A highly-trained branch of the UNSC known as the Noble Team must defend the planet of Reach from a massive Covenant invasion.
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Zoom in with any weapon that doesn't have a proper scope and look at the bottom-left of the screen. There's a scrap of binary code sitting there that, once decoded, just spells out the name 'Dave.' Nobody's ever nailed down who Dave actually is, which somehow makes it funnier.
Look closely at the base of the shotgun's handle in first person and there's a tiny face moulded into the design. It's the kind of detail an artist slips in knowing full well most players are too busy shooting things to notice.
Fire the DMR enough times in a row and every so often a shot will come out gold instead of the usual tracer colour. Whatever it hits lights up with a little glow for a moment afterward. It doesn't do anything extra damage-wise, it's purely a cosmetic surprise for anyone burning through a lot of ammo.
While guarding the Falcon during New Alexandria, keep listening and you'll catch Sergeant Buck's voice chiming in over the radio, on loan from ODST. He also shows up as one of the selectable Firefight voices, so his lines followed the game long after the campaign wrapped.
Tucked away in Winter Contingency is a tiny, scaled-down Skirmisher model that takes two players working together to actually reach. Once the civilians clear out of the building near your objective, a crouch-jump onto a ledge gets you close enough to spot it.
The Package hides one of the campaign's most involved secrets: a whole sequence of steps that leads to a concealed lab belonging to Dr. Halsey. Find it and you're rewarded with seven terminals worth of extra story, which is a lot of effort for something most players will completely walk past.
Fire up your jet pack and hover in place, then flip over to Theater mode and take a look. There's a tiny painted Hornet graphic on the pack itself, a nod to the vehicle from earlier Halo games that never made it into Reach as a flyable ride.
Pick up the bomb in Assault and there's a chance it'll have something scrawled on the casing. It rotates through a handful of lines, including 'Thus I Refute Thee' and 'Kiss It Goodbye,' a running gag that Bungie carried across three games rather than just the one.
Bungie's original plan after Halo 3 was to wrap the trilogy up properly with a Halo 4. They scrapped that in favour of a prequel instead, mostly because it let them build something with a clean slate rather than being on the hook to tie up every loose thread left dangling from Halo 3's ending.
There was a point in development where New Alexandria was supposed to end with Noble Team hijacking a Covenant Scarab and driving it straight out of the burning city, with the player actually piloting the thing. It got cut, and honestly the final version of that mission is intense enough without it.
