Was playing campaign tonight (enjoying mission replay, all though I wish I could replay straight from the menu,) and noticed something about the flashbacks.
The moment from the end of Halo 4 appears, where Cortana tells Chief she can’t go with him (personally I found the ending of that game a bit too cliché) and Chief is shown wearing normal Mark VI (or I suppose Mark VI Gen 3?) armor.
I know in the past they have shown characters wearing the wrong armor to save time on making new models (like at the beginning of Halo 4, or the trailer for Infinite season 1.) but I’m curious what y’all think - is The Mark VI Mod appearance from 4 and 5 still canon, or does this override it?
I could be remembering wrong, but didn’t 343 say the appearance of forward unto dawn in Halo 4 wasn’t canon? And that Halo 3 was how it looked in-universe? This would be along the same lines.
The devs didn’t bother using Mark V or Mark VI in any of the flashbacks, instead using Chief’s Mark VI MOD design in those flashbacks because… well no one knows exactly why.
Honestly it feels as if Frank O’Connor really wanted to hammer in the fact that he was the franchise director and that this Halo was going to redefine the entire franchise, hence his many many retcons.
Well it’s likely just laziness. Gen 2 armour is referred to in the source book as a thing. They haven’t retrospectively said that the armour actually looked different this whole time. So in these visions he should have time appropriate armour on. It’s also odd to make a call back to a specific moment in the lore and radically change it.
You can reason it away as Cortanas shattered memories distorting the Chief as he is now with how he was. Which is why he doesn’t have any other mark of armour than what he has in Infinite. That’s probably the reason they’d give.
That, or it’s actually incongruous. For example in the Halo 4 goodbye John vision the line “I won’t be coming with you this time” is significantly altered in terms of tone to how Halo 4 plays that scene. Less ambivalent is she dead or not and clearly I am off to do my own plan now. So, is it one more oddity that Cortanas “memories” are showing us the Chief as he is now?
That’s definitely the sense I got… it was just so blatant and terrible… everything was a pitiful attempt to “one-up” what came before.
I assume that it came down to not being willing to commit the resources. It’s too bad, they really open up in Halo 4 and start exploring areas of the canon that I’m interested in, but they did it in such a cheesy way…
I hope that they genuinely consider retconning and rewritting Halo 4, or just retconning and starting a new game post Halo 3. I know they would never do it, but I can hope.
they just cut corners, there’s another flashback that’s supposed to be the end of CE with chief and cortana in the longsword and he’s wearing the new suit
maybe they didn’t see a reason to remake two of cheifs old armor just for a couple seconds of use, but they have reachs armor, they couldve used them as more armor cores.
This is probably more along the lines of resource management. It would take more time and effort to create more models to use in the cutscenes so they opted for just using the in-game assets they currently have. The same thing happened in the Halo 4 opening cut scene where you see all the Spartans dropping in fighting the covenant for the first time or chief being given Cortana for the first time while all wearing Mk 6 mod. That for sure was not the cannon look of the Spartans during that point.
When Halo 4 was being developed, in Xbox Magazine or something like that, 343 Industries was discussing the armour design of Mjolnir Mark VI armour and that they were making changes to the aethestics of it to make the armour more realistic.
So the look from Halo 4 and Halo 5: Guardians was not new armour compared to what John was wearing in Halo 2 and Halo 3, but simply a cosmetic redesign (i.e. just like the number of rivets in his gloves from Halo 2 to Halo 3, but on a much grander scale).
Now that 343 Industries has gone back to the classic design, it’s once again depicted similar to Bungie’s look.
For Cortana’s memories that we see as fragments on Zeta Halo, they’re simply data, her shattered memories, and since she was rampant, it appears some inaccuracies were present.
In the intro to halo 4 there was a flash back of the SPARTAN-II’s fighting in the human covenant war wearing master chiefs new armour ( at the time) instead of the spartans wearing MK IV as seen in halo wars or even the MK V as seen in halo combat evolved.
343I don’t understand the importance of this because it somewhat shows what Master Chief has been through.
Ideally, they should do a soft-reboot.
Rewrite Halo 4 to be a better version of itself and actually release the original script of Halo 5 with some adjustments to the final act to lead into Halo Wars 2 and Halo Infinite.
I mean there are games like Assassins Creed where you have hundreds of unique armour pieces. Two really going to break the budget?
A few seconds yes, but the purpose is to make connective tissue with the earlier games and so you would want that to be authentic. Otherwise it would be needlessly jarring. It also takes you out of it as you’re confronted by a lack of attention to detail.
if they were going to bring back them back people would probably want them to bring back most of 4s armor and make new armor for CE, so it would cost some money but i would’ve preferred that over the new armor cores.
They wouldnt want to create a new armor for the sake of 10 seconds. Hence why every dead spartan in the campaign is the same color and armor besides the helmet.
Are we talking the dead Spartans of Halo Infinite’s campaign? Because they were not the same colors. You can unlock their colors in the armor lockers in the game.
The mark VI in halo 4 and 5 was a retconed version of every spartan 2 armor in the human/covie wars (according to the intro to halo 4). If anything this just falls under “fixed art style”
It falls under laziness.
In that same intro cutscene we see them showcase an enhanced render of the Brute Chieftains from Halo 3. Everyone else got a redesign to the strange new style of depiction.
In fact, here is what they SHOULD’VE done.
Make Master Chief and the Forward Unto Dawn materials be updated versions of the classic designs. Essentially doing what Halo 2 Anniversary’s multiplayer did.
And then when regrouping with the UNSC Infinity do we start seeing the newer versions of our weapons, vehicles, and armor.
AND THEN have a cutscene or a guns-down mission where Chief gets the new armor design.
You know, instead of going the lazy way and saying “we retconned nanobots into specifically Chief’s Mark VI armor so while in cryostaisis Cortana could just rebuild his armor to stave off the boredom”.
A weak retcon because -
Despite his armor being redesigned and “repaired” by nanobots, his breastplate still features the same breastplate damage he had in Halo 3.
The redesigned armor also SOMEHOW matches the foot armor of NOBLE-Class MJOLNIR Gen-2, the new standard issue exosuit of MJOLNIR Gen-2, and his glove armor matches the RECRUIT-Class MJOLNIR Gen-2 glove armor.
The redesigned armor is also somehow compatible with the DaVinchi Armor Stations that Spartan-IVs use to apply and remove their MJOLNIR Gen-2.
The weapons and vehicles on board the UNSC FFG-201 Forward Unto Dawn also just so happen to now be models of weapons that did not exist during 2552.
The UNSC Forward Unto Dawn suddenly changed its architecture from a Charon-Class frigate to a Strident-Class frigate.
Lazy.
That is all that it is.
In all honesty, had Spartan-Ops been postponed and made to be a spin-off game and NOT developed alongside Halo 4, perhaps it would allow for further development resources to actually be applied to Halo 4 in order to allow for less laziness.
But then again, they would’ve eventually just redesigned the Scorpion and Mounted Machine Gun instead of just porting them over from Halo Reach.