I’ll opt in any day for the simpler tried and true design choices in Infinite over the noisy, disruptive, polygonal, Waffle House breakfast scramble that was the armor in 4/5/H2A.
The Gen 3 is clearly based off of Reach’s MKVb design, and that’s a very iconic and clear reinterpretation of the OG MKV design from CE.
I guess I prefer armor that shows creativity and detail than attaching a knife or waist-pocket on my armor like 80% of the community apparently prefers.
Seeker, Goblin, Nomad, Atlas, Legionare, Argonaut, Breaker, Engineer, Vector, Foehammer Pioneer was creative?
That’s not being creative that’s just being ridiculous
It sounds like your gripe is with the customization options/choices and not the overall art design of the armor.
Something Adam Savage has stated when working on movie sets/props (and something Bungie did well, better than 343 has done) is that the design has to fit the narrative it’s trying to tell.
Wetwork 4/5 looks really cool (one of my favorite designs), but what about it’s design looks like it fits the narrative it’s meant to fill? It looks like it would stand out more than blend into the background like Sam Fisher would be doing the same job.
As an example, plain Rakshasa has more visual storytelling going on that 90% of the armor across 4/5 because it’s design matches the concept of the “lone wolf”. Light weight, cobbled together from scavenged parts, doesn’t characteristically look like a menacing Spartan and more of a drifter/‘ranger’ type, attachments that look like they work as descriptively intended.
Hard disagree, the armor in Halo 4 and 5 was incredibly ugly.
Infinite looks more like Reach armor in 4K, and that’s fine by me.
How many medkits, laser pointers, flashlights, side pockets, and wrist radars have I seen since 2010? At least what we got was new. Whats ridiculous is how the Halo community goes crazy for a grenade strap every new game.
It is true that Rakshasa is a better looking armor than the other armor cores, but I think that’s the point. Its just a messy detail with the idea of it all being “scrapped together”. I don’t see this being too consistent.
The way I saw Halo 4/5 armor was that it was the Spartan IV’s armor. They were independently customized by the wearer so they would stand out more. Unlike the Spartan 2/3’s, it didn’t matter for them since they were all “battle-born”.
The cannon cores from past games functioning the way they did made sense mostly for the fact that it was all built in house and because the Spartans are part of a military it makes sense that their suits would be uniform in design. They are a team / military squad that needs to be easily recognizable. That’s what the military does they create general uniforms across the board that are the same so that you can easily identify friend from foe. Like you said it makes sense to have different helmets because they were all made in-house and also built on the base mjolnir platform.
Once Spartan fours were introduced and were more easily created it also makes sense that the Mueller platform being contracted out to different companies to create new versions kind of also makes sense. With more units comes more opportunities for specialization and improvements. Maybe not every version that we see actually gets implemented in the field but that doesn’t mean that it’s not potentially usable. Many of the Halo 3 and Halo Reach helmets are just upgraded versions of existing helmets for the UNSC or prototypes built to try and specialize in a particular area.
So I do agree that the format of the armor itself staying constant in three and reach makes more sense but an argument can be made for why there would be multiple varying sets in Halo 4 and beyond.
It would make sense, if we were given a larger timeskip.
The plot of Cortana’s death did require a 4 year timeskip. Even the idea of the Spartan augmentations themselves being improved so drastically can make sense if you consider how long it was being worked on since the Spartan II program, with all 3 generations of Spartan IIIs being the test bed for new and improved versions of the augmentation process.
However, by the year 2552, the armor itself was still very much a private venture. And 4 years is not enough time for all these competitors to catch up technologically to Mjolnir’s standard. Especially with humanity being on the literal brink of extinction by the time Halo 3 took place.
Some armor sets, like Stalker or Wetwork for example, can be argued, as they were designed entirely by reverse engineering Covenant tech, and therefore could have been in the works for as long as 30 years. Though both rely pretty heavily on parts of the lore that were ret-conned. But they are ret-cons that happened in the Bungie era.
But most of them are supposedly purely human designs that compete technologically with Mjolnir. And that’s something extremely hard to believe could have happened in 4 short years, especially on such a large scale.
-Yoink!- the achilles dude that crap was locked behind spartan company bs
I didn’t mind the spartan companies. Honestly it was better than the challenge system we have now, and it encouraged you to complete them with friends.
I understand your point but i was never a fan of the halo 4 style. But I was always a fan of the Reach armour personally. Happy to see it’s return in halo 5. Not so happy it was locked behind a paywall in infinite.
Honestly… I hated the Achilles design. Too much of Halo 5’s armor trended close to being stylized as opposed to functional. That’s what I liked so much about Reach’s armor and what I like about a lot of Halo Infinite’s armor - there’s pouches, there’s Up-Armor pieces, there’s more of what feels like armor as opposed to bits of metal bolted to a suit and a garishly overdesigned helmet (which is what Achilles felt like to me).
I liked both H4 & 5’s takes on the armor. It took time to adjust to H4 since there was so much of it there coming off of 3 and Reach. I know the common joke is that a lot of the armor kinda looks like football pads and braces but when they actually leaned into it with helmets it really does not work for me. Same said for the Mk.VII helm, Brawler. Its just a football helmet to me.
With Halo 5, weirdly, I agree with the “10% is all you need” thing mentioned by others at the top of the thread. You’re favorite helmet and armor are simply a drop in the bucket of whats available (and good looking) to the rest of the playerbase. I say this as a lover of the Anubis helm in Halo:5 who was shocked to see it get a cereal box treatment in infinite. More tank-ish, Still slick looking.
ZY903 said it in fewer words better then i could but yeah, its all just Warhammer 40k miniature sets at this point. Just look at the coatings system, we arnt even allowed to paint the spartan any different then its intended look from the box art (fractures/plausible canon). And the rotating shopping window is just a GWS store 
As a fellow Anubis helmet where in Halo 5 (mostly because I didn’t have a scout helmet and it was the closest thing I had that looked good) I was also surprised when it popped up in the store for Halo infinite and looked a bit chunkier. What they did was give it a gen 3 makeover where they tried to give it a more “classic” Halo art style aesthetic. Meaning it can’t be super sleek and needs more angles/thicker blockier pieces which is what we see with the parts on the side along the jawline.
The Scout helmet has surprisingly been smoothed out some more. The detail on the top of the helmet has now been smoothed out and made sleeker and I also believe they’ve kind of smushed the top visor section back. It seems like the helmets side profile isn’t as long / sharp as what it’s been in past titles. I also hate that it has some dumb new name Celox. Why was it renamed? Because they brought back the Scout helmet from Halo Reach? A helmet that wasn’t the Scout helmet from Halo 3 that already existed? 343 brought back the Halo 3 Scout helmet in Halo 4, updated it and called it Scout. They then continue to use it in Halo 5 and when they brought in Reach armor they renamed the Reach helmet to Vigilant. Which I thought was actually a really good name for that helmet. I just can’t understand why they would change the name of the Scout helmet just so the Reach version could be called Scout.
Scout H3,4,5
Scout Reach= Vigilant H5
That’s 3v1. Doesn’t majority usually win and help people keep track of what items are what because of the name being the same?
You’ve already renamed the oddball so why rename what has already been the standard?
I will add that I agree about the brawler helmet. It certainly smells of 343 design. A little too small, sleek and bit too beetley.