> I will actually say the the old scope looks like every other scope in every game and looks more modern (Its round) Like the real world. The square take on it is actually looks more sleek and looks more futuristic with it being set 2500 it should
It’s interesting that you say that, because my reaction was that the decision made it look too ridiculous.
One of the things that Bungie strove for was a sense of weight with their artistic designs. The Chief is big and heavy, and we’ve all known that for a long time. In the first, game he basically looked like a man had strapped on a tank (specifically, a Batman-style Tumbler, with its many angles and protrusions), and that made sense. Super Space soldier cyborgs should look like walking tanks.
What they did with the weaponry designs though, in my view, was always brilliant and likely brilliantly owed to Robt McLees. Being a gun enthusiast, he wanted them to be believable. It’s been like 150 years since the rifle was invented, and not much has really changed. They are all essentially grooved tubes in which a controlled explosion happens creating a ballistic weapon. The guns in Halo were designed to look like sophisticated, precise, reliable pieces of equipment. We see this in their simplicity. Simple is always better in military terms. A ballistic weapon is a simple construction. It has a few metal pins holding together some other metal bits and springs. A gun enthusiast could look at a Battle Rifle and know exactly what it was supposed to be. The scope on top was traditional because that was recognizable, and made the most sense. You’re going to be under fire with this thing. You don’t want a sensitive electronic component that too much jostling or rough impact could screw up, miss-align, or even break. You want to rely on the old mark 1 eyeball.
Which is something they refer to in the extended fiction. What makes Chief such a monster soldier isn’t all of his amazing high-tech equipment. It’s his willingness to utilize the simplest, oftentimes most brutal solution in which the fewest number of factors can fail. The Spartans even had a term for when things didn’t proceed exactly as they had predicted in their very simple plans.
The effort at making it more “detailed” actually just adds extraneous “sci-fi” pieces that I’m not personally a fan of. We can see the M6 sidearm on his leg, and there’s no question about what it is or that it looks great. The BR, on the other hand, looks bizarre. It looks like something out of Borderlands that Gearbox forgot to color in. Bring back the round scope. Whatever that weird secondary breach is halfway up the rifle? Dump that. What is it even there for? I don’t mind the new look of the railing. In fact, it looks a little beefier, and I like that. It’s slightly more industrial. It looks like a Nerf gun, actually, and that’s a terrible thing to have a comparison made to for Halo as a franchise. But the weapon looks a ton more complicated, which I have a hard time swallowing because it deviates from the established flavor of the franchise. And not just in the original games - the extended fiction, much of it now managed by 343i itself, reinforces this ideology all the time. The human military belief is “simple is better.” Extra pointless bits make it seem like it’s trying to be more “futuristic.” It was more interesting when it was simpler as, once again, that makes it more recognizable and, by extension, believable.
This is going to sound ridiculous, but Halo was mysterious and wondrous because of how much familiarity there was in it. Guns were still guns. Marines were still marines. Jeeps still jeeps. So on and so forth. This gave your brain a break and let you marvel at everything else amazing around you the entire time. The Alien weaponry was a different story, but even then, it’s clear how they operate. There’s a hot bit in the middle that superheats something, and then those glowy teeth bits on the front accelerate the superheated whatever it is out the front toward the bad guy. The Needler sucks needles out of the top and spits them in a direction. Some things were bizarre and fantastic, but it wasn’t pseudo-science magic.
I mean, my disagreement with the artistic direction doesn’t mean it’s bad or even wrong, and I know that. It’s just one of the little things that raises alarm bells in my brain. There are a lot of diehards that are ready to hate this thing, be they Call of Duty fans or otherwise. I find myself drawn to their viewpoint by little things like these decisions which seem to fly in the face of design methodology so well-documented, even lay people are familiar with it. This is a truly bizarre scenario to exist in for me.
). Or maybe it’s simply the scope. I’m not keen on that square scope.