Art is something I’ve never been good at. But whether or not I’m good at it or even you are, we can always appreciate good art.
Halo 5 looks great and I have very few complaints on it’s visuals. This thread is more about what I believe we are missing out on. Obviously, we don’t all like the same things, so everything I’m about to say is subjective.
Recently, I was thinking to myself “Why do I like Reach’s artistic style more than other Halo games?” The answer I came up with is because of how gritty and war-torn everything looks. In Halo 3 and 4, as well as 5, Spartans look just a little bit too clean. It’s nothing major but it looks like the Spartans just came off of an assembly line. I was playing ODST earlier today and saw this picture from an achievement. “Oh. My. God…” Why don’t we look like these guys do in the game itself?? Look at the Battle Rifle designs! The scopes look great and the sling attached to the gun gives off this sort of realistic scout-like appearance. The weapons look sharp and the armor looks fit for a soldier who has a radio, rations, ammunition, grenades, first aid kits, and much more.
The final rendition of the ODSTs that’s actually used in the games looks great, but somehow more fitting to something akin to guarding the interior of a base. In the first picture, those soldiers don’t look like the type to be caught patrolling a city. They are field operatives, they know how to survive when there aren’t reinforcements around to help. They pack enough gear to survive but not too much that it affects their ability to fight.
What I also love about this look is that everything looks much more personalized. What I mean by this is that you’ll see these soldiers marking their own armor with unique characteristics. Examples of this include etching letters into their armor, the do-rag Marcus Fenix wears in Gears of War, Emile decorating his own helmet with a skull. This goes beyond even armor with things like pilots etching their killcount on the side of their trusty plane or WW2 tank crews “decorating” and even naming their tank. There are way more examples that I just can’t think of right now. What I love about this is that it really shows that each character has had enough time to call their gear their own.
No more using a generic piece of armor off of a shelf that anyone could take as their own. Everything is tailored to themselves whether it’s a weapon modification or a picture of their loved ones inside the cockpit of their jet fighter. All their gear looks worn and repaired with scavenged materials.
For Halo 5 I would have loved to see the Spartans’ design follow that philosophy. Recon Spartans dressed like this displays a much stronger visual of being a scout/sniper as opposed to just having the same “silhouette” as other Spartans. It has a stronger identity. “Hey, can I be a Scout Spartan?” “Sure, here’s your helmet, camouflaged gear and ghillie suit for your upper body!” Now you’re gonna feel a lot more like a Scout than Bill over here with his clean-cut Halo 4 Scout armor. Sorry Bill.
Does anyone else think it would be awesome to see a sling attached to the DMR? I mean, the weapon is for Marksmen and anyone else shooting from long range. I think it would really just fit in. It wouldn’t with the visuals the way they are now. But with these changes, it would be crazy not to have a sling!
I guess I’m done rambling about art now. What do you guys think? Do you prefer the cleaner visuals that Halo has now or do you prefer something more like what I talked about?