Seeker doesn’t look awesome or impressive.
It looks like someone made a helmet model out of clay and then swung a baseball bat at the front of it and then stuck on dubstep speakers.
How does Hunter or Goblin or Hellcat armor look like with weighs half-a-ton?
How can you take someone seriously when they are looking at you wearing what amounts to kids-toy-designed armor and then call them a super-soldier?
Have you not taken a design theme class or did you sleep through your basic elementary art classes?
Human, Covenant, Banished, Forerunner, and Flood all have design motifs about them
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Human design is machined and has the aesthetic of being crafted on an assembly line. Thus, it is flat lines with a minimal amount of curves.
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Covenant design is more sleek, alien, and organic and designed to be a contrast to the Human design. The plating is all curved and smooth aerodynamics. And when it came to the alien races of the Covenant, each of them embodied their nicknames through visuals and their behavior.
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Brute design is more animalistic takes on factory machined weaponry and vehicles, with blades all over and it looking like it belonged somewhere between mad-max and space-age equipment. Paintjobs were optional and the whole point was to make it work with bare minimum effort.
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Forerunner design is supposed to be angular, monolithic, and look beyond advanced. Curves are minimal, but when they do appear they are unnaturally perfect and pristine, usually flat along a single axis. Brutalist dystopian architecture is the inspiration.
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Flood design is to simply take all that is around and make it a putrid, festering infestation of that which what was.
343 Industries decided to break these design motifs in Halo 4 and Halo 5.
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The UNSC is now made up of way too many curves when it comes to armor design. About 95% of all the assets in the games hardly represent what was before, so that is a huge dig in the budget to redesign and model something that already has a design to begin with. Take the Battle Rifle for example. All it needed was a higher-poly model. Instead, 343 wasted time and resources on redesigning it entirely to fulfill the same role.
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The Covenant retains its organic design to ships and vehicles, but the aliens now look more like mutants or monsters. The Grunts look like Goblins, the Jackals are no longer bird-like and resemble bulldogs with mange, the Elites look more brutish, ignoble, and are clumsy rather than agile.
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The Forerunner design was retained for architecture, but when it came to constructs of artifictial intelligence or the A.I., they resemble something that was ripped from another sci-fi shooter that was scrapped.
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The Banished are entirely 343’s and Creative Assembly’s creation, but somehow they retained the design motifs of the Brutes from Halo 2 and Halo 3. Even though Banished Engineering has advanced in design, it still retains the notion that the entire point is to cause pain before death.
R&D Guy : “Ah, thank you for coming to our facility Mr. ONI Inspector Sir. We hope our MJOLNIR design is to your liking.”
ONI Inspector : “. . . . . . . . . . what am I looking at?”
R&D Guy : “Jumpmaster-class MJOLNIR Powered Assault Armor Gen-2 of course!”
ONI Inspector : “R&D Guy . . . . . . . for what purpose does this armor have an anvil on the head?”
R&D Guy : “Oh, that? So if you have to headbut someone, it really hurts.”
ONI Inspector : “R&D Guy . . . . . . . . . . . have you ever had to wear a fifty-pound weight on your forehead?”
R&D Guy : "Well . . . . . . . . . . . no sir . . . . . . . . . . "
ONI Inspector : “Well then, why do you think that is?”
R&D Guy : “. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . because that can strain the neck sir?”
ONI Inspector : “Exactly. Scrap this design and start over on the helmet. And another thing . . . . . what is this one over here?”
R&D Guy : “Wetwork-Class MJOLNIR Powered Assault Armor Gen-2 sir. It is something that is already in the field.”
ONI Inspector : “Wait . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . you mean to tell me . . . . that there are Spartans out there that cannot see what the hell is going on in the field?”
R&D Guy : “What do you mean?”
ONI Inspector : “The visor stretches from the mouth to the receding hairline . . . . . . . . . where are Human eyes located Mr. R&D Guy.”
R&D Guy : “. . . . . . but the armor projects the scenery onto the wearer’s eye-level.”
ONI Inspector : “Oh. So the Visor is something that is entirely pointless as it’s only purpose is to flood light into the helmet to make it harder to see the screens that display the outside. Have you ever looked at a TV and had the window open? It is a lot harder to focus on the show when light is blinding you. Not to mention, what is the structural integrity the design compromised in order to have this useless design feature?”
R&D Guy : “. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I take it you aren’t happy with the results.”
ONI Inspector : “I want the name of the guy who designed it and have them removed from the project.”
R&D Guy : “. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . um . . . . . . . . . . . . my kid designed it sir.”
ONI Inspector : “. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . you let a nine-year-old design MJOLNIR armor designed for our top Spartans?”
R&D Guy : “Well, it looks cool sir.”
ONI Inspector : “Looking cool is not as important as ensuring that our VERY EXPENSIVE SPARTANS are not dying out there because of clear design flaws. If I find one more thing improperly designed, you are FIRED.”
R&D Guy : “. . . . . . . . . . . . . . next is Vector-class MJOLNIR Pow-”
ONI Inspector : “Get out.”
It is now clear that I am responding to a troll.
Or someone who didn’t attend a single art class.
Ahhh . . . . . ignorance is indeed bliss isn’t it?
Did you know that before Frank O’Connor was promoted from the Social Media Director to the Franchise Director, that Humanity and the Forerunners were exactly the same species? But then all of a sudden, Frank O’Connor worked with Greg Bear to make an entirely unnecessary trilogy of books to entirely change the universe backstory by adding useless things such as The Precursors, explaining the origins of the Cosmic Horror that is the Flood, and making it so that Forerunners and Humans are entirely separate species?
It totally soured the story of Halo.
Because prior to this retcon it was :
“Humanity was the most advanced species in the galaxy. Then came the Flood that nearly wiped out all life in the galaxy. And when nothing worked, we made the Halo Array as a last ditch effort to starve out the Flood by literally killing anything it feeds on and then reseeding life in the galaxy when the Flood starved to death on the planets. Then we started rebuilding what we had lost. However, the more primitive alien races we saved ended up reverse engineering our technology to skip tech-trees faster than Humans, made a religion out of it all by misinterpreting things, and then upon discovering Humanity and realizing that their ‘Gods’ are mere mortals; they started a genocidal campaign against Humanity in order to keep their thrones. We found a Halo ring by accident and reawakened the Flood contained within. So now were lower tech than our last encounter with the cosmic horror, facing genocide by religious aliens, and have to overcome the Flood again as we are haunted by a ghost from our ancient past.”
Halo’s original story was a bit of a tragedy.
Humanity saved the galaxy and was going to reclaim their position, had it not been for the ancient human tech lying around on the alien worlds to be reverse engineered.
The Forerunners was a Covenant term for their Gods.
And Humanity was going to Reclaim their legacy with difficulty because of this.
And then the Flood is released again to threaten the galaxy again!
There was a reason why Humanity is called “The Reclaimers” and not “The Inheritors”.
We are to reclaim what was ours.
Then came the retcon which made it so Humans and Forerunners were separate species, and we were merely chosen by the Librarian to inherit the legacy of the Forerunners.
A decision which makes no sense to have be the case as all evidence written in the main storyline of Halo Wars to Halo 3 showcases that Humanity were the ones that the Covenant referred to as the Forerunners.
Also, they explained the origins of the Cosmic Horror entity that is the Flood.
Rule No.1 about cosmic horror is that IT IS UNKNOWABLE AND BEYOND OUR COMPREHENSION!
But ~NOOOOOOOOooooooooo~, now we know that the Flood is just a mutation of the Precursors, which are the true origins of all life in our galaxy!
So they decided to ret-con and over-explain the Forerunners, explain the origins of the Flood, and made an entirely new version of “those that came before” as the Precursors.
Further evidence that this ret-con was half-baked?
The Didact of Halo 4, who thanks to the retcon is a separate species from Humanity, refers to himself as Forerunner for some reason.
The Covenant called them Forerunners because it literally means “those that came before”.
It was a term coined by The Covenant and that The Didact should have no knowledge about.
Why would The Didact refer to himself as “Forerunner” and not instead the new name of the species?
And that is just the major retcon.
Want a minor one?
To explain why Master Chief is wearing a new set of armor design, it was retconned to have nanomachines in his Mark VI armor and Cortana was bored and redesigned his armor from the ground up.
This ret-con is doubly-stupid because -
- His redesign existed in Halo 4’s flashback cutscenes.
- The exosuit and hand-guard designs somehow match the exosuit and glove armor of standard MJOLNIR Gen-2 armor worn by the Spartan IVs.
- The armor breastplate still has the battle-damage for some reason. Odd that Cortana would not fix something that could be a structural weak-point in the armor.
- The Forward Unto Dawn and all the munitions on-board were changed to the new art style. aw gee, I guess Cortana had A LOT OF FUN redesigning the ENTIRE SHIP AND ITS CONTENTS to somehow COINCIDENTALLY MATCH the designs made and issued to the UNSC armed forces FOUR YEARS LATER !!
Lazy Retcons
Pointless Retcons
Wasteful
If they wanted to give us a new armor set, then all they needed to do was add in a scene where Master Chief gets an upgraded set of armor after reuniting with the UNSC Infinity.