So let’s talk about the customization in Infinite.
Anytime when you have a new game and instead of giving you more options, you get less, it’s a problem. The customization of Inifinite feels that way for me.
The color selection: I do not understand the reasoning behind blocking selecting your 2, 3 or 4 colors manually and applying them to your armor. Instead, we are told it’s better to select from a limited selection of curated colorways (can’t remember the term they use). The problem is, everyone has the same colorways and that seriously diminishes the feeling of being unique or creative.
Armor cores: This is something that I thought I wouldn’t like and boy was I right. In the past, you could unlock your body, helmet, visor, arms, legs, etc, and mix and match to your heart’s content. Not anymore. You can only combine items from, you guessed it, carefully curated sets. So, again, you are stuck looking like everyone else.
This hit home recently when I unlocked the EVA helmet. I was excited to equip my nice new helmet and use it with the blue and red colorway that I had unlocked and had been wearing for a while. Nope! Not allowed. I unlocked the colorway for my gen 4 body and this helmet (arbitrarily) only fits on gen 5 bodies. Geez. Talk about lame. Without getting too much into how sparse the battle pass feels, I finally unlocked a helmet I was excited about and I can’t even use it with the only colorway I’m excited about. Talk about taking all the fun and excitement out of unlocking items.
I really hope 343 takes this kind of feedback to heart because, honestly, the cosmetics are not fun to unlock at all.
The unlocks all require money. No sense of achievement, even if you grinded the Battlepass to 100. Every player will know that you could have just as easily bought the tiers.
It’s a poorly thought out customization system which was designed for one reason only, microtransaction profits. They don’t want people to be able to color things the way they want to color things, they want people buying the battlepass and credits so that they can make money from the good color combos. They don’t want people to be able to mix and match colors and sets, they want you to have to buy those color all over again for your new armor set.
Nickel and diming sucks, and 343 seems to have learned little since the old lootbox gambling days in Halo 5. It’s an improvement over lootbox gambling, but not enough of an improvement.
I am also severely disappointed with the customization and the overall lack of player’s choice. It seems 343 and Microsoft have set the entire multiplayer up to coincide with the Season Passes so that they can monetize everything as much as possible. Now remember kids! It’s Free to Play!
What makes it even worse is that fact that when they first announce halo infinite on twitter, they even specifically said no micro transactions. That would make it seem like the company is very disingenuous.