Okay, before I actually begin, I’m gonna put it out there that I’m not trying to hate on 343 Industries or the new Halo trilogy. I’m just going to voice my opinion, so here goes. I’m new to the Waypoint forums, so please bear with me.
I am a fifteen year old, slightly -Yoink!- Halo nerd who was introduced to the game by my cousin back in 2005. The game quickly became my first social outlet at school and since then I have been a devoted fan of the series. I started with Halo 2 and didn’t really understand what was going on in the campaign, so I borrowed my friend’s copy of Combat Evolved and completed that game as well. Now, over the course of seven years, I’ve completed all the Halo games, read all the Halo novels except Glasslands and the Forerunner saga, bought the encyclopedia, and more. I’ve pretty much fully experienced the wonder of the Halo universe. The only thing I couldn’t do was the competitive multiplayer, as my parents strongly believe that no kid, let alone one with -Yoink!-, should be playing games online.
I’d like to give my thanks to 343 Industries for managing to carry on the Halo franchise so well. You guys did a great job with Halo Anniversary and I highly enjoyed it even though I’ve already played through Combat Evolved multiple times. Halo 4 looks great as well. The effort you put into the gameplay, graphics, animations, et cetera, really shows and it tells me that in your hands, Halo isn’t going to end up a stale, milked franchise like Call of Duty.
With that being said, I do have an issue with the new Covenant designs. It’s not that they look terrible–it’s that they’re too different. I’ll use the Jackals as an example. So far in the Halo universe, there have been two subspecies of Kig-Yar, the Jackals and the Skirmishers. The Jackals have two major sub-phenotypes with minor graphical variations: the Jackals in H3, ODST, Reach, and CEA; and the Jackals in H2 and Wars. As we can see, throughout all the Halo games besides CE, the Jackals have been fairly consistent with one of these phenotypes or the other (I’m not counting the original Combat Evolved for two reasons, the first being that Anniversary’s remastered graphics overrule the original’s old graphics, the second being that CE was released in 2001 and back then Bungie’s graphical technology simply wasn’t advanced enough to properly represent their artistic vision). It was kind of odd for Bungie to suddenly add the Skirmishers into Halo Reach, but it was easy enough to accept them as a subspecies because they clearly still had Kig-Yar characteristics–the only difference between them and the regular Jackals was the skin color and muscle mass. On the other hand, the Halo 4 Jackals simply don’t fit. Their eyes are too small and their facial structure is drastically different (now it’s a small snout with a massive underbite, as opposed to all the previous Jackals who had long beaks with overbites). I’m sorry, you can’t pull the subspecies card on this one.
The Elites haven’t changed all that much compared to the other species, however they do look a lot more animalistic and reptilian than before, and visually they kind of lack the intelligence and cunning that they had in the previous games. As for the Grunts, I would go into detail about their new design and its inconsistency with the traditional Grunts, but I’m pretty sure that a while back somebody posted a massive thread about them already. I also noticed that the three Covenant species we’ve seen in Halo 4–Unggoy, Kig-Yar, Sangheili–all share the same reptilian skin template and it bothers me a little because these are different species, not animals bred for war by the Locust Horde.
Honestly, I’m not against a new art direction, but I would really appreciate if 343 continued to uphold the artistic integrity that Bungie had worked so hard to maintain throughout their games. Bungie put a lot of work into designing these creatures as unique peoples. 343 have no doubt put effort in redesigning the Covies as well, but they seem to be focused more on making them all monstrous, ugly reptiles as opposed to intelligent aliens.
[The following passage is from comment #155 (which I posted), I thought it would be suitable if I put it in the OP as well.]
To the people who say that these new nonsensical Covies are a result of a new artistic vision, Gears of War begs to differ. That series received a significant graphical overhaul from GoW2 to GoW3. However, the artists stayed true to consistency and the changes they made to the characters/species can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
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The COGs switched into compact armor in order to accommodate higher temperatures. This makes sense, because in the past GoW games the COGs wore bulky, full-body armor that would have made them very uncomfortable had they continued wearing them in the summer.
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The Locust Horde use more primitive equipment than what we’ve seen in the previous GoW games. This makes sense, because their underground home was destroyed in GoW2 and they’re now stranded on the planet’s surface.
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The Locust Queen put on some body armor. This makes sense, because in the absence of strong Locust commanders such as General RAAM and High Priest Skorge she had to do her dirty work herself.
<mark>New artistic vision ≠ shoving canon aside just to differentiate from the past games.</mark>
but that’s just my opinion.