Are cosmetics truly useless?

Games Halo: The Master Chief Collection
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Since Halo 3, Spartan customization has been a welcome addition to Halo. Given Halo’s design ethos of equal starts, each armor piece is purely cosmetic. What you wear, despite the armor description has no effect on gameplay. But even if it doesn’t provide any benefits, isn’t it still fun to personalize your avatar to your own style? I didn’t crunch the numbers, but I’d wager there’s well over a billion unique armor permutations in Halo 3 alone. You would be very hard pressed to find someone who just happens to be wearing the same set (of course friends can coordinate sets). Gameplay or not, armor is very useful in distinguishing myself in a sea of fellow Spartans each unlike the next.

Its clear that a large majority of the community finds customization to be a staple element of Halo and would applaud any means to make it easier for new players to collect season points faster. In a world without seasons I hope 343 finds a solution to ease the arbitrary time gating of all unlockables.

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What certain people don’t seem to understand is that, while cosmetics don’t do anything other than make your Spartan look unique, they are fun to obtain and show off.

In Halo 3, what you wore, you wore with pride because you earned them through achievements (or by impressing Bungie for certain Recon wearers). Before I got Recon, I was ecstatic that I had finally splattered someone with the Mongoose thus earning me the Scout shoulders. And I had those on for the longest of times to show I had done it.

In Halo: Reach, what you wore resembled how many hours, days, weeks, and months, you had spent playing the game. It showed the other 7-15 players in the lobby that you liked playing the game.

What someone wears in a game, they wear because they like it or that they put time and effort into getting it whether it be through Season Points or achievements. Unfortunately though this is a concept that has been lost in recent Halo titles and I hope that one day 343i sees sense and brings these methods back.

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All cosmetics should do is make you look a certain way. However I do support how there should be some cosmetics that are unlocked only one way as a way to show off I suppose or more so as a way for players to earn something. I don’t like how it’s going to how every one can get every cosmetic. I especially don’t care for the very over priced cosmetics in Infinite. I miss the days of if you completed something you were awarded something. But I guess that is just the tide of gaming now a days.

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I think people really mean cosmetics don’t change the game mechanics when saying it doesn’t change gameplay. Cuz they do affect the experience to a degree.

An extreme example would be imagine having a skin for Mario or Link from Nintendo games instead of a spartan, but no changes to the shields, health, movement, etc. Sure it doesn’t affect how you move and shoot, but would be so out of place it would detract from halo continuing to be halo.

So I wouldn’t say they’re useless. As long as it’s consistent within the universe, they present a great way to personalize your experience. I wish they would make a few adjustments for starting customization (esp. color cough cough) and some of them to be achievement based that you do something specific to earn in addition to the store. IMO Halo 3 armors generally had more meaning/value because of that

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I agree with this right here. I extend this notion to the armors released alongside season 8 in the MCC. While they may not be as extreme as the examples you provided, I still believe that they are too far out of the realm of what Halo is and what Halo looks like, and firmly stand by the opinion that they don’t belong at all.

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I’d argue cosmetics are not useless at all.

While it’s true that there are no gameplay elements, I believe there are interesting psychological impacts. Back in Halo 3 (original Xbox 360, not MCC) you could look at what someone was wearing and assume a lot about them.

I personally found those that wore the default Mark VI were often noobs or better players (just had to check their rank). Usually emulating those in MLG tournaments / montages.

Additionally it helps lend a certain level of credibility to things going on in game, as you can compare how long someone has played or what they’ve accomplished. Even where their armor tastes lie and what that may mean about the player.

I wore Mark VI in Halo: Reach because I wore it in Halo 3, and (in the end) I wore it in Halo 3 because that’s what I felt the better players at the time were doing, and that’s what I wore in Halo 2 (albeit without a choice). It helped highlight my “veteran” status in both games as I have been playing for a very long time. Again this is all speculative and silly - but in the end games are supposed to be silly and fun. I continued to wear Mark VI in Halo 4, 5, and wear it in Infinite as well.

From a modern perspective, they are a common piece of modern gaming. The fact that we as Halo players are lucky enough to keep engaging with our favorite games in new and interesting ways is amazing. This can only help to grow the playerbase, and dissuading players from engaging with cosmetics if they want to does a disservice to the Halo community. (I know that is not the point of this thread.)

That said, going forward I would prefer that new armor be grounded in the universe. The ORION set was awesome to see! And the SPI armor too. However, now that 343i have Fractures in Infinite, anything else added to MCC likely may be Fracture related as well (i.e. Season 8).

Yes!!! I seriously had dreams about unlocking the Scout shoulders before I did (probably was playing too much back then haha.) But that was one of my happiest days in Halo 3. I remember I got mine on Isolation!

Apologies for the length of this post! I had more that I cut out, and likely should summarize further, haha. But this was a great topic!

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All of whatever unlockable content you are referring to is indeed useless. None of it will affect your gameplay experience in any way at all. I assure you that no-one is actually examining whatever “armor” you happen to have wasted your time obtaining; they’re simply trying to kill you or - in objective-based games - bypassing you altogether in order to score.

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@JB_Linken Your comment about psychological impact has got me thinking. I can relate to and understand what you mean, just in a slightly different way.

Several years ago when I used to play OG Reach before it was available on the MCC, I used to get an almost sinking type feeling when I’d see that I had matched with people who had achieved the Inheritor rank. Particularly if there were several of them. Now I know that rank was mostly a reflection of how long you had played (considering that the grind in Reach to Inheritor was very long), and didn’t necessarily mean that you were super skilled just because you got there, but it still used to affect me when I’d see it. It would make me almost anxious that I was in for a tough game or, possibly worse, an -Yoink!- whooping lol. I should add that this was long before I had reached max rank too. Over time I slowly stopped feeling that way with the more I played and the better I got, but it was very real for a while there.

Maybe it’s not a big thing, and perhaps it’s something that some of us might do subconsciously (whether it be armor, rank, or something else entirely), but you certainly make an interesting point with that statement.

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Myself as well as others in this thread have provided ample reasoning how customization doesn’t have to impact gameplay to be useful. As long as players have fun customizing their avatar that’s all that really matters. Achievements don’t have any gameplay benefits, but you still chase after them. Would you consider achievements equally useless?

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There is also 4 and Reach putting a narrative focus on a character that is essentially “Us”, the multiplayer spartan, our spartan, whom we choose to make look as we wants with the pieces of gear and colour combinations.

4 did this with the Spartan Ops Side Story, as Fireteams Crimson, Reach’s Noble 6 is the obvious example too.

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When I have bought a game that I enjoy, I will play it to its fullest extent. Halo and MCC definitely falls into this category. I have put more hours into Halo, than I would like to say. And I have unlocked more than most ever will.

The hate for H5 REQ packs, didn’t bother me. Why? Because, I unlocked everything, by just playing the game. It was possible. REQ points earned, bought REQ packs. Sure, it was random, but there were no repeats on essential unlocks, you will eventually unlock everything. At no cost.

As I unlocked items, sure, I changed my look. I wasn’t necessary, but for fun.

Now with Infinite, I’m happy with the default, or the freebies I get for playing. The same reason I still enjoy MCC custom game browser games. I just love playing Halo.

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Most of the achievements are indeed useless and mean nothing - only a select few like the LASO and a few of speed run ones actually mean something in that the player is skilled enough to have completed the games under those extremely challenging settings. Most are just gotten through regular gameplay. Of course the accompanying gamer score received from them is useless as well. In any event it takes no skill to get any of the armor, you could lose every game and have a massively negative k/d yet still eventually get it all.

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And yet no one points out how useless achievements. In fact everyone provides advice and strategy on how to obtain them. Nobody on these forums expects armor to work any different from gamerscore. Some nameplates and skins are associated with certain challenges which do signify skill. Even the LASO achievements are associated with a nameplate albeit a crappy one. Discussions like that don’t need to be reduced to a nihilistic nothing matters don’t bother discussing rant because that’s not what these forums are about.

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You’re off-topic. This post was about the useless armor, I don’t know how the achievements were brought into this discussion. If you’d like to debate the value of the useless armor against the mostly useless achievements please create a new thread.

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Armour can be used as psychological warfare against other players like Achilles in Halo 5 or Haunted in Reach because of the grinding you’d have to do. Although this isn’t a issue it is interesting to see how people when they see high tier armours like these play worse because they perceive the players using these armours as people who are good/play a ton.