Promethean art design

Community Halo Universe
1

I think 343 still hasn’t gotten the Prometheans right yet. Which is strange because, on the face of it, an army of robots is a pretty easy sell for people who like sci fi. Theres a lot of examples to draw from, Terminator, the Cylons, the Necrons, the Geth, the Machines from the Matrix to list just a few. But the Prometheans just haven’t hit it off with a lot of people and I am going to look at some reasons why.

So theres a couple of things that I think they could do to make the faction look better.

  1. Knights look silly standing upright with that huge beetle like hump on their back and when they run at you its comical. They should really make the middle pair of limbs larger and have it moving low to the ground on all fours whilst it fires its weapons. Think the Loxatl from Gaunts Ghosts if you have ever read that novel series.

  2. Replace the Knight blade with a second gun for some variants. The Knight atm looks like it should be a gun platform rather than a fast moving warrior.

  3. If a knight is carrying a chunkier weapon like a binary rifle or incineration cannon, its arm looks too small to carry it. Either make the arm bigger, replace the arm with a weapon mount or have it fire the weapon from somewhere else on its body. Chest, shoulders, eyes etc.

  4. The separate floating parts thing works for Sentinals because they’re flying. It doesn’t work on what you obviously want to be solid, huge robots that we’re meant to take as a serious threat. Knights and soldiers should just be made out of a single piece of metal. Now, if they wanted to be cool, they could change its teleport to the machine breaking apart and flying to a new location or have that be how they enter the battlefield.

  5. Give up on the Crawlers.

Basically I think they should make the Prometheans more humanoid and solid. Think like the Necrons from 40k.

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I disagree with all of that…

3

> 2533274809220485;2:
> I disagree with all of that…

Whats good about Crawlers exactly?

I don’t understand why they’ve incorporated so many animal and insect elements. If they were lore wise meant to be mechanical zerg then I could maybe understand. But, they’re supposed to be the Warrior Servants. So why are they these snarling, screeching, things?

Why have all these rows of thick metal teeth?

They don’t have a consistent theme and it doesn’t fit well with the Forerunners. Its also becoming increasingly confusing with Halo 5 introducing AI versions that talk and are more humanoid.

Compare that to the Geth. Every Geth consciously resembles a Quarian, who are their creators and they have a distinctive flashlight which mirrors the Quarian mask. Beyond that they look relatively basic with pipes and plates so we know that this is a new form of machine intelligence created by the Quarians; as opposed to the Reapers who are more advanced They have a single united look and you can probably recognize a Geth on site. You can tell a lot about a Geth and their history just from this core look.

You simply can’t do that with a Promethean. They’re just weird and don’t look like something the Forerunners would make. They are a bunch of shrieking beetles and robot dogs. Whats that all about?

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I sort of feel like its too late for a major visual shakeup of the prometheans, i guess you could say cortana started doing arts and crafts while conquering the galaxy, but its kind of odd.
That said…

> 1) Knights look silly standing upright with that huge beetle like hump on their back and when they run at you its comical. They should really make the middle pair of limbs larger and have it moving low to the ground on all fours whilst it fires its weapons. Think the Loxatl from Gaunts Ghosts if you have ever read that novel series.

I’d rather ditch the 2nd set of arms entirely. Using all 4’s just reinforces the bug look. Though I suppose if it was kind of…centaur-like it could reinforce the ‘knight’ name.

> 2) Replace the Knight blade with a second gun for some variants. The Knight atm looks like it should be a gun platform rather than a fast moving warrior.

I’d be totally okay with that Especially with them assuming a more hunter like role, them being more weapons platform makes sense. I’d say its doable without seeming like a major visual overhaul either.

> 3) If a knight is carrying a chunkier weapon like a binary rifle or incineration cannon, its arm looks too small to carry it. Either make the arm bigger, replace the arm with a weapon mount or have it fire the weapon from somewhere else on its body. Chest, shoulders, eyes etc.

I’m fairly neutral on this, I think the limbs on them could use some beefing up in general.

> 4) The separate floating parts thing works for Sentinals because they’re flying. It doesn’t work on what you obviously want to be solid, huge robots that we’re meant to take as a serious threat. Knights and soldiers should just be made out of a single piece of metal. Now, if they wanted to be cool, they could change its teleport to the machine breaking apart and flying to a new location or have that be how they enter the battlefield.

I dig the floating parts, but I agree the knights look very…flimsy beyodn their giant beatle torso. I think if they did the limbs more like the Warden Eternal’s they could be both floaty and heavy at the same time.

> 5) Give up on the Crawlers.

I’d say hard to ditch them now, but I really think Sentinels should have been there instead of crawlers all this time. What’s the point of a robo-dog when you have an already nimble floating weapons platform?

Honestly what bugs me is the skull motiffs, it just feels so out of place. I like the Forerunners as more “pearly white exterior, but gets darker and more corrupt as you look into it”, whereas I feel the promtheans and now the guardians are trying too hard to look menacing.

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I really like the look of promethean knights.
The carapace is what makes it iconic, and the hard light blade as well. The way it wields its weapon too, it doesn’t grab it normally, the weapon adapts to the knight as it is socketed in its ‘arm’. The manipulator arms are interesting, and I’d like to see them do something at some point. the insectoid look is what I liemamlot.

The crawlers are obviously meant to be this sort of swarm force… And their design makes it also seem like they can get up close to swarm and incinerate the flood. Imagine them diving into a combat form and ripping it and incinerating it as they do so.

These were designed by didact too, after his incident with gravemind. They are the didact’s creation. The soldiers, they’re more humanoid. Armigers, designed for ancient boarding action on human ships. And the grins they have is this sort of classic warrior servant look, with the faces and stuff. A grin is a look of aggressiveness. Way different from builders style of sentinels. Compare aggressor and watcher sentinels. They both fill two different roles, and look different. Prometheans too are very much, get in, overwhelm with precision, force. I went into theater and looked at them. They certainly don’t look flimsy. The shapes they have are pretty cool too.

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I’m glad they at least got rid of the crawler sniper from H4. They made LASO impossible.
The knights are fine.
Crawlers in general are fine.
Soldiers are weird to me… but they at least make sense.
Promethians however, don’t look like they can kill a infection form, nevertheless a normal flood combat form, which is the whole reason they’re designed that way…
And all are way too complex for the art style of halo. (the Guardians also look worse then the E3 when they were revealed).

> These were designed by didact too, after his incident with gravemind.

they were designed by a madman who was partially infected by the flood to fight flood. Anyone else see a problem with that? (Maybe they were designed with an inherent weakness?)

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I’m okay with most of the promethean designs. I love the knight except its little arms, and the soldier are very cool.
I like them having this white pieces of armor like an exo-skeleton. Makes you identify them as stronger and the light they emits, makes you identify the weak spots in their bodies.
The crawler is a little weird, but I’m okay with them now.

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343’s design goal was to not have the prometheans be “just” robots or monsters, and personally they almost got to their goal but there is still room for improvement, maybe make them more upright and the middle torso that has the “little” arms should be have more human/forerunner proportions. And even in their current state the prometheans do look like something the forerunners would make as they still follow the same design process bungie used for the sentinels which was to include insect like components. Look at these two pieces of concept art for an example.
http://www.halopedia.org/images/2/23/HCE_-Sentinel_1.png
http://www.halopedia.org/images/f/fc/HCE-_Sentinel_2.png

As for the soldiers, I think they need similar “dresses” the actual forerunners had and ditch some of the skeleton aspects. Maybe something like this.

The crawlers should be more sentinel like and should be based of cats instead of dogs because cats actually slink around and climb stuff and somewhere on the body we should be able to see the physical gun they shoot.

The watchers are just sentinels with faces and two hula hoops so they are fine.