To roll the red carpet down on this post, I’d like to appreciate that we as both fans of this franchise and consumers have echoed our complaints on both the progression XP system and the armor-coatings.
Starting from now, we already know that the armor-coatings are locked behind a paywall. Right?
One simple easy fix would be to remove the color restrictions and let us, as consumers to pick colors freely like we did past installments. Everyone would be raving about having freedom of player expression again and that’s good!
Though, the armor-coatings would be redundant then right if you can freely make your own color patterns. If it happened, 343 can’t monetize off of them.
I was thinking of a solution, and bare with me, it’s not perfect and I’m running this idea hoping this partially somewhat solves the problem for both the consumers and 343 Industries.
Setting a happy middle-ground is my interest when making this post as 343 still needs sources to monetize the game without being predatory and taking away the player’s creativity with it.
They should allow us to give us every flat-color, full-stop. We going full-blown RGB. Everything in the color-wheel, hex-values.
Let us make our own armor-coatings with the flat-colors, basic patterns too with the armor-pieces. For Example.
(Helmet; Cyan. Body; Grey. Right Shoulder; Red. Left Ankle; Yellow. Left Wrist; Blue. Right Ankle; Purple.)
You get the gist. (‘Granular’ similarly does this although it’s static. Colors unable to be changed.)
That’s how you allow player expression without making them pay for something they’ve had in the past titles.
Instead make the armor-camos (custom-patterns) purchasable. Imagine a primarily Red and Yellow Spartan running around with the patterned-camo from ‘Ghost-Grey’.
With red & yellow splotches colliding to give the Spartan model a more sophisticated look that’s genuinely made by the player’s choice.
That armor-camo too can be altered into other colors as well. Using the ‘Primary’ & ‘Secondary’ system we had in the old games.
Things like that, would be great instead while allowing monetization. You might have to re-define armor-coatings.
For armor-materials though. I am thinking that they should be free as well as they change only the conditions of the armor.
Dirtied/Scratched/Clean should be free. It’s unfair to make them forced items. Not everyone liked the gritty Reach or polished 3’s Spartans were. I’m glad the armor materials were finally added but this isn’t the way to do it.