducing the Banished for all the people that didn't play this game.