The game is fantastic, but I have to agree that the progression and customization is ridiculous - who thought this will be a good idea?!
It is a bit a ironic, since they mentioned how important customization is for the Halo series, yet this is probably the most limited Halo customization we’ve had… EVER.
Even Halo 2 MCC has more customization options right from the get go.
Also, the fact that you can’t make your own emblems with various elements takes away that personalization aspect as well…
They NAILED the gameplay, but somehow messed up the simple stuff.
The thing that caught my eye: 343 said coatings are like 7 layers of color, material, wear and tear and so on.
ALL armor coatings are exactly the same apart from color. If you cycle through them and keep your eye on any specific mark/scratch you can see it is present in every coating…
So there literally was no reason to get rid of primary and secondary colors apart from “money please”
Oh Armor Coatings are horrible if you ask me and their are other ways to monitize the game. 343i could create their own unique armors to put in the battle pass since thats their objective for monitization. IMO its kinda pathetic that 343i has to monitize bungie armors instead of giving use a line of base armors to use then creating more unique and cool armors like the Samurai armor. We should have our base color options and emblems from previous Halos. If 343i wanted to do a battle pass correctly then it should add to the game experince and not take away.
They knew. We knew. We knew they knew. And they knew that too.
At the end of the day, they belong to a business. Like all businesses, they have one goal: To make money. Finding a balance between keeping customers satisfied while exploiting systems to make the most money possible is just not going to happen. Companies are always going to swing one way or another. In the 1990s and 2000s, gaming companies mostly swung towards the customers - making a game that kept the players engaged is also what was the most fun to create. In the 2010s (and 2020s) companies began to swing in the opposite direction: make the most money, but they won’t be able to do that if they lose their customers. That’s where marketing, public relations, etc. come in. Someone has to pretend the companies are still swinging in the direction of the consumer, even if that hasn’t been the case for quite some time.
It doesn’t help that the majority of players now are blind to these facts because they grew up without thinking about the logic behind things, and those of us from the late 1900’s are growing up with less time to play and fight back against these predatory practices.
Armour Kits are basically “Skins” rather than “Packs”, its abysmal
A Customisation system akin to Warframe’s Colour Pallets or Anthem’s Material System would’ve been preferable, a good compromise between monetisation and freedom of expression.
Sadly we’ve all known this since before it came out, and game devs love to act like they “listen to the community” but they’ll never take action that could hurt their greedy bottom line.
I have to laugh at how many people are coming to the realization that even Anthem’s system is better than this. I pointed it out years ago when coatings were first announced and was pretty much laughed off the forums with my “stupid” idea being bad.
Nailed it, we traded expression for convivence of entry to the game, and I’m not so sure I would’ve taken that trade if this was the idea, curation is not a good compromise for creativity.
Why can’t they just let us pick our own colors and have armor coatings be things like patterns, textures, and materials? That would literally make everyone happy and would even incentivize me to want to pay for cool patterns and stuff.
Right now though the system is just so restrictive and all of the armor coatings have been either just solid colors barely indistinguishable from each other or garbage ugly combinations with the few decently passable ones locked behind a $20 pay wall. It makes me just not even want to interact with customization cause there’s no point to it when it is this restrictive.
I would even pay for the ability to just pick my colors but 343 won’t even let us pay to do that. It feels like they made this system with the sole purpose of just making everyone unhappy with it
Going to try and explain the technicality on this, how I’ve come to understand it atleast.
You’ve noticed that each icon for the coatings is a hexagon thing with a large ball in the middle?
The hexagon is divided into six segments, and the ball is its own segment. These represent the seven layers they talk about. It’s nothing but colors.
So, when you apply the visuals to a mesh ( 3D object ), you have several different 2D pictures representing different aspects of how light behaves when hitting the mesh.
Color texture, this is the color one, can be several too if you want to. It is nothing but a picture which you see as it is.
Normal map, this is a picture which makes little sense, essentially, it manipulate in which angle light bounce off a mesh per pixel on the mesh. It is also applied to the mesh the same way the color texture is, but ingame it is not visible, it just makes light boucne in other directions than you’d think, creating the illusion of a detailed surface, think scratches and so forth.
Defraction map I think it was called, this is a little more complicated, but it kind of distort the mesh without, changing the mesh’s data.
Material map, was fairly new to me, but, again, a 2D picture which changes how a light behaves on the surface of the mesh. Glossy or matte and so forth.
Now, Armor Coats, several coats behaving the same way but with different coats just mean that they use the exact same texture maps apart from the color one.
And no, there was nothing preventing them from allowing us to controll the color of each individual color layer on the armor coatings. They made it static to have more items to sell.
We should have access to the a basic coating that has no patterns and two colors that we can select. The rest of the coatings can go crazy with all kinds of color combinations and such.
Armour coatings have potential, there’s at least some neat looking Mark VII coatings, but that’s the problem, they’re exclusive to a specific core.
Right now in the battle pass I’m close to unlocking the cool-looking air assault helmet and in the very next level I’ll unlock the cool-looking ghost grey coating but I won’t be able to use them together, heck I won’t be able to use the coating with most of my battle pass unlocks because they’re mostly Mark V.
At this very moment there seems to be a lot more Mark V armours to unlock than VII but when it comes to coatings the Mark V has basically nothing interesting, you’re either going to have a flat stock coating or a noble-team inspired coating. Very dull. There’s literally 3 different blue coatings for V with the most minor differences between them.
I guess my point is that no matter what core you choose to focus on you’re going to be handicapped in regards to customisation. I’d say the issue isn’t the existence of coatings but how few there are and the fact they’re locked to cores.
I find it interesting that 343 haven’t addressed cross-core customisation, in a way I think it’s because it’s the key to everything in regards to monetisation in the game. If cross-core customisation is implemented then it would singlehandedly fix a lot of the issues with both the battle pass and the store in that it gives players more value for every battle pass unlock and store purchase.
Honestly they should have just made it so coatings controlled the material type, texture, wear, and paint areas. Leave us the ability to change the color. That way they can still sell us coatings, and we still get to chose our color.
Yeah, either that or let us unlock and/or purchase individual colours, materials, patterns etc. to play around with as we please. That would probably allow for maximum individual expression and 343 could still make bank by selling fancy gold, chrome materials for example.
